MIND VIRUSES: How Fear, Propaganda & Groupthink Hijack Society | John Leake & A.J. Rice

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Dangerous Laughter Laughter Dangerous. Dangerous. Lefter. Lefter. Dangerous laughter. Danger. Left here. Sa. [00:01:07] Speaker B: Day 8 the Emergency Destruct system is now activated. The option to override detonation procedure has now expired. [00:01:20] Speaker C: The ship will automatically destruction back on. Dangerous laughter. I am A.J. rice. Always remember, there is no substitute for perfectly timed derision. Perfectly timed derision. Remember, comedy is our civic duty here. Go to dangerouslaughter.com and stay a while. Definitely. I've got a. A buddy of mine on today. He's written a book that. Similar to some things that I've actually been writing about over the last couple years. And he's. He's one of my favorite people, I got to be honest with you. So, ladies and gentlemen, my next dangerous guest. He doesn't know what the Gen Z ladies are talking about, but he buys them a drink at the bar anyway. He studied philosophy under Roger Scruton, has a master's degree in being a Mack Daddy. He writes a daily substack called Focal Points, is the vice president of the McCullough Foundation, a new York Times best selling author. His new book Mind Viruses. America's Irrational Obsessions. Ladies and gentlemen, my favorite lovable contagion, John Leak. Everybody. John Leaks in the house. Hey, Johnny Boys here live from his hotel room. Had to get all those strippers out behind him, but he's here with us today. Make sure everybody go out, get a copy of this book. It's amazing. Mind viruses, John. Thanks for being here, brother. [00:03:04] Speaker B: A.J. i do wonder how you understand me so well. I mean, it's true, I don't understand what the Gen Z girls are talking about, but I'm always eager to buy them a drink. And then I want to say something to you that's the best I've ever looked in a tux. [00:03:22] Speaker C: I was cleaning you up nicely. [00:03:24] Speaker B: No, it's amazing. So I was at this kind of rifle nut friend of mine store the other day and There was a 1950s era Valter PPK and like 007 carried in his tux. And I was like, I mean, it's just such a cool little gun. And I thought, now accessory for every [00:03:44] Speaker C: party out there, especially in Texas, I'm [00:03:46] Speaker B: gonna buy that gun after all. Now, after seeing myself in the tux. Yeah. I have a new. A new Persona. Thank you. [00:03:53] Speaker C: Well, you know, the creative director here at Dangerous Laughter, Holly said to me, what about this with a little tux action? I said, yeah, I think, I think my homeboy will like it. He's a registered Mack daddy, but he is a philosopher. As well, quite frankly, John, we need more of you and less people getting on airplanes wearing bedroom shoes and pumping gas wearing bedroom shoes and, you know, dribbling Dunkin Donuts all over themselves while they're trying to buy, you know, a bus ticket. [00:04:23] Speaker B: So, yes, it's true. And, you know, I don't know, AJ the last sartorial remark, I just took delivery of this new suit. [00:04:33] Speaker C: I like it. [00:04:34] Speaker B: From Anderson shepherd in London. [00:04:36] Speaker C: Yeah, well, I'm rocking the brown on brown today. A little throwback to the Gipper. You know, the brown suit that Reagan wore. Little brown. Clint Eastwood. It takes a very special person to be able to pull off brown in general. Right. And as I was known, as I was known on the basketball courts of Philadelphia as White Chocolate, I feel like I'm allowed to put on a little brown suit. All right, so I put the brown suit on for you today. So. So this book, I gotta be honest with you, I mean, I've been reading it all weekend. I read some of it, you know, a while back. Mind Viruses. Now I'm going through this thing and I'm like, you know, John and I didn't compare notes, but I've written three books. The Woking How America's Vogue Virus Destroys Our Culture. Second book was called the White Privilege Album. Bringing Racial Harmony to Very Fine People on both Sides. And then, of course, my girlfriend behind me here, the Curse of the Bearded lady, where I spend numerous pages going through, what is it basically, a peer contagion. So I'm reading this and I'm like, man, John's got it. He has got it. So for those that don't know that haven't written books on this, like you and I, let's talk about this term mind virus. Yes, Elon Musk tweeted it. But where. Beyond that, where does it come from? And. And has my. Have mind viruses always been with us? [00:06:12] Speaker B: So a mind virus is a metaphor for an irrational idea. People start to think and feel something that destroys their good judgment, their common sense, and is actually very destructive to them and their interests. But under certain circumstances, fear, a sort of public atmosphere of panic, in this state of fear, people's minds become very susceptible to latching onto an irrational idea or belief. And, yes, these have been around forever. I do take a leaf from Elon Musk book with this. This from his lexicon of mind viruses. But the idea, I think, was set forth and in the most persuasive and sort of elegant way by a Swiss psychoanalyst named Carl Jung. He wrote a long Essay about what he called psychic epidemics. So a psychic epidemic, I think the kind of epitome of this were these witch hunts in Europe in the 16th and early 17th centuries where the people are stressed. There was a series of crop failures, fertility was dropping off amongst women, they were miscarrying or having stillbirths. And this notion starts to spread across the German speaking and the Swiss lands that, well, there are witches amongst us, witches in league with the devil that are cursing the land, cursing women, young women of their fertility. So, so what do we need to do? We need to ferret out these witches in our midst because they're spreading this evil contagion and we need to burn them. And when we burn them, that will have this scapegoating mechanism. Another intellectual sort of inspiration of the book was a Stanford professor named Rene Girard who wrote a whole book about scapegoating. One of the things that Girard talks about is the imitative nature of man. We don't really know what to believe or what to feel. So we look around at what our peers believe and feel. If they're saying that gender dysphoria amongst 14 year old little girls is real, then I guess it's for real. Or if they're saying that climate change, human induced climate change, that the world is going to end in 12 years. Well, I like these people, they're my friends. Some of them are professors at the local university or I see someone on television talking about this. I mean, I guess the world's going to end in 12 years. [00:09:14] Speaker C: That's right. AOC told us so. Yeah. [00:09:17] Speaker B: So if you. Well, let's, let's say that