’You're Wrong' With Mollie Hemingway And David Harsanyi, Ep. 195: ‘Manufacturing Delusion’

Welcome back, everyone to new episode of Your Wrong with Molly Hemingway, Editor-in-Chief of the Federalist and David Harsani, senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Just as a reminder, if you'd like to email the show, please do so at Radio at the Federalist.com. We love to hear from you. Molly, today a first on your wrong. We have a guest, our friend, Buck Sexton. This is very exciting to have Buck here. Yeah.

It's very kind of you guys to have me. I told Molly before the show, I had to write a book and take a year and go back and forth with my publisher and have the CIA spend six months sitting on the book to review it additionally go through all that pain and misery, but I do get to hang out with YouTube. So that's the good news. Well, it's a first world. problem to complain about this, but writing a book really sucks, right? It's just one of the hardest things I've had to do. Well, I can talk to you guys about this because I'm in the, I'm in this weird

position on this where I like some of the people who don't write their own books. And I'll never call people out who don't write their own books. But I actually wrote my book, like sat at a computer, did the research, sat at a computer, did the outline, did all these things. And I know you guys did too. And I'm actually not someone who's okay with this word. of, I can only speak to, like, people like, what about presidential memoirs? I'm like, yeah, but nobody expects that Barack Obama, well, did Barack Obama write any of his books? No, put a pin in that. But nobody expects that, like, Clinton Obama, you know, you name it, write their memoirs. But I think if you're writing a, here's my view of the world book and you do commentary for a living,

you're upholding or, you know, you're presenting yourself as having done something that you actually didn't really do. I think that's weird. I know the people say, that's the industry and everything else. I'm like, yeah, but that's not, if I paid someone to write my PhD thesis for me, nobody would think that was okay. I don't understand why this is, if you have a collaborator, fine. If you have somebody else in the cover, fine. But I mean straight ghostwritten books. Am I alone in this? Do you guys think I'm a weird? Charles Cook, whom I'm very fond of. He disagreed with me on this strenuously, and I was shocked. Really? If I were met correctly, yeah, it was a long time ago. I have ghost written books myself. I know. I'm like, well, I've done some of that work for other

You have to take on their voice. It's very, it's weird. It's a weird experience. I'm not saying I don't respect the skill of the ghost writer. I'm saying the people that are like, here's my book. Like, I'm going around that I'm talking about this thing. And I'm talking about the process of like the research and stuff. There was a lot of cool stuff.

I probably wrote 300 actual. By the way, it's called manufacturing delusion. Sorry. How the left uses brainwashing, propaganda, and indoctrination against you. I actually just wanted to call it manufacturing delusion, but I lost the battle too. I got the title I wanted, but the subtitle. couldn't. Apparently, we have to tell people like everything that's in the book on the page or on the cover or else they won't buy it, which I support your publisher in that. You need to have,

you know, you did get the title you wanted. That is how you'll always refer to it. But it does help sometimes with the book buying public if they know just a little bit more about the angle that you're taking or what they might get from it. You sound like you sound like you work for a penguin, Raid, like you could run Pegman Random House right now. Like that's exactly. I have a book coming out in a couple weeks and it is very simply titled Samuel Alito and then there's the subhead that explains more. But I don't really care as long as you get the main title. I am not judging how other people do things at all, but I do think we should point out that your book is not just written by yourself, but it is not one of those books that's like 10 ways to save the country or

you know, something that's that anybody could do. You did real life experience, real reporting, and real analysis about a pretty complex situation that we're all subject to, about how group think happens, about how mass movements can be fomented, not organically. And this is a much higher level of writing and thinking than we see in a lot of people who have platforms. I appreciate that. First of all, that's incredibly kind of you.

I'll say this is why I basically badger Dave to come on your podcast so that I could sell to a audience of people who like high IQ stuff and want interesting things that are actually worth their time. And yet is very readable because it's based on your personal experience. Oh, yeah. And I do want to also congratulate you that manufacturing delusion immediately became a New York Times bestseller. Thank you.

I appreciate that. Yeah, without any help from Fox News. Thanks, Fox. They were very clear about not helping me. So that's cool. Anyway, it's all right, though, you know, as one does, as one does. So I don't expect anyone else to say anything. I'm just saying it was, you know, sometimes the big platforms are very helpful to people.

Sometimes they're not. So, yeah, you know, the book went really, the book has gone really well. So here's the point about it or how it came about. I'm one of these people that still forever bitter about what happened during COVID. Like, I'm never letting this go because I think it's a written, not because I like to be small-minded and never forgive and forget, although maybe, but because I find that it was a critical lesson. We saw in real time, because COVID actually wasn't anywhere near as dangerous or severe as people thought, we have recovered from it and like the country moves on and everything else. But for one thing, I thought to myself, I mean, what if we actually came up against a virus that had like a 5%? fatality rate or a 3% fatality rate, which doesn't sound that terrible until, of course,

you run the numbers and realize like, okay, that would be catastrophic. How do people go so nuts that they believe the crazy things? Because there were the crazy things. And I said, well, hold on, what was it like during COVID? It felt a bit like being in a totalitarian society. And then I was like, well, if I'm going to answer the question of how people went so nuts, and by the way, it's not a COVID book at all. There's like a little bit in one chapter about COVID, and then it moves on very quickly. And as you said, it actually goes back into the CIA stuff. which I finally was able to write about, which is all jihadism, which I argue is a different kind of mass hysteria, like a different kind of brain virus.

You know, what there, you know, there's the similarities of psychological pathway for someone to, say, join some cult in Japan that wants to end the world, like I'm Shinrikio, and somebody in Birmingham, a UK, who wants to show up and blow themselves up as a suicide bomber in Iraq, a country they had never been to before then. And like, I wanted to look at these extremist movements and extreme belief and extreme ideology and understand how do you do this to people, basically? That's the manufacturing part of this. And no one has done it better than totalitarian.

So that's where I start off with really the Soviet Union, but also sort of the origin of the brain science, if you will, of conditioning with Pavlov. So that's the beginning of the book. And then I kind of go on this journey, although the very beginning is me in Nigeria, which was fun. I did not, I did not blend in, but I was not supposed to. So I got to say my, my, my, my, I know you a long time now. And my favorite part of reading into this was that you, when people say, and you've only mentioned this in passing on it, so you'll say I work for the CIA. But I, you James bonded it. Like you were in Nigeria looking for jihadis. Like, that was really

impressive to know about you. You don't brag about that. Well, it had been entirely classified until the CIA. I'd never told anybody really in media that it's gone. So what happened, and this is kind of a funny backstory, and again, if you buy a copy of the book. And it really was meant to be highly readable, and I appreciate you saying that. And I learned a lot. Like, I had to become a better writer to get through this process myself. They had multiple editors.

By the way, a book is a collaborative process. And I totally admit that. Oh, for sure. So I'm not somebody who's like, I do everything. No, I had phenomenal editors. And I want to say, like, at one point, for example, I got so deep into my Pavlov research, I was corresponding with Professor Emeritus TOTUS of Johns Hopkins University about specific meetings that Pavlov may or may not have had with senior figures.

