9

THE CONSPIRACY OF PERSONAL DESTRUCTION

Remember that the tentacles of the conspiracy reach into your home town, where its puppets are promoting fluoridation, “mental health,” and innumerable other plans to accustom us gradually to increasing slavery and intimidation.

Revilo P. Oliver, All America Must Know THE TERROR That Is upon Us

Intellectuals

The plot to create a new world order was too distant from many people’s lives for them to become alarmed; even warnings about the conspiracy to “enslave Congress and You (documented)” could fall on deaf ears.1 One way to shake up the public was to personalize the conspiracy, as had been done by listing members of the hidden hand who controlled the New Deal. Disparagement of FDR’s “brain trust” had led quickly to a wider attack on intellectuals, even those not involved in politics. For example, Max Lerner, “who took over the department of political science at Williams College for Moscow in the fall of 1938,” was accused of “intellectual arrogance” for his pro-New Deal writings, which were described as a “potpourri of Polish Judaism and Yale Dialectics.”2 By the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against the Communist conspiracy routinely attacked intellectuals. McCarthy’s disparagement of intellectuals “seemed to give a special rejoicing to his followers” and his “sorties against intellectuals and universities were emulated throughout the country by a host of less exalted inquisitors.”3 Mistrust of intellectuals became a standard trope of conspiracist rhetoric. Clarence Manion, although dean of the Notre Dame Law School himself, blamed “scholars,” a word he put in quotation marks, for creeping socialism. Dan Smoot was one of several commentators who blamed academic meddling for the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation ruling—particularly by Gunnar Myrdal, “a Swedish socialist with a Communist front record who, in a book called An American Dilemma, had proclaimed his utter contempt for the constitution of the United States.” Robert Welch, after pointing out Myrdal’s connection to the always suspect Carnegie Endowment, lists several other intellectuals—from W. E. B. DuBois to Franz Boas—who contributed to Myrdal’s findings.4

This barrage of invective against academics expanded into a wider mistrust of expertise, policy makers, literary icons, even scientists. Joseph Kamp, in a pamphlet attacking “the crusade for world government,” characterized its proponents as “‘intellectuals’ without intelligence.” Professors were commonly disparaged as Ivy League “Red-ucators” and “pseudo-intellectuals.” They were the “so-called scholars” behind the suspiciously liberal New Standard Revised Bible; they were “Negro intellectuals . . . carried away” by the civil rights movement. Westbrook Pegler, while admitting that Theodore Roosevelt had gone to Harvard, took comfort in the fact that he had been “only a matriculant, never a scholar.”5 There was often a great deal of defensiveness in such harangues. Inspired by congressional hearings into Alger Hiss’s Communist background, the American Legion used its Thanksgiving message to tell its members to give thanks that

your organization’s position on the twin evils of Communism and Socialism since its very founding 33 years ago, has never shifted or deviated 1/10,000th of an inch. This despite Niagaras of ridicule, abuse, pressure, and, at times, virtual isolation. . . . Unlike some intellectuals and others, it was never flim-flammed by Soviet confidence men and grifters.

WHO IS THE FOOL TODAY? The “simple-minded” Legionnaire who “never grew up” and still believes in the homely virtues of patriotism and sound Americanism, the butt of every smart alec playwright, writer, commentator, and pseudo-intellectual; or the smart alecs, many of whom now stand exposed as Soviet spies, commies, commie fronters, or saps and easy marks for every Stalinist con game pulled off in this country? . . . 

