March 30, 2025 • 27 mins
In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, and renamed it X. When asked why he wanted to own the social media network, Musk talked a lot about something he called the “woke mind virus.” Where does the idea of a mind virus come from? Jill Lepore looks to Cold War science fiction and the recently uncovered writings of Elon Musk’s grandfather in South Africa.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin Tesla ceo Elon Musk offering to buy Twitter for
forty three billion dollars. Muscu has accused the social media
platform of limiting free speech analysis.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
In April of twenty twenty two, Elon Musk launched his
takeover of Twitter, offering forty four billion dollars for it.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Why make that offer? Well, I think it's very important
for be it be an inclusive arena for free speech.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
So, he'd also started talking a lot about something he
called the woke mind virus. Must didn't coin the term,
but he popularized it. Musk is a man of many
interests and many masks. There's the batman mask and then
there's the would be philosopher hat. And making his bid
for Twitter, Musk wore both of these so online, he
(01:09):
complaining that the science fiction on Netflix, for instance, had
gotten too woke. But in conversations with serious people at
a Ted Talks event in twenty twenty two, he talk
about the stakes of buying Twitter in grander terms.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
It's important to the function of democracy. It's important to
the function of the United States as a free country
on many other countries, and help freedom in the world.
Civilizational risk is decreased, the more we can increase the
trust of Twitter as a public platform.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
People in the media talk about Twitter all the time,
but that's because they're on it. Most other people aren't.
In the US, only about one in five American adults
even have accounts, and most posting about politics is done
by fewer than ten percent of users. Twitter isn't, and
never was, a town square. Musk buying it just put
(02:05):
a private platform into different private hands. As his purchase
went through in October of twenty twenty two.
Speaker 5 (02:12):
Twitter users are waking up to find that that little
blue bird has flown. The coup owner Elon Musk, changed
the iconic bird logo to the letter X.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
The way Musk talked about X got increasingly grandiose. He claimed,
the woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else
matters a mind virus, as best I can tell. The
idea came from Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and prominent atheist,
who wrote a tirade in nineteen ninety one, seemingly because
(02:44):
he was furious that one of his ex wives was
sending their six year old daughter to Catholic school. Dawkins
considered religion a mind virus. Computers can get viruses, he explained,
and so can the human mind. At the very least,
Dawkins wrote, the mind is a plausible candidate for infection.
(03:07):
But what even is the virus that Musk so worried about?
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Lork bind myrus is communism rebranded?
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Sometimes, though, must give a different definition using the expression
woke mind virus for something that had been a truly
horrible feature of Twitter and of much public discourse for years,
the suppression, especially on the left of political dissent.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
You can't question things. Even the questioning is bad.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Questioning is good. Here we agree. So I've got some questions.
Welcome to x Men, the Elon Musk origin story. I'm
Jill Lapour. I'm a professor at Harvard. I'm a US
political historian, and for a long time I've been studying
the relationship between technological and political change. In this series,
(03:58):
I've been looking into how Musk is in many ways
an invention of science fiction, and so is Muskism, which
I've been arguing is less a form of futurism than
a throwback. I think that's true of Musk's concern about
a woke mind virus, too. First of all, let me
(04:20):
just say for the record that Musk has a point
about the assault on free speech, including in higher education,
and he has a point that there are indeed some
malign consequences of wokeness. Fair enough. But what I'm interested
in is the very idea of a mind virus. Where
a Musk got that language, what he means by it,
(04:40):
and what effect it has. Because other people might muse
about this kind of thing, but Musk, he spent forty
four billion dollars to buy Twitter to kill the virus.
This story doesn't really start with Richard Dawkins in the
nineteen nineties. It starts in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 6 (05:01):
What is it? What's going on?
Speaker 3 (05:03):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (05:03):
A strange neurosis, evidently contagious.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
In the nineteen fifties, a lot of people were very suddenly,
very worried about mind control.
Speaker 6 (05:13):
It's an malignant disease spreading through the whole country.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Fear of communism and at the same time, fear of
anti communism in the form of McCarthyism. Both fears are
the subject of the nineteen fifty six film Invasion of
the Body Snatchers, where everyone seems suddenly not quite themselves anymore,
and what causes it.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Worry about what's going on in the world.
Speaker 7 (05:35):
Probably this actually.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Was a panic of concern to the military in the
early years of the Korean War that American troops seem
to be succumbing to some sort of mysterious techniques.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Rebecca Lamov is a historian of science at Harvard a
colleague of mine. She's written a new book, The Instability
of Truth, A History of brainwashing, mind control, and hyper persuasion.
Beginning during the Korean War, when the Chinese government under
Chairman now held Americans as prisoners, they were.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
Held in prison camps. Initially these camps were run by
the Koreans and later by the Chinese. The troops were
subjected to re education as a sort of experiment to
see if it would apply to westerners. One of the
soldiers had brought back his journal in which he had
been forced to confess.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Being an evil capitalist, basically.
