Laura Knight-Jadczyk is interviewed by Dr. Kevin Barrett on the topics of psychopathy, political ponerology, and 9/11.


Transcript:

Kevin: Welcome to another coming into the weekend edition of Dynamic Duo, I'm Kevin Barrett, I'm here every Monday and Friday, while co-host Jim Fesser takes over on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Well today we're talking once again with a cutting edge thinker, somebody who thinks way outside the box. I always like people like that and in particular I'm really looking forward to today's conversation, because of all of the sort of tangential paths I've followed, starting at 9/11 and moving off on some related areas, probably the most interesting one is the one that lead me to the book Political Ponerology, by a guy named Lobaczewski. This book argues that psychopaths, and we know about psychopaths from various psychological studies, these are people with no conscience, no empathy and often a very egotistical orientation, these people, according to Lobaczewski, tend to rise up the hierarchies of power and occasionally they infect an entire body politic.

This may explain something about what's been happening here in the USA of late, and the editor of Lobaczewski's book Political Ponerology, Laura Knight-Jadczyk, thinks that that is exactly what is happening here in Bush's USA. So I did a little background research and I discovered that Laura is the author of I believe 8 books, including The Secret History of the World, and 9/11: The Ultimate Truth. She thinks outside the box on a whole lot of various topics, so I guess it's my pleasure to welcome to Dynamic Duo, Laura Knight-Jadczyk. How you doing?

Laura: I'm doing fine, thank you for having me.

Kevin: Well, hey, it's an honour. I'm very impressed with your work on Ponerology, maybe you could start out by explaining to listening audience, just what exactly is Ponerology?

Laura: Ponerology, the word is an archaic term for the study of evil, it was a theological term and Lobaczewski rehabilitated it for scientific use, because we really don't have a scientific term for the study of evil and we really need a scientific term for it because evil is a very important thing to study, and not necessarily in a spiritual sense, because there are scientific explanations for the existence and the spread of evil in society.

Kevin: Well that's a great summary, and, the book Political Ponerology has generated a lot of discussion, and my essay which borrowed some of its ideas, which was called Twilight of the Psychopaths generated a lot of discussion also a few weeks ago whenever I had put it up on the internet.

Laura: It was excellent.

Kevin: Oh great, thank you, glad you liked it. Do you think that Lobaczewski's notion that psychopaths can infect non psychopaths and by doing that actually infect whole societies? This is something that is somewhat new and I don't believe any of the standard people who work on psychopathy have made that observation before. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about that, how did he come up with that idea and how does that work?

Laura: Well I think it wasn't unique to Lobaczewski, as he mentions in his book, he is the compiler of the research of many other scientists who were doing work in more or less a secretive way behind the iron curtain. And even before the iron curtain was erected, from the times of Lenin and Stalin and so forth. Some of the work of some of the Russian scientists who were doing experiments in behaviour modification and so forth, like Pavlov, is included in there. And then there are of course several other famous scientists whose work I can detect in there, though they aren't named specifically. Apparently it was being done secretly and they were making observations and drawing conclusions and seeing how these things operate.

One typical example is something that was written about by several researchers and Sebastian Haffner in his book Defying Hitler talked about how when a pathological individual is on power, people know, they understand that if they do things that are also pathological that they will be excused for those things, that they will just get a nod in their direction and so therefore people will begin to behave in ways that are pathological that they might ordinarily not have done otherwise, they knew that there was going to be a strict legal sanction against their behaviour. That's just one of the ways that it can happen.

Then there's another thing that's really important, and this comes from the work of Bob Altemyer, I think his name is, where he writes about the type of personality, the right wing authoritarian personality. And he talks about how there are people who seek a strong leader and also who then exert their own power and control over others beneath them, it's kind of like a pecking order type of society. And in a funny sort of way you can even think of that book, Lord of the Flies, how the young boys created a hierarchy, a pecking order on a desert island when they were lost and had to come up with ways to survive on their own.

So there are the right wing authoritarian personalities and then there's also the work that Phil Zimbardo did, the Stanford prison experiment, that people want, first of all they want to follow an authority, which is the authoritarian personality and they also want to belong to an in-group. And there is some suggestion that it's not just any authority that they want to follow, but it's an authority that has a certain righteousness about it, because for example, right wing authoritarian type persons who would be considered conservative, did not look to Bill Clinton for their authority because, he wasn't representing the right standards. When they called him out on the carpet for having illicit affairs or sexual misconduct, many, many people in the US, the right wing authoritarian types, despite the fact that he represented the top authority on the land, were against him.

Kevin: Furiously against him in many cases.

Laura: Yeah. So to say simply that it's just the authority, the surrogate parent, the president or whatever, that the right wing authoritarian type follows, it's not quite so simple because this is clearly disproved in the case of Clinton. But then, in the case of say George Bush who is far more psychopathic than Clinton ever was...

Kevin: You may be saying something, Clinton seems to have his kind of, well maybe it's more of a...

Laura: Maybe it's more hidden, yeah, and maybe he's more covert about it. But in any event, because Bush stands up and represents certain things that this right wing authoritarian type personality likes and identifies with, much of which is like, you can pick on those below you. Clinton represents something, even if it wasn't true, but ideologically he would say let's have programs to help the poor or to help the needy, to help the hungry, that sort of thing, which was urging people to not pick on those less helpless than themselves, while Bush is saying let's go out and shoot all the ragheads.

Kevin: Enabling the bullies.

Laura: Yeah, exactly.

Kevin: Ok, well, I'm with you so far Laura, we'll be back for some more in a few moments, this is Kevin Barrett here on the Dynamic Duo, talking today with Laura Knight-Jadczyk, stick around.

