OPINION:
In the 1970s, with the advent of audio-recording cassette tapes, a commercial challenged the listener: “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” Today, we can ask, “Is it real, or is it generated by artificial intelligence?” It is always good to know what is real.
In “Manufacturing Delusion: How the Left Uses Brainwashing, Indoctrination, and Propaganda Against You,” Buck Sexton asserts that with the emergence of AI, “our perception of reality is increasingly at risk.”
Mr. Sexton draws on his many years as a counterterrorism specialist abroad in Mosul, Baghdad and Kabul, as well as in New York, to do a deep dive into the numerous techniques used by the political left to dupe the public. As he writes, the “aim in this book is to equip [the reader] with an understanding of the tactics used to foment mass delusion.”
Mr. Sexton goes further by saying he “combed through the last hundred-plus years of literature on the topic of mass delusion and identified the eight most common tactics totalitarians use to create it: conditioning, menticide [mind-killing], brainwashing, weaponized law, forced phobia, isolation, identity construction, and propaganda.”
Through eight chapters that focus on each tactic and show how they bolster one another, the book aptly addresses the manufacture of delusion.
Pertinent examples abound, including in Chapter 1, on conditioning, wherein Mr. Sexton exposes “The Covid System of Control.” Nonsense non-science was imposed on the public as a requirement for ineffective masking and distancing to prevent exposure to a microscopic, elusive virus.
Arbitrary diktats were levied, whereby certain groups were OK to congregate, such as Black Lives Matter rioters, while church congregants, not so much.
Furthermore, a “‘papers please’ regime of mandatory vaccines was rolled out” with the Biden administration’s 2021 vaccine policies.
In Chapter 2, on menticide, a contemporary mind-killing ploy is persuading people to accept the widespread existence of a trans-sex. No more penis-equals-male-and-vagina-equals-female dichotomy. Do not trust “lying eyes” or “distorted common sense,” and certainly do not confuse children with what is arguably the most obvious observational science.
“Manufacturing Delusion” points out that “as with Covid’s masking and vaccine mandates, the absence of evidence for ‘the science’ of the trans agenda is too often ignored.” As Greg Gutfeld opined on Fox News last July, “as long as you have to tiptoe around basic biology, you’re screwed.”
Chapter 3, on brainwashing, addresses cult leaders and their methods. Chapter 4, on weaponized law, delves into the treatment of Black Lives Matter demonstrators versus Jan. 6 dissenters.
Chapter 5, on forced phobias, reveals much of the hyperbole germane to the “settled science” of climate change. The chapter notes that “the ‘consensus’ on climate change has been consistently, repeatedly wrong over the past fifty-years” and goes on to provide many instances of such consensus errors from the past decades.
Certainly, climate catastrophes of the research-and-information kind continue to make headlines in the present decade.
Isolation, addressed in Chapter 6, is particularly effective, Mr. Sexton says. That is why “every exploitative, destructive cult demands isolation.” After isolation is “the exploitation of this emptiness through identity construction,” which is conveniently the topic of Chapter 7. “The ultimate goal [of, for example, al Qaeda’s written conversion material] is reshaping its readers so that they will see themselves as one and the same with [the organization’s] mission.”
Finally, in Chapter 8, on propaganda — just before the book ends with dire warnings on the future of mass delusion — the concept of lie repetition, or a “Firehouse of Falsehood,” reveals that there is “no more transformative power over public opinion than the ability to make the masses believe lies.”
Thus, “Left-wing interest groups pitch stories to left-wing reporters and editors who produce fantastical stories about the looming climate catastrophe brought on by the U.S.’ fossil fuel industry, the systemic racism responsible for police shooting unarmed black men, or the epidemic of children killing themselves because their backward parents aren’t supportive enough of their gender fluidity. Counterpoints are excluded, marginalized, or mocked.”
The apt observation concludes with this: “If you aren’t aware, you don’t even know you’re being fed a narrative, not the news.” “Manufacturing Delusion” certainly helps you become aware.
So, as the midterm elections approach, make sure that what you see, read or hear is not a product of leftist manufacturing or what many claim as “my truth.” A thorough read of “Manufacturing Delusion” will give a good start to uncovering the unvarnished truth.
• Anthony J. Sadar is an adjunct associate professor of science at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and a co-author of “Environmental Risk Communication: Principles and Practices for Industry” (CRC Press).
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Manufacturing Delusion: How the Left Uses Brainwashing, Indoctrination, and Propaganda Against You
Sentinel, $32, 304 pages
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