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Smartphones, Fear and Addiction – Interview with Dr. Mark McDonald (Part2)
Dr. Mark McDonald gave Kla.TV a great Interview in September of 2022. Mainstream media reporting often causes fear and stress. Can this be addictive? Dr. McDonald explains the phenomenon and its therapy. He also has some advice concerning smartphones.[continue reading]
Interviewer:
Moving on to your books. In your first book, during the pandemic, you described how fear is driving this pandemic. Your recent book, which I just finished, is wonderful. You talk about how fear is actually addictive and I think most of us, when we think of addictive things, we think about stuff that might give us a little pleasure like gambling, or sex, or alcohol, or something like that. How is fear also addictive in the same way as these other things?
Dr. McDonald:
Because addiction doesn't just involve the pursuit of pleasure, it also involves the fleeing from anxiety and pain. And this is a very not well understood by the layman and by the lay public - aspect of addiction, and it's also the reason why I have, I believe correctly, categorized fear and fear addiction as a clinically descriptive explanation of what is driving people to behave nonsensically and in a large degree, a self-harming way, and certainly a harming to society kind of way. As an example, somebody who feels anxious will often pull a cigarette out of their pocket and smoke it. Is it to feel pleasure? Not exactly. Maybe, at the beginning it was, when the person was calm and took a cigarette from his friend and he felt this really great sense of well-being, and focus, and energy come over him. But after a while, the addiction to the nicotine and to the high starts to become necessary just to achieve a new baseline of normalcy.
In other words, without the cigarette, you just feel anxious all the time. So you start to smoke when you're anxious, so that you can feel not anxious - not good, just not anxious. And what I see now is that people are so at baseline, so anxious, so fearful, because they've been told that everything around them is scary, that life itself is dangerous and that taking risks is not a good thing; it's a bad thing. Being safe is what's virtue. It's worship at the altar of safety, that when they walk outside and they see another human coming by, that anxiety level rises. Oh my gosh, another person. We've been told to be afraid. What do I do? What do I? Arghhh… and they reach in their pocket and they pull a mask out, and they put the mask on their face. As they walk past that person, that stranger on the sidewalk, and this sense of calm and relief comes over them, a sense of safety. And then as they pass by 6 feet or 7 feet: okay, it's safe. I'll take the mask off and they put the mask back in the pocket, and they get back to normal again. This is what I mean by an addiction. It is an enactment of an unhealthy behavior that allows you to somehow, just for a brief moment, feel just a little bit less anxious and a little bit less afraid. That is fear addiction in my view, and why it should be correctly called addiction.
Interviewer:
Right. And since it is an addiction, your solution is a 12 step program, akin to the Alcoholics Anonymous program. And I think it's the first step, or maybe the second step. But it's toward the beginning and that is, you have to admit your problem to begin with. And your first book was so successful, it was a bestseller on Amazon. And I'm thinking your second book… how is it going to achieve this success, when the first step is going to be so difficult to the people you're aiming it at? Are these people going to admit that they were wrong about the mask? Because an alcoholic can certainly minimize their addiction and they can lie about it, but they can't lie about the dangers of alcohol, right? That's tough. But these addicts, they can continue with the lie that, `No, no, it protects me! Scientifically it protects me. It's good for me.” Same thing with the vaccine. How do we get these people to just… get by step one?
Dr. McDonald:
It's a very, very difficult challenge because the only way for an addict to start a 12-step program, is to acknowledge that he's been hurting himself, to not blame his firing from his job on his boss's narcissism, to not blame his divorce on his wife's lack of appreciation for his manliness. To not blame the failure of the relationship between him and his son on his sons need to just best his father but to actually acknowledge, that all three of these problems, these disasters, occurred in his life because he's been chugging a flask in his pocket at work and at home, and everyone that used to love him and care for him is all abandoned him. And that is actually the cause of his downfall.
