Editor’s Note: This article is a reprint. It was originally published May 4, 2024.
Gavin de Becker is one of the leading security resource experts in the world. His private security firm, Gavin de Becker and Associates, protects about 70 well-known U.S. families and individuals, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who are at risk of assassination or other violence but don’t have Secret Service coverage. However, he also engages in public education to help protect the general population:
“In my public education work, I write books, and that’s to take the strategies that are used to protect senators, congressmen, presidents, governors, and make them available on an accessible level to regular people. The reason being that a public figure in America is attacked about once every five years, but a woman is killed by a husband or boyfriend about once every five hours.
And so, I wanted to take what I had learned and say, ‘Well, what are the ways that there this crossover so that regular people who are subject to victimization and targeting can be safer?’”
In our interview, we discuss the importance of paying attention to your instincts, how to decipher between the two types of fear as well as how fear is used as an instrument of control, including in the context of COVID-19, the pandemic and COVID jabs.
What Triggered the 40% Rise in Deaths Among Young, Healthy Americans?
De Becker wrote the afterword to Ed Dowd’s book, “Cause Unknown,” which discusses the unexplained 40% spike in deaths that occurred among young athletes and other healthy Americans during the third and fourth quarters of 2021. A new edition, covering 2023 deaths, also came out in March 2024.
Media largely blamed the deaths — which they’re now referring to as sudden adult death syndrome, or SADS — on COVID-19, delayed diagnosis, suicide and other factors. But de Becker explains:
“Could it possibly be that a new vaccine product, mass vaccinated by compulsion on the population, could have anything to do with it? If you had 100 kids die, one of the questions you would ask is, what do they have in common? Did they all attend that same event where the air conditioning had a virus in it? Did they all take the same street drug, for example?
Well, in this case, we know that the overwhelming majority of young athletes were vaccinated [for COVID-19] and typically two or three vaccinations. And you can’t exclude that one possible cause when we know for an absolute fact that the mRNA vaccines do cause myocarditis and pericarditis, it’s acknowledged by the CDC.
… Interestingly, [CDC] just did release something for FOIA, a … 140-page report on myocarditis and pericarditis associated with the [COVID-19] vaccines. Every single page redacted, every single page … Why does the CDC ever have secrets? That’s supposed to be the organization that keeps us informed.”
De Becker describes “Cause Unknown” as a book to give to someone you love who needs to be awakened.
“That book is a book you can hand somebody you love who you’ve been unable to reach, and it’s just possible that they might choose not to vaccinate their 14-year-old kid or they might take a different attitude and not take all nine of these injections that are currently recommended by the CDC,” he says. “We are on injection number 10, will be the next one, currently recommended by the CDC for children.”
The Importance of Listening to Your Intuition
De Becker is the author of “The Gift of Fear,” which came out in 1998 and became a No. 1 national bestseller. It’s still the No. 1 bestseller in the world on violence to this day. The book empowers you to embrace your gut instincts or inner wisdom — your intuition. De Becker says:
“The word intuition … the root of it … means to guard and protect. And that’s what it does for us. It is the sense, we could say the sixth sense, that keeps us safe, sort of our nuclear defense system. And, indeed, the gut has lots of neurons — more than a dog has in fact.
And there’s a form of thought, if you will, or connection to the universe that when we just know something without knowing why, when we don’t use logic, we just say, go back to the house, call the house, move away from this person, get out of this underground parking lot, don’t call this person back, don’t date this person, don’t stay late with this manager of this restaurant when he asks you, whatever it may be.
Sometimes, the overwhelming majority of times, people are not sinister toward us and don’t mean us harm, but sometimes they do. And when you get that signal from intuition, it is very, very important to listen to it. And I say that intuition is always correct in at least two ways. One, it’s always about something. And number two, it always has your best interest at heart.
Now, it might be that the information that you deduce from an intuitive feeling of hesitation or fear or curiosity, maybe your interpretation will be wrong, but the fact that you listen and give it a hearing is very important.”
Understanding the Two Types of Fear
There are two distinct types of fear, according to de Becker — true fear and unwarranted fear. True fear is the instinctual response to an immediate threat, characterized by the physiological reactions that prepare your body to either confront or flee from danger.
This type of fear is an intuitive signal that warns you of genuine danger and helps preserve your safety. “What I call true fear is the automatic immediate reaction of the body,” de Becker says. “Something is wrong here. I see a snake or a tiger, right away I have a physical reaction. And that fear should always be listened to.”
Unwarranted fear, on the other hand, encompasses fears that are not directly linked to immediate threats. These can include anxieties and worries about potential future events that may never occur, often leading to unnecessary stress and precautionary behaviors that do not enhance personal safety.
Unwarranted fear can be influenced by societal factors, past experiences and individual perceptions of risk that may not accurately reflect actual danger. De Becker argues that understanding the distinction between these two types of fear is crucial for recognizing when fear is a helpful guide and when it is a hindrance to living a fulfilled life. He explains:
“The unwarranted fear, like the fear of I’m boarding a plane and I think, ‘Oh, this plane’s going to crash, don’t get on it.’ If that’s based on a news story I saw two weeks ago about a plane crash in Brazil, that’s going to be unwarranted fear in the category of anxiety.
