Day 719: The Curious Case of the Barking Nazis

Yesterday the sequel came out to David Cole's column The Curious Case of the Barking Nazis, but it turned out to be much more politics than COVIDics. Let us instead travel back in time a week to when Dr. Robert Malone's appearance on Joe Rogan was still news and Nazis were still barking mad:

So you invite a Covid “mRNA scientist” on your show and the segment that goes viral involves not science but history.

How the hell does that happen?

Last week, when Joe Rogan hosted social media exile Dr. Robert Malone, the phrase that rightists came away repeating like Pollys wanting crackers was “mass formation psychosis” (MFP).

The term went so viral the AP fact-checked it (yes, the AP fact-checks theories now. Please do CRT [critical race theory] next).

Malone invoked MFP to explain public manipulability during the pandemic. MFP, he said, “comes from European intellectual inquiry into what the heck happened in Germany in the ’20s and ’30s” when “a very intelligent, highly educated population went barking mad” because people had “free-floating anxiety and a sense that things don’t make sense” and “their attention was focused by a leader on one small point, just like hypnosis.” Thus “they literally became hypnotized and could be led anywhere,” so they attacked “the other [Jews]” because Hitler told them to.

Hitler laser-focused a hypnotized, anxiety-ridden people on the Jews, and a highly educated population went “barking mad.”

Except that’s just not how it went down. Malone was repeating a bad Facebook meme (“Ever wondered how the Germans blindly followed a madman and killed six million Jews? Now you know! Please like & share”).

David Cole is a Holocaust historian, so he goes on at length about how it really went down, and concludes:

So what’s my point, beyond trying to appeal to the dog demographic by saying “bark” a hundred times (to all my new canine readers, Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy? You are! You are!)? When you rely on stale clichés like “Hitler hyp-mo-tized the Germans who went mad and killed the Jews,” you miss out on understanding the actual mechanics of how these things happen. You rob yourself of the ability to comprehend.

That's promising, but he gets back onto today's left-right politics instead of today's COVID-driven madness. PlagueBlog questions whether it was really one wrong point of history that stuck from the Joe Rogan show. If so, then it stuck because we are a crazed mob now, regardless of when exactly the pre-war Germans went barking mad. But I think Cole got this impression from overactive censors. Even if you can manage to censor five hundred thousand (alleged) vaccine deaths, there's no stopping Godwin's Law.

As of press time, the MPDH had not published today's numbers to the archive, though we did find it elsewhere afterwards.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up about one and a twelfth percent.