Have you noticed that?

And yeah, I have noticed also that nobody seems to want to have any honest conversation about how we got some of these candidates.

Donald Trump has protected us from the communists.

He has done amazing things.

I talk about it.

You talk about it.

It's great.

Well, thank

You're not in one lane.

Well, thank you.

I was actually just told at a friend's house for dinner yesterday over the weekend, it was kind of a new friend, had a few of us over, that I am apparently very opinionated, which was true.

I am, in fact, but on a whole range of things.

And so I managed to find one of the rare career paths where having opinions on everything is mostly an asset and gets you into a little bit of trouble sometimes, but mostly an asset.

And yeah, look, I'll talk the lies of body positivity, but also the lies of the plastic surgery industry all day.

I mean, I'm... on a huge proponent of uh... being able to age gracefully i think that women are all given these bad messages by the media by hollywood by all this to do all this stuff to all this stuff no it's okay actually it's okay to have some wrinkles it's okay to have quick i want to say okay there's actually a dignified beauty of just being who you are and not doing all this stuff and by the way spending thousands tens of thousands you know huge sums of money

So there's just, it's just, it's hypocrisy, they're hypocrites.

So do you share the Travis thesis or the Halperin thesis that this is explicable or not?

Well, I think the Democrats always get the Democrat advantage in polls, which you could sort of chalk that up to a bunch of different things, maybe.

But I think that there's always a little bit of an edge, even in going back into the most recent election, it seems.

Well, and Seltzer.

That all ended.

But people were off, and they tend to always be off in favor of Democrats.

I'll just tell you this.

This

Uh-huh

... on my conversations years ago with a, with a young woman who was a teacher, uh, at what was called a renewal or, or a renewal school in New York City.

And they decided under the de Blasio administration...

You know, Bloomberg before him, who say what you will about him, he was actually a pretty good and efficient mayor.

Uh, Bloomberg was like, "Look, when schools are just complete disasters, we're gonna shut them down.

Okay, we're gonna shut them down.

We're gonna move the kids to other schools, but we're gonna have essentially some punishment for, for failure." So what happened under de Blasio, and, and th- this I just view as, as a marker for, or, or sort of a, a harbinger of, of things to come with all these other schools as well, these other programs, was they said, "Let's just give endless funding, basically.

Hmm.

Am I crazy?

No, actually, I, I didn't know we were gonna go here, but I'm in the same space.

And, and during, uh, my...

You know, you did this with, uh, with doing book tour stuff.

People seem to think, oh, you have a book out, so you'll just fly to, like, Central Oregon and speak to my rotary club or something.

And I was having to tell all these people during, well, after my book came out, I don't know if you had this thing.

They're like, "Hey, will you just fly out to...

They lay the blame firmly at Trump's feet on it, and I think it's gonna cost us in November badly.

[laughs]

And so I looked at the history, and I looked at the, the, the history and the science, uh, of how you can effectively make people go nuts because you want them to be under your political control, uh, and that is the book.

It is how brainwashing, propaganda, and indoctrination, uh, are used against you.

And, uh, people have really enjoyed learning about the history of this stuff.

They, uh, they learn about Pavlov.

They learn about, uh, Ivan the Terrible's use of the original secret police, the Oprichniki.

Uh, there's stuff about transgenderism and menticide, and a World War II psyops leader.

[laughs]

[laughs]

And so I looked at the history, and I looked at the, the, the history and the science, uh, of how you can effectively make people go nuts because you want them to be under your political control.

Uh, and that is the book.

It is how brainwashing, propaganda, and indoctrination, uh, are used against you.

And, uh, people have really enjoyed learning about the history of this stuff.

They, uh, they learn about Pavlov.

They learn about, uh, Ivan the Terrible's use of the original secret police, the Oprichniki.

Totally.

Including American prisoners of war in Korea.

Exactly right.

And beyond, by the way, people say, well, of course, you just put a gun to someone's head.

Oh, no.

Some of these prisoners, most notably the turncoats in the context of the Korean War, Americans who wanted to stay there after being propaganda tools.

Robert Lifton, in his really seminal study of brainwashing, people who are free, they break free.

And in their initial interviews about what had been done to them in the Chinese brainwashing program, and these are Westerners, by the way, these aren't even necessarily Chinese people.

It all revolves on the same tactics, doesn't it?

Can you do a little bit of an analysis? If, if you see a guy or a young woman today wearing a mask, what's going on with them?

So to, you know, just, just to lay this out, and then, and that by the way, that is really fundamental, the question that you raise and that observation to how I even came up with the...

It's not a COVID book, as you well understand.

I know you read it.

But it does look at what is going on with people.

I mean, to, to wear a mask today because you think it's giving you some form of protection is to engage in a public display of irrationality.

It is, it is absurd.

I mean, what an amazing phenomenon, right?

No, you go.

Oh, I was gonna say, I think that we're in an era now where-People, it's much easier actually to hold people to account if, if you want to, right? I mean, you can ignore anything for as long as you want as well.

Uh, but if you wanted to hold someone to account, we now have betting on politics, which we didn't have before.