And they're like, Buck, you can't, chapter one on Pavlov can't be 80 pages long. And I was like, no, but it's so important. You don't understand. And they're like, no, we understand. want you to sell books and not have everyone say you've lost your mind. So it is a collaborative process and that part of it's very important. But the part about Nigeria was so funny because it's like a classic, there was more to it even than I got into the book in the sense that I showed up. I come out of Amherst after 9-11 and, you know, I was like, I'm going to go do what everyone

was doing from my class, which was investment banking or management consulting, which I found out later in life with more wisdom or two completely miserable career paths that like no human being should act. Just when you're, you know, in the year 2000, when someone's like, you can be a 20, a 21 or 22 year old making like 150 grand year for everyone. Just like, oh, it's like my life is made and you realize it's miserable. Anyway, I, so I joined the CIA out of school and they, because of 9-11, and when I went down, I had done all these interviews and I had studied the Middle East and I'd studied Arabic and

this is kind of how it all happened. And that was pre-9-11, actually. I was going to Arabic class on 9-11, or it might have been the day before, but I just started Arabic, actually. So it gives you a sense I was already on this trajectory. By the way, I speak like five words of Arabic. I mean, it's a use-it-or-lose-it situation, and I never got very good. So people always ask me that. But I was studying it, which was enough at the time because nobody knew anything.

So I show up at the CIA, and I think I'm going to be doing senior Al-Qaeda targeting because, like, I'm here to get bin Laden. Like, that was, you know, I wanted to be, you know, the lady from Zero Dark 30. anyway, and that was basically the idea. And they're like, actually, we're kind of stacked there right now. So, like, you're going to work Africa. And I was just like, first of all, and then really like the continent of Africa, too. Like, they're like, so like figure out something. And anyway, sorry, I'm going deeper into this that I met to, but the point is I was like,

hey, okay, what's like the place that nobody wants to go? I'll just go there. Like, what, give me something to do that would be interesting. That's like miserable because, you know, Nairobi is nice. people go on safari in these places. And they're like, nobody wants to go to Nigeria. So they send me to Nigeria. So that's how I end up there.

And I'm working with the secret police because there were these early reports about, and by the way, it all ended up being accurate. And everybody at the time, this will not shock you. Like, people in the State Department were like, there is no jihadist connection into Nigeria. It's a totally demand. It's an internal dispute. State Department people are so often the worst.

the worst. I knew some good ones, but also some that were just so terrible, because they get so smug about their portfolio. Like, everyone else is an idiot, but them. You know, nobody else could have an opinion on the situation in Burkina Faso, except for some guy who basically should be in the Peace Corps. Anyway, so that was, yeah, so that's how the book starts. But it was the roots of jihadism in northern Nigeria, and I was kind of there at an early stage when that was popping up. And it was all, it all tended to be true. And then Boko Haram came about later.

and was one of the worst terrorist groups in the world for a number of years. And it was all this sort of mass delusion imported, by the way, from Saudi Arabia and money from the Gulf and all the stuff that you think would happen, happened. And so I was like, well, if that could happen there, what happens elsewhere? What are the pathways? What are the tactics? Yeah, that's what I love about manufacturing delusion, looking at how these things are not just one ideology or one religion or one country, but how.

how we can all be subject to the forces that create this mass solution. And you mentioned COVID, and I'm glad that you touched on it in the book, because for me, that was a very, like you, I have in no way gotten over what they did to us with that. And I remember when the shutdowns first started happening, including of churches, I thought there is no way Americans will put up with this. And instead, it seemed like they all welcomed, or so many people welcomed these shutdowns and totally allowed them to happen. And one of the things that I found interesting later about that was in part this happened through bad actors in government shutting down contrary arguments that might have exposed what they had done poorly in their relationship with the Wuhan

Institute of Virology, but also through censorship. The Federalists just successfully sued the State Department for its role in censoring the Federalist. And a lot of that did happen as part of the COVID situation.

And totalitarian's censor. I'm just wondering, like, what are your thoughts on the role that censorship plays in manufacturing compliance with authoritarian regime? Of course, it's huge. So I start, one thing that I noticed when I was looking into, and there's different, it's interesting, too, there's a lot of different terms that, and this is one of the problems in the early writing of the book was, was that I was trying to separate out these things. And I'm like, look, people refer to them in some ways.

They're just variations on the theme. In some ways, they're slight, like distinct either time or location variations on these things. but things like brainwashing, menticide, thought reform, these are all conditioning. Conditioning obviously is, and with Pavlov, it was conditional reflex, which I think is really important because that actually, that's what he called it, translated into the Russian. And we use conditioning now to just be sort of the training of the mind very broadly. But Pavlov was, what can I do that will be actually reflexive, meaning what stimuli can you be exposed to

auditory stimuli, light stimuli, things like that, that has a physiological response. So it was much more mechanistic in his understanding and his research. And he was looking to see where the sort of brain, body connection, if you will, stops and starts. And he was the first person to do it in a really systematic way and to have some real, some really profound discoveries. And the one discovery that, and sorry, I'll get to the censorship point in a second, but the one discovery, that Pavlov have that I wrote about had that I wrote about the book was basically the dogs in the lab were going to drown because the river the Neva River had overflowed in St. Petersburg. It's 1924. And they had been conditioning these dogs or subjected them to conditional reflex for years. And, you know, they had very, some of them had a sort of very regimented and very clearly documented response to different things, but also different people. They thought they were all going to drown. The lab gets busted into it the last second by some of Pavlov's assistance. They save the dogs. Well, guess what? The dogs are alive. They're saved, but because of the trauma they were put through hours of the water slowly rising, their conditioning was, in some cases,

completely wiped away. They also changed their attitudes towards members of the staff. Some became much more aggressive. Some became much more docile, things like that. So an outside stimulus was able to deeply change behaviors that had been effectively trained or conditioned over a long period of time. This is sort of the beginnings of understanding, by the way, like trauma and PTSD and what that can do to the mind. And then the Soviets went basically nuts on the biggest mass conditioning experiment we had ever seen in human history. And it's in part only possible because of the rise of mass media too. First, it was really the posters.

That was a big part of it. But obviously radio started to play a larger and larger role as time went on and then TV. But the iconography. I mean, I have a whole book. iconography of power that was part of the research of the book. The posters, they made millions of these posters of the worker or of Stalin or Lenin and created this sort of visualized control mechanism. And of course, a part of the control mechanism is to do the fire hose of falsehood, which is one of the tactics, it's actually from a Rand paper, a fire hose of falsehood of

propaganda. You have to be able to shut off the contrary, you know, the, The whole point of the repeated and continuous stimuli is that you don't have competing stimuli that can offset it. And this is where, of course, censorship comes in all totalitarian regimes. It all makes sense. But you need to be able to shut off alternative flows of information or alternative stimuli, if you will, in order to have that really deeply effective, what they call coercive persuasion is kind of the new age psychologist, but mind control, brainwashing.

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So social media must have accelerated this incredibly. And also people self-select their own bubbles. So even if you're not censoring, people are just constantly bombarded by the images and the brainwashing and propaganda, right? I mean, it seems like hugely. Yeah, hugely. I mean, you think about the Soviets were able to do this with the threat of the omnipresent threat of extreme violence. And so the tactics, by the way, I feel like I should lay this out because that'll kind of make it a little bit. Or, you know, some of the tactics is things like forced phobia, isolation, menticides, thought reform.

