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Well, joining us now, and welcome back, everybody. About 20 minutes to be able to take some calls, but let's bring in Buck Sexton. He's got a brand new book out. It's called Magnum Factoring Delusion: How the Left Uses Brainwashing Indoctrination and Propaganda Against You. And Buck, welcome.
Congratulations on the book. Thank you so much, man. I appreciate it. It's going well. You're a guy who sells a lot of books, Brian, so you know.
It's hard to sell books. It's going to actually be good. But so far, the response has been really gratifying. People have really enjoyed it. The number one thing I hear from people is: wow, it's actually really good when you read it, which is kind of a backhanded compliment, but I'll take it.
Yeah, I know, because people usually eat the one-page summaries. But, Buck, you just take your CIA background along with your political knowledge, and you see that nothing's organic. There's an intentionality to it, right?
Well, yeah, absolutely.
So, manufacturing delusion is really meant to answer one question. How do people get pushed into being so crazy? And I look at this from a bunch of different perspectives. One, and because 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 going to end because of climate change or that men don't have an advantage in women's sports or that babies get assigned gender at birth? Because this stuff is all objectively nuts, right? I mean, 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. This is crazy stuff. How does this happen? And so I looked at this from the perspective of radicalization first and my time in the CIA, because certainly with jihadist radicalization, you see there's a process, a pipeline, and an indoctrination that occurs to get people to do things as crazy as blowing themselves up in a country they've really never been to before, trying to kill a bunch of strangers. We saw that when I was in Iraq, I was in Afghanistan.
I actually started the book, Brian, my first CIA assignment in Nigeria. I was just like, Basically, fresh out of college. It's kind of random that I ended up there. But it turned out that was a very fertile ground for radicalization, and it got really bad in the years following.
So I look at that, and then I also look at the history of all this.
So you kind of get a multiple perspective answer to the question of how do they make people go so nuts? And I think it's really resonated with people. Post-COVID, we saw most of the country go nuts.
So it's really important to look at these issues. But it's almost like people broke up from being drunk. And they wake up and they go, all those things are crazy. And then President Trump comes along in particular and starts running on common sense and willing to stand up and go, yeah, we got to build a wall. And you know what?
The climate change stuff, it's a big hoax. And everyone's like, don't say that. But almost you needed a guy at the tip of the spear just saying what everyone should have been saying all along. He kind of broke the spell.
Well, yeah, this is my thing, Brian. We're not going to have Trump there to set right the madness. Always and in the future. As we know, he's already almost halfway through his second term.
So I think because Trump was such a counterforce to not just the madness of COVID, by the way, but to the gender, identity, trans stuff. For the BLM, the lies behind the BLM movement and the sanctification of George Floyd. Obviously, the climate change stuff has really fallen away, but when I wrote the book, which was over a year ago, there was still much more talk about the existential threat of climate change, the land acknowledgements that we do now. You know, Brian, I don't know, you're sitting on Iroquois land, buddy. I don't know if you start every show acknowledging that, you probably should.
I'm on seminal land, probably should acknowledge that.
So, here's what I want everyone to know: this will happen again. It will keep happening. And maybe it doesn't happen to the whole society, maybe it happens in part, but you need to understand there's a process. And I go through in the book, In Manufacturing Delusion, which your audience of readers and knowledgeable people who like history, by the way, there's a lot of history in the book, Brian. I go to the origins of mind control science with Pavlov and then go through the Soviet Union and their gulag system and menticide, get into Chinese brainwashing, thought reform.
It's a short book, but it's packed with a lot of history that people need to know because there are things that are done to you, whether it's fire hose, propaganda, fire hose of falsehood, propaganda, or it's isolation or it's conditioning. There are things that are done to mold and even control the minds of individuals and the masses. And I think we need to identify what they are and know more about them because it's happening to us every day.
So Buck Sexton's with us now. His new book is Manufacturing Delusion. Don't you think from the outside perspective, there's outside forces manipulating Americans against Americans? Even 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? Oh, of course.
There are, if you think about Are global competitors and even enemies on the world stage? They have more access to Americans and to our thinking and to shaping and directing our thinking than ever before because of the internet, right? There's a duality to the digital world that we live in, where, yes, we have more access to information than ever before and all the great things about the internet, which there's tremendous, fantastic things about it. But then there's also the flip side, which is that this gives Places like China, the ability to set up a totalitarian surveillance state that is beyond even what George Orwell could have imagined in 1984, certainly in terms of the technology deployed and the omnipresence of the system.
