Exposing How Totalitarian Mind Control Techniques Are Being Used on Us Right Now | Buck Sexton
Buck Sexton’s Manufacturing Delusion exposes how left-wing movements—from transgender ideology to BLM—mirror Soviet, Nazi, and Maoist mind control, using Pavlovian conditioning via deplatforming, algorithms, and workplace retaliation. Psychiatrist Abraham Mirlu’s concept of menticide—eroding belief systems—underpins modern propaganda, with AI-driven loops reinforcing collectivist narratives while the right fractures from ideological warfare. Sexton warns Democrats’ extremism will fuel their 2024 comeback, urging conservatives to prioritize economic resistance over infighting as totalitarian tactics seep into everyday life. [Automatically generated summary]
The two pillars of this are confusion and degradation.
And if you can keep people confused and you can keep people in a state of constant degradation, meaning saying things they know are untrue, undermining everything they used to believe, feeling like they are worthless and they don't have the sort of personal strength to push back on this stuff.
then you have that fertile ground for, and this is the menticidal process, as he calls it.
You have that fertile ground to make people believe whatever you want them to believe.
And I think that the, for example, the gender madness stuff or the transgender stuff today is really one of the most perfect examples of how this plays out in a modern liberal society overall.
It's again, the same processes, but they can't lock you.
It's not Maoist China.
You're not locked in a cell with people beating you saying, say the thing, say the thing.
But as you know, Dave, they will say, say the thing or else we'll take you off the platform.
Say the thing or you will get fired.
say, you know, this is, it's different levels of coercion, but it's still coercion.
I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the host of the Buck Sexton show, as well as the author of the new book, Manufacturing Delusion, How the Left Uses Brainwashing, Indoctrination, and Propaganda Against You, my friend Buck Sexton.
Buck, how are you?
Look, and he's high.
He's holding the book.
You were supposed to be here in studio.
Somebody has a little tummy ache and we had to do this on Zoom.
This thing of like people, and you know, some places, some channels, you know, there are a lot of people that they churn out these books and like they didn't write it.
And it's, it's all just like a sales thing because they put their name on the whole thing.
I'm like, look, if you want to say you collaborated with somebody, that's one thing.
But I, they're like, why do you want to write your book?
I'm like, one, because I can.
And two, I'm not going to say something to all of my audience that's not true.
Do you remember about 20 years ago, Charles Barkley had an autobiography that came out and he said he had a ghostwriter or whatever, but then he goes on a publicity tour and they keep asking well these questions.
It's happened a lot with their books and on our side.
Anyway, so yes, I wrote the book.
And that's why I actually made sure there was like a lot of, I wanted to learn as I did it.
And the biggest challenge that I had, I think, was cutting down a lot of the research that I found really interesting that I wanted people to know about without slowing down the narrative.
And I think we mentioned we have the same editor, right?
So she did a very good job of being like, okay, this is interesting, but like, you know, you can't have chapter one be 60 pages, right?
So you need to, you know, you need to kind of get this thing moving.
But I went back to Pavlov and conditioning.
I went back to the earliest scientific efforts to understand, truly understand how a brain can be controlled.
And there's sort of a seminal event that occurred.
It was actually in 1924.
So you have the Soviets take over, the Soviet, you know, the Soviet Revolution or the Russian Revolution becomes the Soviet Union.
And in 1924, Pavlov is the most famous scientist in Russia and somebody's the most famous scientist maybe in the world.
And in his laboratory of dogs, where they had been conditioning, they really called it conditional reflex, but they had been conditioning these dogs to respond not to a people always say a bell.
It was actually a buzzer or a metronome.
But they had had these animals and they never called the training.
They call it conditioning.
Have responses to stimuli.
There's a flood that happens.
And the flood at the very last minute, these dogs are sent.
You and I are both dog guys too.
So I was actually reading the issue of this.
It's like, oh my God, the dogs.
I was getting really agitated about this.
But the dogs were terrified because the water's rising in the kennel where all these Pavlovian dogs are kept or Pavlov's dogs are kept.
