Mind Viruses: How Fear, Greed, and the War Machine Hijack Your Brain—And How to Reclaim It

Provocative new book shows how all the "crises" of recent years are connected, and how you can immunize your mind against the next mind virus that is unleashed on us.

Since I met author John Leake—with whom I have written two books and who is now Vice President of the McCullough Foundation—we have had innumerable conversations about how our U.S. Republic lurches from one “crisis” to the next, and how all these “crises” are rooted in irrational beliefs that spread like a contagion. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called these contagions “psychic epidemics."

In his just published book, Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions, Leake reveals how each psychic epidemic is generated using the same script composed of the following three elements.

1) Propagate fear and loathing of a purported threat to national security or public health.

2) Present a purported solution whose implementation is characterized as a sacred mission.

3) Scapegoat the purported enemies or opponents of this mission.

As Leake puts it in the Preface:

Recent missions have included reducing greenhouse gas emissions and getting all humanity vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19. Here at the outset, it should be noted that, in each of these missions, the threat is grossly overstated and oversimplified, and the efficacy of the championed solution cannot be measured, tested, or falsified. The rational observer eventually suspects that the point of the sacred mission is to keep it going, because the interested parties would be out of business as soon as the problem is solved.

Please watch this long format interview of McCullough Foundation Vice President John Leake about Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions and share it with your friends.

🧠 Mind Viruses: Fear, Money, and the Contagion of Irrational Thought

McCullough Foundation President, Dr. Peter McCullough opens by framing the COVID-19 pandemic as a textbook mind virus: a fear-driven script in which an exaggerated threat (“respiratory viral monster”) meets a pre-packaged solution (the heralded vaccine) with no allowance for questioning—even by physicians of McCullough’s academic credentials and clinical experience.

Leake unpacks the mechanism that begins with FEAR, which he describes in his book as follows:

Fear is a critically important emotion for rapidly detecting and reacting to mortal dangers and avoiding them in the future. Fear keenly sharpens one’s focus on a threat and prepares the body to fight it or flee from it. Within the hostile natural environment in which human evolved, fear kept people alive. Without it, the human species would not have survived. However, as the conditions of modern life have become more secure and complex, fear may greatly impair the ability of individuals and societies to respond to events in a rational manner that serves their best interests.

Mind viruses are propagated when central authority raises the alarm about a boogeyman, terrifies the populace, and offers salvation with a grossly oversimplified but wildly profitable “solution.”

💰 The Financial Engine

Leake identifies the core driver: institutional profiteering through crisis. Drawing on Thomas Sowell’s insight, he notes that institutions purportedly created to solve problems will go out of business if the problems are indeed solved. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about, the biopharmaceutical complex that profited massively from COVID, the Wall Street bailouts—all follow the same perverse logic: a major crisis is a bonanza for the parties who are positioned to take advantage of it. Peace and health would put an end to the massive transfer of public funds to the purveyors of “countermeasures.”

McCullough drives this home: defense contractors, intelligence agencies, and biopharma entities are financially dependent on threats. No threats, no revenue. This creates an incentive to exaggerate, foment, and even fabricate threats. True threats may be mismanaged and allowed to do harm to generate a pretext (or “false flag”) for massive central government actions such as the “War on Terror” and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

🦠 How It Spreads

The book traces mind viruses across multiple domains, including the following selection mentioned in the interview. See the above table of contents for the full list of mind viruses characterized in the book.

• War: The “Father of All Mind Viruses”—an archaic fear of invasion exploited by a national security state that is constantly on the offense all over the globe, despite thirty documented American misadventures abroad since the end of World War II.

• Bioterrorism: The anthrax letters, gain-of-function research, and the PREP Act all follow the script: manufacture a threat, offer a “countermeasure,” use it as an instrument for exerting power and making a fortune.

• Racism: A “divide and conquer” misdirection trick for drawing scrutiny away from the massive Wall Street fraud and malfeasance, and especially the bailouts— trillions of Treasury and Federal Reserve money—that went to the same bankers who caused the Financial Crisis of 2008.

• Climate Change: A particularly virulent mind virus for the young, built on unmeasurable, untestable, and unfalsifiable claims, serving as a pretext for transferring hundreds of billions of funds to the purveyors of “alternative energy” and destroying the traditional manufacturing economy of developed nations such as Germany.

• “Transgender Medicine” for Minors: The most criminally insane and perverse mind virus documented in the book.

🛡️ The Antidote: Free Speech

Leake anchors his defense of free speech in John Milton’s 1644 pamphlet Areopagitica. As Milton put it, human understanding is imperfect, and any attempt to gain understanding will be error prone. If orthodoxy forbids free speech to prevent error or heresy, there can be no advancement of understanding. The First Amendment exists precisely to protect unpopular speech—that is, opinions that many people (especially those in power) find threatening.

Leake observes that many of those who admired McCullough for his pandemic stance will now likely regard him as a dangerous heretic for opposing the Iran war. They must contend with the question: Why did you vehemently reject the US government’s representations of COVID-19, but wholeheartedly embrace the government’s representations of Iran?

Free speech isn’t a matter of protecting opinions with which one agrees, but those that challenge one’s assumptions. The antidote to mind viruses isn’t censorship; it’s the disciplined willingness to listen to points of view that are incongruous with your long-held beliefs, the maturity to have a civil conversation about challenging ideas instead of angrily dismissing them out of hand, and the courage to overcome fear instead of being governed by it.

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Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

President, McCullough Foundation