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- [00:00]
Podcast Host
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:04]
Justin Richmond
This is Justin Richmond from Broken Record. The three things I love about summer are pool days, blaring, all the new summer songs that come out, and endless refreshing iced drinks from Starbucks. Even better, my favorite summer drink has returned to Starbucks. The Summer Berry Refresher is available now. A mix of berry flavors shaken with ice and poured over raspberry flavored pearls and it's light, vibrant and just as refreshing as the summer fun you'll be having. So queue up your playlist and head over to Starbucks to check out their summer menu. There's something for everyone from creamy cold brews to ice cold refreshers. Your Summer Berry Refresher is ready at Starbucks.
- [00:43]
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- [01:55]
Narrator
Pushkin.
- [02:01]
News Anchor
Tesla CEO Elon Musk offering to buy Twitter for $43 billion Musk has accused the social media platform of limiting free speech and now says In April.
- [02:11]
Narrator
Of 2022, Elon Musk launched his takeover of Twitter, offering $44 billion for it.
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Commentator
Why make that offer? Well, I think it's very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech.
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Guest Speaker
Yeah.
- [02:26]
Narrator
So yeah, he'd also started talking a lot about something he called the Woke mind virus. Musk 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. In making his bid for Twitter, Musk wore both of these so online he'd troll 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 2022, he'd talk about the stakes of buying Twitter in grander terms.
- [03:05]
Commentator
It's important to the function of democracy. It's important to the function of the United States as a free country and many other countries. And to help freedom in the world. Civilizational risk is decreased the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a public platform.
- [03:23]
Narrator
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 1 in 5American adults even have accounts, and most posting about politics is done by fewer than 10% of users. Twitter isn't and never was a town square. Musk buying it just put a private platform into different private hands. His purchase went through in October of 2022.
- [03:53]
News Anchor
Twitter users are waking up to find that that little blue bird has flown the coop. Owner Elon Musk changed the iconic bird logo to the letter X.
- [04:04]
Narrator
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 1991, seemingly because 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. But what even is the virus that Musk is so worried about?
- [04:51]
Commentator
Woke Mind virus Is communism Rebranded?
- [04:53]
Narrator
Sometimes, though, Musk gave 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.
- [05:12]
Commentator
You can't question things. Even the questioning is bad.
- [05:16]
Narrator
Questioning is good. Here we agree. So I've got some questions. Welcome to X Men the Elon Musk origin story. I'm Jill Lepore, 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, 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 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 Musk got that language, what he means by it and what effect it has, because other people might muse about this kind of thing. But Musk, he spent $44 billion to buy Twitter to kill the virus. This story doesn't really start with Richard Dawkins in the 1990s. It starts in the 1950s.
- [06:41]
Historical Figure
What is it? What's going on?
- [06:43]
Commentator
I don't know.
- [06:44]
Historical Figure
A strange neurosis, evidently contagious.
- [06:47]
Narrator
In the 1950s, a lot of people were very suddenly very worried about mind control.
- [06:53]
Historical Figure
It's a malignant disease spreading through the whole country.
- [06:56]
Narrator
Fear of communism and at the same time fear of anti communism in the form of McCarthyism. Both fears are the subject of the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers where everyone seems suddenly not quite themselves anymore.
- [07:13]
Historical Figure
What causes it worry about what's going on in the world? Probably.
- [07:21]
Podcast Host
This actually was a panic of concern to the military in the early years of the Korean War that American troops seemed to be succumbing to some sort of mysterious techniques.
- [07:33]
Narrator
Rebecca Limav is a historian of science at Harvard. A colleague of mine, she's written a new book, the the Instability of A History of Brainwashing, Mind Control and Hyper Persuasion. Beginning during the Korean War when the Chinese government under Chairman Mao held Americans.
- [07:51]
Podcast Host
As prisoners, they were 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'd been forced to confess being an evil capitalist, basically being an evil capitalist or having had a hand in oppression, or in this case he was African American. So sometimes they would actually incorporate a racial sort of liberation analysis into it. But at any rate, 91% of the prisoners reported that they were forced to.
- [08:28]
Narrator
Journal because part of the reeducation is you have to retell the story of your own life.
- [08:33]
Podcast Host
Exactly. Okay, 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 they seem to be not themselves. And there was evidence that, as a New Yorker reporter later put it, 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.
- [09:10]
Narrator
I mean, it's terrifying. It's a terrifying, terrifying prospect.
- [09:14]
Podcast Host
Yeah. 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.
- [09:33]
Commentator
New York, where American executive Robert Vogler.
- [09:35]
Interviewee
Is home with his wife after confinement in a Hungarian Communist prison camp for 17 months.
- [09:40]
Podcast Host
So Robert Vogler was an American businessman, an executive who was working in Hungary for IT and t the International Telegraph and Telephone Company. And he entered the headlines because he was returned after being imprisoned by the secret police.