This is what we have to get across to people who are harming themselves with mRNA injections, with masks, with anti-social behavior, with locking themselves in their homes, with converting their life over to virtual, that this is not actually safety; this is harm. This is harm to you and it is harm to others. Until that reality sinks in… until the truth… the extent of the harm that one is causing oneself through the addiction, and the harm to others, is acknowledged, just acknowledged, there can be no progress.
So, for people who still believe that they're keeping themselves safe, that they're helping themselves and others, that they are not afraid, or if they are afraid, they're afraid for a good reason and it's not irrational - if they don't have curiosity, even curiosity, just a wondering if maybe this doesn't make all that much sense, if they don't even have that, that sort of wonderment about. “Is this something that we should really continue forever or is this something that actually has a price?” - just cost-benefit-analysis, if that's absent: dead in the water. There is no point in reading the book. There is no point in recommending to someone. You need to assess first and foremost for yourself or for your friend, your family, or your group of people that you care about, does that person a) acknowledge that he's harming himself or b) Is he even curious about the question? If yes, then this book is for them. If not, it's a waste of time. You're hitting your head against the wall.
Interviewer:
Right. And I'm thinking of kind of a self-defeating cycle here, and that is fear itself, like anger, kind of muddles the mind and keeps you from thinking clearly. And you mentioned that one boy, the high school kid who had an obsessive compulsive disorder before Corona. But with your therapy, with your intervention, he was able to recognize the problem and work towards a solution. But for some reason he's not been able. He can't do it with the mask and the vaccines and the whole Corona stuff. And that must be because of the fear campaign they've put into this.
Dr. McDonald:
It's a huge problem and I address it in one of the steps in the book, which is titled `Drop the Dealer´. I see the drug dealer and the drug of course being fear as largely the media. You cannot overcome alcoholism, for example, if you walk home every day past a bar. Because you're going to be sucked into the bar and you're going to go in with the idea that you're going to have a sparkling water and you're going to have just one beer and then just one beer becomes a 12 pack and then producing you're passed out on the floor and you're in the drunk tank. In the same way that if you wake up every morning and the first thing you do is you look on Apple news flashes which for a year and a half just kept announcing the number of people dying of the Wuhan virus. If you're still doing that and you're still reading on emotionally charged misinformation, and I mean real misinformation like what Barbara Ferrer announces: in LA County, 37 more people died today of the Wuhan virus when actually they were all over at 95 years old and immuno-compromised and had come in with heart attacks and strokes - if you're only reading that every day then you're going to keep reinforcing your fear addiction. So the only way to have a shot at overcoming the fear is to drop that constant reinforcement of the fear which is the media feed, which is probably in your pocket right now that you're just waiting to get another buzz from. You've got to cut that off. If you don't do that, then you're doomed.
Interviewer:
Right. Right. Now, this brings me to another point. I thought, you know, this book I'm reading, if it's aimed at those people who can't get over their Corona fear, man, it's going to be a hard sell, because they won't get by step one. But I thought after I read to the very end I thought, no, this book is for everybody. And I wonder if…um…those of us, okay, we see the Corona pandemic for what, for the fraud that it is. We're against the mask. We're against the vaccines. But are we doing up a little bit of this too? When we wake up every morning and we access the, let's say, the Conservative news aggregate site that has the sensation, maybe true, but this is sensational, bad news, that “ain't it awful” stories every single day? That's also damaging, even if it's true.