[Break]

Kevin: Today I'm talking with Laura Knight-Jadczyk, she has a very interesting website and to find it you can probably just Google her last name, or the second half of it which is Jadczyk, or you can go to the Muslim-Jewish Christian alliance for 9/11 truth, which is Mujca.com and you can click on the radio schedule and find links to a couple of her sites.

Laura we were talking about the obviously apparent behaviour of not just the current leadership, Bush, Cheney and company, and also the people that they've enabled beneath them. But also the whole society kind of gravitating towards this kind of behaviour. It's one thing to call these people bullies or authoritarian personalities and it's another to say that some of them may be clinical psychopaths, as you suggested is a possibility regarding the president. So maybe you could explain to the listeners, just what exactly is a clinical psychopath?

Laura: Well, a clinical psychopath is described in the titles of 3 books, Without Conscience, The Mask of Sanity and Snakes in Suits. The psychopath is not, as many people think, necessarily a violent, aggressive or even criminal individual.

Kevin: Let me stop you there and say those books are by Robert Hare?

Laura: Robert Hare, Hervey Cleckley and Hare and Babiak.

Kevin: Right, and then Martha Stout has also written a couple.

Laura: Martha Stout has written a really nice book, she uses the term sociopath and I think that's because many psychologists are trying to shy away from the word psychopath because it has been so corrupted by connecting it with mad-dog serial killers like Hannibal Lector and so on. I think that if you try to clarify things through say the DSM-IV, the diagnostic and statistical manual, the bible for diagnosing, that you'll find that using the word sociopath is a way of describing behaviour that's more external or viewable than something that's hidden inside, such as a lack of conscience. And so by doing that you would miss a lot of the true psychopaths who do most of the destructive things in our society because they are completely aware, a complete mask of sanity. And the real issue is a conscience, they don't have one. And of course Martha in her book moved very close to asking this really big important question, which is, what is conscience? And she talks about it in certain ways and she finally comes to the conclusion that basically a conscience is based on love, that conscience is a feeling of obligation to other people, based on emotional attachment.

Kevin: Right. And that's a really interesting concept, she opposes it to the Freudian idea of super ego, which is kind of a parental controlling disciplinary little voice in the head.

Laura: Introject.

Kevin: Right, an authoritarian. But the super ego really isn't based on love. Martha thinks that this love is a sort of cosmic connection between all beings and especially all people, so we can empathise a little bit with other people based on this kind of love and the lack of that seems to be the chief characteristic of psychopaths.

Laura: Well Martha gets a little bit antsy when she starts approaching the spiritual aspect, but she almost comes out and says that psychopaths are soulless. And this is an interesting thing because Hervey Cleckley came very close to saying the same thing himself, he butted around it, but that's pretty much what he said. And if you look around the world and look at what's happening in the world, and if you study history, which is my main thing, because I come at this from a historical point of view, you see that the vast majority of historical times and probably even pre-historical times, we can't tell it's because archeologically about those times, but there has been a vast preponderance of what appears to be absolutely soulless behaviour on the part of the rulers of our world and those people who follow them or become their tools. It's really frightening when you review what is really happening on this planet and continues to happen even today.

Kevin: Right, that was kind of the point of my essay, Twilight of the Psychopath, it appears that essentially almost throughout recorded history we've had this ruling class of people without conscience. You can sort of see why that would happen, since so-called civilisation is really, a kind of protection racket, run by some kind of military chief that then organises a bunch of killers to threaten and kill peasants in order to steal their food and redistribute the food to the soldiers, the killers, to keep the whole thing going and the scribes, who become the keepers of the key to literacy, and that makes you think...

Laura: Well, don't forget the role of religion in here because throughout history it has been religion that has kept people in line, religion and power, politics have always been very closely intertwined.

Kevin: That's pretty ironic though because religion is supposed to deal with the domain of the soul.

Laura: Well, it's supposed to, but it doesn't necessarily do it, in a way religion is the biggest psychopath of them all, because it wears an almost complete mask of sanity. It presents itself as kind, authoritative, benevolent caretaker of the human race and it really isn't. It's pretty much designed and setup from the get go to just control people. You know, I come from a fundamentalist Christian background, I'm a recovered fundamentalist in fact. And it took me many years and a lot of research to come to the realisation about religion that I did. I don't want to offend anybody, so please understand that, but there are several books that everybody ought to read so they can get really clear about this. The first of those books would be Victor Klube and Bill Napier's The Cosmic Winter and The Cosmic Serpent, which talk about how religions originated. Other books would be Burton Mack's books on the New Testament, John Van Seters and Thomas L. Thomson's book on the Old Testament. And once you read these books and get a really clear picture from scholarly studies of religion and astronomical and historical studies of religion you come to the realisation that you've been had, all along, you've been had.

Kevin: Well, this sounds a little bit like what some of my listeners may have seen in Zeitgeist, the film that's gone viral, part one of Zeitgeist deals with a certain take on the history of religion, which argues that it's all kind of a fraud and it's just based on cosmic astrological symbolism.

Laura: It is, but, I really want to quickly interject here, that's not to deny the spiritual nature of human kind.

Kevin: Ok, well on that I agree 100%. We'll be right back.

[Break]

Kevin: We're talking about psychopaths, people without conscience or without soul, depending on how you define them. And Laura you were just saying that you see religion as being essentially kind of a racket for keeping people in line, with the masters of religion, like the masters of the rest of civilisation tending to be these soulless people. I guess I don't see it quite that way, taking a somewhat idealistic view of how Islam, which is the religion I happen to adhere to, has operated through history, I would describe it, which for me would be, gently I guess, would be that the rules that Islam brings to the society where it operates are there to create a peaceful, harmonious society in which people can develop their souls to the fullest possible potential. Now most people take that opportunity only so far, and a few people take it very far indeed and become the great souls, or the saints or the friends of god as we Muslims call them. But I don't see it as operating just as psycho power protection racket, although sometimes it can be viewed that way. Am I completely off track here?