Speaker 4 (06:31):
Being an evil capitalist or having had a hand in oppression,
or in this case he was African Americans. So sometimes
they would actually incorporate a racial sort of liberation analysis
into it. But at any rate, ninety one percent of
the prisoners reported that they were forced to journal.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Because part of the re education is you have to
retell the story of your own life.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
Exactly what the US military and then later the press
were seeing when these prisoners were returned was something they
felt was quite mysterious. They would appear vacant and sort
of dissociated, and would be quoting Communist propaganda, which used
that very formulaic language that their families wouldn't recognize. So
(07:13):
they seemed to be not themselves. And there was evidence that,
as a New Yorker reporter later put at, something new
in history was happening, and they called in troops of
psychiatrists and sociologists and any expert to see see if
they could break the spell.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
I mean, it's terrifying. Is they're terrifying, terrifying prospect.
Speaker 6 (07:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
There were also American pilots who gave false confessions to
having dropped biological weapons over China, and there were American
businessmen who also seemed to be turning up having been brainwashed.
So it was quite terrifying that the Communists had something
that just was not understood.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
New York. Well, American executive Robert bogla Is home with
his wife after confinement in a Hungarian Communist prison camp
for seventeen months.
Speaker 4 (07:59):
So Robert Vogeler was an American businessman, an executive who
was working in Hungary for IT and T, the International
Telegraph and Telephone Company. He entered the headlines because he
was returned after being imprisoned by the secret police.
Speaker 6 (08:15):
I was shoved into a sixth feet by nine feet cell,
and the cold was unbearable. The worst of it, however,
was the endless routine repeated every six minutes, of the
steel people being opened and clang shut.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
He couldn't quite remember what had happened to him. He
had been converted to communism initially. When he came back
then he sort of decompressed and returned to himself. Later,
when he reflected on it, he said, the very body
is forced into league against one's personality.
Speaker 6 (08:50):
The important thing to be learned from my experience is
that it can happen to anyone. It can happen to you.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Lamov says that the public learned about brainwashing from a
writer named Edward Hunter.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
He actually was quite an experienced OSA agent Office of
Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the CIA essentially,
and he had been working in China for several decades
and had been an anti propaganda that was his beat,
and he had also worked as a journalist. He had
an extensive collection of propaganda. So he wrote an article
(09:27):
in nineteen fifty announcing that the Communist had developed a
new super weapon. He called it brainwashing.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
But it's a very evocative phrase. So that becomes the
language with which Americans talk about this process of malist
indoctrination exactly.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
It takes off, and he publishes a book. He goes
on a lecture circuit. He explains more deeply, and he
connects this brainwashing to Communist techniques and hypnosis, and also
to Soviet programs to build new types of human beings.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
The US government was concerned enough that in nineteen fifty
three it started its own brainwashing program MK Ultra, led
by the CIA, horrifying human experiments. The public didn't know
about it for decades, but you can see the fear
of brainwashing reaching a kind of apex with the film
adaptation of the nineteen fifty nine novel Manchurian Candidate.
Speaker 7 (10:21):
I have conditioned them or brainwashed them, which I understand
is the new American work.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
It was as if these men had been made into machines.
Speaker 7 (10:30):
His brain has not only been washed as they say,
it has been dry clean.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
In the midst of all this, one man in Pretoria,
South Africa, was frantic.
Speaker 7 (10:45):
Every day the brainwashers repeat and emphasize the things they
want us to believe.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Remember Elon Musk's maternal grandfather, J. N. Haldeman. I talked
about him in an earlier episode. That's an actor, reading
from a tract Haldeman published in South Africa in nineteen sixty.
In it, Haldeman described himself as having been a student
of social engineering who had directed a number of scientific, social, economic,
(11:12):
and political organizations. In the nineteen thirties, He'd been a
leader of the technocracy movement in Canada. Then he joined
the anti Semitic Social Credit Party, becoming its national chairman.
In nineteen forty nine, he began thinking about moving to
South Africa, attracted by its newly announced policy of apartheid.
(11:33):
He moved there in nineteen fifty. In May of nineteen sixty,
Haldeman wrote the International Conspiracy to establish a World Dictatorship
and its Menace to South Africa. The tract was a
response to a speech by the British Prime Minister.
Speaker 7 (11:50):
The window Chaine is blowing through this continent.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Whether we like it or not.
Speaker 6 (11:56):
This growth national consciousness is a political fact.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
In February nineteen sixty, Harold McMillan, the PM, had addressed
the South African Parliament disc countenancing apartheid and urging acceptance
of the inevitability of independence.
Speaker 8 (12:15):
We was all accepted as a fair.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Only weeks later, South African police opened fire on a
crowd of thousands of black South Africans protesting outside the
Sharpville police station. Police killed sixty nine people, including children,
and wounded nearly two hundred.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
There was a rattle of machine gun and people started running.
Speaker 6 (12:38):
Pocerta children were screaming around the street crying for the amadas,
and some other policemen's were busy shooting those children.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
The killings were captured on television and the coverage reached
around the world. In the ensuing protests and state of emergency,
Nelson Mandela was among eighteen thousand people arrested and jailed.
Haldeman wrote this tract that spring, suggesting that the uprising
had been staged.
Speaker 7 (13:09):
Questions to be asked who were the white leaders in
the Shopville Native riot? Who escaped. Who were the ones
who fired the shots at the police that would guarantee
that a major event would take place at that time?
What are their connections?
Speaker 2 (13:25):
He believed apartheid had come under attack due to an
international conspiracy spreading dangerous ideas like these.