It is looking, Mark, and I'll admit this because I am, I am a man who, uh, is, is willing to revel in humility.

Uh, it's looking like I'm gonna have to buy Clay Travis an outrageously expensive steak because in a fit of hubris, I said Kamala Harris did so poorly, this was right after the last election.

She did so poorly that she will not run again.

She will become the provost of a second tier UC school, making a million dollars a year to go to cocktail parties.

Yeah

Yep

...

so they could max- maximize their distancing, which was just, this was insane.

This was delusional.

Um, and we have to call it that.

But, you know, there's a widespread, uh, movement or belief in this country of people who say they don't wanna have children because they're worried about the carbon footprint and, and ending the world via climate change.

There, there are a lot of people in this country who will now tell you that, uh, a man can in fact have a vagina, which is not true.

[laughs]

They

replaced the evil of communism with the evil of capitalism.

They are Orwelling Orwell.

That just happened, everybody.

That happened a few days ago.

This is the society that we live in now.

But I want to make sure everyone understands none of this is by accident.

But they just repeat it over and over and over, hoping that the vulnerable will embrace the lie.

Yeah

... audience and capacity for this.

So here's the thing.

When you look at a delusion, uh, when you try to unpack this for somebody, it's very hard because you're not operating from the same set of facts.

Because the whole notion of the del- of the delusion is that it is preying upon more base aspects of the mind, uh, like fear center of the brain, um, going to people's anxieties, uh, going to try to get as much of a reflexive response from them a- as, as they can.

And conspiracy is inherently more interesting, uh, especially in the news world than the truth-

Mm-hmm.

And really what it is, is when you join a conspiracy, you're joining a cult, uh, because you are...

America's gonna swallow, "We just need to do it in order to prevent a nuclear weapon from dropping on our heads."

So I promised the last time for your esteemed audience that I'll reference my resume, but I said I worked in the Iraq office, Megan, at the CIA.

I worked in the office that actually did the WMD assessment for the Iraq War.

Um, I was not there when that happened, but I worked with a lot of folks who were, uh, and certainly understand how that has colored the thinking not only of people from within the intelligence community, but all of us, right? So getting this stuff right matters a whole hell of a lot, and we have gotten it quite wrong in the past, and I've seen, uh, I, I've, I've seen from the inside how that sort of thing can happen via political pressure.

So I just, I just think that's worthwhile context, 'cause I, I come at this from a very, um...

I'm very anti-Iran, uh, but I'm also really not interested in any long, drawn-out conflict again in, in the Middle East of, of any kind.

But now we're there.

And we did, and we canceled our trip back to Pakistan

Go right ahead.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Well, you know, last time we were on, we talked a bit about the, the breakdown process, right? So we talked menticide, brainwashing, thought reform in China, Pavlovian conditioning, all things to understand.

So that's how they, they, if you will, break down the system.

But then to create a, a society of the robotized, if you will, to create people who are programmed, you have to do what I refer to in the book as identity construction.

Um, and, and this is something that is incredibly powerful for whether it's jihadist cults, you know, the wackos running I- Iran or, or Hamas, uh, also in cults, and also for left-wing factions in this country and, and increasingly from the very top of the Democrat Party on down.

Uh, what is propaganda?

What motivated you to write this book?

So it came out of, uh, COVID really, because I looked around...

And, and Mark, you know, I, I would listen to your show during COVID, uh, and, and I would listen to voices of people who were, who were saying things that were, and not just, not just correct or, or even rational, but, but, uh, sane.

And there was such a, a clear push of millions of people in this country into the grips of, uh, mass hysteria, mass delusion, mass formation psychosis.

You know, "Oh, put the mask on before you go to the table at the restaurant, but then sit at the table and take the mask off," or on the plane, mask up between bites or ha- I mean, we could go through this.

We, you'd do hours and hours on just this, right? But I said, "You know, it's not just COVID," 'cause, you know, the publisher, to their credit, they're like, "Look, we don't need another COVID book.

Uh, we don't need that." I said, "No, no, it's not about that, though.

Yeah.

There's an intentionality to it, right?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Uh, so Manufacturing Delusion is really meant to answer one question: how do people get pushed into being so crazy? And I, I look at this from a, a d- a bunch of different perspectives.

Uh, one, and because the, you know, the subtitle of the book is How the Left Uses Brainwashing, Indoctrination, and Propaganda Against You.

So I look at what's going on today.

Like, why is your neighbor so nuts that he or she thinks that the world's gonna end because of climate change, or that men don't have an advantage in women's sports, or, uh, that babies get assigned gender at birth? 'Cause this stuff is all objectively nuts, right? I mean, we, we all need to start speaking about this.

This stuff is crazy, you know, that men can have vaginas and women can have penises.

Don't you think from the outside perspective there is outside forces manipulating Americans against Americans? Even that we do a good job on it on our own, but don't you feel as though we're being manipulated from the outside, too?

There's an intentionality to it, right?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Uh, so Manufacturing Delusion is really meant to answer one question: how do people get pushed into being so crazy? And I, I look at this from a, a di- a bunch of different perspectives.