Laura: Well, I would just urge you to read Victor Klube and Burton Mac and John Van Seters, Thomas L. Thompson, and just kind of apply some of the studies that they have done in the realm of the Old Testament and the New Testament and a little crossover application to Islam, because after all, Islam is based on the validity of the Old Testament and Thomson and Van Seters and others, Giovanni Garbini, the Italian semitist,have pretty well established that it's all a big fraud. So if you have a religion that's based on a fraud that came before it, how much validity can it have as a religion?

Which is not to say that the social rules and the social constructs and the ways of interacting with one another are not a good and benevolent thing, because those things cross all cultural boundaries. If you look at the period of time that the great religions formed up, there's some very basic things about all of them that are pretty much the same. So it's clear that these rules of conduct, these spiritual values are something that are almost genetic in people with souls, people who have a conscience and who have empathy, and if they find that there is a religious context in which they are better able to express that, then I have no problem with it. I'm just pointing out that religion is the perfect soil for psychopathy and always has been. It's like anything else, it's the place where it can lurk and breed and grow. Christianity is a pretty nefarious example, because throughout the history of western civilisation Christianity has been a violent oppressive force and yet there are many, many people who talk about the teachings of Jesus, you know, love your neighbour, love god and so on, the higher spiritual values and there are many very good Christians, well, a few at least I think, I have my doubts anymore because many of those that I used to think were really very good Christians have become right wing conservatives, so... [laughter]

Kevin: David Ray Griffon is my example of a Christian I admire.

Laura: Yeah, exactly. And there are Martin Luther King and many others, but still it's the perfect soil for the growth of psychopathy because psychopathy is a mask of sanity, it's all about lies, it's all about using religion as a control system. And that's how and why Judaism came to exist as a control system and this is pretty firmly established in the work of these scholars.

Kevin: I'd like to look at that, because I haven't read any of the scholars you've quoted, even though I have studied some comparative religions, so we'll have to maybe exchange some notes through email on those particular books.

Laura: Well yeah.

Kevin: The kind of approaches that I've looked at, through Illiady and people like that, as well as the so-called traditionalists, and that's what got me interested in Islam, was the traditionalists, who are a bunch of western people, who in the early part of the century started gravitating to Islam, for the most part, although a few chose other religions, saying that the traditional spiritual teachings of these religions could not be separated from the religions themselves, and thus anybody who wanted to get anywhere spiritually really needed the shell of a the standard traditional religion. And so after studying comparative religion from this particular angle, I guess it seems to me that there's a whole other side to religion. They tell you for example in the esoterics of religion that every society is religious, that all sorts of, you could call democracy an American religion, and you can't get away from the notion of the religious really, so generalising about it, and saying it enables psychopathy might be a little bit, sort of generalising about society, society or hierarchical society also enables psychopathy, but you can't get away from it, you're stuck in society.

Laura: Right, and there's a problem there also and that is that for most of the last 2000 years Judaic Christianity has dominated the discourse, it has led to the various contentious issues between say, the Catholic church and the emergence of Protestantism and so forth, have led to, say the birth of science, which is an interesting thing, that religion, the ideas of the Protestants led to the renaissance and then to certain scientific ideas, getting rid of the whole the sun goes round the earth thing.

So, when that happened it was like the dog biting the hand that fed it, so to speak, because science then immediately turned against religion and discounted religion entirely, but at the same time it excluded it from scientific study. It's really kind of a bizarre thing that the very thing that created it is excluded from study and all the attitudes of science are such that they're based on certain Judaeo Christian principles, even excluding Judaeo Christianity from scientific scrutiny.

So, this is something that is being corrected in say that last 25, 30 years, a lot of it going on very quietly in academic surroundings, but there is some research, some studying going on that is really astounding and I would really urge you to have a look at some of this material because it shows just how cunning and sly this problem is.

Kevin: Ok, well I will try and do that, I respect your ability to bring new and challenging ideas out there to people's attention, as you did in editing Political Ponerology, I'll look at some of your other work as well. Getting back to the idea of psychopathy as being a way of explaining what's going on in the US today, I think its Dr Justin Frank and his book, Bush on the Couch, diagnosed Bush as possibly borderline, but more of a narcissist than a psychopath per se. Anyway we'll have to pick that up when we come back.

[Break]

Kevin: So Laura, in terms of the actual psychopathy in the White House, you actually peg Bush as a genuine psychopath, somebody without a soul, somebody without a conscience?

Laura: Well, he's got all the signs and symptoms, you know. One of the things that Hare talks about when he describes the symptomatology of psychopáthy or psychópathy as some people prefer to call it, I'm a southern girl, what can I say. He talks about the peculiar speech and the mangling of sentences, using words inappropriately, what they call Bushisms, those are absolutely typical signs of a psychopath, and Hare and his book Without Conscience lists many cases giving exact example of criminal psychopaths using exactly those same types of little slips of speech, being unable to control their words, because they think in a different way and they also move their hands in a different way when they speak, short little chopping motions, they beat time with their hands while they're talking, and Bush also does that.

So when you put those two really kind of tiny little symptoms together with his behaviour and some of the things he said, like his little sneering remark about Carla Fay Tucker, begging for mercy before she was executed and his attitude about Iraq, Iran, the whole picture, you put it all together and he comes across as a really good candidate in my opinion, I'm not an expert, I can't diagnose anybody, I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but as a researcher who has really read cases, cases, cases, and more cases and analysis and technical papers and academic papers, he's a good candidate, I'd say.