Dr. McDonald:
I completely agree. I was in Bosnia for six weeks, broken up apart by a week or two of work here in Los Angeles a couple of months ago. And what I noticed being largely cut off from media - I was working, I was traveling, I was going out to dinner and speaking to people in the evening. I barely looked at my phone and my computer. My phone wasn't even working, so I didn't have the SIM card in it. What I noticed most prominently in myself was a tremendous, rapid lowering of this vibrational intensity of frustration, anger and irritability which comes up for me very frequently when I get another article from Fox News or Tucker Carlson or the Wall Street Journal, whether it's economic, political, social, every single piece of news reconfirms how dire of a situation we're in. And it's all true. It's not even propaganda. It's not even hysterical. It's just truth, just facts. But sometimes you don't need to hear more of that. And when I got that cut off and I started to focus on people and relationships and being around those who were largely speaking courageous. The Bosnians really don't care about this nonsense that we're dealing with in the United States. They don't trust their government. They are quite independent. They're not even part of the EU. They're very cynical, which I think is protected them to a large degree from a lot of the intrusion of the propaganda. When you don't have that media source constantly coming at you and being around other people who are infected by it, then suddenly there's this opening up to the experience of the immediate reality around you that is full of social life and human interaction and nature and real work and pleasure and family and friends, that can be a really great antidote to the media. So I started to…I wouldn't say I'm terribly successful at it, but taking these media holidays where for a whole day, almost like a Shabbat, what the Jews do, I just turn it all off. I read a book. I read a magazine that's not a contemporary news magazine. I write. I go hiking, I go take a course. Because I need to disconnect from that too. I don't mean disconnect from the propaganda crap; I mean disconnect from the constant reminders of the people that are on my side of how bad of a life we have here and how dire the situation is now. I'm not expecting that the situation will improve because I'm cutting the media off. I'm not putting my head in the media sand. I'm just giving myself a respite or reprieve so that I can reconnect to what's important in my day-to-day life and then come back with a fresher mindset and less cynicism fighting the problems that I fight day in and day out.
Interviewer:
Right. Right. So this cutting off of all this media garbage temporarily includes, I assume, cutting off the smartphone.
Dr. McDonald: Yes.
Interviewer:
Could you give us your standing-on-one-leg indictment of the smartphone, especially as it applies to youth.
Dr. McDonald:
The smartphone Apple iPhone One – 2007 it came out the year I graduated from medical school and got my residency. I remember buying that phone and thinking it was a godsend. I now think it's of the devil. I am 100% opposed to all youth having access to a smartphone until they turn 18 and they can make their own legal decisions. And even then I'm not sure it's a good idea. But what can you do? No parent under any circumstances should provide a smartphone to his child. Period. There is no net benefit. None. If you need an emergency calling device, give them a flip phone. If you want them to be connected up with what's happening on computers and able to use apps and so on, then have an iPad available which you physically control and also electronically lock down and you can remove it. But to have a phone in the pocket of your child outside of your supervision, walking around outside with friends at school, you are just inviting problems. Now, of course the response is, “Well, but their friends are going to have the phones, but you know what? That's that. I don't care. If it becomes such a problem, then get new friends. It's like saying I'm not going to feed my kid cake and ice cream every day because when he goes over to Tommy's house his mother gives him cake and icing. Okay, well, then don't have him go over to Tommy's house or teach him that he shouldn't be imbibing when he goes to Tommy, because you're going to give him better food. Teach your kid values.
Interviewer: The only thing he and Tommy do together is snort cocaine.
Dr. McDonald:
So what can you do? I guess I might as well give him cocaine for breakfast. This is such a foolish, stupid argument, and I'm tired of hearing it. And if it's so bad, if your environment is so toxic, if your child is swimming in diarrhea in the pool, find another pool. Well, but it's far away. Well, you know what? What's more important? You are a parent. What is more important than the well-being of your child? And if that means getting another job, if that means moving, if that means home-schooling, then do it if it's that bad. But don't give me this nonsense of, “Oh my gosh, what can I do? My wife and I are busy working all the time, and he's going to be exposed to it anyway. So let's just give it to him.” That´s a cop out. That is not parenting. You should be ashamed of yourself. That smartphone will ruin your child. That smartphone will give him access to information and news and porn and violence. And not only that, but it'll give him a constant, addictive urge to be looking for reinforcement, whether it's a emoji, or a like, or a clapback, or a heart or a `your photo looks great´- comment, which is all of these devices are doing now, especially Snapchat. That is not what your child needs in his or her development. You don't need to create an addiction in your child's pocket, and you have the obligation, not the right, the obligation as a parent to limit that possibility as much as possible. Now, I understand that your child will be exposed to it. Children were always exposed to pornography and to marijuana at some point, but why would you want to keep it in your home just because he might inadvertently come across it at school? That makes no sense to me. Harm reduction. It's not about being pure. It's not about escaping into the forest and going working off the grid and living on a farm and everything organic. Limit the harm and if you've done that, you've done your job.