Uh, one, and because the, you know, the subtitle of the book is How the Left Uses Brainwashing, Indoctrination, and Propaganda Against You, so I look at what's going on today.

Like, why is your neighbor so nuts that he or she thinks that the world's gonna end because of climate change, or that men don't have an advantage in women's sports, or, uh, that babies get assigned gender at birth? 'Cause this stuff is all objectively nuts, right? I mean, we, we all need to start speaking about this.

This stuff is crazy, you know, that men can have vaginas and women can have penises.

Like, that's not true.

Don't you think from the outside perspective there is outside forces manipulating Americans against Americans? Even that we do a good job on it on our own, but don't you feel as though we're being manipulated from the outside, too?

[laughs]

The Academy, the Academy, uh, has become overrun with people who are leftists.

I mean, I think part of this is, uh, that there's been, uh, any institution, I forget who came up with this rule, but any institution that is not explicitly conservative becomes explicitly li- liberal, uh, or left-wing.

And a better way I explain this is that, um, I view, I view leftists as an invasive species, right? There are some things that can coexist in an ecosystem, and there are some things that by their very nature Have to devour all the other little fishies around them, or take out all the other, uh, little froggies or whatever it may be.

I'm here in Florida, so this is actually...

By the way, I can't believe you don't live here yet, but we'll talk about that another time.

Mm-hmm.

And we go into, and this is a coin, a term coined by Jost Meerloo, who was a psychiatrist/information warfare specialist against the Nazis in the Second World War.

Yeah

... say we've written them.

Uh, and in this case, look, uh, this comes out of a very straightforward question.

Why are so many people going nuts? How are people believing all this crazy stuff? And I looked at the psychological, psychiatric, and even neurological roots of how you can abuse people's sense of reality to get them to believe what you want for the purposes of control, for the purposes of politics.

I mean, so we're talking BLM, COVID, uh, climate change, uh, men can be women, women can have penises, you name it.

All this stuff-

It's so difficult to break people free of these delusions.

Well, for one thing, I think a lot of people prefer to be controlled.

Yeah

... was running around Nigeria with the secret police, looking at Boko Haram before that was even called that.

But then I get into Iraq and Afghanistan and deployments there and, and in the, in the isolation chapter, there's a chapter on this, 'cause obviously it's an important theme.

It's something you talk about, too, about how you make people crazy.

I said, look, you can be physically isolated, right? I mean, if you're in some little village, uh, you know, an hour's drive from Kandahar, it's easier 'cause you don't have access to the internet or television or even radio, whatever.

It's easier for people to in- indoctrinate you.

But Hannah Arendt talks about atomized subjects, and these are people who are psychologically isolated.

[laughs]

Right.

Anyway, um, with, with Pavlov's dogs, yeah, these are some of the things you can learn in the book.

With Pavlov's dogs, there was a s- there was a seminal incident, um, in the understanding of brain, body, and, and essentially the beginnings of what we think of as brainwashing as a process.

In 1924 in St. Petersburg in Pavlov's lab, he's had these dogs.

They get them, you know, the salivation occurs.

They hear the buzzer, salivation.

And so what that tells everybody is, hold on, if you, if, if your brain is processing certain things, it actually has a physiological response.

So I think everyone lives in the middle, and all the people that live in the middle will obey.

Buck Sexton.

Thank you, sir.

And thank you for the kind introduction.

And I would just say, before we dive into some of the meat of this conversation, which you've just teed up for us, I'm very gratified.

The book, in its opening week, hit number four on the New York Times bestseller list.

So for a first-time author, I think that's a pretty solid outing.

Unsurprising, though.

people will read it, they're going to love it.

How are we suffering under menticide or temps at menticide today?

Well, it's because there are similar, as I've discussed in Manufacturing Delusion, there are similar tactics that are used, even though the mountains of force and the extreme violence that, say, was central to the Stalinist and Nazi and Maoist efforts of men to side, There are, for example, Miralu breaks down a menticide, and there's a whole book, Rape of the Mind, where he gets into this in detail, and it's a fascinating book, by the way, that I'm hoping will kind of bring back, I'm hoping to bring it back into the mainstream with my own book, Manufacturing Delusion.

But he talks about confusion and degradation.

If you're looking at ways that your mind is to be controlled by outside forces, they want to keep you in a constant state of confusion, and they want to keep you in a state of degradation, meaning that you don't trust yourself, you say things that you know are lies, you undermine your own sense of reason.

Now, confusion, for example, confusion can be, remember, this is all about your brain, your perception, the way that your actual mind is interpreting stimuli.

Confusion can be created by locking you in a dark cell somewhere, and you don't know what time it is, and you have no sense of what day, and they're waking you up in the middle of the night.

This is something you'll see when they're trying to break down.

It really did.

This is the explanation of almost everything in American politics today gelled down into this one little paragraph, Buck Sexton.

Thank you, sir, and thank you for the kind introduction.

And I would just say, before we dive into some of the meat of this conversation, which you've just teed up for us, I'm very gratified the book, in its opening week, hit number four on the New York Times bestseller list.

So for a first-time author, I think that's a pretty solid outing.

Unsurprising, though.

If

people will read it, they're going to love it.

Thank you.