Kevin: I would think so too, and it makes me wonder, how could somebody who is such a good candidate for being diagnosed as a psychopath, who does not have a terribly high IQ, it appears, certainly not much of a scholarly record, not much of a list of accomplishments, how did somebody like that end up in the White House?

Laura: Well because he has something else that the psychopath has, which is the ability to project authority, the thing we were talking about earlier, and also to lie extremely cunningly, to lie so well and so authoritatively that people take everything he says, at least certain kinds of people, take everything he says as the gospel truth, no pun intended.

Kevin: And the rest of us have figured out that if his lips move, he's lying.

Laura: Well yeah, and this goes back to another reason that religion is such a good hiding place for psychopaths, because Christianity teaches that everybody has a soul, and there are unsaved souls and there are saved souls and so forth, but basically everybody has a soul. And this is a big lie, it is a complete lie because it is quite clear that there are many people who do not have souls. Whether this came about due to a mutation, because I tend to think, because I study spiritual matters more or less scientifically, I tend to think that the presence or absence of a soul is possibly determined by your genetics. So what if the genes that help interface with the spiritual nature are lost or damaged in a mutation incident somewhere, 6000, 10,000 years ago, and there is a line of genetic psychopaths that began to thread its way through human society, and because of their breeding habits, they tend to reproduce rather well, because the psychopathic men go on the move and they breed indiscriminately, 10 wives, 25 kids from however many woman. They don't even have to be married to them, rape is a great way of spreading the psychopathic genes. And there is that funny little website that talks about the possibility that Barbara Bush was the daughter of Alistair Crowley.

Kevin: Oh no, you're my first guest that actually brought that up, that's the one conspiracy theory that even I can barely handle.

Laura: I just cracked up when I read it, I said, this is just the most ridiculous thing I ever heard, but then you look at her face and you look at Crowley's face...

Kevin: Oh, the pictures, they're a mirror images.

Laura: And whoever put it together, they actually did collect some data, and good lord, you know there are some really crazy things going on on this planet, so for all we know... And psychopathy is thought by many researchers is to be a sex linked gene, carried by the mother, passed on to the son.

Kevin: Oh boy, yeah, when I'm studying conspiracy theories from a folk lore perspective, and of course you should put that in quotes, because the government's own story of 9/11 is of course an outrageous conspiracy theory itself. But what the kinds of things that tend to get called conspiracy theories, which we do study in folk lore, if you want to come up with a sort of mathematical formula for figuring out which ones are interesting, you can multiply their plausibility based on a certain kind of evidence, that is, could this actually be true, by their complete outrageousness.

Laura: Yeah, it's like an inverse ratio.

Kevin: Right, and this one actually scores pretty well.

Laura: You're kidding. Oh my god, that is funny, but I read it and I immediately discounted it. But anyhow, that's just one of things that I think about when I'm looking at these things, because Barbara Bush is a Pierce, and the Pierce's were Percy's. Well my great grandmother was a Pierce, so I'm very distantly related to Barbara Bush, but I can tell you right now that my line of the Percy's was not those crazy people that she comes from. I just have no truck with that kind of thing.

Kevin: Hopefully you're not a descendant of Alistair Crowley and a cousin of Barbara Bush.

Laura: Oh god, well no. It's a funny thing, and the fact that I think about this issue of the soul and soullessness and conscienceless, you just begin to understand how it can spread in society, not only genetically, because American society is adaptive for psychopathy, the dog eat dog world of capitalism.

Kevin: Right, Martha Stout makes that point.

Laura: Yeah, it's just the perfect environment for it to grow and spread. And then the problem is when psychopaths get on top and they start making the rules. And think about the legal system, the legal system is set up to make it possible for psychopaths to get off, because you have somebody sitting there who swears to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, this oath is going to act on a person of conscience, they will take this oath and they will tell the truth because they believe in this oath, a psychopath will not, he'll swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and mean not a word of it, and lie through his teeth all the way down the line. So the jury who doesn't know either of the people or anything about them or their past or their acquaintances or their associations, and they're not allowed to know those things, have to evaluate the case based on just what is presented in court, and if the psychopath is a good liar, he will win.

Kevin: And even if he's not any better of a liar than the person who is the truth teller, the jury's might, "What's the difference?"

Laura: Yeah, so the system is set up for psychopaths.

Kevin: Yes I'm afraid you have a point there. We'll be back to take of on that point when we come back after the break.

[Break]

Kevin: Laura, we have a call, so let's go to our caller, it's Rudy from Michigan. How are you doing Rudy?

Rudy (caller): Not bad, how are you doing?

Kevin: Pretty good.

Rudy (caller): I was really interested in the topic you're talking about, I was wondering if you guys could discuss how a psychopath uses their lack of consciousness to somehow control other people's subconscious and in some form brainwash them into doing what it is they want them to do.

Laura: Oh that's a good one.

Kevin: Why don't you go ahead Laura, you're the expert on this.

Laura: Well, I don't know if I'm the expert on it but I can tell you what I've observed. The psychopath, first of all, as I mentioned, they come across as very authoritative. They also have these word glitches, like blank spots in their speech and what tends to happen, because most believe that everybody has a soul and everybody is like them, the normal person will project onto the psychopath and fill in the blanks, it's like driving down the road at night and you see a sign ahead that says m_tel, and you fill in the 'o', because you know it says motel. So what happens when psychopaths talk and they use emotional words but don't necessarily exhibit those emotions, we tend to project onto them, what we ourselves feel.