- [09:55]
Historical Figure
I was shoved into a 6ft by 9ft cell and the cold was unbearable. The worst of it, however, was the endless routine repeated every six minutes of the steel peephole being opened and clanged shut.
- [10:14]
Podcast Host
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.
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Historical Figure
The important thing to be learned from my experience is that it can happen to anyone. It can happen to you.
- [10:41]
Narrator
Lamov says that the public learned about brainwashing from a writer named Edward Hunter.
- [10:47]
Podcast Host
He actually was quite an experienced OSS 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 in 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 in 1950 announcing that the Communists had developed a new superweapon. He called it brainwashing, but it's a very evocative phrase.
- [11:16]
Narrator
So that becomes the language with which Americans talk about this process of Maoist indoctrination.
- [11:22]
Podcast Host
Exactly. 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.
- [11:38]
Narrator
The US government was concerned enough that in 1953 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 1959 novel Manchurian Candidate.
- [12:02]
Historical Figure
I have conditioned them or brainwashed them, which I understand is the new American word.
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Narrator
It was as if these men had been made into machines.
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Historical Figure
His brain has not only been washed, as they say, it has been dry cleaned.
- [12:19]
Narrator
In the midst of all this, one man in Pretoria, South Africa was frantic.
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Interviewee
Every day the brainwashers repeat and emphasize the things they want us to believe.
- [12:32]
Narrator
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 1960. In it, Haldeman described himself as having been a student of social engineering who had directed a number of scientific, social, economic and political organizations. In the 1930s 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 1949. He began thinking about moving to South Africa. Attracted by its newly announced policy of apartheid, he moved there in 1950. In May of 1960, 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.
- [13:30]
Historical Figure
The wind of change is blowing through this continent. And whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.
- [13:43]
Narrator
In February 1960, Harold Macmillan, the PM had addressed the South African Parliament discountenancing apartheid and urging acceptance of the inevitability of independence.
- [13:56]
Historical Figure
We must all accept it as a fact.
- [13:59]
Narrator
Only weeks later, South African police opened fire on a crowd of thousands of black South Africans protesting outside the Sharpeville police station. Police killed 69 people, including children and wounded nearly 200. There was a rattle of machine gun.
- [14:17]
Commentator
And people started running for shelter.
- [14:20]
Interviewee
Children were screaming around the street crying for their mothers. And some other policemen were busy shooting at those children.
- [14:29]
Narrator
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 18,000 people arrested and jailed. Haldeman wrote this tract that spring suggesting that the uprising had had been staged.
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Interviewee
Questions to be asked who were the white leaders in the Sharpeville 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?
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Narrator
He believed apartheid had come under attack due to an international conspiracy spreading dangerous ideas like these.
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Interviewee
The natives are ill treated, underpaid, underprivileged, separate development is wrong, Apartheid is unchristian.
- [15:26]
Narrator
And Heideman believed that the media itself was doing the brainwashing.
- [15:32]
Interviewee
Every day newspapers Magazines, commercial, radio, newscasters drip this into the conscience and subconscious minds of of the public.
- [15:44]
Narrator
He pledged to stop the spread of the virus.
- [15:46]
Interviewee
People who know it is 99% untrue 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 from the earliest times, but on their own built nothing, discovered nothing, not even the wheel.
- [16:19]
Narrator
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 2 years old. I mention him here because he's an excellent illustration of the persistence of fears of mind control.
- [16:38]
Interviewee
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 psychopolitical warfare which has been conducted to change people's minds for everything.
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Narrator
Haldeman blamed brainwashing.
- [16:58]
Interviewee
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.
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Narrator
This was being done, he alleged, not only by the media but also by universities.
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Interviewee
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 indoctrination.
- [17:44]
Narrator
While we're at it, it's curious that another of Haldeman's big evils was government waste.
- [17:50]
Interviewee
Most of this waste is a result of following the tax and debt system are the internationalists.
- [17:57]
Narrator
He wanted to set up a finance committee to combat inefficiency.
- [18:01]
Interviewee
A watchdog financial agency is needed and.
- [18:05]
Narrator
He wanted one to combat brainwashing too.
- [18:07]
Interviewee
Another watchdog committee must have power to counteract the psychopolitical warfare that is being directed against South Africa. This must be done or the finance committee would soon find they had no public support for their efforts to save the country. People must be warned and become fully 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.
- [18:42]
Narrator
Haldeman was writing in 1960 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 1990s, the end of the Cold War, the beginning of the Internet. That's when Richard Dawkins started 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 right here. 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 you have to watch out for. Which brings me to Musk's admiration for the writings of a Canadian marketing professor, the Parasitic Mind.
- [19:58]
Guest Speaker
It's a very good book. I recommend it 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 work mind virus that is damaging civilization.
- [20:09]
Narrator
That's Musk in 2024 talking to the author of the Parasitic 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 following on X and a YouTube show called the Sad Truth.