So, yes, there are countries like China, like Russia, others that want to influence the way Americans think. It's a very powerful, very effective way to try to steer policy without a single bomb dropped or a single bullet fired.
So, that's what I actually get into places where a manufactured delusion or manufactured delusions are essentially running the country, if you will. That was certainly true in the Soviet Union. It's true in communist China today, although it's not really communist, but that's a longer conversation. And certainly in North Korea, and we see it in fits and starts in other places around the world. And you could think of it like mass hysteria, mass delusion.
These are the same things. What happens to people, whether it's the 1600s and it's the witch craze in Europe, which by the way was. Far worse than the Salem witch trial situation here. Far more women were killed, burned at the stake. Why did that happen?
Why is it that jihadists are able to be radicalized sitting in their basement? And how does that tie in? And this is what I think really hits people. Why are some of the tactics that I identify here in indoctrination, in brainwashing for terrorist groups, for cults? You see little bits of this in college campuses, left-wing activist groups, even left-wing media and corporate America, things like the forced confession, the bending the knee, the profession of things known to be false.
These are all tactics that are used to engage in coercive mind control. Or really, the most common term, Brian, is brainwashing. These are variations on a theme, but there's a process in this historically and today that people really need to be aware of. And that's what manufacturing delusion lays out. Right.
So in other words, if you could identify it, you could make sure you're not a victim of it, right? Yeah, of course.
Well, if you think about it this way, if someone's trying to get you to join a cult and you're sitting there, now that's a very specific example, but of course that still happens today. I talk about Omsha Enrikyo, which is a fascinating and horrific cult. Really wanted to bring about the end of the world. They're the ones that put the sarin gas on the subways in Tokyo, could have killed thousands and thousands of people if they had just gone about it a little bit differently. But I go through this and I say, look, look, there are these things, whether it's separating you from your family, whether it's forced false confession, whether it's exploitation of phobia, so irrational fear, all these different things.
These are done to you on an individual level so that they can separate you from your previous belief system and make you think crazy things. And like I said, it can even be something like, oh, I put the black square up on BLM. I'm a big believer in this movement. And I think that, you know, 15,000 black men are killed by cops in America every year in a racist murder with no consequence. I mean, the real number, and it's not even clear.
That these are racist murders, but the real number is like 15 when the Washington Post did the analysis. But most Democrats thought it was in the thousands and thousands.
So you can see these things, right? You can see why do they get you marching in crowds? Why do they get you chanting slogans? You see the way that people's minds are manipulated and used. And this is the part of it that's so important, exploited for reasons of politics.
And I truly believe that this, certainly not climate change and certainly not an asteroid hitting us tomorrow. This is the biggest threat we face.
Well, do you think there's a coordination between that podcast world that we're seeing on the extreme right? And a lot of the messaging that's happening out there, a lot of people feel as though there's something manipulating there. Rather than people just getting clicks, there's an agenda. Do you see it that way? Yeah, there's international money flowing into people now, not just on the left.
That's been going on for a long time, but on the right as well. And I think this will come out more in time. There's a lot of blurring of what is an investment in a media entity versus what is effectively paying for an off-books lobbyist or propagandist, even somebody that should be registering under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. That's happening. We're going to see more of that, I think, meaning people looking into this in media.
It certainly is going to happen, I think, if you have a Democrat that wins in 28, because they'll be able to pick out people on the right who have started to coordinate their messaging with foreign entities in a way that is deeply concerning. I think it's more common on the left, but it's happening on the right as well. And if you can get people, I mean, what. The best way to defeat America is to defeat us from within by convincing us of manufactured delusions, by slowly but surely chipping away at our sense of unity, of community, of what it means to be an American, of our Constitution, of our shared history.
So these are just, these are. Information operations, Brian. I mean, if you're talking about it in military terms, this is psyops. And there are psyops being run via the internet on the American people all the time, externally, certainly, but using some of our own people, unfortunately, as useful idiots of Soviet lore. Fox News is now streaming live on Fox One.
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Download today. Right.
I also would think the anti-Semitism, there seems to be a strategy behind that. Where did that come from? Why is it everywhere? Why is that linked almost on October 7th and 8th? Why all of a sudden did that rise up when it should have been a time for sympathy towards Israel and the Jewish community?
It was actually, it just bred scripted hate.