Ok, so that's the first thing. The second thing is that a psychopath can use these emotional words to trigger in a person certain emotional states that causes them to think a certain way. Now the psychopath knows very well what they're doing to the person because they are masters of human psychology, normal human psychology that is. And at the same time the psychopath may pretend that they too are feeling emotional, they may use words and they may mimic certain behaviours, they may even cry, shed a tear, crocodile tears, but all the while they're doing this, they are completely cold and calculating inside and they're constantly observing the effect of everything they're saying and doing, and they can work a person this way and that way and the other way and get them to actually believe that black is white, up is down, and red is green and inside is outside, by completely confusing them.

There's a process called Transmarginal inhibition that was described by Ivan Pavlov, and there are several techniques that can induce a state of hysteria in a normal human being by playing on their emotions. When that person is in an induced state of hysteria, the handler, the programmer, can at that point, when they're in that hysterical state, make pronouncements, authoritative statements that the individual will accept as true. In a sense it's kind of like Stockholm syndrome, were you abuse a person, you cause them emotional distress, you delay things, you put them in all kinds of stressful situations and then all of a sudden you say something kind or seemingly feeling toward them, and then they are so grateful for your kindness in their state of terrible distress, that they begin to look on you as some sort of saviour, and whatever you say while they're in that state, they will believe that, they will come to adopt that as a fact and as truth because it's being said authoritatively to them while they're in a hysterical emotional state.

Look at 9/11, for days and days and days, we watched repeatedly while these jets were flying into the buildings, the buildings were collapsing, the news programs were so focused on putting everybody in the United States into a state of hysteria so that the story that the government had cooked up to explain everything that had happened was then pronounced authoritatively, and that is the reason why so many people came to believe it. And why they didn't rise up en mass and demand better explanations for what happened, because the authoritative pronouncements were made while they were in a state of Transmarginal inhibition.

Kevin: That's what Doug Rushkoff describes in his book Coercion, which was my inspiration in the other biggest viral essay I wrote, other than the Twilight of the Psychopaths, which I believe was called Apocalypse of Coercion, and Rushkoff says that this technique is used by car salesman, as well as mind control specialists, they pretty much separate the person from their normal sense of self and the world, through torture or massive confusion, the sort of thing they did to us on 9/11, and once they've done that then they move in and regress the target to...

Laura: They're heavy on the shock.

Kevin: Right, and step in as that parental authority figure that you were just describing.

Rudy (caller): I have one other comment, I also read quite a bit of stuff about covert aggressors, and their bag of tricks which to me seems like basically a psychopath with another name.

Laura: Absolutely.

Rudy (caller): And the one thing I see that is very telling of the way they act is when they use a defensive attack in order to disarm you, so that they can then subliminally give you whatever they're ideas are and put them in your head.

Kevin: So what is a defensive attack?

Rudy (caller): Well it's when they setup a situation where something you've said, they take it as offended, so they show that they're hurt by your words, and you believe it, so now you've been disarmed to defend yourself, then they attack you under the fence of them being hurt, when they really aren't, so you'll accept almost anything they'll say to you at that minute.

Laura: Yeah, that goes to another line of attack, which is where the criminal or the psychopath, or whoever, attacks themselves, to feint an injury, not to feint, but they actually have an injury, they injure themselves to make it appear that they're innocent. That's what the whole Pentagon attack was about, that was the fake self-injury to indicate that, well, of course Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld they were all there and they were being attacked, their lives were at risk to, so they couldn't possibly be guilty,but it was a precision attack designed to make sure that they themselves were never in any physical danger, while at the same time it could be made to appear that they were.

Kevin: Right, it hit the opposite side of the Pentagon from where the top brass have their offices and then of course they did kill 20 some budget analysts and accountants the day after Rumsfeld had announced that 2.3 trillion dollars had gone missing from the Pentagon budget.

Laura: Absolutely. And this one is so old that, why people don't think about it just astonishes me. Look at Agatha Christy and all of her "who dunnit" mystery stories. That was one of the more typical situations that she would write about, where the criminal would fake an injury on themselves to make it look like they were innocent.

Kevin: Yeah, that's interesting because Martha Stout actually talks about the routine that psychopaths pull by making themselves out to be the victim, the victimisation thing.

Laura: Yeah, pity, pity me, and that goes back to covert aggression. George Simon wrote a book called Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, and I really think that the majority of what he is describing is psychopathic behaviour behind a very well-crafted mask of sanity.

Kevin: Ok, sounds pretty convincing to me, I think it's one of the more interesting tangential areas I've stumbled upon since getting interested in 9/11 truth, hope you agree, we'll be back to talk some more.

[Break]

Kevin: We do have another caller, I was told it was Julie-Anne from Whitewater, but I know somebody named Joanne from Whitewater. Is this Joanne or Julie-Anne?

Joanne (caller): This is Joanne, right, a fantastic show as usual. I've got a question about Barak Obama, and I'm curious about his hold on followers, especially young people. I'm very worried about this, especially as it relates to larger policy issues, larger issues in which he could be involved. We've had a candidate or two, Ron Paul is one of the candidates of course and we've got perhaps Cynthia McKinney who would be opening some of the books about 9/11 and certainly exposing some of these important issues. I'm wondering whether or not Barak Obama even understands these issues or if they're on his radar screen, however his cult-like followers will take his role of reality, his version of reality whatever that is?

Kevin: Well, Laura, what do you think? I guess we're talking about psychopathy and Barak Obama, I haven't really studied him enough to have a sense of it, but I guess when you have a highly charismatic leader you almost want to kind of vet them for this, don't you?

Laura: Well, you know it's funny, because I was looking at him just a little bit the other day and there was some stuff going around on the internet, where they were claiming that there was some old timey African prophet, who had predicted that the United States would be taken down by a man, a son of their people, and it just happened to be the same tribe that his grandfather or something came from.