- [20:34]
Podcast Host
He was educated in the 1990s, interestingly in a PhD program. He's an evolutionary behavioral scientist, but he's a professor of marketing. So he basically spent the first 20 or 30 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 best sell, you know, high heels to women when they're. It's 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.
- [21:10]
Narrator
And then he ran into a wall. Here's how Saad tells it in a conversation with Musk last year on X.
- [21:17]
Gad Saad
I first noticed all of these mind viruses in my academic work when I was trying to introduce, you know, evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology in the business schools. And most of my social science colleagues were so dead set against using biology to explain human phenomena. So that was my original sort of aha moment. We have a problem.
- [21:38]
Podcast Host
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.
- [21:58]
Narrator
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. You're not wrong about that.
- [22:14]
Podcast Host
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, rebranded. 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.
- [22:29]
Narrator
Absolutely. Yeah, I get it.
- [22:32]
Podcast Host
Right. I agree. It's uncomfortable because I think. I wouldn't want to just say, this is absurd.
- [22:39]
Narrator
Where I get off the train, where I leap off that train is when Saad'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.
- [22:56]
Gad Saad
All of these parasitic ideas originated from, you know, the university ecosystem.
- [23:01]
Narrator
The parasitic mind is an argument against a collection of bad ideas spawned on university campuses. What Za describes as anti science, anti reason, and illiberal idea pathogens, including postmodernism, radical feminism, and transgender activism. Musk read the book, loved it and started tweeting about it. Said it gave him nightmares.
- [23:24]
Gad Saad
When was it for you that you noticed that something was wrong?
- [23:27]
Guest Speaker
I'd say about five years ago. I mean, 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.
- [23:40]
Narrator
In his book, Saad argues that Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have more global control over us than all other companies combined. He writes, it is not hyperbole to say that they have more collective power in terms of the information they control than all of the rulers, people, priests, and politicians in all of history. Hence, Musk is saving civilization.
- [24:04]
Gad Saad
In my view, your purchase of Twitter will go down historically as the most important of all of your great initiatives.
- [24:12]
Interviewee
Do you feel that?
- [24:13]
Gad Saad
Was that a right calculation on my part or was I overstating the case?
- [24:17]
Guest Speaker
Well, you might be right. 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 my quality of living. But it really felt like if, like it was, there was a civilizational danger. There was just no place to actually get the truth.
- [24:35]
Narrator
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.
- [24:49]
Commentator
To summarize, maybe the Woke Mind virus, it consists of creating very divisive identity politics. So it actually amplifies racism, amplifies sexism and all the 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.
- [25:12]
Narrator
Still, Musk also does echo a lot of his grandfather's fears from decades ago. Last year, Musk warned that Christianity might soon perish.
- [25:22]
Commentator
Also, the Wilk Bind virus is communism rebranded.
- [25:25]
Narrator
And Musk has said he wanted to correct for Twitter's longtime leftward tilt.
- [25:29]
Commentator
And now, in the past, Twitter was controlled by far left activists. Objectively, they would describe themselves as that.
- [25:36]
Narrator
Though what 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 buying Twitter, a personal one. It involves one of his kids, one of J.N. haldeman's great grandchildren. Musk spoke with anguish about what he called child mutilation and child sterilization.
- [26:02]
Commentator
It happened to one of my older boys where I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys, Xavier. This is before I had really any understanding of what was going on. And the we had Covid going on. And so there was a lot of confusion. You know, I was told, oh, you know, Xavier might commit suicide.
- [26:23]
Narrator
That was in 2020, 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 16, who transitioned that year and who disputes Musk's account of what happened.
- [26:37]
Commentator
I lost my son, essentially. They call it Jed naming for a reason.
- [26:40]
Historical Figure
Yeah, I.
- [26:41]
Commentator
All right, so the reason it's called dead naming is because your son is dead. Killed by the Woke mind virus.
- [26:50]
Narrator
In 2022, this child turned 18, changed her name to Vivian Wilson and cut off all contact with her father.
- [26:59]
Commentator
So I vowed to destroy the Woke Mind virus after that.
- [27:02]
Narrator
That year, Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X. Rebecca Limov, expert on the history of BrainW, does think there's something to fear.
- [27:16]
Podcast Host
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, we need to be extremely aware of the possibilities that our minds are being changed in tiny, tiny ways.
- [27:38]
Narrator
And here's what haunts me in this decade's life long story of the fear of mind control. Who is actually in control? In 1960, 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, 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, 50 copies, and then they mostly disappeared. In the 2020s, when Elon Musk decided that he wanted to warn the world about a Woke mind virus, he bought Twitter. Twitter is not a typewriter. Musk spent $44 billion 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 200 million people. He runs a company that feeds people information. And this is liberating us from mind control? No, this is the dream of the brainwasher. Next time on X Men. Elon Musk's plan to save humans from being destroyed by artificial intelligence, Muskism and the AI Apocalypse.
- [29:13]
Podcast Host
This is an iHeart podcast.