My job used to have me behind the wheel many hours a day M-F and in hotels 3-4 nights a week. The only thing that didn't cause me to get sleepy behind the wheel was conservative talk radio and we had it in abundance back then, especially if you had satellite radio.

I soaked myself in stuff and, from some hosts, I got a free education. I was always up to date on the current issues and it was fun. But some hosts were sinister. They pretended to be constitutional conservatives and slowly introduced fear. I found myself buying things in bulk and being constantly worried the country was on the verge of collapse. My behavior and mindset literally changed but I did not realize it in real time at all.

I snapped out of it when the GOP took the House in 2010 by winning over 60 seats. It was a momentous occasion. And this was bad news to one of the people I listened to every day. He never paused to enjoy the victory but made it seem like it was bad and we would never recover. This made me wake up and I realized I had been living in fear of what might come because I had let this dishonest entertainer influence me negatively. I realized almost immediately that I had let myself join a cult through the radio. I had been so focused on "what if" that I had been neglecting my family and spending money very unwisely on things I would never need.

In the years since, I have had a lot of friends fall into this. It accelerated with YouTube and the online platforms. When you watch doom and gloom online, the algorithms direct you to watch more doom and gloom. This isn't sinister, it's just the way a computer program works. It's going to direct you to stuff you spend time on and then to the most popular of that similar stuff. And the people getting paid off hits are going to keep getting paid, guaranteed.

This model of fear-based info-tainment has become so large now through the internet platforms that we see people falling into it pretty regularly. And there's nothing you can do to stop it. If you speak about their guy, then the cult part kicks in and you're a RINO or something worse. We see this all day here on Twitter with third rate pretend pundits slandering each other and getting paid off the attention. I lost a few long-term friends over this in the past few years because I wouldn't go into the conspiracy world with them. But I've been in that dark place and I am not going back. Period.

People, understand this is the same as a religion. These things used to be reserved for end-time cult religions but now they are part of our every day lives. We've seen in the past couple weeks a lot of people realizing "their guy or gal" are complete frauds. Kid Rock drinking that beer that shall not be mentioned only a couple weeks after shooting cases of it. T^cker going to the fights with a guy he has openly loathed. The House of Representatives ousting a perfectly good Speaker so it could continue to operate exactly as it did under that Speaker because that's our reality. I just hope more folks can come out of this trance and realize these "influencers" are making money keeping us in fear and at each other's throats. Life is too short to be missing time with your wife, kids, and church because you are hinging on every spoken or tweeted word of a charlatan who is just getting rich telling you lies.

#shabbatshalom