At the same time the perpetual lockdown lovers and “vaccine” fanatics were once again shouting about “THE SCIENCE” following the on-field collapse of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin on Monday, I was noticing the uncanny similarity that those hateful nags have with some of the people in the newish docu-series “Don’t Pick Up the Phone.”
The Netflix production revisits the shocking series of events entailing a man’s phone calls to dozens of fast food joints wherein he convinced employees to humiliate and sexually violate other staff members and customers in the restaurant. Typically, he would tell a manager he was a detective or police officer and that he had received a complaint that one of the workers on duty had stolen money from a customer. He would say that either the accused staffer could consent to a strip search, administered by the manager, or there would have to be an arrest.
It remains a confounding mystery that those who received the calls willingly followed orders to perform cavity searches on coworkers right there in the restaurant, with no proof that they were talking to legit law enforcement — obviously he wasn’t — and no hesitation as to whether it felt wrong. But one theory that a psychologist interviewed for the show proposed was the phenomenon recreated by social scientist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. In a series of experiments, Milgram instructed participants to quiz actors who were hooked up to a shock machine, and each time an actor answered a question wrongly, the participant was to administer a painful zap (which wasn’t real — but the participants thought it was).
“Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not,” Milgram wrote. He concluded that “the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.”
In essence, many people, maybe even most, tend to obey self-proclaimed authority, even when what they’re instructed to do contradicts their natural impulses and dispositions. It’s the exact behavior leftists engaged in Monday night when anyone pondered aloud whether Hamlin’s freak collapse was perhaps a side effect of having received a Covid shot.
The Washington Post: “The inevitable, grotesque effort to blame vaccines for Damar Hamlin’s collapse”
Vice: “Far-Right Trolls Are Already Spreading Anti-Vax Conspiracies About Damar Hamlin”
Salon: “Right-wingers use NFL player’s collapse to push anti-vax conspiracy”
The vaccines have been demonstrably linked to heart complications, though as of now, it’s unclear to what extent. It might be an exceedingly rare occurrence. It might be more common than we realize. Honest people admit the lack of certainty. But the scolds aren’t operating based on honesty. They’re taking direction from authority: “THE EXPERTS,” who call such questions “misinformation” and “conspiracy mongering.”
They justify their antisocial, pro-censorship conduct by appealing to authority every time. The Salon article dutifully noted that “public health experts” had “slammed” anyone who suggested that vaccine-related myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, could predispose someone to a sudden collapse like the one experienced by Hamlin. The Post traced the “grotesque effort to blame vaccines” to “Trump and other Republicans” who had “disparaged public health experts and elevated fringe voices raising conspiracy theories about the virus.”
Just the same, subjects in the documentary who went along with the hoax phone caller’s instruction to compel the disrobing of an employee, and to describe the victim’s undergarments and body parts in detail, said they did it because they believed the demands were coming from a person of authority. They didn’t challenge. They mindlessly obeyed. They hurt others at the direction of someone they couldn’t even see.
That’s the frightening reality of the enduring presence of vaccine fanatics.