These are all identity construction. These are all pathways to manipulate psychology at an individual and at a mass level to get people to go along with believe and sometimes deeply, like, defend extreme falsehoods. That's really, I think the, and this is where the COVID thing for me tied in was the willingness of people to defend obvious lies was deeply unsettling and for that to happen in America. And honestly, for the, you mentioned the churches, for the Christian community to just almost entirely say, yep, churches are shut down. It's like the weed stores are open, guys, but the churches have to be shut down. You know, we can't do outdoor. We couldn't even do outdoor services, even though we knew from the beginning that the chance of getting this stuff from anyone outdoors was basically zero. So, you know, we need to learn some of these lessons and we need to see what's happened in other societies where this stuff has been able to run rampant.

And effectively, a cult is just like a self-silly. You mentioned self-selection, David. A cult and a new age religion is what the, again, that's what the sort of psychologists call it these days. It's just a, it's a self-selected totalitarian society, really. I mean, it's just people that are creating a little totalitarian environment for themselves or, or joining one and subjecting themselves to many of the same psychological processes that you would have if you lived in North Korea, which makes sense, right? If you're the average North Korean or if you join like nexium or something, they're going to do

things like firehoods of falsehood, false confession, separate you from previous belief, separate you from family members. These are all things that are done. And I think that one of the tricks that I have to sort of pull off in the book, which is, again, By the way, I've been told to do this, Molly. Manufacturing Delusion. Available in books. You know, you guys know.

You're book people. You sell books. Manufacturing delusion available in bookstores everywhere. People say, okay, you talk about isolation in the context of thought reform in China. But, I mean, what do we really, you know, in America? How does that? How does that? Because we can't just lock people in cells here.

I mean, J6, they did this to some people. But lock people in cells endlessly and, like, separate them from everyone. And yes? But one of the things I think is good for people who are reading manufacturing delusion is to think about how these things apply to them personally so that they can better resist similar tactics that are used even in America. Oh, yeah. I, for my Supreme Court book, I was talking to someone at the court about how there's this

Joseph Piper who wrote about how flattery can be used to condition people to behave a certain way. and the withholding of praise can be used also to condition people. So you see Supreme Court justices who start out supposedly pretty conservative, and then the New York Times praises them every time they depart from conservatism, and they withhold praise if they do stay with the conservatives. And some people can be subject to that kind of influence, and we all can be subject to that kind of influence,

which is a very mild form of mentist. side or something like that to encourage behavior. You saw it even in the U.S. with the BLM movements and other movements where there was extremely strong social pressure to publicly identify with a Marxist, racist movement of BLM by, you know, doing those blackouts on Facebook. And, you know, if you read like Voslov Havel and how he wrote about post-totelitarian systems, it's a straight up greengrocer sign, you know, where he talked about how in communist systems, they make you put up a sign to show that you're no threat to the people above you, but also you're okay to work with for the people below you.

What else was that, then, are social media hysteria in favor of certain radical positions? Well, what you've established is actually a critical part of the structure of the book is I look at the historical and the sort of most, the origins of and the most extreme version of some of these tactics, like a menticide, for example, which comes from Yost Mirleu, who was a Dutch psychiatrist in the Second World War who dealt with, he was part of the Dutch Army in exile, and he debriefed. He did psychological operations, by the way, in the Second World War, against the Nazis. So he has some idea of how, you know, info battles go. And then psychological warfare operations, stuff like that, sciops. And then he also debriefed Nazis to

understand how they did what they did. But menticide, the two pillars of menticide, according to Mirlu, are confusion and degradation. And now, of course, if you can put brown shirts on every street and you can just humiliate people and do the, you can confuse and degrade people in all the ways that Nazi Germany did. But his point, and this is from the guy, the actual guy who coined the term menticide and is the originator really of a lot of this research, which there's some guys that have done fascinating research on this. He wrote a book, The Rape of the Mind, which I read as part of the research for this. It's a really interesting book. He says, yeah, but you have to understand the human brain, if you can confuse and degrade people systematically anywhere,

you can get them to effectively be brainwashed. This is like the baseline of what you do. And so I take that, for example, menticide. I get into the gender stuff. that we've dealt with where we have now lived through a society where we are told that's not a penis, that's a woman, deal with it. And by the way, say the pronoun. And this is something I remember actually briefly talked to Douglas Murray about this after a dinner, about how courtesy has been used to the extreme detriment of the right in this country as just like a, just be nice. Just because I think that maybe culturally, maybe I'm delusional about this, but Culturally, I think people on the right at least like to try to be polite.

I think there still has been in the past. Now, people would say, look at Trump and everything else. But most conservatives, I know, aren't looking to offend people unnecessarily in their day-to-day speech. And so just say the preferred pronoun. Yeah, but you're degrading your sense of what is true and what is not every time you do it. And when they change the pronouns and they have 37 pronouns and all this, they're confusing you on purpose. They're confusing the discourse on purpose because a confused person whose reason is degraded is very easy to mold. for the purposes of the state.

Allah, a manufactured delusion. This reminds me of a comedian I saw recently who was herself kind of genderqueer, but she was saying that she had all these friends from college who had insisted that they be called they, them, but now they were saying, I'm not doing that anymore. She was like, like, heck, you aren't.

You took us on this journey. You made us do all of this crazy stuff. You're going to ride that horse till you die. It's just funny. No, but it actually, it does go to the point of they, this was, we were told that this was absolutely essential. So why should the politics shift and all of a sudden it's not, if this is about basic human rights, it shouldn't matter what the polling says. But you'll notice something, though, that they do the feints, they do the retreats. They play this as a very political game.

And one of the things that I do believe, it's, it's, this is not a tactic I get to in the book, but it's a tactic that you both. have certainly seen a million times, is the left wing, it's not happening, it's only happening a little, it's happening, but it's a good thing, and you better shut up about it. That progression is a very effective, and people will call it gaslighting, and certainly that's true, but that's a very effective progression, and we've seen that with some of the most clear manufactured delusions about it. I get into, BLM is one of them and the issue of, of, you know, using the criminal justice system actually as a weapon of psychological control, which is also true, or using notions of justice.

And I get into the gender theory stuff. But think about it. I've always said it this way. If they can get you to say that a man is a woman, they can get you to say anything. Yeah. And there's a line that I didn't use in the book, but it was one of these, one of these, one of these, psychiatrist slash information warfare specials that I studied, who said, the real trick is not getting you to say that there are mountains that you've never seen. The real trick is getting you

to say that the mountains that you know are there have disappeared, which I think was, I thought was very powerful. It's like, it's not about just getting you to say things that, you know, maybe you don't know. It's the most fundamental things that you know to be true, that you know right now. They want to, they want to hack away at that. They want to get rid of your foundational understanding of the reality around you. And then remotely, by the way, Stalin and Lenin, they were fascinated. Pavlov became this big propaganda tool for them. And there was like the Pavlov, you know, award.