you're. Let's say that you're a young woman who lives in New York and you admire AOC and you think that she's a good representative. You hear her say it and you say to yourself, well, I don't know anything about climate stuff, I mean, but I like aoc, so I guess that's the truth. And so you see how an idea that is not really supported by factual reality can spread. [00:09:46] Speaker C: Sure. [00:09:47] Speaker B: Almost like a contagion. So that's the underlying idea. But I go one step further than Jung, who was very much interested in an elucidation of the human psyche. I talk about how this can be hijacked and manipulated by unscrupulous interest groups. So the idea is we an interest group, we want something, whether it be power or control or money or whatever. So let's use our propaganda organs to propagate this idea that there's some terrible, fearful boogeyman that's coming to get us. That fear will spread like a contagion. When the people are terrified, they will then look to us. The sort of self asserted, self promoted authorities. Yes, they will look to us. We will invoke our authority, tell everybody what to do. If anybody challenges our authority, we'll escape. Member of the Witches in Switzerland in the 17th century. We will say that they're evil, they're an anti vaxxer, a climate denier, a racist, whatever the scapegoating epithet may be. And then those people will then be persecuted, kicked out of their jobs, canceled, whatever, and so that our agenda will ultimately reign supreme. Now the final element of the script is you gotta get the US government, you gotta get Congress, you know, levers of power or what, whoever the president happens to be, his executive order, you gotta get those guys on board to pull some levers to direct a ton of federal dough into this scheme. Because that's the way you get rich. And the important thing is in many ways this book is like a history of 21st century America. You see, there's just one crisis after, there's always some terrifying. The world is always empty. So. But what you will notice if you look into this is that there's always a shitload of federal dough that is created or just dispersed to particular groups that have positioned themselves. There's like Jacques Cousteau thing about these sharks that get in a current, they just kind of hang out in a current and they wait for the current to bring them the food to them. [00:12:27] Speaker C: Bring them food. Yeah. [00:12:29] Speaker B: So I have a couple of chapters on the COVID 19 pandemic. [00:12:33] Speaker C: Let me, let me just ask this, let me ask this. So Cold War ends. We go through an era of, you know, stain in blue dresses in the White House and you know, bongos and, you know, avoiding your wife in the White House and so on. Eight years of fairly relative calm. There were some things going on around the world, USS Cole bombing and things. But as you leave the, the 90s, when I'm, you know, graduating from high school, going into college because I'm a geriatric millennial, you've got what I believe was the first scare to get us, right? And now this freaking thing has like its own SiriusXM channel. So you've got Y2K, you got the Florida recount about how someone was selected, not elected. You start to deteriorate the institutions. Supreme Court decide, decides the election, right? They've got to go. This is where the Supreme Court's got to go. Stuff starts. It starts there, at least in the modern iteration. And of course, September 11th. Now, I'm not here to litigate each one of these things, but in the archipelago of, you know, hysteria, you know, of this contagion that is, it begins there. And you. You basically decide. You write this in the beginning that, you know, you said the 21st century to basically use that as a demarcation line and then come forward to today. So walk us through a little bit of that timeline, because it's not. I mean, we all. I know we all think history began yesterday or it began when the, you know, when Trump came down the escalator. But some of this chaos that we have been put through, you know, and it's been woven around us, really, whether it's the Me Too movement or George Floyd or Covid or any of. We have had almost a quarter century now of this nonsense. And that's what Mind Virus is about. We move from one irrational obsession to another. Correct, Right. [00:14:42] Speaker B: That's it. So when you graduated from high school and you had that, that Buddy Holly kind of COVID band and you're a lead singer, and I remember there were two songs on your. On your debut album, Hanging. No, the Blue Dress and Hanging Chad. [00:15:04] Speaker C: Exactly. Two of the greatest hits of the early, of the early 21st century. Yes, exactly. [00:15:11] Speaker B: So, you know, I mean, I could [00:15:13] Speaker C: like, [00:15:15] Speaker B: just to give you an idea. So this is. I weave a little. I'm not too self indulgent, but I weave a little autobiography into this. I mean, the 90s were so relatively calm. We were sure we were basking in the sort of prosperity of, of winning the Cold War. And Francis Fukuyama wrote this book, you know, the End of History. Like Madison. Madison's vision of limited liberal government had prevailed. And from henceforth, all of mankind would just have a. A sort of constitutional republic with. [00:15:49] Speaker C: Yeah, we'd all. We'd all become Star Trek. Right, right, right. [00:15:53] Speaker B: So, you know, during that period, I mean, you know, I could imagine starting a Buddy Holly cover band and, and writing a couple, but. Because the world just seems so relatively calm. But the problem, a major figure looming large in my book is President Eisenhower, when he left office, his farewell address. You know, people think that he, you know, might have just been speaking idly. He was not. I mean, that was. He warned us. He said, look, I'm really concerned about the undue influence of the military industrial complex. And he also mentioned something else that was particularly relevant during the pandemic. He called it the scientific Technological elite, a small group of guys just kind of do whatever they want. But because the US Government has marshaled these guys with unlimited federal funding into Washington or military directed science projects, you know, they. In their laboratories, you know, under the guise of their scientific authority. It is. Nobody questions these guys. And Eisenhower says, I mean, this could be a real problem. Like, there could come a day where this country no longer has representative government. It's just ruled by scientific experts. [00:17:21] Speaker C: Right? And he saw, and look, he. This was the farewell address. He obviously, you know, is the most decorated general of the 20th century. American general, became president, you know, wasn't sure which party he was even going to be. Nixon was his vice president. He's on his way out and he is detecting something. You know, we had Mel Kay on the show not long ago, and she's basically written a book on the 10 years following World War II and has zeroed in on Eisenhower's speech and Kennedy's speech, which actually was given at the Waldorf Astoria four months later. [00:17:56] Speaker B: Right. [00:17:57] Speaker C: Four months later, where he's talking about how the country could be taken over not by invasion, but by infiltration. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna pick up on this. On the other side. We're gonna. We're gonna take a quick break. We're talking to John Leak. Get this book, guys. Mind viruses. Remember, guys, we're unfit for polite company. We'll be back on the other side. I'm like the Joe Patchy of conservatism. Write my books to fight back. I write my books to, you know, poke fun at these people. Because, look, there's plenty of people out there to talk as fast as, you know, Ben Shapiro. I mean, there's all kinds of people, you know, Victor Davis Hansen's a genius, and this one's a genius. And guys like Gutfeld, Steven Crowder, the Babylon be. What I try to do in some ways are more devastating. And this is what made Charlie so effective, is that Charlie was able to take. He. It was almost like he was weaving tapestry in front of his brain. Moved very quickly. One of the fastest I've ever seen, you know, and I never shut up. And I will tell you, he was able to take, like, the New Testament and weave it with the Magna Carta. Make jokes about what happened on the Bachelorette last night. I mean, he was. He was able to weave like that. And that scares the hell out of anyone that can weave like, and Trump does. Anyone that can do that cares. Then I'm not here to get into the. Go into all the rabbit holes there. [00:19:08] Speaker D: But. [00:19:08] Speaker C: But I will tell you, Charlie Kerr was a master at weaving politics and the culture together. Just like Ross and just like Breitbart. [00:19:25] Speaker E: You should be women. And yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so. Someone once said, comedy is the art of turning horror into humor. That's the essence of the curse of the Bearded Lady. Laughing in the face of madness before it devours us whole. Nothing in living memory has been funnier or more horrifying than a movement convinced there are 72 genders. Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina. The curse of the Bearded lady. The curse of the bitter lady. The trans mafia has whipped America's sanity. It's Monty Python by way of Mengele. Absurd theater with real victims. I'm not here to conduct a medical examination of the Trans mafia. This is a cultural autopsy. If Billy Shakespeare could write tragedies, histories and comedies, why can't I? The radicals refuse to surrender their gender mad stranglehold on America's vital institutions. This book will show how we got here, how we fight back, and how the Democratic Party's obsession with mainstreaming the Baird and Lady will doom it to political extinction. Stay locked in with the man who slayed the Woking dead. This is Dangerous Laughter with AJ Rice on the Publius Media Network. [00:21:05] Speaker C: Back on dangerous laughter. I'm A.J. rice. We're talking to John Leak, author of Mind Viruses, one of my best dressed guests ever. You were talking a little bit ago. We're talking about Eisenhower and Kennedy and you're talking about the late 20th century. And Fukuyama's book the End of History and the Last Man. The other book that was popular at the time, that was trying to set up what possibly could happen now that this bipolar world of the Soviet Union and the United States collapses is Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, right? Where he basically says, we're going to revert to tribalism. Whether it's Sunni, Shia or whatever. It's going to be Yugoslavia collapse. He. He gives a couple, you know, explanations for this. I think we have seen some of that. I think he was closer to the mark than Fukuyama's fantasy. You know, where we'd have the Federation of Planets and the Klingons and Vulcans are going to go on a picnic together. But all of this stuff, the one thing that I get from your book, Mind viruses, everybody go out and get it. Get to. Is a lot of times when this stuff is being pushed and sometimes when it's being believed, it's not being believed by stupid people. It's being bought, gobbled up by supposedly intelligent people. So how do, how do we get groups of intelligent people, not just the herd, you know, the 300 pound blue hairs and all the rest that are just, you know, following the herd. But in order for this to work, in order for the fanaticism and the formation of the mind virus to spread, intelligent people have to believe this too. So walk me through that. How do we, obviously the experts, we're told, oh, this one's an expert on the Middle east and this one's an expert on MRNA DNA and you know, and on and on. Al Sharpton's an expert on race relations. The expert. Right. The experts try to sort of shape society. What do you think about that? [00:23:09] Speaker B: Well, you know, I oftentimes in reference to experts, thought about Thomas Sowell, the famous conservative economist and you know, who is the expert class? It's a group of vain, pompous people who think that they should be in charge and that the great mass of humanity should just shut up and listen to them. So the question is thinking about the expert class. I would divide it into two categories. There's President Eisenhower's warning about the scientific technological elite. Now when you look at that class, the problem with those guys is when we saw this During COVID 19, a lot of these guys, they have been corralled into US government, the whole economic structure of the US Government with, with grant money and subsidies and, and you know, academic chairs and a lot of federal money is being sloshed around. So what exactly do they believe? If you were to speak privately with them in a cocktail party, what they tell you they privately, privately believe may not be the same thing that they espouse and their public policy communiques. I'll give you an example of this. He was scared of me talking about this, so I'll kind of try and cloak who he is. But I know a guy who is an absolute top astronomer, like top, like, he probably knows more about astronomy than like anybody and he has the tools to look at the firmament privately in a cocktail party. It'll tell me that this whole narrative of human induced global warming, both as a theoretical and as a practical policy proposition, it's just a bunch of nonsense. There's nothing scientific about it, it's just kind of an assertion. But if he were to say that in public, his NASA and Noah and these various government agencies that support the guy in his observatory, he'd be in hot water with those guys. So, I mean, I Think that's an important distinction to make. The expert classes in many, what in many