Kevin: I saw that too, I think it was reported by Sasha Powell, only a medium sort of reliable source.

Laura: Yeah, well I'm not sure. Some of the things that this group comes up with are pretty interesting and I've got the idea that it's a psy-op. They take things that are very interesting and unusual and they give it a twist at the end or take it in exactly the wrong direction, and so I started wondering why are they trying to paint Obama with such negative brushstrokes. So that piqued my interest and then they mentioned his genealogy, so I had a look at his genealogy which was rather boring and mundane, he did have a grandmother who abandoned her child, which would suggest maybe a little psychopathy there, maybe a mother to son type thing, but then that wouldn't pass to him because it was on his father's side. On his mother's side there wasn't anything terribly interesting other than a suicide and that doesn't necessarily indicate any deviant genetics.

Kevin: Wait a minute Laura, is it really that genetic, because I thought I read in Stout and Hare and so on that it is about 50% genetic?

Laura: Well it's actually more than that, when you start getting into the studies, you find it's about 80% genetic, 20% environment, especially when you're dealing with psychopathy. Now, sociopathy and other things like that, there's are a little bit different, but trying to get a handle on him, I'm just trying to look at him and I'm thinking about it and the main thing I think about when I look at these things is that it's really not about anybody getting elected, because I don't think that the American people have elected anybody for a very long time. Number one because of the electoral college system, that's the first thing. The second thing is it's not who votes but who counts the votes, and we know with the electronic voting that there's probably not any real chance of anybody worthwhile being elected, so it's strikes me that Obama and Clinton are really just, they're almost like puppets and they're being run and being danced around and it's all a façade, a farce to try to convince the American people that they still live in a democracy, that they still have some say, even if it's the choice of the lesser of several evils. As for Obamas power of his cult-like following, you can almost understand that because here we have a black man and he's Muslim, isn't he?

Kevin: No, no, no, I wish he were, I wish we had a Muslim about to be elected president, I'd vote for him. [laughter]

Laura: There were some rumblings that he was a closet Muslim and he's a black man and he's young and he's good looking and he's got a good looking family, and it's just natural for him to get kind of a cult-like following because he seems like something fresh and new and different, and everybody is really, really tired of what's old and stale and bad.

But the tendency for people to form cult-like followings around anybody is pretty normal. They've done a study recently at the University of Leeds, they've shown that it only takes a minority of 5% of a group of people to influence the other 95%, which way they go, in terms of just moving around. And the same thing is true when you're dealing with psychological issues, it takes a very small percentage of people to influence a very large number of people, especially if that small percentage come across as very authoritative. But, is it really going to matter even, who gets elected? It's the same power controllers behind the scenes that are gonna be controlling whoever it is.

Kevin: I agree with you there Laura. I have had this debate on my shows though, between people like Webster Tarpley, who think Obama is especially bad because, Webster's idea here of course is that the Zbigniew Brzezinski is not exactly just Obama's chief adviser, but in fact according to Webster, Brzezinski hand-picked Obama to be a candidate.

Laura: I wouldn't be surprised.

Kevin: Right, just as he and Rockefeller, his controller, picked Jimi Carter back in 76. So the idea here would be, according to Webster, that Brzezinski is a Russian hater, he absolutely detests the Russians, he's a revanchist out for revenge for the perceived slight that Poland has gotten from the Russians, so he's a very dangerous guy to get in there because he might lead us into war with the Russians, and of course they're a lot better armed than the Iranians and Iraqis. Now, from my perspective though, I also would ask Webster, and I have debated him on this on the air, whether it might not be a nice change to get somebody who, rather than beating up on these poor countries that can't defend themselves and killing millions of innocent people, somebody who picked on a country that could defend itself, number one, might not get into a shooting war, because of course with nuclear weapons, you just don't get into shooting wars, and number two, he'll call off this evil war against the Middle East, which from my perspective would be a great thing, maybe he'll even call off some of the assaults on the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. So there's that counter argument, and we've gone back and forth here, but ultimately Laura, I think I come down with you on saying that I'm not convinced that it really makes a dimes worth of difference.

Joanne (caller): Well, one of the reasons I'm concerned is that Obama has a way of reaching people that bypasses the brain, and, at least with Hillary Clinton there are some things that she says that...

Kevin: Ok, well we'll have to pick it up after the break about what it is that Hillary says that I guess goes through the rational part of the brain rather than the charismatic hero worshipping parts that Obama supposedly reaches according to this, we'll be back to pick it up in a moment.

[Break]

Kevin: Actually that song is kind of ironic given the topic of conversation, psychopathy in political power, because of course John Lennon was one of those people with a conscience, who accumulated a certain amount of power through his charisma over other people, and he seems to have been taken out by these psychopaths in the same way that so many other influential people who have like-wise had a little bit more conscience than the average powerful person, seem to get taken out. Look at JFK after he went toe to toe with the Russians over the missile crisis, he seemed to rethink militarism, you know, re-think this where millions of people could be incinerated at the touch of a button and he wanted to demilitarise, and the psychopaths took him out. And you look at these other folks that get taken out, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, perhaps Bobby Kennedy and all these leaders in other countries too, you know, Mosaddiq in Iran, and then there's Arbenz in Guatemala and on and on. These people who have extra conscience seem to get killed, leading one to suspect that the people who are running the show have a lot less conscience than the average person. Am I barking up the right tree here Laura?