And they celebrated him years later. By the Pavlov hated their guts because he was smart enough to know that they completely destroyed Russia. And, you know, but he did take their money to continue his research. So there was this whole, he almost starved the death at one point, though, because they screwed everything up so badly with the first five-year plan that, you know, like the lab was. fallout, like everything. I think he was actually, there was turnips that he was growing, like in the yard. I mean, it was that kind of a thing to survive. But Pavlov understood the Soviets wanted to build, not just the new, they wanted to build a new society. As part of that, the Soviets wanted to create the new Soviet man, this idea of like a perfected, scientifically

engineered new human species, of course, all in the model of communism or, you know, Marxist-Leninism. And what an absolute nightmare that was, one of the things that he learned from the the conditioning of dogs was that even dogs, it's not always, everyone is different. People ask me, how do you resist this and how do you avoid this? Well, the truth is, it's on a very individualized basis. Some people just have more innate ability to stand by what they think or stand by what they believe. So that has to be taken into account. So, yeah. Although I do think you have to cultivate that practice. Oh, for sure. It's like a muscle. Some people are born genetically stronger than others, but you can work out and get stronger. It's the same thing with understanding.

I think how people try to manipulate, manipulate your mind. It seems to me then that AI would be like a super weapon here in the sense that people go, Grock, is this true? You know, or go on and ask AI for facts as if it's some sort of deity almost. So if you have fake, you know, forced phobias, fake history, fake science like climate, like I will go on to whatever the Google AI is, I forget its name. And I ask it about our men, women, you know, can went. can you change your gender?

And it will talk about gender affirming care, right? So it's like a propaganda super weapon in a way, if you want to use it that way. Right. I mean, the last chapter of the book is that look ahead, David, exactly at that issue of now. It used to be that deep fakes were like the thing that your boomer relative would send you in some email. And you're like, that's clearly not, you know, you'd have to like gently say to them like, no. Like, Nancy Pelosi is not actually a space lizard. Like, that's not true.

And now, I find myself looking at things going, wait a second. Is that real? Is it not? And the capacity, you have two things simultaneously happening. One is the capacity for digital fabrication or fabrication of a visual reality has now gotten to the point where it is close to indistinguishable, right? I mean, what you're observing online that is made versus what is real, what is manufactured from what is real. It's very, very hard. And also at a time when we're really, I mean, you guys are.

like me and this, we're the first generation of people to have lived in a pre-internet and now in a sort of deep internet world where now kids are growing up and they're being subjected to this stuff. And I guess this is part of also the anxiety about TikTok and TikTok programming. Like this stuff is very real. This is a giant concern for all of us, I think. So that's the final chapter of the book. On that note. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. No, no, go ahead. So much of your book is looking at how some of these totalitarian efforts have been deployed by the left. Does the right have any problems? I think the right tends to be just by virtue of how they become conservative.

They tend to be more resistant to some of this. And they're more individualistic. They tend to be more individualistic or to support the individual. but do they have problems with this as well? Yes. And actually much more so in, or rather I should say much more apparently since, and this is going to sound like such a dodge. It's so wimpy. But I thought about this when I was writing the book.

And initially I had a chapter on demagoguery, which got cut. And I kind of looked at Trump and what Trump has meant for the country and what he has done that is positive. that I voted for Trump three times. Everyone who knows who I am knows that I'm a, I'm a Trump supporter, etc. But a lot of the, I mean, we're talking about tactics. I mean, you know, Trump is a is a world-class demagogue. And I think he, it's kind of like, I think he uses his powers for good, but the way that he does things could very much be used for ill. And people should be aware of how powerful these, these techniques are on. And they have been, by the way, going back to like ancient Greece. I mean, this is not where the term, of course, comes from.

This is not something that is, I think, shocked anybody. And we only cut it, and this is the truth, because there wasn't a corresponding. Now, remember, I put the book away almost two years ago, 18 months ago. And that's when it got submitted, right, for all this stuff, for CIA and then for publishing. So to me, there wasn't a really good example of this. I mean, the closest thing, and Molly, this is going to kicking this up at the end, And the closest thing, I think, would have been some of the beliefs around around the 2020 election, not the hey, are people in Georgia getting votes counted when they live in the wrong county because, yeah, that was happening. But did Venezuela, North Korea and, like, Iranian IRGC cells hack into computer term or hack into voting terminals?

It's like, that did not happen. That did not happen. And that became a very durable falsehood on the right online. That's actually why I wrote the book rigged was. which I have a copy of here, not just saying. It was obvious there were problems, but some people were saying some really ludicrous things. I originally wrote it more in response to some of those crazy things, and it ended up that people were so crazy on both sides. What they didn't realize, I think, was that this was like putting two Siamese fighting fish in the bowl or something, is that the crazies gave the other side, the ability to kind of just smash together all 2020 questioning.

And so they were deeply, and it's unfortunate because I know. know some of the people who were the most ardent promoters of the craziest 2020 theories, not the, I think Trump actually got more votes, and here's why, and here's how they abused mail-in-balloting, and here's how they shut down the challenges. Like, you know, what I was talking about, the North Koreans and the Venezuelans and this all this sort of stuff, then it was able, they were able to kind of dismiss all of that out of hand. Yeah, they were able to just push it all aside.

And I think they were pretty, unfortunately, pretty effective in doing that in the general discourse. But on the right, you know, this thing now about, you're asking me, and now people are probably going to, I'm sorry if people start leaving your podcast guys, because we're never allowed to criticize our own side. I feel like you guys probably do. I respect that you guys approach your work with intellectual integrity. These days, you just say the craziest stuff possible and get the most clicks, and that's considered winning for a lot of people. So I don't think the people you're going to mention right now are on our side, to be honest with you. I mean, but please, yeah. I mean, they'll be lumped in with us, but yeah. So the, the, the, the, the,

Go ahead, Molly. I just would say this is what's good about manufacturing delusion and thinking about how these things happen. Throughout human history, there have been people who are extreme or say hyperbolic things. You yourself need to guard against going down that path. And when you're following a crazy person, like who's more at fault? The crazy person or you? Like, you should focus on yourself. How am I analyzing information?

How am I analyzing news? Am I being subject to an information operation? You shouldn't just be able to see it when the New York Times does it. You should also be able to see it when someone radical supposedly on your own side does it as well. Well, I got to ask a question. Do you think we're more susceptible to this sort of thing now? Or is it just more obvious because everyone is on social media and we all see it? I mean, I always wonder if we've always been prone to conspiracy theories and weird Gnostic knowledge and all of that.

I'm not sure. I think it's actually both, which I know is always kind of a maybe unsatisfying answer, but I think it's both of those things. I think that one problem that we have on the right is that after the 2024 election, because it has gotten a lot worse in my mind since 2024. I mean, this is sort of spiraled on the right. And I would have had, if I were writing this book now, there would be a chapter on like, hey, guys, the other side, you know, one of my least favorite things is, like,

Like someone goes on the Bill Maher show, for example, and they're talking about some recent, like, whack job, like tranny going and shooting a bunch of people or something. And they're like, violence is on both sides. It's like political violence is actually, I don't care what stats they try to show. It's like when they show who the biggest terrorists are and they always start in 2002. And I'm like, that's interesting. That's a weird cutoff date, right? So, and they don't include the probably at this point trillions of dollars we've spent, keeping people from Alahuach barring this all into the stone eight. another part of the conversation that I think, you know,

we're not getting pat down when people are trying to get on the plane because they're so worried about the MAGA hat wearing crowd, okay? Anyway, I think if I wrote the book now, I would have to do something on the right. And it's because in part, we felt so triumphant, I think, after 2024, and there are people who have a need to have an enemy that is a parent or an opposition that they can really just, honestly put a lot of their

own frustrations into fighting this enemy. And in some cases, you know, if you're somebody who's like, you're, you know, you're ardently pro-life and I am, and you're putting your frustration and day-to-day life into like trying to save more babies and get involved, like that's a good thing. But that's a powerful emotion

that you need to understand can be manipulated by bad people out there. And I think we've seen that in 20, post-20204, particularly with this, people have convinced themselves that the single most important thing in the world is like the Jeffrey Epstein files. And I keep sitting here saying, yes, there's a lot of weird stuff. Yes, there's. And by the way, not just that there's the Jeffrey Epstein files in general, but that there's a global cabal of pedophiles.