respects has been captured. So it doesn't really matter what they, you know, privately believe. Then there's the other class of people who consider themselves to have a sufficient level of higher education that they know about things, they understand things, they're in the know, they're part of the cognoscenti. That is the most dangerous class of all. Because what's happened is in this country that class has very, with great aplomb has been convinced that the true sources of information for the cognizanti or the New York Times and the Washington Post. So they're the easiest, they're the easiest cohort of all to manipulate. If they don't read it in the New York Times, they just don't believe it. But the New York Times, as we can see, is in many ways indistinguishable from a propaganda organ. And the Washington Post is basically a CIA cutout. [00:26:45] Speaker C: Sure. So owned by Amazon. [00:26:49] Speaker B: Correct. So and then the other problem with the expert class or the so called educated class is they're particularly susceptible to ideological concepts of reality. So as you know, we're presented with some new phenomenon. We're told there's a novel coronavirus emanating from China and that the real guru on this is Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx. So this class of so called educated people, they read the New York Times, they read the Washington Post, they look around at their fellow cognizanti and the word gets out that Anthony Fauci is the supreme authority on this. So their posture is one of personal identity and ideology. It's an ideological conception of reality. And they say, well, Anthony Fauci, he's the Mack Daddy, he's, he's the, the sort of, you know, big shot. [00:27:46] Speaker C: Big shot with the jabs. Big shot with the jabs, that's right. [00:27:50] Speaker B: So in other words, it's a license for the mind just to switch off. Just, I mean, you know, that somebody. [00:27:57] Speaker C: Wait a minute, wait, hold on, pause a second. Because I got this question I was, I've been thinking about. I almost said it to you on the phone the other day. This is where this comes in, this is where the mind virus comes in. Because it's like, why would people rather possess a wrong answer with absolute confidence then live with an honest question? Right? So like you and McCullough, you got, everyone was asking questions, you know, Pierre, Corey or Bobby, everybody. But I think people would rather there's some warm blanket of, of Rapture tied up in this. And this is why they can walk. Fauci, who looks like, you know, a second class Joe Pesci walks out there and Deborah Birx, who looks like a realtor for Keller Williams. And everyone believed it, but you guys didn't. But everyone's like, yeah, it's my, you know, the experts are here to tell us what, what we should believe. [00:28:57] Speaker B: The problem, the problem with the. I mean, it's a great question and a lot of people scratch their heads about it. There was this German dissident, I actually reference him in my book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, arrested as part of this plot to assassinate Hitler and was, was hanged. But he, he, he did some time in prison before he was hanged and he wrote an essay that was published posthumously called On Stupidity. Like literally. And he, you know, he makes an observation that I think is very apt. He says, stupidity, it's not an innate condition. You can have people who are born pretty intellectually agile. They're intellectually capable people. Under certain circumstances, pressure, political pressure, pressure to conform, fear, there's fear in the air. Under those conditions, they're just rendered stupid. It's, it's almost like they're possessed. It's almost like they're entranced and you can't wrap them out of it. The hypnotist is like, hey, wake up. Like, yeah, don't you see that Fauci looks like he, how did you describe him? [00:30:12] Speaker C: He's a poor man's Joe Pesci. But people are in a, they're in a fugue state, right? Highly intelligent people seem no more immune to mass delusion than anyone else. They're, tell me, you know, like fortune teller, like, you know, like they're going in and they're getting their palms red. But this is life or death stuff. And as we know now, Fauci was just playing three car money with us. He was just making this crap up as he went along. And he was basically moving around data like a propagandist. [00:30:42] Speaker B: Well, you know, it's funny because Fauci, you know, his family is apparently originally from Naples. And I must say, I mean in terms of like weird, fascinating, endlessly, kind of. There's just no end to this city. Like, Naples is really one of the most fascinating places on earth. But he once said, you know, my favorite character in all of cinema history is the Godfather. You know, I kind of sometimes think of myself as the godfather of infectious disease. So he's kind of telling you how he feels about himself. He thinks he's sort of Don Corleone. [00:31:22] Speaker C: What an eye tie stereotype. You know, I thought you're gonna say his guy. His. His idol was Chef Boyardee. I mean, that's. That's what he turned into. He's no. He's no Donkey's. No Marlon Brando. Are you kidding me? This guy. [00:31:35] Speaker B: Oh, well, so you remember. You remember. I mean, the. The Godfather series kind of fell off a cliff with Part three, but in [00:31:44] Speaker C: part three, well, they did that third one for money. I mean, they all did. You know, they couldn't afford Bobby Duvall anymore. He's like, I'm not even going to be in this. [00:31:54] Speaker B: Well, so. So what they do, though, that's kind of fun is they have the Corleone family make an alliance with the Vatican. [00:32:03] Speaker E: Right? [00:32:04] Speaker B: It's like the dawn. You know, the guy who's kind of. Everybody's kind of a marionette. [00:32:12] Speaker C: He. [00:32:12] Speaker B: He actually gets all the way to the Vatican. [00:32:16] Speaker C: They whacked the Pope, I think. And I mean, I think. Oh, yeah. [00:32:20] Speaker B: So, yeah. This is like the weirdest thing of all. This is a €20 silver coin issued by the Vatican commemorating the COVID 19 vaccine. And, you know, basically this boy is depicted receiving the vaccine, but it's. It's like he's receiving the Holy Communion. It's this sort of. You've got the cr. The cross. [00:32:42] Speaker C: Weird. [00:32:42] Speaker B: Then you've got. [00:32:43] Speaker C: And look, I'm Irish Catholic, and that's. That's just. To me, that's outrageous. It's outrageous, but get a load of this. But that's what Fauci thought. He was right. Some true. The one true holy apostolic Fauci. Right. [00:32:59] Speaker B: I am science, and anyone who questions me, frankly, is questioning, son. So in other words. [00:33:04] Speaker C: That's right. [00:33:05] Speaker B: In other words, it's a papal bull, a directive of supreme authority issued