Laura: I think you're barking up the right tree. I've written exactly the same things myself. You see people like Princess Diana who spoke out against the land mines, and John Lennon and JFK and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and what was his name, Paul Wilston. The list is rather long and when you consider the fact that these people had so much charisma and they had position and they could have turned public opinion in a such a way and so obviously somebody knew that and decided to take them out, which is another clue to the awareness of the psychopath of who and what they are and what they're doing, they're really do know who and what they are and they are connected.

Kevin: That's a frightening thought. And that does lead to a slightly different take on the caller's question about Obama and his charisma, because it does seem to me that charisma is sort of a two faced item, a Janus like quality, because it can take people in the wrong direction of course, like Hitler and his wonderful speeches, or it can take people in potentially the right direction as JFK was in a position to do. They couldn't touch him because he had that kind of hypnotic hold over the people, he could propose these outrageous things like, not just the atmospheric testing treaty, but he was ready to radically demilitarise, and the people would have gone along with it because they were hypnotised by a good guy. I wonder if Obama will turn out to be a good guy?

Laura: Well there's always that possibility, but I would like to hear what the caller was going to say about Hillary Clinton.

Kevin: Yeah, oh I cut her off, Joanne are you still there?

Joanne (caller): Oh yeah, definitely, I love the conversation and I didn't mind waiting. My general point was Hillary Clinton, who appears to policy walk, comparing different, early childhood programs, whatever, I've asked her some questions in large forums in the past, and she knows every policy and can compare them very readily, as opposed to Barak Obama, during his rallies he takes very few questions, almost everything is about him, he's a blank slate that people are filling in with their own ideas and impressions. What's interesting is that I saw that Teddy Kennedy was trying to fill that blank slate with the Kennedy imagery and all that, and almost like a barnacle on a ship, or a, whatever, a parasite on a larger animal, fill in and try to gain from that larger creature.

Laura: Well, one thing that I'd like to point out to people, because you know, Kennedy has been so defamed by the right wing authoritarians since he died and before he died and so forth, they point out the fact that his father Joe Kennedy used the mob to get him elected, and my thought has always been that, yes he did use the mob to get himself elected because he had plans and in the US that's almost the only way you can get elected, is to lay low, to fly under the radar, to appear to be a blank slate, and then when you get a position then you can start putting things together and doing things. His only problem was of course that he didn't really understand the nature of the psychopath and how far they really are willing to go to maintain their power and their control and their dominance. Obama, being a blank slate could be exactly that, a really blank slate, just a puppet. He could also be somebody who is flying under the radar, it's hard to tell at this point, there's just not enough data points to go on.

Kevin: And sometimes people change. With JFK, I'm not convinced that he was particularly outstanding until he had that experience of being close to the nuclear brink during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which apparently re-awakened some conscience in him. Also, of course, he, apparently started taking LSD with an associate of Timothy Leary's, who was committed to the cause of radical disarmament, and apparently that may have had an effect on him also. Interestingly, that was the wife of Cord Meyer.Cord Meyer was the head of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird, which controlled the media at that time, his wife Mary Meyer was sleeping with JFK, taking LSD with him and reporting back to Timothy Leary on her effort to get the president on board with radical disarmament stuff. It's pretty interesting that Cord Meyer, it turns out, was the leading figure in the JFK assassination plot, according to the recent confession by former CIA agent, Howard Huts, who said he took part in it too.

Joanne (caller): I just have one more quick question and then I'll let other callers jump in. I'm actually interested in the possibility that John McCain could have enough animosity towards the Bush administration, that John McCain could open the book on 9/11 and perhaps lead us all towards the war crime trials that we're looking for?

Laura: Oh, be still my heart. [laughter]

Joanne (caller): There could be enough lying beneath the surface, and John McCain's psychology, and certainly he was trashed by the Bush administration very heavily in South Carolina in 2000, in his race.

Laura: We can only wish.

Kevin: Yeah, I don't know, McCain sounds to me like he's even crazier than Bush and Cheney. It's like what Pat Buchanan said, he said that McCain makes Cheney look like Ghandi, so I don't know.

Laura: You're kidding. That's quite a statement.

Joanne (caller): Thanks very much, I'll sign off, bye.

Kevin: Ok, thanks Joanne. Well, can this new science of Ponerology, the study of psychopathy and power, help us evaluate these kinds of alleged decisions that we make when we go to the voting booth, can it really help understand what's going on?

Laura: Yes, because the unique thing about the book is that it tells you how these networks form, what kinds of psychopaths play, which kinds of roles in terms of the network, and how they extend their networks into society, and how they use their ability to charm, to coerce or to mislead. There's the schizoidal psychopath who generally does a lot of theoretical writing on which certain ideas are based. For example, the neo-conservatives and their adherence to the Strausian philosophy. Strauss is probably a schizoidal psychopath, and there are some definite deficits in his philosophies which the neocons have followed. And another example is Milton Friedman and his trickledown economics, that's completely a schizoidal psychopath's work and the bases for the shock doctrine.

Kevin: I would totally be with you on the neocons and Strauss, but Friedman I'd have to think about, but there's always time to think and we'll have a few minutes to think before we come back.

[Break]

Kevin: We have another caller, it's Karl from Montreal, how are you doing Karl?

Karl (caller): Hey, it's a great topic you have on discussing tonight. I can't agree more, I wish you had this guest on earlier, it kind of relates to my own experiences with people.

Kevin: Well gee Karl, Laura you mentioned that incident where Bush really brutally and insensitively insulted what was it, Carla Fay Tucker right before her execution, well Karl here is calling from incarceration in Canada and the main reason he's locked up because Karl you drew a political cartoon that was satirising that horrible incident, can you describe that cartoon?

Karl (caller): Well I had Bush standing before all mighty god in heaven, with the words "please don't kill me", he was kind of saying it in the same kind of manner, in that micking manner, the way that Bush had mocked Carla Fay Tucker with those words.

