Every Panic Has a Profiteer

John Leake's new book asks a simple question about every crisis of the last twenty-five years: who would be out of business the moment the crisis gets solved?

Author’s Note: The author of our weekly McCullough Foundation newsletter—an exceptionally talented writer and documentary filmmaker named Brian Olson — surprised me this morning by devoting an entire newsletter to my new book, Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions in which he highlighted how the book’s core thesis aligns with our mission at the McCullough Foundation. I found it very gratifying to read his interpretation of the book, which is precisely how I intended it to be interpreted. The only thing I would change (upon further reflection) is his title. I would say that “Every panic has a profiteer”—a bit more precise than “Every panic has an owner.”

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Every panic has an owner.

John Leake’s new book asks a simple question about every crisis of the last twenty-five years: who would be out of business the moment the crisis gets solved?

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. — H. L. Mencken, the book's epigraph

In 1999 the United States was strong, unified and confident. Budget surpluses. A booming market. The biggest scandal in the country was an affair. John Leake’s new book is about what happened next — and it argues that what happened was not a run of bad luck.Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions is out now from Skyhorse. Twenty-four chapters, from a murder in Moscow in 1869 to the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

What a mind virus actually is

Leake gives it a definition precise enough to test, and it is the most useful thing in the book. A mind virus is a psychological operation with three properties: a purported threat to national security or public health and safety is fabricated or grossly exaggerated; the effectiveness of the championed solution cannot be measured, tested or falsified; and the interested parties need to maintain crisis in order to remain in business.

The metaphor of an irrational belief being introduced to the populace like a contagion is not his. It is Churchill's, describing how Imperial Germany transported Lenin from Switzerland back into Russia in 1917:

in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city — and it worked with amazing accuracy." An idea, introduced deliberately, by people who expected to benefit, that went on to kill twenty million.

It is no coincidence that mind viruses have emerged with increasing frequency during a period of runaway federal debt, with no constraints on creating and transferring trillions of public money to "crisis response" interest groups. Just look at the federal spending on the biggest "crises" that have afflicted the US in recent years — the War on Terror, the 2008 Financial Crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

So it's easy to criticize, but they're really criticizing science because I represent science." — Anthony Fauci, CBS Face the Nation, 28 November 2021

You know it’s a mind virus — the product of a massive psychological operation — when you’re not allowed to question what we’re being told. If criticism of Anthony Fauci is criticism of science, then no criticism can ever be valid, and none of his statements are testable or falsifiable — that is, the two primary criteria of the scientific method. That is not a slip of the tongue. It is the mechanism, stated out loud, on camera — and four of Leake’s twenty-four chapters are about what government-propagated mind viruses cost We the People.

Twenty-four chapters, one coherent thesis.

The table of contents is the thesis. Read it in order and the shape is hard to miss:

•War, the Father of All Mind Viruses · The Scientific-Technological Elite · Islamic Terror · Bioterrorism · Crisis and Bailout Capitalism•Racism · Russia · The Great Pipeline Opera Ends with a Bang · Climate Change · The Climate-Industrial Complex•The Coronavirus Disease of 2019 · There’s No Business Like Pandemic Business · In COVID-19 Vaccines We Trust•The US Proxy War Against Russia in Ukraine · Transgender · Iran · The Devil and the Great Undoing

Each one is the same machine wearing a different face. As the trailer puts it: the face changes, the script never does.

Why this lands here

Two of the twenty-four chapters are about medicine, and they directly align with the Foundation’s work—the COVID-19 vaccine and the diabolical enterprise of transgender “medicine” for minors and men masquerading as women to dominate women’s sports.

The book also goes to the heart of the McCullough® Foundation’s mission of safeguarding our constitutional protections from government agencies that invoke the specter of mortal dangers as a pretext for abridging free speech, freedom of association, and bodily autonomy. Dr. McCullough has spent four years on the first of those questions and has the citations to show for it. Leake devoted an entire book to elucidate how these medical mind viruses are connected to every other mind virus characterized in the book.