by the Pope himself. But the mystery is, are kind of this empire of dip shititude that his. [00:33:27] Speaker C: That's right. Right. Holly, grab that sound bite. That's why I'm stealing that phrase. Go ahead. [00:33:33] Speaker B: Empire of dip shitty. The question is, so what it boils down to, there's this really clever guy who I've enjoyed listening to. I think he's cracked the code. And I do reference some of the same literature he does. His name is Chase Hughes. He's a psychologist who has consulted with various intelligence agencies. And I think Chase Hughes gave the most succinct, kind of mechanistic description of what's going on here. People will believe anything if it comports with their identity. [00:34:11] Speaker C: That's right. [00:34:12] Speaker B: Identity. And he says there are tricks in an interrogation where you don't appeal to a person's sense of factual reality. You appeal to their identity. [00:34:26] Speaker C: Yes. [00:34:26] Speaker B: And if you can get them to. If you can introduce an idea to their. To their minds in a way that comports with their identity, their group identity and, well, and their personal identity as part of a group, then you can get them to believe anything. [00:34:44] Speaker C: Right. [00:34:45] Speaker B: And so. [00:34:47] Speaker C: And that's the herd mentality. You got identity politics meets the herd mentality where you have people that would rather. Well, you know, would. Would most people rather be wrong with 10,000 friends or right. By themselves. Correct. And then what happened was a bunch of you guys, you included Peter, Naomi, Wolf, others, Bannon. You were, you know, obviously you're talking to each other, but you guys were considered the people that were concocting conspiracy theories. Right, Right. So, you know, I mean, 80% of human history follow some of that, that herd mentality, whether it's in the Coliseum in Rome or the burning of the witches or whatever it is. That mind virus, as you write about, that's the book, guys. That's. That's what takes over. And there's. Everyone feels like, well, this little group doesn't pass the purity test. So we have to crucify them. We have to burn them, stone them alive, destroy them, you know, financially, you know, deplatform, demonetized shadow ban. That's just the new form of the witch hunt. [00:35:55] Speaker B: That's it. So. So you, you got it. I mean, where this thing, like really took a terrifying turn, like a really scary turn was in 2021. The. You know, this was even after Rochelle Walensky acknowledged on television that the COVID 19 vaccine does not prevent transmission. It doesn't prevent. In fact, people will still get infected. So even after the CDC director stated that, which completely eliminated the rationale of the COVID vaccine as a contagion control of preventing people from getting sick. Even after Wolinsky acknowledged that the screws were just turned on the people in the autumn of 2021, and it got really. Where the whole thing started to get downright scary. I'll never forget it. It was this. All of the late night comedians, none of whom have 1100 of your irreverent humor. I mean, those guys, those guys have turned into just the biggest parcel of weenies. [00:37:05] Speaker C: Like, oh, they're just shills. They're just shills. [00:37:08] Speaker B: So. So this, this parcel of weenies all on the same Saturday night, they all agreed to flood the zone with propaganda to take Ivermectin out behind the woodshed and. And axe it. I mean, I've never seen such an organized, orchestrated campaign to destroy. [00:37:31] Speaker C: Unbelievable. [00:37:33] Speaker B: A Nobel Prize. [00:37:35] Speaker C: Nobel prize. That's right. [00:37:36] Speaker B: Cured African river blindness. So it has one of the safest, safest profiles in all of the pharmacopoeia. But they decided we're going to kill Ivermectin. And so Jimmy Kimmel gets up and he says, well, you know, Dr. Fauci says that, you know, the emergency rooms are, you know, they're being overrun with severe Covid illness. And, you know, but meanwhile, all these people aren't getting the vaccine, which is crazy. You know, instead they're taking this ivermexin, this horse paste. He said, so if it comes down to a dilemma, who do you give an ICU bed to? That's no dilemma for me. Vaccinated person having a heart attack come right in. Unvaccinated person gobbling horse goo. [00:38:23] Speaker C: That's right. [00:38:23] Speaker B: Rest in peace, wheezy. [00:38:25] Speaker C: That's right. The death panels. The death panels from late night bozos, little doughy white bozos there on. On late night death panels that Sarah Palin warned us about. Everyone got made fun of. You know, look, if an idea behaves like a virus, and as you can see there, they're all singing from the same, you know, sheet music, then ridicule is the antibody. That's one of the things. We're going to take a break here. That's one of the things that we do here at Dangerous Laughter. We believe. We believe that ridicule moves faster than rebellion, that there's no substitute for perfectly timed derision, and that humor is moral warfare by other means. It has to be. You have to hang a joke on these people. So we're going to take a quick break. We're talking to John Leake, the book Mind Viruses. We will be right back. [00:39:19] Speaker F: Women's rights champion Riley Gaines calls it a fierce defense of principle wrapped in humor from a satirist who dismantles the trans mafia's propagand number one. Amazon best selling author AJ Rice completes the trilogy that started with the Woking Dead and the White Privilege album. The Curse of the Bearded Lady. How the Trans Mafia whacked American Sanity, Volume 3 of Publius Prose, already a bestseller. Get your copy today. Available everywhere books are sold. [00:40:06] Speaker A: And now please enjoy another elegant celebrity endorsement of dangerous laughter with A.J. rice. [00:40:14] Speaker D: Hey, how's it going? This is John Gruden, the old coach, just getting started here. It's an early morning in Las Vegas right now. The streets are quiet out there, but last night they were rocking. They were all talking about A.J. rice. A.J. rice is live. I love this guy, man. This is your moment right now. If you're gonna host your own podcast, you gotta be a nightmare for the opposing team. And I'm into nightmares. I mean, I want you to live rent free inside the enemy's head. Byob. Be your own blocker. Hustle, hustle, hustle. Rice, flip right, double edge. Jet 36, counter naked. Waglet 7X quarter. I mean, I want you to be a player, not a spectator. Rice. Let the competition come. Rice. Bring it on. Be the franchise quarterback. Rice. You got a motor, kid. Everybody sees it right now. Hit the gas and run these guys over. And don't forget Spider2y banana execution. Congratulations. You've been diagnosed with dangerous laughter. Now get out there and win. Love you, man. [00:41:31] Speaker A: This endorsement has been brought to you by collapsing standards everywhere. And now back to Dangerous Laughter. [00:41:40] Speaker F: The management of this station are clueless. [00:41:44] Speaker E: You're listening to Dangerous Laughter with AJ Rice on the Publius Media Network. [00:41:53] Speaker C: Back on the DL, talking to John Leak, his new book, Mind Viruses, America's Irrational Obsessions. And, you know, we are historians of dangerous laughter. Here on the DL, we go all the way back to Elijah in the Old Testament. We go back to Aristophanes making fun of Cleon to his face. Imagine that. Making fun of a war. Making fun of both sides of a war at a publicly funded wine festival. Can you imagine? So at the beginning of the preface of this book, There is a H.L. mencken quote, who you know is one of the Jedi knights of dangerous laughter. Chris, let's put that up on the screen here. Here we go. So it reads this. