You watched them force mask mandates on two-year-olds, demand that doctors pretend men can get pregnant, and fire nurses who wouldn't affirm the lie.
You knew it was insane – but you couldn't explain how millions of educated Americans went along with it.
A former CIA officer who spent his career dismantling the propaganda of terrorist networks just gave that madness a name – and the science behind it will make your blood run cold.
The Word That Changes Everything
Buck Sexton didn't coin the term "menticide."
A Dutch psychiatrist named Joost Meerloo did – back when he was watching Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong turn ordinary people into willing participants in mass atrocities.
Meerloo defined it as the murder of the mind – the systematic destruction of a person's ability to reason, to question, and to resist.
Sexton's new book, Manufacturing Delusion, makes the case that the American left has been running this playbook on you for years.
"The two core pillars of menticide are confusion and degradation," Sexton told Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers on The Drill Down podcast.
Confusion breaks your ability to think clearly.
Degradation destroys your willingness to trust your own judgment.
Stalin's Scientists Were Watching
Here's the part that should stop you cold.
Both Lenin and Stalin had spies embedded in the laboratory of Ivan Pavlov – the scientist famous for conditioning dogs to respond on command – and paid close attention to everything he discovered.
And what happened when Pavlov's lab flooded during the Neva River overflow is just as important as the experiments themselves.
The conditioned dogs nearly drowned in their cages, and many of them lost their conditioning entirely afterward – their personalities altered by the trauma.
Stalin's men took notes on that, too.
The lesson: extreme psychological pressure can wipe a person's previous beliefs and make them receptive to entirely new ones.
What This Looks Like in Your Living Room
Sexton spent his CIA career watching jihadist organizations use these exact techniques to transform normal young men into suicide bombers.
The mechanism was identical every time: isolate the target, flood them with confusion, demand they mouth slogans they don't believe, and punish any resistance.
Then he came home and watched the left do it to America.
"COVID was a mass rape of the American mind," Sexton told Schweizer and Eggers.
"We were lied to. We were forced to do absurd, insane things."
The forced masking, the school closures, the demands that you stand six feet from your neighbor – those weren't just bad policy.
They were the confusion phase of a menticide operation.
The Language Trick That Proves It
Sexton points to deliberate language manipulation as the clearest evidence of an active psychological operation.
"Gender transition" became "gender affirmation."
"Abortion" became "reproductive health care."
"Global warming" became "climate change."
This isn't accidental branding.
When they force you to say "gender affirmation" instead of "gender transition," they're not just changing a word – they're making you participate in the lie.
"If they can get you to affirm the lie, to mouth the preferred slogans no matter how absurd, they are debasing and degrading your own sense of reason," Sexton told Schweizer and Eggers.
That's the degradation pillar.
Working exactly as Meerloo described it in Stalin's Soviet Union.
The Inoculation
Think about the last family dinner where someone at the table couldn't say something obviously true.
Men can't get pregnant.
Biological males have a physical advantage over women in sports.
The COVID lockdowns destroyed more than the virus ever did.
Someone at your table hedged.
Someone looked at the ceiling.
Someone changed the subject rather than say the words out loud – not because they didn't believe them, but because they'd been conditioned to fear the cost of saying them.
That's not a personality flaw.
That's menticide working exactly as designed.
Meerloo identified isolation – what philosopher Hannah Arendt called "atomization" – as the essential first step in every successful menticide operation.
You cannot condition someone who remains connected to trusted people, honest information, and their own uncompromised sense of reality.
The left knows this.
It's why they target churches, break apart families, and call any information source they can't control "misinformation."
Glenn Beck called Manufacturing Delusion required reading for anyone who wants to understand how Orwell's 1984 gets built in real life.
Sexton gave the left's playbook a name, traced it back to Stalin's labs, and explained exactly how it's being run on American soil right now.
Buy the book.
Read it before they find a reason to call it dangerous.
Sources:
- Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers, "Schweizer: How the Left Is Brainwashing America, Featuring Buck Sexton," Breitbart, February 25, 2026.
- "Manufacturing Delusion by Buck Sexton," Penguin Random House, February 17, 2026.
- "Buck Analyzes Leftist Mind Control Tactics," clayandbuck.com, February 18, 2026.
- Clay Travis, "Weekly Review With Clay and Buck H3 – It's Hard to Hate the Guy," iHeart Radio, February 21, 2026.