Speaker 7 (13:33):
The natives are ill treated, underpaid, underprivileged. Separate development is wrong,
apartheid is un Christian.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
And Heldemann believed that the media itself was doing the brainwashing.
Speaker 7 (13:51):
Every day newspapers, magazines, commercial radio newscasters drip this into
the conscious and subconscious minds of the public.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
He pledged to stop the spread of the virus.
Speaker 7 (14:06):
People who know it is ninety nine percent un true,
repeat these lies emphatically and emotionally. The facts of history
show that the white man has always developed the country
he inhabits to the benefit of all concerned. The black
people of Africa have been in close contact with civilization
(14:28):
from the earliest times, but on their own built nothing, discovered, nothing,
not even the will.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Now, let me state again what I've said before. Elon
Musk is not responsible for the ideas or actions of
his grandfather, who died when Musk was only two years old.
I mentioned him here because he's an excellent illustration of
the persistence of fears of mind control.
Speaker 7 (14:57):
People have become misled on the proven traditional attitudes of
what is right and wrong and what is good and
bad for themselves and for their country by an intensive
psycho political warfare which has been conducted to change people's minds.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
For everything Heldeman blamed brainwashing.
Speaker 7 (15:17):
Psychopolitics is now one of the chief weapons of the internationalists,
and it is in this field that they are having
so much success and practically no opposition. An intensive mass
mind conditioning has been going on for a century.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
This was being done, he alleged, not only by the media,
but also by universities.
Speaker 7 (15:41):
It is no wonder that so many university professors come
out with liberalistic, anti nationalist statements, although they may be
professing Christians and sincerely feel they are patriots. Throughout university
courses to get their degrees, they were subjected to a
materialistic inductrination.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
While we're at it, it's curious that another of Heldeman's
big evils was government waste.
Speaker 7 (16:09):
Most of this waste is a result of following the
tax and debt system of the Internationalists.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
He wanted to set up a finance committee to combat inefficiency.
Speaker 7 (16:20):
A watchdog financial agency is needed.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
And he wanted one to combat brainwashing too.
Speaker 7 (16:27):
Another watchdog committee must have power to counter erect the
psycho political warfare that is being directed against South Africa.
This must be done or the Finance Committee, which soon
find they had no public support for their efforts to
save the country. People must be warned and become fully
(16:48):
aware that when they read the international English language newspapers,
these are not really British or American. They are more
likely to be psychopolitical organs of Moscow and Wall Street.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Heldeman was writing in nineteen sixty just as the public
panic about brainwashing was beginning to wind down. After that,
people stopped talking about it so much. Rebecca Lamov says
the public fear about mind control didn't really start up
again until the nineteen nineties, the end of the Cold War,
the beginning of the Internet. That's when Richard Dawkins started
(17:23):
writing about viruses of the mind spreading like computer viruses,
and then the worry became those viruses are spreading by computer.
Full disclosure. I hate Twitter. I hated it when it
was leftier, and I still hate it now that it's rightier.
(17:46):
I hate all social media. I've never had an account
on any of these things. I think social media is
a disaster for democracy, for fairness, for decency, for humanity.
On the other hand, Musk's plan for fixing Twitter. It
brings to mind the adage that the cure is sometimes
worse than the disease. If history is any guide to
the fear of mind control, it is the backlash that
(18:08):
you have to work watch out for, which brings me
to Mosque's admiration for the writings of a Canadian marketing professor.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
The Parasitic Mind Stray good book. It recommended to everyone.
In fact, I did recommend it to everyone. It really
does hit the nail on the head with respect to
the sort of ork mind virus that is damaging civilization.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
That's Musk in twenty twenty four talking to the author
of The Parasitic Mind, how infectious ideas are killing common sense?
A man who's described his book as the mind vaccine
against all of the idea pathogens that have been destroying
the West. Name of Gad Sad. He's got a big
(18:49):
following on x and a YouTube show called The Sad Truth.
Speaker 4 (18:53):
He was educated in the nineteen nineties interestingly in a
PhD program. He's an evolutionary behavioral scientist, but he's a
professor of marketing. So he basically spent the first twenty
or thirty years of his career applying the insights of
evolutionary behavioral science, or he would say, evolutionary science to
commerce and to marketing, and so basically, how do you
(19:17):
best sell you know, high heels to women when they're
its best when they're menstruating, or can you target these
particular moments because there's evidence that women are more receptive
to certain messages at certain times, or things like that.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
And then he ran into a wall. Here's how Sad
tells it in a conversation with Musk last year on X.
Speaker 8 (19:36):
I first noticed all of these mind viruses in my
academic work when I was trying to introduce, you know,
evolutionary psychology evolutionary biology in the business schools, and most
of my social science colleagues were so that set against
using biology to explain human phenomena. So that was my
original sort of at ha moment, we have a problem.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
I think he had trouble in academia, and this is
what caused him to sort of move in the direction
he has is that people were resistant to listening to
his ideas at any moment. He identified sex differences between
men and women. If it happened to reflect poorly on women,
he said that people were just unwilling to listen to
his ideas, especially the smart people who are actually dumb.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Yeah, and he's not wrong that there's a tremendous rejection
of those ideas without inspection. And that's a common part
of academic life, Like I don't think in terms of
diagnosing the closed mindedness of a lot of academics, they're
not wrong about that.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
Yeah, exactly. So then you could maybe say that because
these things are associated with what they would say the
far left, it is a form of communism be branded
and the way that we I suppose we can both
identify moments in academia where it does feel like there's
a kind of lockstep.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Absolutely, Yeah, I get it right.