Interviewer:
Excellent. You know, I think that issue is so important, I think I'd like to end the interview on that one, but I'd like you also to give our viewing audience a chance to tell them where they can find your work. Tell us about your Substack again and your books and your web page.
Dr. McDonald:
So I do a couple of things and I'll put them into two groups. One is a podcast with Doctor Jeff Barkey called “Informed Dissent”´, and we interview people like Charlie Kirk, Sebastian Gorka, Katie Hopkins, Joseph Ladapo, the Surgeon General of Florida, and others about the intersection between healthcare and politics. That's our content and it's on www.informeddissentmedia.com. That's where we yap. If you want to hear us yap, go there. If you want to read what I'm writing then go to my website. My literary website which is: www.dissidentmd.com and on dissidentmd.com there are links to my Substack account, to my Facebook page, to my Twitter account and up until recently my LinkedIn account, which has been deleted by Microsoft because I posted a clip from a video made by Mikki Willis of “Plandemic 3”, the documentary filmmaker, called `The Dangers of Education´.
Interviewer:
Where he interviewed you?
Dr. McDonald:
Correct. He interviewed me and it was a two or three minute clip from a larger interview where I described why it's dangerous to send your kid, or kids, to government schools and within a few days LinkedIn had not only taken down the post, they had actually deleted my account. Deleted it! The page no longer exists. They've wiped it! That was LinkedIn, so I don't even have a LinkedIn account anymore. In addition, there's links from my books and where you can purchase them if you don't want to buy them on Amazon. There's a subsidiary page called www.conservativereaders.com where you can buy them if you don't want to support Amazon. That's fine. It doesn't matter to me. For both “United States of Fear”, my first book, as well as my new book `Freedom From Fear´. So everything that you find about me that I write or that I post about on social media is on one page and it's called www.dissidentmd.com. The other one is www. informeddissentmedia.com, which is the podcast page.
Interviewer:
Excellent. Well, Dr McDonald, thank you very much for the interview. It's been a pleasure and an honor.
Dr. McDonald: Thank you, Dan.
16.10.2022 | www.kla.tv/23893
Interviewer: Moving on to your books. In your first book, during the pandemic, you described how fear is driving this pandemic. Your recent book, which I just finished, is wonderful. You talk about how fear is actually addictive and I think most of us, when we think of addictive things, we think about stuff that might give us a little pleasure like gambling, or sex, or alcohol, or something like that. How is fear also addictive in the same way as these other things? Dr. McDonald: Because addiction doesn't just involve the pursuit of pleasure, it also involves the fleeing from anxiety and pain. And this is a very not well understood by the layman and by the lay public - aspect of addiction, and it's also the reason why I have, I believe correctly, categorized fear and fear addiction as a clinically descriptive explanation of what is driving people to behave nonsensically and in a large degree, a self-harming way, and certainly a harming to society kind of way. As an example, somebody who feels anxious will often pull a cigarette out of their pocket and smoke it. Is it to feel pleasure? Not exactly. Maybe, at the beginning it was, when the person was calm and took a cigarette from his friend and he felt this really great sense of well-being, and focus, and energy come over him. But after a while, the addiction to the nicotine and to the high starts to become necessary just to achieve a new baseline of normalcy. In other words, without the cigarette, you just feel anxious all the time. So you start to smoke when you're anxious, so that you can feel not anxious - not good, just not anxious. And what I see now is that people are so at baseline, so anxious, so fearful, because they've been told that everything around them is scary, that life itself is dangerous and that taking risks is not a good thing; it's a bad thing. Being safe is what's virtue. It's worship at the altar of safety, that when they walk outside and they see another human coming by, that anxiety level rises. Oh my gosh, another person. We've been told to be afraid. What do I do? What do I? Arghhh… and they reach in their pocket and they pull a mask out, and they put the mask on their face. As they walk past that person, that stranger on the sidewalk, and this sense of calm and relief comes over them, a sense of safety. And then as they pass by 6 feet or 7 feet: okay, it's safe. I'll take the mask off and they put the mask back in the pocket, and they get back to normal again. This is what I mean by an addiction. It is an enactment of an unhealthy behavior that allows you to somehow, just for a brief