Now some people in the right are accusing Trump, by the way, of protecting them. There's a global cabal of pedophiles who actually run the world as sort of a, you know, child predator, Illuminati or something. And if you aren't devoting a huge... Have you guys come across this, by the way? Or is this sounding insane to you? This is big on the right.

Molly's looking at me like... I'm like, Molly, I get... We get calls about this all the time on the show. I guess, to me, that's somewhat different because... And I think it still can be directed poorly. But there is at least truth there, that there were powerful people engaged in bad behavior. And then it fits... to this larger story of no one ever being held accountable if they're powerful or rich enough.

So I totally agree that people have gone off the rails in how they're pursuing it, including destroying any sense of a very fundamental American principle that you're innocent until proven guilty. So they're releasing files from crazy people who can say anything. And then that person's name is tarnished. I totally agree with that. But I don't think, you know. It's not a it's not a, it's not a, it's not a.

penis is a vagina and vice versa, which is what the left is doing. I under. And so, so whether it's a delusion or an extreme exaggeration, I think, is a fair or, or, you know, it's out of, out of kilter. Well, I think does. I'm sorry. I think the delusion is that they take the Epstein files and they fit it into this pattern. So they cannot abide by anything being random or just happening on its own or not being a big

story. And then they create this massive puzzle where every piece fits in together. Yeah, the conspiracy aspect of it. I mean, I'm, I've, By the way, I've been shouting about the Epstein stuff for way longer than all of these people, including, and I'll give full credit to your, Anne Colter, I think, was one of the earliest people on the Epstein stuff saying, do you guys realize the plea deal that this guy was given in Florida? I mean, this is insane.

I mean, the stuff that this guy was doing and what he played. So she was, she was very early on this stuff. And obviously, Acosta in the Trump administration first round, lost his job just because he was the, you know, the U.S. attorney who. oversaw that on the federal side. But clearly Epstein, there were failures of the justice system, failures to protect young women from his predatory behavior, failures, failures, failures. But to David's point, that's different than now people are saying Donald Trump is actually part of the, like people that are on the right, Donald Trump is part of the cabal. And Dan Bongino is

say, I've seen, you've probably seen videos. I mean, we all know Dan. Like, the idea of Dan Dan Bongino would stand athwart punishing pedophiles is so insane and so baseless and derogatory, but people who think their right wing now say this. And I don't mean one or two. Like, people have basically assaulted Dan. I mean, it actually pisses me off. They've like assaulted him at events over this and shouted at him, calling him a pedophile protector. And like, he can handle it. big boy, he doesn't need me, certainly to defend them. But the point is, like, the hell is wrong with these people? They've gone nuts. Another example, since we're on this, I've never seen so many people so convinced that a guy who clearly shot somebody didn't shoot

somebody with the Charlie Kirk assassination. What is going on, people? What is going on? When did our team go insane? Not all of us, obviously, but when do these people go insane? What's really the, the theory doesn't have, David your point, the theory doesn't even make any sense. But the second you start asking questions about the theory, you're just told, well, you don't know about this other crazy thing that also makes no sense. I have people that I know in my life, by the way, who are who are, who are who are who were Republicans, who send me like, hey, did you see this? And it's, you know, it's about I mean, I can't even tell you. Like stuff is so insane. And it's like.

And you can't debate these people because you can't debate a fantasy. So whenever you say anything, it just unwinds this new conspiracy. Well, then you're part of it. But this is, by the way, David, then you're part of the cabal of the pedophiles, by the way. Oh, yeah. You're part of the pedophile cabal because you don't think that the guy who was like a lunatic dating a tranny who hated Charlie Kirk, who has admitted to it and blah, all this other stuff and we're about to see all this evidence that he's, like, I can't comprehend it. I know. This is insane.

And also, sorry. I have some advice for people who are going down conspiracy theorizing paths. And as an investigative journalist, I can't remember who said it, but to some extent, there's a fine line between being a conspiracy theorist and an investigative journalist in that you have to kind of imagine a scenario that you're going to report on. You have to understand that when you come across something abnormal, that there might be many players involved in that abnormal thing. So you're always kind of experimenting in your mind with where this story might go. And so I have that background as an investigative journalist. I do think, like, it's reasonable if you are someone who was horrified by Charlie Kirk's horrific assassination in public to think, I feel like there's more to this story. Well, there are healthy, reasonable ways to explore that, such as how did his assassin become so radicalized?

Did his assassin have accomplices have help? Was it direct help or indirect help? This is fruitful. This is good to think about. And it relates to your book. How do people get in such a place where they're going to commit this type of crime? It's like 9-11. How do people get to the point where they're commandeering passenger airlines into the World Trade Center towers? It's worthy of exploring and having that unfold. And it's healthier than being like, no, everyone's keeping secret something that nobody could keep secret that would involve thousands of people involved. You know, it's just, it's, there's a healthy thing. Whether you're in a totalitarian society or you find yourself, like truly, you know, in communist China or the Soviet Union or North Korea, all of which, or obviously Nazi Germany, all of which I get into in the book, which is called manufacturing delusion, whichever one should go get a copy of. Sorry, that's the last time I'm going to do that, fam. No. But the reality of it is, Any, the ability, you talk about censorship, but it's really, it is considered a betrayal to take on new information that goes against the orthodoxy.

Inherently, that has to be, and that's a part, of course, of a censorship industrial complex, if you will, but there has to be an immediate revulsion to, oh, this is a true thing that I found out, but this doesn't line up what I've been told has to be true. then it must be evil. And you see that. I mean, you saw that, you know, certainly in the Soviet Union, you would have seen that everywhere with people. And you, that would be the expectation of the state. I'm not saying, and of course, we all know that a lot of people live behind the Iron curtain who were like, this is garbage, people are morons.

But the point is the society had to live under this constant, both fear and demand for lies. And the demand for lies, I think, is really the root of a totalitarian society. I mean, Hannah Arendt, and I write about this, talked about even in a place like not Germany, you would have atomized subjects. So it's not so isolation, which is one of the clear tactics of mind control, you can isolate someone in a cell, but you also can have somebody who's isolated in their basement, watching Anwar al-Laki videos, feels psychologically separated from all of these people around them, and then grows to have this antipathy toward them. And then, of course,

is more subject to the fires of falsehood and the, and the enraging radicalization processes that they go through. So it's isolation in all of its context, right? I mean, it did work in communist China. If they could lock you in a cell and have you write 50 false confessions, which they would do to people, right? The confession was never sincere enough. I read it. Robert Lifton did the most interesting studies on that during the thought reform process of the Maoist revolution. And I just thought it was so fascinating that they would force you to lie and they knew you were lying and you knew you were lying, but they would keep going through it because part of the process is your lie is not creative enough and we don't think your heart's in it, you know, to really break you.