Kevin: The police department apparently didn't appreciate your satire.

Karl (caller): And also, I would hear about a topic about the religious issue, and I agree a lot with what she's saying. I'm a Christian, but, I don't accept Catholicism or Protestant theology because I grew up from a family of Catholic and Protestant background and I started going to churches and I started seeing all the ignorance and the people that didn't have understanding of the Bible, and it seemed like there was just a lot of blindness, people following more traditions, and I started searching for answers and I started seeing that a lot of people are just going off of what they think they know, and I started finding a lot of errors. Well that's a whole other story, so I started finding a lot of similarities between the Bible and the Koran, the Bible teaches submission to god and also teaches the oneness of god, but I see a lot of, people might disagree with me, a lot of listeners, how the certain churches interpret the oneness of god, as a oneness of essence or a philosophical oneness, and I see there's a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of the psychopaths, people tend to follow these charismatic leaders and these people tend to buy into anything that they're told, instead of looking for answers on their own, they're kind of steered in a certain direction which often leads us down the wrong road.

Kevin: It definitely happens with religions and maybe Laura you can respond, because you were saying that in general religions are perfect vehicles for psychopaths and that there are mythology that's designed for manipulation, but maybe it depends partly on the way that people approach them?

Laura: Well one of the things that religion can be used to do, like I mentioned before, is to convince everybody that everybody has a soul, this of course gives the perfect out for the psychopath, who I don't think has one, I'm really treading into spiritual matters here, but then, I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist so I don't have a reputation to lose, I can say what I want. [laughter]

Kevin: You know, the Koran though Laura actually does give a good picture of psychopaths, although it may be a little broader than that, but it talks about people whose hearts, they have rust on their hearts.

Laura: Well then, the great Sufi Sheik Ibn al-Arabisaid that some men are born men and live life as pigs, so they can lose whatever they had, but, the thing is that, about this cartoon, Bush pleading, "oh please don't kill me", at the pearly gates, or god or whatever, the sad things is that if psychopaths don't have souls, that means they don't pay for their crimes once they die. And that seems to be so monumentally unfair, but as I was saying, religion can be used to conceal the activity of the psychopath, to obtain favours for them, to get control for them. It's been historically used repeatedly to control large numbers of people and I just recently did a series of articles, actually I'm still working on it, talking about how religion has morphed and changed over the centuries through interactions with different events in medieval Europe and so forth, and how the witch trials came along and what they did to outspoken... That was just an excuse to get rid of any woman who had confidence, who had any material property, after the 100 years' war there were a lot of women who were widows and they were in charge of their property and they were assertive. And the men who were in charge were a little bit afraid of this and they had to find a way to get rid of these women, and to take their property. So they instituted witch persecution. So there's a lot of ways that religion has been used to hide the activities of psychopaths and it's not just in the beginnings of the religion. Judaism was created as a control system, that's all it was.

Kevin: Yeah right, I agree with that, as an observation that it happens, one example that I have studied would be the Hassan II of Morocco, the previous king, not today's king, who seems to be a little bit more human, but his father Hassan II seems to have been quite a psychopath, he brought in the CIA to build a gigantic torture centre, enjoyed torturing and killing his opponents and so on. He did all this by justifying his rule, as a descendant of the prophet Mohammad and somebody with mystical Baraka, he legitimised his rule through religion, so I'm not saying it doesn't happen with Islam, it certainly does happen with all religions.

Karl (caller): I see the leaders today are a lot like emperor Constantine, he was the first one that professed Christianity and made it a state religion, and I think a lot of our problems go back to this basically divine right of kings, they believe that they are doing gods will, they put themselves in the positions of power believing that they're backed by god.

Laura: And believing that they're backed by god, they must have to approval of the priesthood, and what Constantine did was, he gave the clergy the power, he gave them authority over the courts, beyond which there was no appeal. So naturally that was the way to create a psychopathic institution, and it certainly did, and it has been so ever since and western society is suffused with the ideas and ideology. Christianity stands almost alone as being a religion that declares it's god is the only god and that there is no recourse beyond that god, and if you don't believe in that god, you're damned to hell for all eternity.

Karl (caller): Yeah, I would be condemned as a heretic because I don't accept Constantine's decisions on the council of Nicaea. I think that the church we have today is the false teacher that Jesus warned about. Have you ever read Isaac Newton's Right Observations on Daniel and Revelations and also the book by Alexander Hislop, Two Babylons, I think that Christianity is the very church that runs around preaching Jesus.

Laura: Certainly it is, but even more important than that is the fact that, Burton Mac has pretty well demonstrated to my mind at least, through his scholarly studies of the linguistics of the various layers of the New Testament, that whoever this Jesus legend was formed around, he probably wasn't Jewish and he was more likely to be a cynic, a peripatetic, somebody who gets up at the market place and pokes fun at the authorities and encourages all the young to people to overthrow the traditions and to get rid of the social restraints and to forget about class and class structures and social structures, and seeing how the layers got built up and how each layer was added by someone else. The Book of Mark was undoubtedly written by a schizoidal psychopath, in my opinion.

Karl (caller): I agree with a lot with what you're saying, basically I kind of go along those lines, I believe that what's been pushed upon us, we've deluded ourselves, the Bible talks about errors, people deluded by errors and I kind of go along with this, that it's exactly what's happened.

Laura: The bottom line is, religion is used by psychopaths to control vast numbers of people in the name of politics.

Kevin: OK, well that's the last word I guess, because we're coming to the end of today's Dynamic Duo show. So I'd really like to thank Laura Knight-Jadczyk for comming on, it was a great conversation.

Laura: Thanks for having me.