moment, feel just a little bit less anxious and a little bit less afraid. That is fear addiction in my view, and why it should be correctly called addiction. Interviewer: Right. And since it is an addiction, your solution is a 12 step program, akin to the Alcoholics Anonymous program. And I think it's the first step, or maybe the second step. But it's toward the beginning and that is, you have to admit your problem to begin with. And your first book was so successful, it was a bestseller on Amazon. And I'm thinking your second book… how is it going to achieve this success, when the first step is going to be so difficult to the people you're aiming it at? Are these people going to admit that they were wrong about the mask? Because an alcoholic can certainly minimize their addiction and they can lie about it, but they can't lie about the dangers of alcohol, right? That's tough. But these addicts, they can continue with the lie that, `No, no, it protects me! Scientifically it protects me. It's good for me.” Same thing with the vaccine. How do we get these people to just… get by step one? Dr. McDonald: It's a very, very difficult challenge because the only way for an addict to start a 12-step program, is to acknowledge that he's been hurting himself, to not blame his firing from his job on his boss's narcissism, to not blame his divorce on his wife's lack of appreciation for his manliness. To not blame the failure of the relationship between him and his son on his sons need to just best his father but to actually acknowledge, that all three of these problems, these disasters, occurred in his life because he's been chugging a flask in his pocket at work and at home, and everyone that used to love him and care for him is all abandoned him. And that is actually the cause of his downfall. This is what we have to get across to people who are harming themselves with mRNA injections, with masks, with anti-social behavior, with locking themselves in their homes, with converting their life over to virtual, that this is not actually safety; this is harm. This is harm to you and it is harm to others. Until that reality sinks in… until the truth… the extent of the harm that one is causing oneself through the addiction, and the harm to others, is acknowledged, just acknowledged, there can be no progress. So, for people who still believe that they're keeping themselves safe, that they're helping themselves and others, that they are not afraid, or if they are afraid, they're afraid for a good reason and it's not irrational - if they don't have curiosity, even curiosity, just a wondering if maybe this doesn't make all that much sense, if they don't even have that, that sort of wonderment about. “Is this something that we should really continue forever or is this something that actually has a price?” - just cost-benefit-analysis, if that's absent: dead in the water. There is no point in reading the book. There is no point in recommending to someone. You need to assess first and foremost for yourself or for your friend, your family, or your group of people that you care about, does that person a) acknowledge that he's harming himself or b) Is he even curious about the question? If yes, then this book is for them. If not, it's a waste of time. You're hitting your head against the wall. Interviewer: Right. And I'm thinking of kind of a self-defeating cycle here, and that is fear itself, like anger, kind of muddles the mind and keeps you from thinking clearly. And you mentioned that one boy, the high school kid who had an obsessive compulsive disorder before Corona. But with your therapy, with your intervention, he was able to recognize the problem and work towards a solution. But for some reason he's not been able. He can't do it with the mask and the vaccines and the whole Corona stuff. And that must be because of the fear campaign they've put into this. Dr. McDonald: It's a huge problem and I address it in one of the steps in the book, which is titled `Drop the Dealer´. I see the drug dealer and the drug of course being fear as largely the media. You cannot overcome alcoholism, for example, if you walk home every day past a bar. Because you're going to be sucked into the bar and you're going to go in with the idea that you're going to have a sparkling water and you're going to have just one beer and then just one beer becomes a 12 pack and then producing you're passed out on the floor and you're in the drunk tank. In the same way that if you wake up every morning and the first thing you do is you look on Apple news flashes which for a year and a half just kept announcing the number of people dying of the Wuhan virus. If you're still doing that and you're still reading on emotionally charged misinformation, and I mean real misinformation like what Barbara Ferrer announces: in LA County, 37 more people died today of the Wuhan virus when actually they were all over at 95 years old and immuno-compromised and had come in with heart