Duped Again: Why Sophistry Works

By Marc H. Rudov

Marc Rudov, who's written three books on branding for CEOs, published Duped Again: Why Sophistry Works to simplify a complex subject: why people lie and why they believe or accept lies. You'll be surprised at how easily you'll understand your life after reading this groundbreaking book

• Language: English
• Publisher: MHR Enterprises
• Release date: Feb 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9798891453241

Marc H. Rudov

Marc Rudov is a branding advisor to CEOs, media commentator, and author of three books on branding. Rudov has headed marketing organizations in both large and small companies. Known worldwide as an independent critical thinker, thought-leader, and truth-teller, he rejects wokeness and what he calls technologica erotica. Mr. Rudov rails against industry, product, and technology jargon, and urges his clients-from various industries-to escape their comfort zones to stand out, to be unique.He counsels CEOs that, if they fail to lead and enforce their branding initiatives internally-the essence of intrabranding-they'll imperil their destinies, and, consequently, squash their bottom lines.Mr. Rudov holds an electrical engineering degree from the University of Pittsburgh and an MBA from Boston University.Contact him at MarcRudov.com for advisory services, media appearances, debates, and speaking engagements.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

In his 1651 book, The Court and Character of King James, Anthony Weldon cited an Italian proverb: He that deceives me once, it’s his fault; but if twice, it’s my fault. This proverb has morphed into the expression we know today: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice; shame on me.

In the Lincoln-Douglas debate, on September 2, 1858, Abraham Lincoln, who became America’s 16th president on March 4, 1861, and was assassinated on April 15, 1865, famously asserted: You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Since the dawn of man, people have been lying to and deceiving others—engaging in sophistry—in business, politics, and their personal lives. You’ve been lied to, and you have lied to others. Sometimes, you were oblivious to others’ lies and unfortunately believed them, other times quite aware of them and begrudgingly accepted them—and vice versa

Why do people lie and believe lies? To get what they want or to keep what they have.

Getting duped has injurious consequences, causing one to make bad choices: date or marry an unsuitable paramour; accept a career-ending job; make a regrettable purchase, move, or investment; put an untested chemical into his body; vote for a disastrous candidate; or support a destructive ideology.

Duped Again: Why Sophistry Works explains the basic ingredients of deceiving (duping) and deception (sophistry), why people lie and why they believe and accept lies.

Exodus 23:7 tells us: Distance yourself from words of falsehood. This is the only sin from which the Torah warns us to distance ourselves. Alas, people rarely heed that admonition.

On June 12, 2020, Anthony Fauci, Dr. COVID, former director of the National Institute of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told TheStreet.com that the US government had held off promoting face masks because it knew shortages were so bad that even doctors couldn't get enough. Despite his deceit, people worshipped him. All over DC, one could see Fauci yard-signs like the one below.

Fauci’s lies caused America to endure constant COVID hysteria: untested-vaccine mandates, useless masks, bogus lockdowns that disrupted commerce and put schoolchildren behind by two years, and sham social-distancing.

On January 9, 2024, Dr. Fauci appeared before the US House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. He admitted that guidelines to maintain six feet of separation, purportedly to limit the spread of COVID-19, was likely not based on scientific data and sort of just appeared. Because people initially believed his lie, which forever changed American culture, learning the truth made them angry and distrustful of the government.

By duping us, Fauci forced cultural change on our country. Gyms, stores, and hospitals ordered us to stay six feet apart from each other, as did corporations and TV studios.

It gets worse. By funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, Fauci caused the COVID pandemic. National Review reported on 9/5/23: A 1/20/20 NIH/NIAID email revealed that Fauci’s NIAID funded the gain-of-function research through the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which contracted the Wuhan lab for the past 5 years.

Feeling good so far? Let’s turn to Joe Biden, who has spent 40% of his presidential tenure on vacation.

Joe Biden has lied endlessly over the years about his education, the classified government documents he illegally stole while a US senator from Delaware and US vice president, his disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, accusations of MAGA extremism, his son Beau’s death (which was in Bethesda from brain cancer, not on the battlefield in Iraq), guns, climate change, white supremacy, extorting cash from Ukraine and China via his son Hunter (they both did it), transgenderism, and his economic failures, which he mendaciously spins as Bidenomics.

Despite Joe Biden’s history of serial mendacity and plagiarism, the mainstream media—CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR, the Washington Post, and the New York Times—have been covering for and rallying him since he announced his candidacy on April 25, 2019.

