Words like “mind control” and “brainwashing” get tossed around, but it is a very real science and a very dangerous game that former CIA operative and now conservative talk show host Buck Sexton calls by its scientific name of “menticide,” the murder of the mind.
Psychological attacks are real, and the concept of menticide dates to a Dutch psychologist who studied how totalitarian governments control the thoughts of their populations. Joost Meerloo witnessed and studied the way Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong used the insights from Pavlov’s experiments on dogs against people. His most famous work is called The Rape of the Mind.
“Joost was a trained psychiatrist and got involved with first the resistance and then the Allies in the debriefing of Nazi officials and members of the SS,” Sexton tells Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers on the most recent episode of The Drill Down. “He realized that something of a psychiatric pandemic had unfolded in Nazi Germany where you had these seemingly normal people willing to do the most heinous things, but also to believe obvious lies.”
Sexton has just published a new book, Manufacturing Delusion: How the Left Uses Brainwashing, Indoctrination, and Propaganda Against You that applies Meerloo’s insights to modern-day techniques used in China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and other totalitarian regimes. But the political left in the United States uses these techniques, too. Sexton talks about three specific areas – COVID, trans ideology, fear over climate change, and Black Live Matter-inspired “struggle sessions.”
“Brainwashing, cults, thought reform, menticide – they’re all variations on a theme, different approaches to get you to the same place, which is to be able to control the thoughts, control the mind of another human being,” he says in explaining the book.
He applies psychological analysis with the techniques he saw practiced as a CIA officer stationed in Africa to the challenge of explaining why mass delusions can take hold in modern societies so quickly.
Today’s instantaneous communications, he argues, make mass hysterias of history like the Salem witch trials seem trivial. “Those were mass hysterias, but they weren’t able to be broadcast over radio and shared with pamphlets to millions of people at once,” Sexton notes.
The scares and forced masking during COVID inspired him to look into this phenomenon. “COVID was a mass rape of the American mind. We were lied to. We were forced to do absurd, insane things,” he tells Schweizer and Eggers. “And I wanted to get to how do they do this to you? The two core pillars of menticide are confusion and degradation.”
Turning to the issue of “trans,” Sexton says he was struck by noted scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson publicly saying on Bill Maher’s talk show that “he didn’t know” if men had a physical advantage over women in sports, for example.
“This is where we’ve come to now,” Sexton says in frustration. “I think it’s funny that even when they try to change language, which they’ve done, the language choices that are being made are often meant to concede arguments before you were even able to get to the table.”
“There’s a whole range of things. But gender affirmation, for example? We’ve gone from gender ‘transition’ to now ‘affirmation,’ Sexton notes. “So, what is it if somebody de-transitions, then is it de-affirmation? It makes no sense.”
Eggers asks if the key for someone trying to avoid mind control efforts is being part of a community and avoiding isolation.
“Well, you say ‘community,’ Sexton responds. “I would say I would say trusted individuals or trusted people who are invested in you.”
He noted the work of Hannah Arendt on isolated people, which she called “atomization,” and noted that it is today a tool used by jihadists to keep immigrants to western countries from assimilating.
For the book, Sexton studied the experiments of Pavlov on dogs. The book notes that during Pavlov’s research a fascinating accidental experiment occurred when a flood of the Neva River near Pavlov’s St. Petersburg lab nearly drowned a kennel full of conditioned dogs. The dogs were just barely saved from drowning in their cages but afterwards, many of the dogs “forgot” their conditioning or showed signs of changed personalities, establishing that extreme trauma has deep-seated psychological consequences.
Both Lenin and Stalin, he learned, had spies within Pavlov’s research team and paid close attention to his work.
“The contention you make in the book is this is going on now,” asks Schweizer. “It’s actually happening in the United States now?”
“To people who would say we don’t have it here, I say, really? What is ‘confessing your privilege?’ Why do we have some of these steps that the left forces you to go through? They can’t lock you in a cell or beat you with truncheons, but they can take away your professorship or get you fired or block you from a job or from school. They actually have coercive mechanisms, and they force you to confess with those coercive mechanisms and by doing so they put you on the same pathway that you would be in in a totalitarian society,” Sexton replies.
“The consequences that you face physically are obviously far less extreme, but the psychological consequences can be very similar,” he says. “With menticide [as one example], I went specifically after the issue of the transgender ideology craze in this country. And that’s where you get into the confusion and degradation part of what I see going on — the desire to degrade your sense of reason.”
“If they can get you to affirm the lie, to mouth the preferred slogans no matter how absurd, they are debasing and degrading your own sense of reason, your own sense of your ability to make distinctions and come to reasonable conclusions,” Sexton tells the hosts.
Why does Sexton think people succumb to these pressures?
“There’s a desire by a lot of people want to be civil rights heroes without actually doing anything heroic,” he says. “And this allows them to be part of the new thing and part of the mob mentality.
Besides gender “affirmation,” he sees the constant emphasis on changing the meaning of language to support the delusions to be the main “tell” of mind control efforts, citing euphemisms offered by academia and the medical establishment such as “reproductive health care” to mean abortion, “climate change” to replace “global warming,” and adding “cis” to biological sex designating words.
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