Speaker 4 (20:52):
I agree it's uncomfortable because I think I wouldn't want
to just say this is absurd.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Where I get off the train. Where I leap off
that train is when Sad's argument, Musk's argument runs this way.
I don't like these ideas. Therefore, these ideas are bad ideas. Therefore,
these ideas are mind viruses, and therefore I will kill
them in the name of free speech.
Speaker 8 (21:15):
All of these parasitic ideas originated from the university ecosystem.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
The parasitic mind is an argument against a collection of
bad ideas spawned on university campuses what Sad describes as
anti science, anti reason, and illiberal idea pathogens, including postmodernism,
radical feminism, and transgender activism. Musk read the book, loved it,
(21:40):
and started tweeting about it, said it gave him nightmares.
Speaker 8 (21:44):
When was it for you that you noticed that something
was wrong?
Speaker 3 (21:46):
I'd say about five years ago, come in in the climate,
just before COVID. The degree of panic over COVID was
exacerbated by this unwillingness to question science or question the
accepted view.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
In his book, Sad argues that Google, YouTube, Facebook, and
Twitter have more global control over us than all other
companies combined. He writes, it is an hyperbole to say
that they have more collective power in terms of the
information they control than all of the rulers, priests, and
politicians in all of history. Hence, Musk is saving civilization.
Speaker 8 (22:23):
In my view, your purchase of Twitter will go down
historically as the most important of all of your great initiatives.
Speaker 7 (22:32):
Do you feel that.
Speaker 8 (22:33):
Was that a right calculation on my part? Or was
I overstating the case?
Speaker 3 (22:37):
Well, you might be right. It's possible. It's possible that
you're right. I mean, I didn't do the purchase because
I thought it was a great way to make money,
or because I thought it would improve by quality of living.
But it really felt like if it was a civilizational danger,
it was just no place to actually get the truth.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
There ought to be some kind of watchdog committee, right,
And so Musk bought Twitter to stop the spread of
the woke mind virus. Musk, by no means shares all
of his grandfather's views, and in fact, many of his
views are of course very different.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Rice maybe the work bind virus. It consists of creating
very divisive identity politics. So it actually amplifies racism, amplifies sexism,
and only isms, and while claiming to do the opposite,
it actually divides people and makes them sort of hate
each other, and it makes people hate themselves.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Still, Musk also does echo a lot of his grandfather's
fears from decades ago. Last year, Musk warned that Christianity
might soon perish.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Also, the work Bindvirus is communism rebranded, and.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Musk has said he wanted to correct for Twitter's long
time leftward tilt.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
And on the past Twitter was controlled by fall left
activists objectively, they would describe themselves as that, though what.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Musk actually did when he bought X was to limit
content moderation and restore the accounts of people who'd been
banned for extremism or for spreading misinformation. Musk also gave
another reason for by Twitter, a personal one. It involves
one of his kids, one of J. N. Haldeman's great grandchildren.
(24:16):
Musk spoke with Anguish about what he called child mutilation
and child sterilization.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
It happened to one of my older boys. Where I was,
I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of
my older boys, Xavier. This is before I had really
any understanding what was going on and that we had
COVID gone on, and so there was a lot of confusion,
you know. I was told, oh, you know, Savior might
commit suicide.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
That was in twenty twenty, the year Musk and Grimes
had a son they named x. It was another child,
an older child from Musk's first marriage and now sixteen,
who transitioned that year and who disputes Musk's account of
what happened.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
I lost my son. Essentially, they call it dead naming
for a reason. Yeah, all right, So the reason it's
called dead naming is because your son is dead, killed
by the walk line virus.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
In twenty twenty two, this child turned eighteen, changed her
name to Vivian Wilson and cut off all contact with
her father.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
So I vowed to destroy the my virus.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
After that that year, Musk bought Twitter and renamed it x.
Rebecca Lamov, expert on the history of brainwashing, does think
there's something to fear.
Speaker 4 (25:35):
I think that we live in an environment, including an
information environment, where you know, the stakes are quite high
and the tools are incredibly powerful, and therefore the countervailing
pressures are also very strong, so that we need to
be extremely aware of the possibilities that our minds are
being changed in tiny, tiny ways.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
And here's what haunts me in this decade's long story
of the fear of mind control. Who is actually in control?
In nineteen sixty, when Elon Musk's grandfather wanted to warn
the world about the international conspiracy against white Christian civilization
that involved mind control through the media and the universities.
(26:18):
He got out a typewriter, typed up a tract or
two and a newsletter, and made a few dozen mimeographs.
He mailed them to a few friends, maybe I don't
know fifty copies, and then they mostly disappeared. In the
twenty twenties, when Elon Musk decided that he wanted to
warn the world about a woke mind virus, he bought Twitter.
(26:42):
Twitter is not a typewriter. Musk spent forty four billion
dollars on it. He could do that because he is
the richest man in the world, and he can do
things like that. Every time he wants to speak, he
reaches over two hundred million people. He runs a company
that feeds people information. And this is liberating us from
(27:03):
mind control. No, this is the dream of the brainwasher.