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by an endless series of hobgoblins. Most of them imaginary. Most of them imaginary. That's right. These are. These guys are in the attic. These guys are in the floorboards. I can hear them. They're coming for you. There's a knock at the door. Do this, eat this, don't eat this, inject this. How dare you teach your kids this. I mean, this is where we're at. And technology obviously helps the propagandists capture people. So you got corporate capture, you got social capture coming from academia, the media, Hollywood, the Democrat Party, and in some cases, some. Some people on the right, even. So, you know, I, I. John, I want to go Back to like you, we led this discussion with Carl Young. And you know how some of, some of your research comes out of this idea of psychic epidemics. So like, I look at modern technology and if Jung was around, Freud was around, and others, you know, little Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, they would have fun with this too. If Carl Jung were alive today and you handed him Twitter X or Tick Tock or Reddit, would he look at those things like communications platforms or basically the largest uncontrolled psychiatric experiment in human history. I mean, because I look at these things, especially Reddit, you go in there, you get lost in there forever. The, the, the craziness, it's like just people pouring their psyche out, like writing on the bathroom wall with a Sharpie. Right? I mean, this is, this is where we're at. And this, this is, this, this, I guess, passes as legitimate communication now. [00:44:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, look, Jung would probably say that this tech, technology that can rapidly communicate enormous amounts of information, you know, it could be a useful tool in the hands of a grown up, of a mature. A person who's mature already has disciplined habits of reason and logic and some understanding of history in order to have a perspective that he is able to bring to bear on what he's being presented with. But if you have completely uneducated people, extremely young people who have no experience, they have no interpretive framework, so they're just being blasted with all of this stuff. And the greatest concern I think he would have is specific to the way in which these social media algorithms are in effect watching you. So it's not watching the television, they're watching you. They're seeing your sort of disposition, your inclinations, and what you look for, what seems to appeal to you, what you like, what you engage with. And then instead of challenging any kind of wacky notions that you might be, you know, getting from this, it's actually confirmed. You start just getting this massive blasting of confirmation bias. Well, if you like this lunatic thing, you're really going to like this lunatic thing, right? You know? [00:46:14] Speaker F: Yeah. [00:46:14] Speaker C: And that's how the contagion spreads. [00:46:16] Speaker B: Right. So your lunacy is actually being reinforced. [00:46:20] Speaker C: Exactly. [00:46:22] Speaker B: So that's, that is quite disturbing. You know, I think in many ways this is kind of a grandiose statement, but humanity just doesn't yet have the maturity to handle the Internet. It's, it's. [00:46:38] Speaker C: Yes, and they certainly don't have the maturity to handle AI. Like, are you kidding me? We are in the tear, the technological terror dome now, okay? We are in it I mean like, [00:46:51] Speaker B: you know, I sometimes I lived in Europe for a long time and I remember, you know, dining with friends and you know, they're 16, 14, 15, 16 year old kids are dining with the adults and they're allowed to have like one glass wine or one. And and so kind of just having a glass of wine with dinner just to just sort of, I don't know, just kind of normal, I guess. So when they hit 21, they don't just go out and lose, right. [00:47:20] Speaker C: They go off to college and then the next thing you know they got a DUI and they're getting their stomach pumped and all the rest of it because they've had a little bit of Barolo since they were 14. [00:47:31] Speaker B: Right. So the idea is, is maturity of experience of, of kind of an initiation into, into oh, the digital brown shirts are calling us. I always do kind of wonder if this thing's listening. So yeah, you know, another thing is, you know, when I was a kid, I'm a Gen Xer, I mean the best we could do is like a Playboy magazine, you know what I mean? [00:48:03] Speaker C: Right. [00:48:04] Speaker B: Kind of a centerfold girl or something. Now these kids, it was very tasteful [00:48:10] Speaker C: compared to what you could get now. [00:48:13] Speaker B: So the mind of a, of a child or an adult is just not prepared now all of all of this pornography online. And so I think anyway, I mentioned that by way of prefacing. I mean, I think even adults were, we weren't really ready for the Internet. It's gonna, it's gonna take some maturity and yeah, you know, what weather will that process is going to be, you know, there's probably going to be a pretty bumpy road, the long road to Internet maturity. Right now everybody's just flat out addicted. I mean I've been in some of the most beautiful places of Europe. This summer I took a vacation and I am amazed. [00:48:57] Speaker C: You're walking down, they're all staring down at their phones. Yeah. [00:49:03] Speaker B: You're in an old Venetian harbor in [00:49:05] Speaker C: a Sistine Chapel looking down at your shoes. [00:49:09] Speaker B: It's wild, huh? [00:49:11] Speaker C: Huh. [00:49:12] Speaker B: So, but anyway, back to our theme. I think what Jung would say is, is that the enormous, enormous propaganda power that is now just immediately at the disposal of whatever interests wish to propagate some wackadoodle idea. You know, it's not that people are going to go buy a newspaper and you know, and drink it, watch it, read it over morning coffee. It's always, it's