Michael Malice

There was an epidemic and all these horses got sick.

And because the vaccine didn't work on the horses, the bacteriologists were arrested because they were regarded as wreckers.

It's like we gave you a job.

You didn't do it.

You're undermining the socialist state.

So it's kind of a backward series of incentives, and it's designed to maintain at all costs the ruling ideological superstructure.

Well, the ideological is like in the sciences and what's true in genetics or what's true in astronomy, that doesn't really percolate out to the masses, right?

So the Pravda is maybe covering this scientist is great or these discoveries are great, but it's not necessarily the same as day-to-day or glorifying political leaders.

I can give you an example, a very easy one.

So again, with regarding North Korea, Kim, the great leader Kim Il-sung, who was the founder of North Korea, had a tumor on the back of his neck and it was too close to the skull, the spinal column, so they couldn't operate on it.

And throughout his life, it got bigger and bigger.

And I got mixed messages in my research about whether North Koreans knew about it because they always photographed him from this angle.

And I met a refugee and I asked her, I'm like, did you know that he had this tumor?

She goes, yeah, yeah.

When people played him in the movies, they would, you know, you'd make up there.

And she goes, it was an old war injury.

And I go, why would a war injury get bigger throughout your life?

And she just stood there and she was like, holy, but she never questioned it.

But it was the kind of thing where they put the idea in her head.

And since there was no reason to question it, she just kind of went with it her entire life until I talked to her.