Next time on x Man Elon Musk's plan to save
humans from being destroyed by artificial intelligence Muskism and the
AI Apocalypse
Pushkin Tesla ceo Elon Musk offering to buy Twitter for
forty three billion dollars. Muscu has accused the social media
platform of limiting free speech analysis.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
In April of twenty twenty two, Elon Musk launched his
takeover of Twitter, offering forty four billion dollars for it.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Why make that offer? Well, I think it's very important
for be it be an inclusive arena for free speech.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
So, he'd also started talking a lot about something he
called the woke mind virus. Must didn't coin the term,
but he popularized it. Musk is a man of many
interests and many masks. There's the batman mask and then
there's the would be philosopher hat. And making his bid
for Twitter, Musk wore both of these so online, he
(01:09):
complaining that the science fiction on Netflix, for instance, had
gotten too woke. But in conversations with serious people at
a Ted Talks event in twenty twenty two, he talk
about the stakes of buying Twitter in grander terms.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
It's important to the function of democracy. It's important to
the function of the United States as a free country
on many other countries, and help freedom in the world.
Civilizational risk is decreased, the more we can increase the
trust of Twitter as a public platform.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
People in the media talk about Twitter all the time,
but that's because they're on it. Most other people aren't.
In the US, only about one in five American adults
even have accounts, and most posting about politics is done
by fewer than ten percent of users. Twitter isn't, and
never was, a town square. Musk buying it just put
(02:05):
a private platform into different private hands. As his purchase
went through in October of twenty twenty two.
Speaker 5 (02:12):
Twitter users are waking up to find that that little
blue bird has flown. The coup owner Elon Musk, changed
the iconic bird logo to the letter X.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
The way Musk talked about X got increasingly grandiose. He claimed,
the woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else
matters a mind virus, as best I can tell. The
idea came from Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and prominent atheist,
who wrote a tirade in nineteen ninety one, seemingly because
(02:44):
he was furious that one of his ex wives was
sending their six year old daughter to Catholic school. Dawkins
considered religion a mind virus. Computers can get viruses, he explained,
and so can the human mind. At the very least,
Dawkins wrote, the mind is a plausible candidate for infection.
(03:07):
But what even is the virus that Musk so worried about?
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Lork bind myrus is communism rebranded?
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Sometimes, though, must give a different definition using the expression
woke mind virus for something that had been a truly
horrible feature of Twitter and of much public discourse for years,
the suppression, especially on the left of political dissent.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
You can't question things. Even the questioning is bad.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Questioning is good. Here we agree. So I've got some questions.
Welcome to x Men, the Elon Musk origin story. I'm
Jill Lapour. I'm a professor at Harvard. I'm a US
political historian, and for a long time I've been studying
the relationship between technological and political change. In this series,
(03:58):
I've been looking into how Musk is in many ways
an invention of science fiction, and so is Muskism, which
I've been arguing is less a form of futurism than
a throwback. I think that's true of Musk's concern about
a woke mind virus, too. First of all, let me
(04:20):
just say for the record that Musk has a point
about the assault on free speech, including in higher education,
and he has a point that there are indeed some
malign consequences of wokeness. Fair enough. But what I'm interested
in is the very idea of a mind virus. Where
a Musk got that language, what he means by it,
(04:40):
and what effect it has. Because other people might muse
about this kind of thing, but Musk, he spent forty
four billion dollars to buy Twitter to kill the virus.
This story doesn't really start with Richard Dawkins in the
nineteen nineties. It starts in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 6 (05:01):
What is it? What's going on?
Speaker 3 (05:03):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (05:03):
A strange neurosis, evidently contagious.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
In the nineteen fifties, a lot of people were very suddenly,
very worried about mind control.
Speaker 6 (05:13):
It's an malignant disease spreading through the whole country.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Fear of communism and at the same time, fear of
anti communism in the form of McCarthyism. Both fears are
the subject of the nineteen fifty six film Invasion of
the Body Snatchers, where everyone seems suddenly not quite themselves anymore,
and what causes it.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Worry about what's going on in the world.
Speaker 7 (05:35):
Probably this actually.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Was a panic of concern to the military in the
early years of the Korean War that American troops seem
to be succumbing to some sort of mysterious techniques.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Rebecca Lamov is a historian of science at Harvard a
colleague of mine. She's written a new book, The Instability
of Truth, A History of brainwashing, mind control, and hyper persuasion.
Beginning during the Korean War, when the Chinese government under
Chairman now held Americans as prisoners, they were.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
Held in prison camps. Initially these camps were run by
the Koreans and later by the Chinese. The troops were
subjected to re education as a sort of experiment to
see if it would apply to westerners. One of the
soldiers had brought back his journal in which he had
been forced to confess.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Being an evil capitalist, basically.
Speaker 4 (06:31):
Being an evil capitalist or having had a hand in oppression,
or in this case he was African Americans. So sometimes
they would actually incorporate a racial sort of liberation analysis
into it. But at any rate, ninety one percent of
the prisoners reported that they were forced to journal.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Because part of the re education is you have to
retell the story of your own life.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
Exactly what the US military and then later the press
were seeing when these prisoners were returned was something they
felt was quite mysterious. They would appear vacant and sort
of dissociated, and would be quoting Communist propaganda, which used
that very formulaic language that their families wouldn't recognize. So
(07:13):
they seemed to be not themselves. And there was evidence that,
as a New Yorker reporter later put at, something new
in history was happening, and they called in troops of
psychiatrists and sociologists and any expert to see see if
they could break the spell.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
I mean, it's terrifying. Is they're terrifying, terrifying prospect.