attacks and strokes - if you're only reading that every day then you're going to keep reinforcing your fear addiction. So the only way to have a shot at overcoming the fear is to drop that constant reinforcement of the fear which is the media feed, which is probably in your pocket right now that you're just waiting to get another buzz from. You've got to cut that off. If you don't do that, then you're doomed. Interviewer: Right. Right. Now, this brings me to another point. I thought, you know, this book I'm reading, if it's aimed at those people who can't get over their Corona fear, man, it's going to be a hard sell, because they won't get by step one. But I thought after I read to the very end I thought, no, this book is for everybody. And I wonder if…um…those of us, okay, we see the Corona pandemic for what, for the fraud that it is. We're against the mask. We're against the vaccines. But are we doing up a little bit of this too? When we wake up every morning and we access the, let's say, the Conservative news aggregate site that has the sensation, maybe true, but this is sensational, bad news, that “ain't it awful” stories every single day? That's also damaging, even if it's true. Dr. McDonald: I completely agree. I was in Bosnia for six weeks, broken up apart by a week or two of work here in Los Angeles a couple of months ago. And what I noticed being largely cut off from media - I was working, I was traveling, I was going out to dinner and speaking to people in the evening. I barely looked at my phone and my computer. My phone wasn't even working, so I didn't have the SIM card in it. What I noticed most prominently in myself was a tremendous, rapid lowering of this vibrational intensity of frustration, anger and irritability which comes up for me very frequently when I get another article from Fox News or Tucker Carlson or the Wall Street Journal, whether it's economic, political, social, every single piece of news reconfirms how dire of a situation we're in. And it's all true. It's not even propaganda. It's not even hysterical. It's just truth, just facts. But sometimes you don't need to hear more of that. And when I got that cut off and I started to focus on people and relationships and being around those who were largely speaking courageous. The Bosnians really don't care about this nonsense that we're dealing with in the United States. They don't trust their government. They are quite independent. They're not even part of the EU. They're very cynical, which I think is protected them to a large degree from a lot of the intrusion of the propaganda. When you don't have that media source constantly coming at you and being around other people who are infected by it, then suddenly there's this opening up to the experience of the immediate reality around you that is full of social life and human interaction and nature and real work and pleasure and family and friends, that can be a really great antidote to the media. So I started to…I wouldn't say I'm terribly successful at it, but taking these media holidays where for a whole day, almost like a Shabbat, what the Jews do, I just turn it all off. I read a book. I read a magazine that's not a contemporary news magazine. I write. I go hiking, I go take a course. Because I need to disconnect from that too. I don't mean disconnect from the propaganda crap; I mean disconnect from the constant reminders of the people that are on my side of how bad of a life we have here and how dire the situation is now. I'm not expecting that the situation will improve because I'm cutting the media off. I'm not putting my head in the media sand. I'm just giving myself a respite or reprieve so that I can reconnect to what's important in my day-to-day life and then come back with a fresher mindset and less cynicism fighting the problems that I fight day in and day out. Interviewer: Right. Right. So this cutting off of all this media garbage temporarily includes, I assume, cutting off the smartphone. Dr. McDonald: Yes. Interviewer: Could you give us your standing-on-one-leg indictment of the smartphone, especially as it applies to youth. Dr. McDonald: The smartphone Apple iPhone One – 2007 it came out the year I graduated from medical school and got my residency. I remember buying that phone and thinking it was a godsend. I now think it's of the devil. I am 100% opposed to all youth having access to a smartphone until they turn 18 and they can make their own legal decisions. And even then I'm not sure it's a good idea. But what can you do? No parent under any circumstances should provide a smartphone to his child. Period. There is no net benefit. None. If you need an emergency calling device, give them a flip phone. If you want them to be connected up with what's happening on computers and able to use apps and so on, then have an iPad available which you physically control and also electronically lock down and you can remove it. But to have a phone in the pocket of your child