And to me, this is like what they do in a lot of these college campuses when they bring kids in and they're like doing the land acknowledgements and they're forcing them to use the ZZ pronoun, all this other stuff. It's like it's all meant to break you. It's just different ways of breaking you. Anyway, I didn't mean to detract from her discussion on the right because this is really cathartic for me. But anyway, can I just say one quick thing about the right? Isn't there an entertainment aspect to this? if I'm uneducated on history, right? And someone says, well, Akami killed JFK, a Palestinian killed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 9-11 was, you know, terrorists. If I come up with these amazing conspiratorial stories that are really entertaining and fun to dig into and, you know, I'm going to be drawn to that if I'm a young person.

So if I don't know much about history and I'll go listen to one of these dumb, you know, fake historian podcasters, that's a lot more exciting. part, has that always been part of this? I mean, your books about stripping people of critical thinking, but once you've done that, you still need to entice them with something. Oh, absolutely. Well, that's where the identity construction piece of this comes in, which is, okay, now that you have been stripped of reason, rationality, individualism through a mentocidal or brainwashing or thought reform process, what happens next? Like, what do they come up with? What do they replace it with? And to me, that's actually where the Chinese were really interesting because they were so good at this, the Chinese communists, that people who were even freed from their confinement, freed from the system of thought reform, would continue for months afterwards to defend them. I mean, that's how effective it was, right?

And the case during the Korean War of the so-called turncoats, the Americans who were prisoners of war, who did propaganda, and then. then stayed, right? They did propaganda lying that America was doing, you know, biological weapons and all this sort of stuff. And then they stayed behind. They're about a, what, it was like a dozen of them. I forget the numbers in the book. But yeah, I'm very much concerned about how now in the Internet era, because it's all now globalized and instantaneous, you can mold people's thinking anywhere and you can do it far more readily. And now that's not an excuse for censorship, but to Molly's point, I mean, it's like, people need to really, like, I think about this as a parent now, by the way. I mean, as a new parent, but I think about this as like, what am I going to allow my kid to be subjected to?

Because I think a lot of parents have found out if you don't pay attention to this, all of a sudden, your kid does come back from college. And Bob says he's Sally and wants to be called these pronouns. And it's like, you didn't do this to them, but there were these other influences along the way that were able to run rampant and really mess with their minds. Well, that was another thing I wanted to highlight from manufacturing delusion, which you've already- I love how Molly keeps saying the name of your book. She's such a pro. I wish I, she's the best. You guys are people who've written books and sold books. You know, you just got to be relentless with them. It's not just that. It's that I have a bad memory. So like, if I'm listening to a podcast and someone's talking about their book, I'll be like, wait, who was that and what's it called? You know, I just, I need help. So I like to help those who are like me. But, and you've already talked about it a little bit, but how loneliness and,

isolation from family makes you vulnerable to all of these influences. And so I think that's another way that people can take all of your excellent research writing personal experiences to heart. If you don't want your kids to end up horrible and if you don't want yourself to end up in a bad situation, make sure you are surrounded by good friends and family and that you do not let the left, frankly, which really is into deconstructing the family. Don't let them succeed in that. That is the primary means by which totalitarian regimes gain control is by separation. Or even like you think about the history of slavery, what would they do?

Frederick Douglass wrote about this. He was taken away from his own mother. And having those bonds broken make you easier to control. So don't break those bonds. Make sure they're healthy. Make sure you're encouraging your kids to get married and have families. it's the best thing you can do as an American, I think. I know, by the way, I firmly believe that family,

not just family formation, but the family unit is among the most important bulwarks against this. I feel like that word has been polluted for reasons. I know, that's such a good word. Can we take it back? But anyway, I think it's one of the most important mechanisms that you have. And to your point, there's the apocryphal hero of the Soviet Union. David, you may remember.

his name, the boy who informs on his parents to the party for being, you know, counter-revolutionaries. I forget there's a little, there's like a little story that was told the Soviet Union about what a hero this boy was. It wasn't real, but the idea was to encourage people to inform other own family. Certainly, this was true of the Stasi in East Germany as well. You know, they wanted to have people informing on family members, because that's when you really, that's when they know they've got you. I mean, there's a, there's a part at the end of 1984 where they know they finally got him because

the one woman that he loves, he denounces her and says, take her instead, basically. And it's like, okay, you are fully broken. I mean, it's really stark, but it's effectively the same thing as when people break bonds with their family because of these coercive ideologies and these efforts at manufacturing delusion. I'll note that it is absolutely out of the cults. And part of the research in the book, it was a lot of it was on totalitarian mind control history, but also on cults. And one of the things you'll always see is separating you from friends and family right away.

This is why. Suppressive person I think in Scientology, they call it, you know. Yeah. I mean, this is why the left is so invested in controlling public schools and making sure that your kids go there. From the earlier and earlier ages, they want to have your kids separated from you. I mean, most of these terrible ideas are proselytized in our educational systems. I mean, that's, yes, college, but also earlier. So I think it's...

Can I tell you something funny? My little, my sister has two kids, one's little boy. And they're looking for school from in Manhattan. And I have a photo. I told her you have to take a photo of this because people will say that I am, like, like, I'm making this up. So I still have the photo. But it's a school that you guys would know if I, I mean, I, uh, anyway, I don't know. Should I name it? It doesn't matter. Anyway, but it's, it's a private school in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And my sister went to tour it for her five

year old to start at, you know, whatever it is kindergarten or nursery school. And she just said, you're not going to believe that. She says they have a whole, by the way, the school is almost entirely wealthy Jewish New Yorkers. Okay. Just, no, you know. Not a surprise, right? I mean, but that's, I mean, the school is like $60,000 a year. And they had a wall of history's great authors. Just like this thing of like, history's great others, it's a wall. Every person on the wall was black.

There was like 15 authors. Every single one of them. And she said, she said, it's not Black History Month. It's not History's Great Black authors, which, of course, that's fine. We could celebrate that. History's great author. school full of Jewish kids from New York, radical left school. There are no great Jewish writers, right?

No Jewish writer, but she sent me this photo. I was like, you have got to be kidding me. But I mean, this is for, by the way, this is for kids in like the first grade. This is for little kids. And they have a wall of great. No Shakespeare. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I said here. I started naming authors.

I see here all day. I hadn't even heard of some of these authors, by the way. It's going to be honest with you. History's great authors. Amazing. All of them are black at the all white school on the Upper West Side, but it's radical. It's the most left-wing school in the city. That's what it's known as.

So it's just radical left. I saw a comedian described Boulder the other day as the place where everyone has a black lives matter signs, but no black people live. That's what I feel like this school's like. That is amazing and very true. There was a friend of mine in Palm Beach, actually, lived across the street from somebody who had a huge during the whole thing. Because I would go to Florida to escape the madness of New York,

a huge Black Lives Matter flag in front of their, obviously, it was a white family. There are $15 million, Palm Beach, not on the water, because Palm Beach, $15 million mansion. And no, that's very, I mean, this is like getting into the virtue signaling part of it, but I, or the luxury beliefs part of it.

But that's also going back to coercive mind control, you know, there's carrots and sticks too, right? There's like, don't be a bad person, but there's this also as a way to make it seem like you're a good person. This is something that, I think that's the single biggest benefit to being a Democrat is that you get to go around. You're part of a belief system that says if you just believe this, you're a good person. I think conservatives think so. No, just saying Molly mentioned family, but also faith, religion. Without religion, you're looking for something to fill that.