Speaker 6 (07:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
There were also American pilots who gave false confessions to
having dropped biological weapons over China, and there were American
businessmen who also seemed to be turning up having been brainwashed.
So it was quite terrifying that the Communists had something
that just was not understood.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
New York. Well, American executive Robert bogla Is home with
his wife after confinement in a Hungarian Communist prison camp
for seventeen months.
Speaker 4 (07:59):
So Robert Vogeler was an American businessman, an executive who
was working in Hungary for IT and T, the International
Telegraph and Telephone Company. He entered the headlines because he
was returned after being imprisoned by the secret police.
Speaker 6 (08:15):
I was shoved into a sixth feet by nine feet cell,
and the cold was unbearable. The worst of it, however,
was the endless routine repeated every six minutes, of the
steel people being opened and clang shut.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
He couldn't quite remember what had happened to him. He
had been converted to communism initially. When he came back
then he sort of decompressed and returned to himself. Later,
when he reflected on it, he said, the very body
is forced into league against one's personality.
Speaker 6 (08:50):
The important thing to be learned from my experience is
that it can happen to anyone. It can happen to you.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Lamov says that the public learned about brainwashing from a
writer named Edward Hunter.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
He actually was quite an experienced OSA agent Office of
Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the CIA essentially,
and he had been working in China for several decades
and had been an anti propaganda that was his beat,
and he had also worked as a journalist. He had
an extensive collection of propaganda. So he wrote an article
(09:27):
in nineteen fifty announcing that the Communist had developed a
new super weapon. He called it brainwashing.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
But it's a very evocative phrase. So that becomes the
language with which Americans talk about this process of malist
indoctrination exactly.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
It takes off, and he publishes a book. He goes
on a lecture circuit. He explains more deeply, and he
connects this brainwashing to Communist techniques and hypnosis, and also
to Soviet programs to build new types of human beings.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
The US government was concerned enough that in nineteen fifty
three it started its own brainwashing program MK Ultra, led
by the CIA, horrifying human experiments. The public didn't know
about it for decades, but you can see the fear
of brainwashing reaching a kind of apex with the film
adaptation of the nineteen fifty nine novel Manchurian Candidate.
Speaker 7 (10:21):
I have conditioned them or brainwashed them, which I understand
is the new American work.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
It was as if these men had been made into machines.
Speaker 7 (10:30):
His brain has not only been washed as they say,
it has been dry clean.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
In the midst of all this, one man in Pretoria,
South Africa, was frantic.
Speaker 7 (10:45):
Every day the brainwashers repeat and emphasize the things they
want us to believe.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Remember Elon Musk's maternal grandfather, J. N. Haldeman. I talked
about him in an earlier episode. That's an actor, reading
from a tract Haldeman published in South Africa in nineteen sixty.
In it, Haldeman described himself as having been a student
of social engineering who had directed a number of scientific, social, economic,
(11:12):
and political organizations. In the nineteen thirties, He'd been a
leader of the technocracy movement in Canada. Then he joined
the anti Semitic Social Credit Party, becoming its national chairman.
In nineteen forty nine, he began thinking about moving to
South Africa, attracted by its newly announced policy of apartheid.
(11:33):
He moved there in nineteen fifty. In May of nineteen sixty,
Haldeman wrote the International Conspiracy to establish a World Dictatorship
and its Menace to South Africa. The tract was a
response to a speech by the British Prime Minister.
Speaker 7 (11:50):
The window Chaine is blowing through this continent.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
Whether we like it or not.
Speaker 6 (11:56):
This growth national consciousness is a political fact.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
In February nineteen sixty, Harold McMillan, the PM, had addressed
the South African Parliament disc countenancing apartheid and urging acceptance
of the inevitability of independence.
Speaker 8 (12:15):
We was all accepted as a fair.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Only weeks later, South African police opened fire on a
crowd of thousands of black South Africans protesting outside the
Sharpville police station. Police killed sixty nine people, including children,
and wounded nearly two hundred.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
There was a rattle of machine gun and people started running.
Speaker 6 (12:38):
Pocerta children were screaming around the street crying for the amadas,
and some other policemen's were busy shooting those children.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
The killings were captured on television and the coverage reached
around the world. In the ensuing protests and state of emergency,
Nelson Mandela was among eighteen thousand people arrested and jailed.
Haldeman wrote this tract that spring, suggesting that the uprising
had been staged.
Speaker 7 (13:09):
Questions to be asked who were the white leaders in
the Shopville Native riot? Who escaped. Who were the ones
who fired the shots at the police that would guarantee
that a major event would take place at that time?
What are their connections?
Speaker 2 (13:25):
He believed apartheid had come under attack due to an
international conspiracy spreading dangerous ideas like these.
Speaker 7 (13:33):
The natives are ill treated, underpaid, underprivileged. Separate development is wrong,
apartheid is un Christian.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
And Heldemann believed that the media itself was doing the brainwashing.