always funneling straight to the brain. And the other thing that I mentioned in the book and There's a very interesting German author. He wrote a book also published by Skyhorse, called the Indoctrinated Brain. His name is Mikael Nails. And you know, he points out how this, this constant stimulation from imagery and, and stories, much of which is distressing images of violence, it keeps the brain in a state of hyper vigilance. The brain never has a moment of repose. [00:50:17] Speaker C: Right. [00:50:17] Speaker B: And it's so, it's, it's like a stress Clockwork Orange. [00:50:23] Speaker F: Right. [00:50:23] Speaker B: So [00:50:26] Speaker C: let me, let me dig in on that for a second. I know that author too, you know, through Skyhorse. We've done some actual work for him at the PR firm. I'm interested in the seduction of certainty. So I think there's some wisdom in the ability to not know something, to not know the answer, to not be a finished product. Right. Because the second you are, I mean, what, you know, what do you got left? And I, I think, I don't care whether it's Confucius or Nietzsche, a different Plato, different people have, have touched on this, you know, the. Where true wisdom comes from. And it's the ability to not know things. And I just think we're uncomfortable with that. Right. [00:51:07] Speaker B: It's, it's, it's true what you say. And, and you know, people, People, you know, have asked me why. Why were my instincts, for example, at the beginning of the COVID rollout of that mind virus? Why was I apparently quite immune to it? And I would say after about three weeks of just paying attention, sort of looking around, talking to people, I realized pretty quickly that what we were being told was not plausible. And that kind of gave me the intellectual posture of skepticism. And the problem with skepticism is it isn't really a comfortable state. I mean, you're being told things and you know, the. As social beings, the pressure is to go along with what the tribe is telling you. I mean, and I have a chapter on our kind of archaic, prehistoric past. For hundreds of thousands of years, we were relatively small tribes and we had to bind together to survive. I mean, just to say, you know, I'm going off on my own. I'm sick of all of the nincompoops in my tribe and I'm going solo. That just wasn't an option. You had to find a way to get along with your tribe or basically your dad, right. You wouldn't survive. So I think that archaic programming is still very much, you know, within us. And so to say I'm skeptical. The authorities, the chieftains, the high priests, the king, whoever, are telling me Something, but I'm skeptical of what they are telling me. That's kind of an uncomfortable position to be in. [00:53:04] Speaker C: Sure. [00:53:04] Speaker B: You know, I think it was Upton Sinclair, this writer of early. [00:53:10] Speaker C: I know America. [00:53:12] Speaker B: He said it's, you know, there is another element of this, of just material well being. I think he said it's hard to get a man to believe something if his paycheck depends on him. [00:53:24] Speaker C: He wrote the Jungle. Right? He wrote the Jungle, Right, right, yeah. About the Chicago meatpacking industry. Right. Well, let me get into this historical question. Then. Every generation looks backward and says, how could we have believed this? Right. Like, oh, phrenology, head size dictates intelligence. Or like there was this idea in that. In the 19th century, some French, you know, lightning, the loafers guy said that he detected a planet somewhere between Mercury and the sun. He was calling this planet Vulcan. And obviously Einstein came along and said that. Now, that's a bunch of nonsense. There's no planet there. Whereas we've got half the country or at least half the political parties in this country believe that there's 72 genders. So, I mean, it's not just hidden planets. You know, the Democrat party lifts up their skirt and there's 72 genders under there, so. [00:54:18] Speaker B: AJ I'm so glad that you mentioned that, because in many ways, the COVID 19 pandemic is the most illustrative of every dimension of this lunacy. But in terms of just distilling, distilling the madness down to. What was that spirit, you know, that you would spike the punch bowl with? Ever clear. [00:54:42] Speaker C: Ever clear. [00:54:45] Speaker B: A mind virus, in which the madness, this mechanism of. Of truly embracing a totally irrational idea, you know, the. Ever clear of this is absinthe. [00:54:58] Speaker C: Yeah, no, exactly. Right. It's. You're right. [00:55:01] Speaker B: It's the transgender. And I thought I knew about transgender, but as I got into researching that chapter, this is the most demented, irrational, destructive, and I kind of shy away from getting into metaphysics. But, you know, I start getting into these doctors at the University of California, San Francisco, who write a paper in which they're celebrating how double mastectomies and little girls between the ages of 12 and 17, that during this period of the study, I think it was 2014 to 2021, during that period, and obviously that's a very brief period of time. Double mastectomies in their hospital system in the Bay area were up 1300%. Now, who. [00:56:04] Speaker C: Mangele. Mangela. Look, I. Why do you. I wrote. Look, I read your chapter on trans. Because I've got a 300 page book behind me that I've written on it. And I wrote about that too. And I read your chapter. And I'm like, john's way smarter than me. He will help me validate with my herd mentality that I'm not totally insane and caught up in a mind virus myself. And boy, did you nail it. The idea that they are celebrating it like they wanted. The slot machine at the casino. Removing organs from little girls and monetizing it. It's outrageous. [00:56:38] Speaker B: And well, and then. And then I want to add something to that. So. So, you know, do you remember that. Do you remember that series of books in fiction in the 80s? I think the writer's name was Harris. He wrote a book called Red Dragon. [00:56:56] Speaker C: Robert. Yeah, yeah, Thomas Harris. [00:57:00] Speaker B: Right. That's. [00:57:01] Speaker C: He wrote Lecter. Hannibal Lecter. Sounds. The Lambs. Red Dragon. Yep. [00:57:06] Speaker B: So. So there's a scene. Michael Mann made an adaptation of Red Dragon. [00:57:13] Speaker C: Mindhunter or something, right? [00:57:15] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, Graham, the FBI profiler. His. Somebody asked him, you know, you know what? So you were able to kind of penetrate this strange mind of Hannibal Lecter. Sure. You know, what did you see? And he says something that I really didn't want to see. I mean, it's. It's like Bluebeard's castle. It's. It's like. It's. You remember that one where the. The wife is told, you can. My castle is your castle. Just don't look in this one particular room of the castle. And then