Well, when I looked again at the process, and I think it's so important when I'm laying this out or when someone's reading Manufacturing Delusion, the book, which I certainly hope your audience will go get a copy of. I think they will find it well worth the read. Everybody that has come up to me, strangers, have said that they were surprised by how much they got out of it, how much they learned from it. And part of that is that process, Brian, of the steps, the tactics, if you want to call them that. I refer to them as tactics along the way.
And confusion and degradation are two of the pinnacles, or two of the pillars rather, of Menticide, which is mind destruction. And I get into the history of what Menticide is in the book, but more importantly, for your question about Israel and what happened on October 7th. It was actually the people that hate Israel and the people who are anti-Semites, they view this as an opportunity to push even further and essentially, we saw this in the US in 9-11 as well, by the way, to say, Oh, well, either it didn't happen, it didn't happen the way that they said, or they deserved some combination of these things. Because once you are degrading yourself. As somebody going along with this narrative that is so obviously and demonstrably false, you are deeper and deeper into the brainwashing apparatus, if you will.
Confusion and degradation. Confuse the people that you want to control by telling them it's a good thing, or it didn't even happen, or even if it happened, it is a good thing. I mean, they just constantly. Change what the narrative is as long as it's hateful toward Israel. And then the degradation part of it is say things that are objectively false.
But that's actually how you prove your allegiance to the ideologies. You have to lie about this stuff, or you have to say that it's not true, it didn't happen, or whatever. Because once, if you're willing to say the most obvious things are untrue, or the most clearly true things are untrue, then they've got you. Then it's easy to push you further down the rabbit hole of madness, of a manufactured delusion. And now you have Democrats standing on the stage with a guy that says.
We deserve 9-11 and October 7th didn't happen. When you have what's happening over in Michigan right now.
So, what happens is you say something so extreme, and everyone's like, Oh, of course that Hassan Piker is not going to be acceptable.
Next thing you know, RoConna standing with him, go, I don't agree with everything he says. And those statements become more and more acceptable as you see people that you're familiar with standing with them.
Well, you know, we're all also in the last chapter of the book is the future of mass delusion. And I get into the changes that we're seeing technologically, but that affect us very much day to day. You know, we are running a real-time experiment here, Brian, of people carrying around. Effectively, propaganda devices at all times with them in their pocket. I mean, smartphones, whether it's social media, all the different ways that you can get information, and now AI, which obviously also plays a very and will play a stronger and stronger role in this.
People's minds are being molded and they're being subjected to conditioning processes in a more 24-7 and constant loop than ever before. And we're starting to just grapple with this, I think, as a society. We're seeing with kids, by the way, you saw that lawsuit against Facebook. People are recognizing, well, hold on a second. You can really do damage to kids if they're not being watched out for on these social media platforms.
In terms of the messaging, I'm not even talking about people, predators and people like that who are targeting children. That's obviously a major problem as well, but that's been known for a long time. But the issue in these lawsuits has been what it does to the minds of young people and how it creates a loop for self-harm. Yeah, that's also true, though, at different levels. Obviously, adults have agency and a greater responsibility to take care of this themselves, but it's happening to our whole society all at once.
And the craziest stuff now is getting the most attention. And one thing, Brian, you know, I appreciate, I mean, obviously, I'm a fan of your work. We've known each other for years. I appreciate that you stick to what you believe is true and what you think is good and honest and right. As you and I both know, that's not what always gets the clicks these days, my friend.
I know. Say the most outrageous stuff, say the wildest garbage, profess the biggest imaginable delusion you can, and all of a sudden you're atop the charts. All of a sudden, you're getting all this attention. The currency of the internet is outrageous, it's mania, it's conspiracy, and that's just unfortunately spiraling. And it is creating delusions on the right as well.
I might say people are just saying wild stuff. I know normies, as we would call them, who are texting me and they're saying, Hey, did you see this conspiracy theory that's whether it's related to the Charlie Kirk assassination or it's related to Trump and Epstein or it's all these things? And I'm looking at these people. I'm like, What are you? Yeah, of course, we ask questions about all this.
Yeah, of course, we need presentation of evidence and investigation is fine and necessary of these things. But, you know, the North Koreans are not working with the Venezuelans to get a space landing going to set up a laser so that they can take out the J.D. Vance administration before it even happens or something. I mean, these people are nuts. The stuff they're saying is crazy.
And it's troubling to see that this is spreading so rapidly.
So, manufacturing delusion is about how we stop this madness. Congratulations on the book. Pick it up. Manufacturing delusion, Buck Sexton. Congratulations.
Amen. Thank you so much, Brian.
