Body Snatchers from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story

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.

In April of twenty twenty two, Elon Musk launched his takeover of Twitter, offering forty four billion dollars for it.

Why make that offer? Well, I think it's very important for be it be an inclusive arena for free speech.

Yeah.

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 complaining that the science fiction on Netflix, for instance, had

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.

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 a private platform into different private hands. As his purchase went through in October of twenty twenty two.

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.

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 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,

Lork bind myrus is communism rebranded?

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.

You can't question things. Even the questioning is bad.

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, 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

What is it? What's going on?

I don't know.

A strange neurosis, evidently contagious.

In the nineteen fifties, a lot of people were very suddenly, very worried about mind control.

It's an malignant disease spreading through the whole country.

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.

Worry about what's going on in the world.

Probably this actually.

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.

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.

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.

Being an evil capitalist, basically.

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.

Because part of the re education is you have to retell the story of your own life.

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

I mean, it's terrifying. Is they're terrifying, terrifying prospect.

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.

New York. Well, American executive Robert bogla Is home with his wife after confinement in a Hungarian Communist prison camp for seventeen months.

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.

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.

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.

The important thing to be learned from my experience is that it can happen to anyone. It can happen to you.

Lamov says that the public learned about brainwashing from a writer named Edward Hunter.

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 in nineteen fifty announcing that the Communist had developed a new super weapon. He called it brainwashing.

But it's a very evocative phrase. So that becomes the language with which Americans talk about this process of malist indoctrination 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.

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.

I have conditioned them or brainwashed them, which I understand is the new American work.

It was as if these men had been made into machines.

His brain has not only been washed as they say, it has been dry clean.

In the midst of all this, one man in Pretoria, South Africa, was frantic.

Every day the brainwashers repeat and emphasize the things they want us to believe.

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, and political organizations. In the nineteen thirties, He'd been a

The window Chaine is blowing through this continent.

Whether we like it or not.

This growth national consciousness is a political fact.

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.

We was all accepted as a fair.

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.

There was a rattle of machine gun and people started running.

Pocerta children were screaming around the street crying for the amadas, and some other policemen's were busy shooting those children.

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.

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?

He believed apartheid had come under attack due to an international conspiracy spreading dangerous ideas like these.

The natives are ill treated, underpaid, underprivileged. Separate development is wrong, apartheid is un Christian.

And Heldemann believed that the media itself was doing the brainwashing.

Every day newspapers, magazines, commercial radio newscasters drip this into the conscious and subconscious minds of the public.

He pledged to stop the spread of the virus.

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 from the earliest times, but on their own built nothing, discovered, nothing, not even the will.

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.

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.

For everything Heldeman blamed brainwashing.

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.

This was being done, he alleged, not only by the media, but also by universities.

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.

While we're at it, it's curious that another of Heldeman's big evils was government waste.

Most of this waste is a result of following the tax and debt system of the Internationalists.

He wanted to set up a finance committee to combat inefficiency.

A watchdog financial agency is needed.

And he wanted one to combat brainwashing too.

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 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.

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 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.

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 following on x and a YouTube show called The Sad Truth.

He was educated in the nineteen nineties interestingly in a PhD program. He's an evolutionary behavioral scientist, but he's a

And then he ran into a wall. Here's how Sad tells it in a conversation with Musk last year on X.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Absolutely, Yeah, I get it right.

I agree it's uncomfortable because I think I wouldn't want to just say this is absurd.

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.

All of these parasitic ideas originated from the university ecosystem.

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, and started tweeting about it, said it gave him nightmares.

When was it for you that you noticed that something was wrong?

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.

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.

In my view, your purchase of Twitter will go down historically as the most important of all of your great initiatives.

Do you feel that.

Was that a right calculation on my part? Or was I overstating the case?

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.

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.

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.

Still, Musk also does echo a lot of his grandfather's fears from decades ago. Last year, Musk warned that Christianity might soon perish.

Also, the work Bindvirus is communism rebranded, and.

Musk has said he wanted to correct for Twitter's long time leftward tilt.

And on the past Twitter was controlled by fall left activists objectively, they would describe themselves as that, 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 by 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.

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.

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.

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.

In twenty twenty two, this child turned eighteen, changed her name to Vivian Wilson and cut off all contact with her father.

So I vowed to destroy the my virus.

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.

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.

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. 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