Worse, half of Americans have been blindly lapping up Biden’s prevarications. Seething, in September 2023, I couldn’t take it anymore. I felt compelled to write about how and why people are so easily duped. This has been a tough endeavor, akin to drinking out of a firehose: every day, there is more news about another government deception.

To wit: Robert Hur, the special counsel investigating Biden’s purloined documents, dropped his 388-page report on 2/5/24: Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified military and national security information. Moreover, during the interviews with Hur’s team, he couldn’t remember when he was vice president or when his son Beau died. Furthermore, in the trove of documents Biden illegally retained were talking points and a transcript of a telephone call he had with the Ukrainian prime minister from a key period in Hunter Biden’s Burisma Holdings employment, as well as a classified briefing on US energy assistance to Ukraine, from September 2014, right after Hunter had joined the board of Burisma.

Back to 2023. On October 7, 2023, Hamas killers from Gaza massacred 1200 Israelis, injured 5000, and kidnapped 250. The lies that emanated from Gaza, and immediately believed and spread by the leftist media, astounded me—to the point that I had temporarily stopped writing this book.

Hamas is a bunch of bloodthirsty, Jew-hating savages with one purpose: to wipe Israel off the map. Hamas lied about 500 people dying at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, on October 17, 2023, falsely blaming Israel for bombing this hospital. Truth: Islamic Jihad fired that rocket, which hit the hospital’s parking lot, killing dozens, not 500. The BBC and New York Times were instrumental in peddling this lie worldwide. Pierre Trudeau, the Marxist prime minister of Canada, absent any fact-checking, immediately condemned Israel.

Although the rest of the world—including the Biden administration—accepted Islamic Jihad as the culprit, BBC’s Jeremy Bowen, on November 25, 2023, admitted that he got it wrong but has no regrets and doesn’t feel particularly bad about his inaccuracies. And, as of November 28, 2023, the New York Times still would not admit its blatant error, calling the cause of the carnage contested.

On the night of February 8, 2024, in a hastily convened presser at the White House, Biden attempted to defend himself against Robert Hur’s charge that he is an elderly man with a poor memory. Said Biden: My memory is fine. Then, he mistakenly referred to el-Sisi, Egypt’s president, as Mexico’s president. As Biden was leaving the lectern, a member of the press shouted a question about hostage negotiations between Israel and Hamas. Biden returned to the microphone with this nugget: I’m of the view, as you know, that the conduct of the response in Gaza Strip has been over the top. Really?

During the Super Bowl, on February 11, 2024, news began to spread on X/Twitter that the IDF, in Rafah, Gaza, had freed two Israeli-Argentinian hostages—Fernando Simon Marman, 60, and Louis Har, 70, abducted by Hamas terrorists from Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak on 10/07/23. After a firestorm of outrage, The Daily Beast deleted its tweet characterizing Hamas’s actions as allegedly and the terrorists as militants.

Four days before Biden’s over the top trashing of Israel, on February 4, 2024, his love affair with Democrats and independents had hit a trough: an NBC News poll revealed a paltry 37% approval rating. The Democrat pollster said the damning results show a presidency in peril. To wit:

Donald Trump not only led Biden by 5 points nationally (47%-42%) but also led in the following by big margins:

mental & physical health (46%-23%)

handling the economy (55%-33%)

dealing with crime & violence (50%-29%)

competence & effectiveness (48%-32%)

improving America's image (47%-36%)

securing the southern border (57%-22%).

Despite these disastrous results, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared the same day with a straight face on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos to declare: As we enter into the campaign season, the American people are beginning to focus on President Biden’s incredible track record of results. Seriously? Sophistry on steroids.

Not all lying is evil, as it is with Fauci and Biden. Often, one uses puffery as a means to motivate himself and cajole those around him.

Walter Issacson published in 2023 a brilliant biography of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man ($230B, as of 01/24) and head of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter/X. Isaacson posits sharp insights about Musk’s thinking processes and belief systems:

Elon was hell-bent on creating an autonomous car, one that could navigate streets without a driver operating it. In his Autonomy Day presentation [April 22, 2019] to investors and the media, in which he promised that, a year henceforth, one million self-driving Robotaxis would be ferrying passengers [there wasn’t even one, four years later]. "Musk mixed, as he often did, vision and hype. Even in his own head, he blurred the line between what he believed and