Speaker 7 (13:51):
Every day newspapers, magazines, commercial radio newscasters drip this into
the conscious and subconscious minds of the public.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
He pledged to stop the spread of the virus.
Speaker 7 (14:06):
People who know it is ninety nine percent un true,
repeat these lies emphatically and emotionally. The facts of history
show that the white man has always developed the country
he inhabits to the benefit of all concerned. The black
people of Africa have been in close contact with civilization
(14:28):
from the earliest times, but on their own built nothing, discovered, nothing,
not even the will.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Now, let me state again what I've said before. Elon
Musk is not responsible for the ideas or actions of
his grandfather, who died when Musk was only two years old.
I mentioned him here because he's an excellent illustration of
the persistence of fears of mind control.
Speaker 7 (14:57):
People have become misled on the proven traditional attitudes of
what is right and wrong and what is good and
bad for themselves and for their country by an intensive
psycho political warfare which has been conducted to change people's minds.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
For everything Heldeman blamed brainwashing.
Speaker 7 (15:17):
Psychopolitics is now one of the chief weapons of the internationalists,
and it is in this field that they are having
so much success and practically no opposition. An intensive mass
mind conditioning has been going on for a century.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
This was being done, he alleged, not only by the media,
but also by universities.
Speaker 7 (15:41):
It is no wonder that so many university professors come
out with liberalistic, anti nationalist statements, although they may be
professing Christians and sincerely feel they are patriots. Throughout university
courses to get their degrees, they were subjected to a
materialistic inductrination.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
While we're at it, it's curious that another of Heldeman's
big evils was government waste.
Speaker 7 (16:09):
Most of this waste is a result of following the
tax and debt system of the Internationalists.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
He wanted to set up a finance committee to combat inefficiency.
Speaker 7 (16:20):
A watchdog financial agency is needed.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
And he wanted one to combat brainwashing too.
Speaker 7 (16:27):
Another watchdog committee must have power to counter erect the
psycho political warfare that is being directed against South Africa.
This must be done or the Finance Committee, which soon
find they had no public support for their efforts to
save the country. People must be warned and become fully
(16:48):
aware that when they read the international English language newspapers,
these are not really British or American. They are more
likely to be psychopolitical organs of Moscow and Wall Street.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Heldeman was writing in nineteen sixty just as the public
panic about brainwashing was beginning to wind down. After that,
people stopped talking about it so much. Rebecca Lamov says
the public fear about mind control didn't really start up
again until the nineteen nineties, the end of the Cold War,
the beginning of the Internet. That's when Richard Dawkins started
(17:23):
writing about viruses of the mind spreading like computer viruses,
and then the worry became those viruses are spreading by computer.
Full disclosure. I hate Twitter. I hated it when it
was leftier, and I still hate it now that it's rightier.
(17:46):
I hate all social media. I've never had an account
on any of these things. I think social media is
a disaster for democracy, for fairness, for decency, for humanity.
On the other hand, Musk's plan for fixing Twitter. It
brings to mind the adage that the cure is sometimes
worse than the disease. If history is any guide to
the fear of mind control, it is the backlash that
(18:08):
you have to work watch out for, which brings me
to Mosque's admiration for the writings of a Canadian marketing professor.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
The Parasitic Mind Stray good book. It recommended to everyone.
In fact, I did recommend it to everyone. It really
does hit the nail on the head with respect to
the sort of ork mind virus that is damaging civilization.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
That's Musk in twenty twenty four talking to the author
of The Parasitic Mind, how infectious ideas are killing common sense?
A man who's described his book as the mind vaccine
against all of the idea pathogens that have been destroying
the West. Name of Gad Sad. He's got a big
(18:49):
following on x and a YouTube show called The Sad Truth.
Speaker 4 (18:53):
He was educated in the nineteen nineties interestingly in a
PhD program. He's an evolutionary behavioral scientist, but he's a
professor of marketing. So he basically spent the first twenty
or thirty years of his career applying the insights of
evolutionary behavioral science, or he would say, evolutionary science to
commerce and to marketing, and so basically, how do you
(19:17):
best sell you know, high heels to women when they're
its best when they're menstruating, or can you target these
particular moments because there's evidence that women are more receptive
to certain messages at certain times, or things like that.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
And then he ran into a wall. Here's how Sad
tells it in a conversation with Musk last year on X.
Speaker 8 (19:36):
I first noticed all of these mind viruses in my
academic work when I was trying to introduce, you know,
evolutionary psychology evolutionary biology in the business schools, and most
of my social science colleagues were so that set against
using biology to explain human phenomena. So that was my
original sort of at ha moment, we have a problem.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
I think he had trouble in academia, and this is
what caused him to sort of move in the direction
he has is that people were resistant to listening to
his ideas at any moment. He identified sex differences between
men and women. If it happened to reflect poorly on women,
he said that people were just unwilling to listen to
his ideas, especially the smart people who are actually dumb.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Yeah, and he's not wrong that there's a tremendous rejection
of those ideas without inspection. And that's a common part
of academic life, Like I don't think in terms of
diagnosing the closed mindedness of a lot of academics, they're
not wrong about that.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
Yeah, exactly. So then you could maybe say that because
these things are associated with what they would say the
far left, it is a form of communism be branded
and the way that we I suppose we can both
identify moments in academia where it does feel like there's
a kind of lockstep.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Absolutely, Yeah, I get it right.