That's why you have, you know, or patriotism even that you would no longer have. You're looking for other flags. From you, David Agnostic Harsani. Well, you know that I think religion is a very important foundational, you know, of Western society. That's a really important observation because in a totalitarian society, it's really politics is the religion, right? I mean, and that's why they always have to stamp it out. That's why there can be no real, you know, separation of church and state or even more than

that. They just can't allow. They can't coexist, as the word I was trying to find. They can't coexist. It's a competing power, yeah. The most perfect example of this is actually North Korea. People think of North Korea. North Korea is not meaningfully communist in any way.

North Korea is actually much more built along the lines of Imperial Japan. It's just a family that's a mafia state that runs the whole country. There's no Marxist, Leninist. There's a book, David, that I would recommend that you might enjoy it, called the cleanest race. And it's all about North Korean ideology and propaganda. It was written actually by a guy who's like, I think, a staff writer at the Atlantic who specializes in North Korea. But he lays out of, I think, a very convincing case that North Korea is much, it obviously borrows heavily from Stalinism and Maoist China

as well. But there's a lot in the actual belief system because it's a necocracy, technically. The chairman of the party there is still Kim Il-sung. He's the forever chairman. So it's essentially a, it's like a monarchical system where someone is elevated as being a deity. And that's the whole state is for the worship of that family, which is why they have the, you know, the posters and every, in every, why, you're not buying it? You're not buying it. What a lovely family it is. No, I just think we talk about horseshoe theories.

But in actuality, those things are on the same side of whatever kind of line you're looking at in the sense that you can use communism or fascism or a monarchy or whatever. it's a means of control of the normal person, right? And I mean, people have ever written about this before. But yeah, I mean, I totally take what you're saying. I also would say that on the sort of other side of the carrots and sticks of a mind control and a manufactured delusion, something that I've come across. I've become really, and this is something after a few things that I did at the found on the research of the book they thought was really interesting.

One thing that they cut that I was just sad because they were right, but I was just like, do you guys know that lemmings don't commit suicide? Do you know that? No. I've only learned that quite recently, yes. That is a total falsehood. It is actually like a Disney documentarian looking to make a sort of nature documentary. And they basically like, because they do move and herds.

They look kind of like big gerbils, what a lemming looks like sort of. And they kind of just like shoved a bunch of them off a cliffside and videoed it. And it created this complete falsehood that what animal species would commit mass suicide? It makes absolutely no. Like, it's the most, but yet people, obviously this came up in the context of a collective illusion or a manufactured delusion. Everyone thinks this. And if you think about it for one second, that's insane. Of course they don't do this.

Of course they don't all kill themselves in some, like, but people say, oh, I'm going over the cliff like a lemming, total. And they're like, you just want to tell this story. It really, you're not fitting it into the chapter. Technically, they were correct. But something else. So it didn't make into the book, but I just wanted everyone. If nothing else, guys, and thank you for having me. on your show, by the way. And I'm sorry that I talk so much.

But if nothing else... I can't believe you're talking on a podcast. What's wrong with you, man? I got three hours of radio coming up, too. I want to tell you something. I'll tell you a little secret. Clay Travis is like a robot built in a lab to do media. He never gets tired. He can talk and talk and talk for it.

I've never... I sometimes end the show, like slump over after you're ready to come like, oh, God, three hours. Clay's just like, cool, doing five Fox hits. today and then I'm going on this guy's podcast. I'm just like, I don't even, the only person I've ever seen that kind of has that talking stamina. Do you guys know Andrew Wilkow? He's a buddy of mine.

Yeah, Will Cow. Will Cow can talk forever. We grew up in the same town. I'm pretty sure, really? Okay. I'm pretty sure Will Cow could like, you know, have like an aneurysm, but like he would still be talking even if he was technically passed out.

I mean, Rush used to go on for three hours on his own. Like, that's crazy. Yeah. she was doing five hours a day during the pandemic solo five hours a day which was just insane mollie and i like what the hell are we going to talk about for an hour what i think is actually really i could never i'm very uh introverted i don't think i come off that way but i like to hide in my shell with my husband but what i always was so impressed by is you know how rush limbaugh had people listening to catch him saying stuff that was bad 100% of the time and he only rare like it was relative to

three hours a day of controversial discussion. You really didn't have that many media matters hits. Whereas if I were talking if I were doing that, I would have so much that came out that I shouldn't have said or that would get me in trouble. I think when you start getting into the zone of talking for three hours, one thing that I always tell people is that every story is actually a continuation of the stories you've been talking about. It's never entirely. fresh content. It's new news, obviously, but it's a continuation of a thread that you've already, so for example, like, I know we could have done a podcast today talking about Iran stuff and, you know, is it going great? Is it kind of a, you know, like not so great or whatever? But whenever

we talk about Iran, of course, there's all, you bring all the context of that of what people have been saying in the past and what has happened, what happened in Iraq. So, you know, when you thread it all together, I think that then it seems far less of a mountain to climb to be talking. Um, to be talk at the time. Plus clips obviously are, you know, are a commentator's best friend because it gives you both something to work off of, but also a 30 second breather where you go, ooh, okay. So that's, that's another little secret from the three hour a day, three hour a day crew. I find like the mindset of speaking or doing a podcast or whatever and writing are completely different, right? Like, when I write, it gives me time to stew on an idea, to think about it, to lay it out in a certain

way. Did you, do you find writing harder or do you find speaking harder? Like, what, what? I've, at this point, I've done so much more extemporaneous speaking that, that writing is certainly requires more of a, how do I do this? And am I doing this well? With radio, I think, or with podcasting, same thing, right? Spoken word is, I guess, what we're supposed to call it now. But I always feel so like, am I like telling a story around a camfire? Spoken word. But, But you get sort of, you get used to it like anything else where that just becomes even more natural. I find now my frustration is actually, I mean, Molly does so much TV. I do a lot less TV now than I used to, in part because, like, I don't really have a TV home.

So I don't, you know, there's nowhere that I particularly appear and do very much. But I used to do a ton of TV. And my frustration was always, it's so fast. I know. You just, you just like. 20 seconds to say a lot. Yeah. I always, when I used to help people, and some of them actually are now, like, I mean, I've

helped people that have become like hosts at Fox later, like help them learn how to do media from the early days. And one of the things I always said was your first sentence when you're on air on TV is by far the most important sentence. And you're basically establishing with the first thing you say, well, it's a bit like a headline in writing, by the way, right? It's like this either works or the title of the book. It either works or it doesn't.