But if it’s based on seeing the two pilots stumble out of the bar drunk at the airport, that’s something I might want to listen to. So, you at least ask yourself the question, what’s this about?
Many of us have had that feeling about don’t get on this airplane, for example. And sometimes, it’s hard to act upon, and sometimes it will be unnecessary or misinterpreted. But if you ask yourself if it’s based on memory or imagination, that is not true fear. If it’s based on something in your environment, something you see or smell or hear or feel, that is often true fear and should be listened to.
… Fear does have a gift for us and no animal in nature, even the strongest lion that’s suddenly afraid, will say, ‘Oh, it’s probably nothing.’ But we do that. A woman will be standing at an elevator in a building late at night, an office building and the elevator doors open up and there’s a man in there who causes her fear. We don’t know why only a human being will get into a steel soundproof chamber with someone who causes them fear.
An animal won’t do it. And so, we override, we prosecute our own intuitive feelings. And my life is full, and yours too, of people who said, I knew it, but I still did such and such. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I still hired that person or I knew I had a feeling about that environment and I stayed in it.”
Fear as an Instrument of Control
Fear isn’t only a tool you can harness to keep yourself out of harm’s way. In the interview, we also discussed how fear is used to control and manipulate populations.
“All governments and all leaders have used fear as an instrument of control. And all governments also benefit from division in their countries,” de Becker says. “And the reason that they benefit from division in their countries is … you want people to be energized in their focus on each other and not on those in power.”
De Becker describes some recent historical events that have used fear to gradually take a way freedom and liberty, from Y2K, when it was said all technology would stop functioning when it turned to the year 2000, to COVID-19:
“After 9/11, every big office building suddenly implemented security procedures where you had to show ID to get into the building. Now, we have to remember, you didn’t need ID to fly an airplane into the building. The security response was absolutely unequal to what had actually happened. Airplanes have been flown into buildings.
That’s one kind of thing, intruders trying to get in your building and documenting everybody and passes. And we became a national security state over fear of terrorism.
Then you have killer bees was another thing that was posted on the public. And terrorism is an interesting thing because you start with an enemy like a country. It’s a real country, there it is, it’s Russia, it’s China. Then you go to communists. Communists are the problem. Then you go to communism is the problem.
Now, you’re getting down to a very fine, almost talcum powder, and then you go to terrorists are the problem. Then you go to terrorism, which is an idea, is the problem. And finally, we have landed on the smallest possible particle, the virion, the virus. Virus is the problem.”
In early March 2020, de Becker did a report for clients on the actual risks of COVID and quickly learned the odds of dying from COVID were remote for healthy people. Still, fear was used to implement order and control.
“This was a war by governments on citizens. And it completely shifted the power … such that you could accomplish with words getting billions of people to stay in their homes, getting everybody in America to not go to work. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed forever,” de Becker says. “… And what happens when you’re afraid is that you’ll take any train that’s leaving the station even if it’s not going where you want to go. And that’s what America did.” He adds:
“The reality is that very, very few people were in danger and it should not have been used to lock down societies and close schools and these things that were tremendously damaging to young people and ultimately to all people. So this was a power move. It will always be something, terrorism, communism, terrorists, Russia. It will always be something.”
Two Strategies to Avoid Fear and Stay Safe
Even if you’re living in a society where fear is being used to manipulate the common narrative and impose control, you can opt out of the madness. One strategy to do so, de Becker says, is to not watch television news, including local news channels, which he says are nothing more than “40 hours a week of original content designed to get your attention with fear.”
Instead, he recommends seeking out your own information, particularly in the form of reading, which gives you knowledge without accompanying alarming images. De Becker explains:
“Reading allows you to decide what happens to your body. Whereas seeing something alarming does not allow you to decide what happens to your body. The body does not understand media. Meaning when I see a terrible thing on the news … I have no way of knowing whether it’s close or far away. I have no way of knowing whether it’s true or not true. And I have no way of knowing whether it’s dated or recent.
But in all cases, just like a movie, it will cause alarm. You’ll recoil from it. When you read something, even something alarming, you can decide how it is brought into your system and how you deal with it. So, I really encourage people to seek their own information when they’re curious and not allow television producers to decide what’s important in your life and much of what’s on the news.”
The second strategy de Becker recommends is embracing the principle of subsidiarity, which suggests matters be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. In essence, it’s a framework for decentralization that supports the empowerment of small, local units. By living as local as possible, de Becker suggests, we can all embrace autonomy and bow out of the fear around us:
“Another great gift that’s available to us is to work on subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is a word I only learned in the last couple of years, but that is government at the most local level possible and living at the most local level possible. And somebody I read the other day, he called it the great nearby instead of the great beyond.
… I don’t live in a global relationship. I live in with the people in my life, the people in my community, the people I know, and the people I choose … it’s fine to think globally, but remember that every time there’s a global crisis that only lends itself to a global solution, that is power telling you what to do, because you can’t do anything about the global crisis or the global solution.
These are used to control conduct. And so, living as locally as we can is a very wonderful antidote for the fear that is being sprayed at us out of a fire hose 24 hours a day.”