outside of your supervision, walking around outside with friends at school, you are just inviting problems. Now, of course the response is, “Well, but their friends are going to have the phones, but you know what? That's that. I don't care. If it becomes such a problem, then get new friends. It's like saying I'm not going to feed my kid cake and ice cream every day because when he goes over to Tommy's house his mother gives him cake and icing. Okay, well, then don't have him go over to Tommy's house or teach him that he shouldn't be imbibing when he goes to Tommy, because you're going to give him better food. Teach your kid values. Interviewer: The only thing he and Tommy do together is snort cocaine. Dr. McDonald: So what can you do? I guess I might as well give him cocaine for breakfast. This is such a foolish, stupid argument, and I'm tired of hearing it. And if it's so bad, if your environment is so toxic, if your child is swimming in diarrhea in the pool, find another pool. Well, but it's far away. Well, you know what? What's more important? You are a parent. What is more important than the well-being of your child? And if that means getting another job, if that means moving, if that means home-schooling, then do it if it's that bad. But don't give me this nonsense of, “Oh my gosh, what can I do? My wife and I are busy working all the time, and he's going to be exposed to it anyway. So let's just give it to him.” That´s a cop out. That is not parenting. You should be ashamed of yourself. That smartphone will ruin your child. That smartphone will give him access to information and news and porn and violence. And not only that, but it'll give him a constant, addictive urge to be looking for reinforcement, whether it's a emoji, or a like, or a clapback, or a heart or a `your photo looks great´- comment, which is all of these devices are doing now, especially Snapchat. That is not what your child needs in his or her development. You don't need to create an addiction in your child's pocket, and you have the obligation, not the right, the obligation as a parent to limit that possibility as much as possible. Now, I understand that your child will be exposed to it. Children were always exposed to pornography and to marijuana at some point, but why would you want to keep it in your home just because he might inadvertently come across it at school? That makes no sense to me. Harm reduction. It's not about being pure. It's not about escaping into the forest and going working off the grid and living on a farm and everything organic. Limit the harm and if you've done that, you've done your job. Interviewer: Excellent. You know, I think that issue is so important, I think I'd like to end the interview on that one, but I'd like you also to give our viewing audience a chance to tell them where they can find your work. Tell us about your Substack again and your books and your web page. Dr. McDonald: So I do a couple of things and I'll put them into two groups. One is a podcast with Doctor Jeff Barkey called “Informed Dissent”´, and we interview people like Charlie Kirk, Sebastian Gorka, Katie Hopkins, Joseph Ladapo, the Surgeon General of Florida, and others about the intersection between healthcare and politics. That's our content and it's on www.informeddissentmedia.com. That's where we yap. If you want to hear us yap, go there. If you want to read what I'm writing then go to my website. My literary website which is: www.dissidentmd.com and on dissidentmd.com there are links to my Substack account, to my Facebook page, to my Twitter account and up until recently my LinkedIn account, which has been deleted by Microsoft because I posted a clip from a video made by Mikki Willis of “Plandemic 3”, the documentary filmmaker, called `The Dangers of Education´. Interviewer: Where he interviewed you? Dr. McDonald: Correct. He interviewed me and it was a two or three minute clip from a larger interview where I described why it's dangerous to send your kid, or kids, to government schools and within a few days LinkedIn had not only taken down the post, they had actually deleted my account. Deleted it! The page no longer exists. They've wiped it! That was LinkedIn, so I don't even have a LinkedIn account anymore. In addition, there's links from my books and where you can purchase them if you don't want to buy them on Amazon. There's a subsidiary page called www.conservativereaders.com where you can buy them if you don't want to support Amazon. That's fine. It doesn't matter to me. For both “United States of Fear”, my first book, as well as my new book `Freedom From Fear´. So everything that you find about me that I write or that I post about on social media is on one page and it's called www.dissidentmd.com. The other one is www. informeddissentmedia.com, which is the podcast page. Interviewer: Excellent. Well, Dr McDonald, thank you very much for the interview. It's been a pleasure and an honor. Dr. McDonald: Thank you, Dan.
from dw