You would, the worst that you can do is, yeah, TV host. that's a good question. And I've definitely given some thought to it. You know, you kind of back into something, whatever. I feel like people are already. You're losing people with that. So a little bit on the media art and science side. Bridgium told me that in my writing, I'm allowed to be nuanced, but on TV, you just have to pick one thing and say it. And it's been very helpful for me to separate. My writing is very different from my. Oh, yeah. And it's really two different ways of thinking. I'll tell you this too. I mean this. We need more good writing on the right. We have, and particularly with books, I mean, I think a lot of people still are writing

editorials. Go get them federalists. Writing editorialists and doing good stuff. But I think that the, I mean, I was told this before my book came out, that this past year has been one of the worst years for conservative books in like 20 years. In terms of sales, in terms of just breaking through and everything else. So they basically told me be prepared for like this to go down like a like a like a like a belly flush. Again, congratulations that it. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I did. I mean, people have bought it and they liked it. So that's that's been really, really gratifying. And also as you guys know, I certainly certainly don't necessarily. I don't know. The book advances are also going down to in the era of AI and everything else. I think this is going to be a

real problem. People have to buy books because it's like art. Like they have to support this. And we're moving into a post-literate society, which means we're all going to be more subject to some of these totalitarian impulses. If you want to steal your mind against those things, you have to keep reading. And, you know, in my view, an actual physical book, not even, you know, I do listen to books on audio and I do, you know, occasionally read them on the computer on a Kindle. But having an actual book that you read will help you keep all of those ideas, ruminate on them, become a better person. And so I'm not just saying that for your book, Buck, manufacturing, delusion. But for just books in general, people should keep doing it.

Yeah, you're also laying out an argument over many pages, and it helps you think deeper about subjects. There's a superficial kind of knowledge out there now where people just AI everything, and they just throw out some fact. It's so annoying. I hate when people are like, Grock, is this true under whatever you're writing? Like, they can't even be bothered to read up on it themselves on the Internet, which is instantaneous, right? Yeah. And I think your book has probably done well because it's making an actual, it has a thesis.

It's making an actual argument about something. It's not just some ad hominem about how libs suck, you know? I really believe that. Can I tell you guys something? I was offered. I was offered, and this was years ago, I was offered $300,000 in advance to write a book. Write a book. I wasn't going to write it.

I didn't take this, obviously. And it was, the Democrats hate you and you should hate them. That was the offered title. And I didn't do it because I was just like, what is it? By the way, I say that because, like, actually advances. I was like a big advance for the time or whatever. But I was like, I don't want to be, I don't want to be a part of this. I don't know.

I just feel like there's, you know, there's plenty of that already. And honestly, I'm doing a fair amount of that on the radio. I'm not pretending like I don't, but that's kind of a daily commentary thing. Like a book that's like, here's why we're smart and they're dumb. And I, but I really, I miss there used to be, do you guys disagree? I feel like 10 years ago, more people on the right were putting out books that were at least interesting to read. Like the word that were

solid to very good. And these days, no one, first of all, everyone makes so much more money from podcasting than they do from book writing, right?

Everyone makes so much more money from these other media, you know, YouTube and stuff. you know, book money, you know,

it's paid out over years. It's a tough business. It's not a, you know, people think of like Dan Brown and stuff in the 90s making $30 million from writing. Like,

good luck with that. Well, although I do, I really think it's important to write books. And I have now done three. And the first one was on the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation. And by not just putting it online or in a paper, but actually writing out the whole history of that Brett Kavanaugh confirmation.

And getting that book out before all of the attacks on him came out, you know, in book form, that was important for laying down a historical marker. And that's why you write a book. A book is more substantial and it changes things. more. And I mostly, most of my writing is online. I mean, I think I remember Molly. I think I think I just texted or called you an abject frustration and rage at what was going on to Brett Kavanaugh while that was happening because, yeah, that was the ugliest thing I think I've ever seen in American politics. I was a huge moment in American political history. That was that was a seminal. That was like a

make sure that they don't let that happen. That's why Kerry Severino and I wrote the Brett Kavanaugh book. We were like, we have to get this history down. That is my favorite Molly Hemingway book because I have your books and I have read them. I also have Euro trash over here, Arsanii. Don't think that you're left out of the left out of the book reading list. And I love your staff, by the way, on how Mississippi per capita is wealthier that. I've busted that out on people left and right. People don't believe me. It's true. Yeah, Mississippi wealthier than the UK per capita. Per capita, but Molly, I agree with you on basically everything, but one thing I would say about the, you know more about it than I do, no question that Clarence Thomas situation, but what they

were saying about capital was a lot worse, right? Like, when you're accusing somebody of raping, like, aggressively raping people at a serial gang rapist, yes. It was much worse than saying you're a sexual. Yeah, like you made inappropriate jokes and maybe like squeeze my butt. I mean, that's bad, but that's not, you know, they were saying that Brett Kavanaugh was a serial gang rapist. The worst thing than any guy, by the way, every guy I know would rather be called a murderer than a serial gang rapist.

They'd be like, at least if someone who kills somebody, might have some honor. It was also a lie about Clarence Thomas. And for judges of that caliber, they do not appreciate having their integrity questioned, whether it's a little lie or a big lie. There was a racist. There was a racist component to that class Thomas thing. It always has been. Yeah, that he acted in a way that's very, you know, the stereotype of a black man.

I mean, he was right about that. I think people forget that aspect of it was really nasty. But yeah, Molly has a new book coming out, Samuel Alito. I've read part of it. It's really good. I think it's similar to the first book in a lot of ways, right? Maybe you can interview me. about it. I was going to say, I know a guy with a radio show, but probably you know that better than

anybody. You'll have you on for your big, beautiful book, Molly, beautiful book, Samuel Alito coming out. All of you need to get a copy. So, yeah, for sure. We'll have, just text me or have your team, you know, reach out to me, whatever. We'll have you on for that. That'll be great. We're all, my mom is a fan. And so that just means, like, you're, you know, you're golden for anything you ever want. Great. Oh, my gosh. My whole family, was Molly, but I was at, I was at an event last week and people, this happens every time to me. They just start breaking out into, oh, you have a podcast with Molly and then they just start

talking about how great Molly is like you're not standing there. They're not even like you guys are great or anything. It's just Molly. She's all she's the best. I get it the same way, David. There we go. Well, you guys, thank you. So by the, my my earbuds are actually dying because we hug out for so long. Sorry for keeping you so long, but it's such a great time. I love talking to you guys. I would look. I know that I kind of, I kind of para dropped in. to your show here and took a lot of your time. But I will come back and hang out anytime. I love talking to you guys.

And actually, if you want some time, I would even get, you know, who would like it? I'll get Clay to show up, too. If you guys, we could do a four-way pod where we could just chat about whatever, because you guys, the technology exists now. But seriously, guys, thank you for letting me talk about the book. And you guys are both. I am legitimately fans of both of your work. I'm like the number one Cory Booker of David Harsani.

Like, I don't think anyone's had David on. COVID, I was on your show, I think weekly or more. Yeah, like, David's been like, he's like a constant, a constant presence. But you were going to. Wait, wait, can I tell you the real quick story? Yeah. Real quick. And then I, and then I'll let you go.

I've got to go save Iran. When I was at the blaze, and I knew nothing. And I wrote an editorial. And I was like, is this going to suck or not? The first person that I ever went to because people said he was smart and good at writing to, like, just read it over to make sure it didn't suck. It was David Arsani. I don't even remember it.

Did I say it sucks? I got published in the Washington Times. Like, they took it right away. It was like my first ever, yeah. But I was like, I was like, David, yeah, he doesn't even. He's like, yeah, kid, whatever, you know. But I was like, woo, the smart guy likes my, likes my piece. You were like, yeah, it's pretty good.

He's a tough critic too. So that's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you, Dave. And thank you, Molly. You're welcome. I like to think I launched your career, man, obviously.

There we go. Yeah. That's the fair, fair point. All right. Well, thanks, Buck. Thanks, guys. If you'd like to email the show, please do so at Radio at the Federalist.com. We'll be back next week.

Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.