And at the last minute, some of the employees basically at the lab run in and save them.
But what was fascinating was that these dogs had had conditioning over years.
And in many, not all, but in many cases, the conditioning was entirely wiped away in one night of extreme trauma.
And in some cases, not only was the conditioning wiped away, but they actually had major behavioral changes that stayed for months, if not years, effectively permanently with dogs after this.
And so what it showed was that extreme external stimuli can have dramatic changes on psychological processes and behavior.
That scientific revelation comes in 1924.
Then you have the rise of the Soviet Union.
With the rise of the Soviet Union, you have the new Soviet man and the mass communist experiment, really nightmare of a totalitarian society in total control.
You have the rise of Nazi Germany.
You have the rise of Maoist China.
You have these totalitarian societies that try to achieve really a mechanistic, almost like a robotized version of humanity.
And it wasn't building on Pavlovian.
Pavlov had no part of this.
It wasn't like that was his goal, was to teach people how to do this.
But it is the beginnings of the mind control, you know, mind control field and behavioralism that then led to people understanding more about cults and the era of cults we went into.
And then I just bring it to the modern day where there are tactics.
There are things that totalitarian societies do that are replicated, and I get into the specifics about this: replicated with gender identity stuff, with the trans, you know, trans kids and trans theory, replicated with BLM, replicated with obviously COVID and these things where you create a sort of politicized madness by using techniques of totalitarian societies of the past.
I was thinking about this because I think people believe that, like, I wrote this when I wrote this, it was really coming off of COVID and entering the era.
It was, I wrote this during the Biden years, really.
And then, because of publishing and because of the CIA review, which took five months, like it took a, but a lot of the stuff that, you know, the tactics I'm seeing among some people on the right now in a troubling way.
And it's the same, the thing that would be most familiar to people is really the replication of cult indoctrination stuff, which I get into in the book.
I mean, Um Shinrikyo, you have people that are educated and have come from a highly educated society in Japan.
They're educated themselves.
They're not like starving, impoverished third worlders, and they're paying thousands of dollars for if they're told there's bathwater from this guy who's the Messiah of this.
Like, how do you get people?
And I get into Jim Jones and that kind of stuff too.
But there is a replication of that that's going on on the right today that I do find very troubling.
Do you find that there is a difference in the personality type that would allow someone on the left to go this way versus how someone on the right may go that way?
So I think that the left-wing mind tends to be more consensus and therefore communal and community-based, right?
It's generally less involved in individualism or less prone to think about the importance of individual accomplishment, individual freedom.
And then also, obviously, statism comes along with that or wants an overwhelming state apparatus, often to be in place of God, often to be in place of family.
And I get into this in, there's a chapter called Menticide.
And again, my book, Manufacturing Delusion, which, which, so I got to tell you, does he have a book?
Manufacturing Delusion that you guys actually have to buy.
You know what the biggest compliment I'm getting on it is from so many people, including in our business, who have like, they're like, I read the first couple of chapters.
But just like the surprise that any of it is that I'm coming up against.
I'm like, no, it's a good book.
Like, I actually put a lot of work and effort into it.
But in the Menticide chapter, there's this guy, Just Mirlu, and he changed his name to Just, by the way, from Abraham because he was trying to evade the Nazis in occupied Netherlands in World War II.
So he was trying to deal with that reality.
But he was a psychiatrist and then did some debriefings of, he did counterpropaganda against the Nazis for the Allies, then did debriefings and interactions with Nazi prisoners after, you know, toward the end of the war.
And he came up with this idea of Menticide and his two, there's two pillars.
And there's a more extensive when I get into the details of the process, but the two pillars of this are confusion and degradation.
And if you can keep people confused and you can keep people in a state of constant degradation, meaning saying things they know are untrue, undermining everything they used to believe, feeling like they are worthless and they don't have the sort of personal strength to push back on this stuff, then you have that fertile ground for, and this is the Menticidal process, as he calls it.
You have that fertile ground to make people believe whatever you want them to believe.
And I think that the, for example, the gender madness stuff or the transgender stuff today is really one of the most perfect examples of how this plays out in a modern liberal society overall.
