Totalitarian regimes, such as those led by Communists and Nazis, have something in common with jihadist terrorist organizations and politically fashionable leftist movements. They all use propaganda, scare tactics, the law, social isolation and pressure to convince people to passively accept the unacceptable as not just normal, but an inescapable imperative. That’s a key insight of radio host Buck Sexton’s new book, Manufacturing Delusion: How the Left Uses Brainwashing, Indoctrination and Propaganda Against You. He joins JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin on this week’s episode of “Think Twice.”
Sexton says he was motivated in part to write the book because of the way Americans were manipulated into accepting COVID-19 pandemic measures like masks, lockdowns and vaccines that authorities imposed upon them with lies and false reassurances. But the tactics that enabled that mass deception to happen also apply to other issues, including the alarmism over climate change, gender ideology and the acceptance of myths about racist killings of African-Americans that fueled the Black Lives Matter movement.
The former CIA analyst and New York City Police Department terrorism consultant argues that the Islamist extremism that he witnessed in Iraq and in Nigeria was enabled by some of the same methods pursued by the tyrants who ran the Soviet Union and Communist China. The effort to force people to abandon independent judgment and accept the lies imposed on them was discussed by George Orwell in his classic novel 1984, which sought to alert the world to the threat from communism. These tactics have also been used by cults as well as by political movements.
He notes that it is no small irony that contemporary extremists who have spread antisemitism and blood libels as part of an effort to mainstream efforts to destroy Israel are using lies and slogans crafted for the same purpose by Soviet propagandists. The radicalization of those who join terrorist groups involves these methods.
But it also applies to the way masses of people are convinced to believe conspiracy theories that use Jews and Israel as the scapegoats for the world’s problems. That has led to indoctrination of young people by leftist ideologues and is also part of the explanation for the Jew-hatred promoted by right-wing podcasters like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
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