Speaker 4 (20:52):
I agree it's uncomfortable because I think I wouldn't want
to just say this is absurd.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Where I get off the train. Where I leap off
that train is when Sad's argument, Musk's argument runs this way.
I don't like these ideas. Therefore, these ideas are bad ideas. Therefore,
these ideas are mind viruses, and therefore I will kill
them in the name of free speech.
Speaker 8 (21:15):
All of these parasitic ideas originated from the university ecosystem.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
The parasitic mind is an argument against a collection of
bad ideas spawned on university campuses what Sad describes as
anti science, anti reason, and illiberal idea pathogens, including postmodernism,
radical feminism, and transgender activism. Musk read the book, loved it,
(21:40):
and started tweeting about it, said it gave him nightmares.
Speaker 8 (21:44):
When was it for you that you noticed that something
was wrong?
Speaker 3 (21:46):
I'd say about five years ago, come in in the climate,
just before COVID. The degree of panic over COVID was
exacerbated by this unwillingness to question science or question the
accepted view.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
In his book, Sad argues that Google, YouTube, Facebook, and
Twitter have more global control over us than all other
companies combined. He writes, it is an hyperbole to say
that they have more collective power in terms of the
information they control than all of the rulers, priests, and
politicians in all of history. Hence, Musk is saving civilization.
Speaker 8 (22:23):
In my view, your purchase of Twitter will go down
historically as the most important of all of your great initiatives.
Speaker 7 (22:32):
Do you feel that.
Speaker 8 (22:33):
Was that a right calculation on my part? Or was
I overstating the case?
Speaker 3 (22:37):
Well, you might be right. It's possible. It's possible that
you're right. I mean, I didn't do the purchase because
I thought it was a great way to make money,
or because I thought it would improve by quality of living.
But it really felt like if it was a civilizational danger,
it was just no place to actually get the truth.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
There ought to be some kind of watchdog committee, right,
And so Musk bought Twitter to stop the spread of
the woke mind virus. Musk, by no means shares all
of his grandfather's views, and in fact, many of his
views are of course very different.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Rice maybe the work bind virus. It consists of creating
very divisive identity politics. So it actually amplifies racism, amplifies sexism,
and only isms, and while claiming to do the opposite,
it actually divides people and makes them sort of hate
each other, and it makes people hate themselves.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Still, Musk also does echo a lot of his grandfather's
fears from decades ago. Last year, Musk warned that Christianity
might soon perish.
Speaker 3 (23:41):
Also, the work Bindvirus is communism rebranded, and.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Musk has said he wanted to correct for Twitter's long
time leftward tilt.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
And on the past Twitter was controlled by fall left
activists objectively, they would describe themselves as that, though what.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Musk actually did when he bought X was to limit
content moderation and restore the accounts of people who'd been
banned for extremism or for spreading misinformation. Musk also gave
another reason for by Twitter, a personal one. It involves
one of his kids, one of J. N. Haldeman's great grandchildren.
(24:16):
Musk spoke with Anguish about what he called child mutilation
and child sterilization.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
It happened to one of my older boys. Where I was,
I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of
my older boys, Xavier. This is before I had really
any understanding what was going on and that we had
COVID gone on, and so there was a lot of confusion,
you know. I was told, oh, you know, Savior might
commit suicide.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
That was in twenty twenty, the year Musk and Grimes
had a son they named x. It was another child,
an older child from Musk's first marriage and now sixteen,
who transitioned that year and who disputes Musk's account of
what happened.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
I lost my son. Essentially, they call it dead naming
for a reason. Yeah, all right, So the reason it's
called dead naming is because your son is dead, killed
by the walk line virus.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
In twenty twenty two, this child turned eighteen, changed her
name to Vivian Wilson and cut off all contact with
her father.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
So I vowed to destroy the my virus.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
After that that year, Musk bought Twitter and renamed it x.
Rebecca Lamov, expert on the history of brainwashing, does think
there's something to fear.
Speaker 4 (25:35):
I think that we live in an environment, including an
information environment, where you know, the stakes are quite high
and the tools are incredibly powerful, and therefore the countervailing
pressures are also very strong, so that we need to
be extremely aware of the possibilities that our minds are
being changed in tiny, tiny ways.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
And here's what haunts me in this decade's long story
of the fear of mind control. Who is actually in control?
In nineteen sixty, when Elon Musk's grandfather wanted to warn
the world about the international conspiracy against white Christian civilization
that involved mind control through the media and the universities.
(26:18):
He got out a typewriter, typed up a tract or
two and a newsletter, and made a few dozen mimeographs.
He mailed them to a few friends, maybe I don't
know fifty copies, and then they mostly disappeared. In the
twenty twenties, when Elon Musk decided that he wanted to
warn the world about a woke mind virus, he bought Twitter.
(26:42):
Twitter is not a typewriter. Musk spent forty four billion
dollars on it. He could do that because he is
the richest man in the world, and he can do
things like that. Every time he wants to speak, he
reaches over two hundred million people. He runs a company
that feeds people information. And this is liberating us from
(27:03):
mind control. No, this is the dream of the brainwasher.
Next time on x Man Elon Musk's plan to save
humans from being destroyed by artificial intelligence Muskism and the
AI Apocalypse
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!