It's again, the same processes, but they can't lock you.
It's not Maoist China.
You're not locked in a cell with people beating you, saying, say the thing, say the thing.
But as you know, Dave, they will say, say the thing or else we'll take you off the platform.
Say the thing or you will get fired.
Say, you know, this is, it's different levels of coercion, but it's still coercion.
How much of it do you think is all planned either by the globalists or the KGB or shadowy government things, you know, or the Democrat Party, for example, like directly coordinated versus a certain amount of it that is probably just modern nature of the internet, everyone being slammed with conflicting opinions in a time when our institutions also happen to be failing us?
The end of the book, I get into how, you know, because it's like, well, why did, why is the modern science of mind control?
Like, why do I started this really this Pavlov in 1924?
Now, of course, there had been, you know, religious, there's been like religious movements and fervor stretching back for millennia.
And there was the craziness of the, people think of the Salem witch trials.
That wasn't actually very many people.
There were series of similar freakouts, if you will, witch mania in Europe that had occurred around the same period and stretching for hundreds of years before that, where thousands, I mean, women were burned at the stake.
There were witches.
It's crazy stuff.
People went mad, right?
There's the famous Mackey book, The Madness of Crowds.
That's popular delusions and the madness of crowds.
So we've been, and that's really about economic madness.
And so that's not new.
But what is new, you know, it's not that the crowd and Gustave Le Bon, and I have some quotes from him in the book, you know, he's about mass psychology and it's like shout the slogan, carry the placard.
By the way, very useful to understand the Alinskyite left and Democrats in America.
What's unique here and why I start with this is that the rise of mass media alongside mass mind control is what is different now.
And that's the uniqueness that you see in these huge totalitarian societies where now it's like everywhere you go, there's the poster of Stalin.
Everywhere you go, there's, you know, the dear leader is like over being blasted from the speakers.
Or, you know, the Chinese communists use radio all the time.
Radio was hugely important in communist China.
So to your point, today we are walking around in an era of constant, you could argue, conditioning, effectively programming by these devices and these platforms, whether it's social media.
And now when you add artificial intelligence into this and the ability to have machine learning giving you in a constant feedback loop more of what maybe you think you want, but it's actually what somebody else wants.
We are all being programmed in real time in a way that even, you know, in Stalin's era, you know, it's hard to have people with truncheons on every corner like beating people.
I mean, they tried, but like it's different when you're doing it to yourself.
And that's what I see going on now.
And that's why I don't think the COVID madness, Dave, would have been possible without social media.
We would have thought that social media would have freed us from it.
And now with X and Elon, I think that's more likely and Rumble and Rumble.
But what we did see actually was, no, they had seized the Telegraph office.
It's just the Telegraph office, so to speak, was Facebook and YouTube and all these platforms that were able to engender a mass madness.
Or are we in just some sort of repetitive phase now until either AI just kind of completely takes over or some of these people succeed and we end up just in totalitarian states because we're all just so damn broken.
I mean, are you, I take it, you're not going to end the book black pilled, right?
The good news is that it really actually all does come down to the individual.
And I can take you back to Pavlov's lab and the dogs, right?
So bring us full circle to where it started.
One of the great confounding factors that Pavlov came up against in his research was some dogs just weren't being conditioned.
They're like, I'm happy and I'm going to do what I do.
And you're not going to, I'm not going to get all excited when I'm supposed to, or I have excitation and inhibition, these different, anyway, I don't have to get into all the sort of laboratory speak they use, but I'm not going to respond the way that you want me to.
I'm going to act this way.
Some of them took to it.
Some of them didn't.
Some of them resisted.
Some of them were easy to mold.
And all of that research was done with an eye to if this is present in dogs, it must be at some level present.
So it's even more complicated with people, of course, is the reality.
And this is also why, you know, brainwashing and these things, they work on some people much more easily than they do on others.
But it is about individual vigilance and understanding.
And I think that that's more necessary for people now than ever because there's just so much going on around you that is meant to make you think certain things.