she does. And when she looks into it, all of Bluebeard's former wives, who he got sick of and bored with after a while, and he's murdered all of them and stuck their corpses in this room. So it's like Bluebeard's castle, the minds of these people. [00:58:06] Speaker C: Sure. [00:58:07] Speaker B: So that's kind of Silence of the Lambs type stuff. But what I think is really distressing about it, it's not these weirdo doctors. It's the broader legal and political institutional structure that allows this. That is the true mind virus. Like, how did this atrocity go from being limited to a few pervert doctors, kind of Mengele types. How did that then expand outward into the broader institutional structure of the entire society? And I gotta give. I tip my hat to my senior partner, Peter McCullough, a lot. He was also one of the first guys to say this. Transgender medicine, so called for minors. This is really, really bad medicine. And he submitted an affidavit to Ken Paxton, our valiant district attorney. Excuse me, Attorney General in Texas saying, like, this is bad. This is evil. This needs to be outlawed in the state of Tech, preferably the whole nation. But let's start with Texas. And my hat's off to Ken Paxton. There was a fine state legislator from New Braunfels. I'm ashamed to say her name is suddenly slipping me. But they really went for it, and they got this evil disease of the mind practice banned in the state of Texas. It's not legal to do this to minors in the state of Texas. So there is ground for hope that, you know, we can decontaminate from, you know, these mind viruses. [01:00:02] Speaker C: For sure. For sure. We're talking to John Leak, author of Mind Viruses, America's Irrational Obsessions. And before we go, I just want to ask something, I ask a lot of authors on here. What's the one section of the book that you want people to know about that no one is asking you about? Okay, what's that one section? Because obviously, you know, we. Everybody sort of gravitates towards different things. But what's the section that you're like, I need to dust this off, people. And you bring this out into the light. People need to focus on this section. [01:00:38] Speaker B: What? They need to focus on the. The human mind operates through the. The direction of attention. So there's an enormous amount in the world that the mind. It's just this low resolution. Like, I'm walking down my jogging trail, and there's birds flitting across, and there's a construction site here, and there's cars driving here, and I'm kind of lost in thought or thinking about my forthcoming interview with AJ and then a really beautiful girl wearing tight yoga pants walks in front of me, and it's all attention. And look. People say, well, John is not being very scholarly, but those yoga pants are now designed to grab my attention. And it. And it works. So they don't trigger. [01:01:32] Speaker C: They trigger the boner virus, though. I think not the mind. [01:01:37] Speaker B: Too personal about this. I'm just speaking of the drawing of attention. [01:01:42] Speaker C: Yes. [01:01:43] Speaker B: So, you know, a friend of mine was a pilot in the Navy, and he said that back in the. This is 20 years ago, he said he flew an FA18, and he said that the radar had a mode track while scan. And he talked about going to a cocktail party, and there's like, scanning. So it's track while scan. There's a bunch of beautiful women at the party. So you're scanning, but then you're in the radar mode, where you can also track a particular bogey that's walking across so anyway, attention, the drawing of attention. We think that all of these hobgoblins, that the reference in the H.L. mencken quote, that they're all unrelated, that climate change is not related to the US proxy war against Russia and Ukraine, that climate change is not, is not related to the COVID 19 pandemic. But what you see is it is the same. And I think it's true. There is a sort of globalist institutional structure in the world now. It's a combination of captured politicians and local governments, non government organizations, large international foundations like the Gates foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. There are these global, the World Economic Forum. And they formulate these objectives for the human race. And the way that their objectives for the human race are rolled out is by identifying or purportedly identifying a threat. So if it's global warming, if it's gender dysphoria, whatever it is, they're not siloed. These are related features of the same agenda. [01:03:54] Speaker C: Absolutely. [01:03:55] Speaker B: And so what I do in the book is I set this forth kind of like an anatomy class, like laying it all out so that people can see. Well, you know, don't allow your attention to be drawn to just one of these. You need, your mind needs, your attention needs to be nimble and see that all of these mind viruses that have been incubated and propagated are actually related. [01:04:24] Speaker C: Exactly. That's a look. And that's why we, we do this show Propaganda Hates Comedy. You know, they, you know, you, you, you, you could ridicule the truth out of people. It's like I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh. He used to say his job was, you know, to use irreverent humor to illustrate truth. That's what we try to do here, John. Tell everyone where they can find you on substack and online. [01:04:51] Speaker B: Well, Dr. Peter McCullough and I have a daily substack. It's called the focal points dot com. The focal points dot com. Buy my, buy my latest book on Amazon. It's the best way. Give it a five star review and a five star rating and a nice little review. Share it with your friends. Absolutely. And then I'm on X. I'm not the greatest hand on X, but I do have an X channel. It's at John Sears League. [01:05:23] Speaker C: Yep, yep. So mind viruses, America's Irrational Obsessions. New York Times best selling author, John Leake, Buddy of mine, I love the guy. The guy's a, he's a dapper guy. He's a, he's a Mack daddy down there. In Texas. He knows his. His cocktails. He knows a good tailor. Definitely go get the book from Amazon. Maybe you can help Jeff Bezos send his wife back into space. And, John boy, I really appreciate it, brother. I really, I mean, thank you for coming on. Really. [01:05:57] Speaker B: Thank you. AJ this is one of the most entertaining conversations I've ever had. You. You are a very engaging conversationalist. [01:06:07] Speaker C: I appreciate that. You can thank my Irish Catholic mother sticking her, you know, foot up my ass my whole life. You know, get moving. So, ladies and gentlemen, just remember, this is dangerous. Laughter I am A.J. rice. Remember, comedy is our civic duty. And always, always, America, remember one thing. Stay dangerous. [01:06:27] Speaker A: Dangerous Lefter. Dangerous. Danger. Left you. Laughter Dangerous. Laughter. Danger. Laughter.