rs, right? I don't think the data changed. I think what changed was the persuasion. What you saw on television. Who was the president? You know, how many stories were run of a certain type? What did social media do? So without the data changing at all, I mean I haven't even looked at the data, but I don't think it got worse between 2016 and 2019, did it? Or 2020. It didn't get worse. I mean if it did it's like some small amount, but basically it's the same. But our opinion of it completely changed. So do you think opinions change because of data? No. The data stayed the same and the opinions wildly changed because of persuasion. So if you don't see that the data didn't make any difference and the persuasion made all the difference, you're watching the wrong world.

So let's talk about some more fun stuff. So I've told you before that fear is the primary persuasive force. There is nothing more persuasive, period, than fear, because fear is the top of your concern stack. If you're literally afraid at the moment, you're going to take care of that first. You won't even eat first if you're afraid. First you take care of afraid. Go hide. Protect yourself. Do what you need to do and then you eat. So there's nothing that competes even close to fear as a primary persuasive variable.

And here's what the Democrats are doing for their campaign strategy. They're calling for defunding the police at exactly the same time other Democrats, and I say that more jokingly because I'm just doing that thing that all pundits do. I act like the one percent of the bad characters represent the whole. Obviously the looters do not represent Democrats. Can we agree looters are not representative of Democrats? Even if you think it, even if you think that's true for fun, it's not true mathematically. But it is nonetheless true that in a political season, if the Democrats are producing two things simultaneously, it's not a good look. One of the things they're producing is a very powerful and maybe successful call to defund the police. So that's one thing they're doing. But other people who will be associated with the Democrats because they lean in that direction, even if they're not registered Democrats, even if they're not voting, is the people doing the violence on videos. So we have all this video of what happens when the police are not there, which is, if I can be blunt, white people being killed by Black people. I'm not saying that that describes the world. I'm saying it describes these selective little videos that are running nonstop because those are the anecdotes we're getting.

So if you're doing two things simultaneously, the Democrats saying let's defund the police while all of the visual persuasion, what do I tell you about visual persuasion? It overwhelms other kinds of persuasions that involve your senses. It's not as strong as fear, but the visual can be part of the fear persuasion too, of course. But the fact that it's visual, it's on video and it's horrible and you're seeing people just being killed by rioters and looters breaking store windows, you couldn't have a weaker strategy going into the election. In fact, if you were to sit down and try to design on paper the worst campaign strategy, it would be defund the police while simultaneously showing nonstop images of what happens when the police are not standing right there. I don't know that that could be worse from their side. Am I wrong? Highest form of persuasion, and they're creating a situation to scare you to death.

Now if you haven't seen this clip, I just tweeted it. You have to watch it just for the reaction. It's a CNN clip in which Alison Camerota i