And you would think, Dave, that in an era where we have more access to information than ever before, you have a better informed public.
But I think increasingly you have a more molded public, as in public opinion is being directed by people in ways that we need to be more aware of because, you know, you're not just going to the library and getting books and picking these things out.
Every action you take now is being directed, cataloged, and involved in the kind of algorithmizing of life that we live.
So you have a large audience of smart people, Dave.
And so I was told I must have a large audience of smart people.
That is all of you.
And you must buy this book because, you know, I got, I'll tell you this.
I got beat week one.
It did very well in the first week of release, but I got beat by a former stripper named Bunny XO, whose book is the number one book in America to this day, who is the wife of a country music star.
So that is where we are.
That is literature in America today.
I'm not passing judgment.
I'm just saying I couldn't, there's no, she has a thong photo on the cover of the book.
I wanted to put mine, but Dave was like, Buck, your thong photo is not selling any copies.
I'm going to text Helen right now and tell her that that was completely unnecessary.
You would have moved more books.
In our remaining time, Buck, let's just talk about a few things going on in the political world.
Look, we got nine months till the midterms.
It feels like it's probably not going to go well, although it is hard for me to believe that people are going to think that the Democrats are the answer to all of this.
And I think that a lot of the squabbling and the eat your own on the right and the stuff that we see going on right now is suddenly going to fade away.
We realize that these communists are lunatics and that once they're back in power, they're going to try.
It's not like, oh, yeah, now all the people in society who have bad ideas and are like self-indulgent and crazy have gone away and we live happily ever after.
This isn't a fairy tale.
So, you know, I think that people should really, the two things I would say about the next nine months, obviously, well, for the Trump side of things, they've got to just focus on the economy and affordability.
And if that sounds like some response to AOC's Marxist crying about, you know, home prices or whatever, it's reality.
People are upset by it and you've got to address the concerns of the citizenry.
And I think that in the meantime, people should look at what's going on and say they just want Trump to run off the scoreboard with as much good stuff as he can.
And people should enjoy this while we can because it ain't going to last.
And I think everyone's gotten a little used to very quickly, oh, the good guys are in charge.
Oh, good things are happening.
For now, I'll come back in your show, Dave.
We'll talk about what things are like under the Newsom administration.
And you're a gitmo and we're doing this distance, you know?
I was going to be orange, like an al-Qaeda guy in the orange jumpsuit with the, you know, to be like, Dave, how are they treating you with your long beard?
Yeah, look, I think that a lot of them are going to, I think that there's going to be like a reconciliation commission of some kind.
Not really, but I think that people are going to come back and say, you know, there'll be a little bit of mea culpa here and there.
There'll be a little bit, because ultimately, this is what happens when you have people who the whole right-wing media ecosystem has created fighters, basically, right?
I mean, you know, we think about you and me.
I was CNN for God's sakes for years.
Like Signal is getting punched, being treated like a sideshow freak.
And like, we're used to fighting and we're used to having the entire media ecosystem completely layered against us and being, and now it's like, we sit here, we're like, wait a second.
I mean, like, we're things, we're more culturally relevant than the left.
We're much more ascendant.
All of our top people are far more competent and capable in media than theirs.
Like, it's just, I think we just look around and the success has been a little bit of a, and so what happens is you got people that all they've been doing is training for war, so to speak, you know, ideological war, and they just get itchy trigger fingers.
They start shooting at each other.
And that's what I've been seeing.
And I'm just like, I can't stop it.
I wish I could, but it is going to stop because this quiet we have from the commies right now, Dave, you know this.
This is not.
They are pissed.
They are going.
The second that they see an opening, a real opening, they are going to pull out the truncheons and the jack boots.
And we're going to be, like I said, I'll be doing the Ruben show live from Gitmo.
Manufacturing Delusion, which your smart audience of literate people who like good writing and books and is a very large audience, therefore a lot of books should be bought should please go get this book.
And Dave, by the way, Dave is going to be very happy if you help me out on this one because Dave's a friend and he's like, he will be sad for me if we don't sell a lot of books.