WHO PLAYED THE FOOL, THE LEGION OR THOSE BLATHERSKITE “INTELLECTUALS”?6

Conspiracists often felt persecuted, first by the Anti-Defamation League in the 1930s, and then by anti-Nazi writers. As the New Deal gave way to internationalism, a feeling of persecution at the hands of a much wider array of intellectuals and their organizations began to grow. When Gerald Winrod blasted America’s “Gestapo” for persecuting radio preachers in 1949, he was referring to more than the Anti-Defamation League; his primary enemy was now the Federal Council of Churches, the main ecumenical organization in the country. This church group, working in league with organized labor and the NAACP, could bring tremendous pressure to bear against right-wing radio preachers, Winrod complained, since they knew the liberal Supreme Court would support them. Under these conditions, even Jesus would be “immediately banned from the radio as an ‘anti-Semite.’”7 Upton Close, whose radio commentaries were not aired on WOR in New York, maintained he was being censored at the behest of “officials at Macy’s” who found his program “un-Soviet.” Persecution by law enforcement agencies, Close also complained, was orchestrated by the Anti-Defamation League, “a mysterious network organization with vast funds and agents available to follow cases anywhere”—like “private secret police.”8 The arrest and subsequent trial of the suspects of the 1958 Atlanta synagogue bombing was deemed persecution by those who believed the bombing to be a false flag operation undertaken by “Jewish organizations.” The membership gained and money raised as a result of “this successful ‘coup!’” would help the ADL in its campaign to destroy America’s “White Christian Founding Race.”9

Myron Fagan, whose career began by exposing Reds in Hollywood and finished with diatribes against the Illuminati, faced constant persecution at the hands of one-worlders. His enemies were a “SECRET POLICE” as bad as the Soviet Union’s: the United World Federalists, the Christian Science Monitor (under the editorship of Erwin Canham, “Rhodes Scholar, a zealous ‘one-worlder’ and frantic supporter of the ‘United World Federalists’”) and CBS News’s Chet Huntley, “a wild-eyed ‘Liberal’ Radio news commentator.” Fagan’s sense of persecution only intensified when he tried to sue his persecutors. His lawyer “betrayed” him and the California Bar Association refused to consider his subsequent complaint. Similarly, Robert H. Williams took such umbrage over questions about his background in U.S. Army Intelligence by the ADL and “Communist publications” that he included photostats of his performance evaluations in one book. Even with these, “the author expects renewed attacks by the alien cults to keep people from heeding his warning.”10

Responding to the persecution he suffered at the hands of radio personality and press columnist Walter Winchell, Joseph Kamp told his readers that Winchell “had been bribed or cajoled by an International Cabal into service as a frightening Twentieth Century Golem made of newsprint pulp.” Many others suffered similar persecution. After Eustace Mullins founded the Aryan League of America, the American Petroleum Industries broke off their contract with him, who had been their “propagandist.” In New York, “Jewish Civil Officials” used legal methods to deny meeting venues to James Madole’s National Renaissance Party, and in Chicago, heavy-handed FBI surveillance of Mullins, according to him, amounted to “siege conditions.”11

By the 1960s, this level of persecution was taken for granted and featured strongly in communications with members of conspiracist groups. In his year-end report for 1961 (attached to a fundraising letter), Myron Fagan enumerated some of his persecutors, Chet Huntley having been joined by unnamed “Hollywood producers,” “TV sponsors,” and even the California American Legion. Fagan maintained that, although his persecution might seem trivial, “it is NOT trivial. Control of Hollywood, Radio and TV, especially TV, is even more vital to the Masterminds of the Great Conspiracy than the already controlled Press.” Faced with similar persecution, Fred Schwarz attached a form letter to the program for his 1961 anti-Communist “school” for attendees to copy and send to Life magazine, which had disparaged some of the school’s faculty as “crackpots”: “Please make a copy of this letter, or one in your own words, and send it to the editors of Life Magazine. Let them know by action and swamping them with paper and ink that we true Americans and freedom loving people do not like subversive and Communist sympathizing editors or writers on there [sic] staff.” Karl Prussion, conversely, expressed pride over being attacked by “collaborators and appeasers of communists” such as the California Board of Education. Robert Welch seemed fatalistic in the foreword to the 1961 edition of the John Birch Society’s Blue Book, mentioning in passing: “Naturally, we have faced extensive and malicious attacks from the open and disguised left.” Later, describing the 1960s as “the era of ‘be kind to communists and their friends,’” Welch scoffed that “the whole left-liberal cabal of the religious, educational, entertainment, labor and communications world has tried to erect a ‘Nazi or Fascist threat’ out of the John Birch Society.”12

In the eyes of those trying to stop the march toward world government and the implicit end of sovereignty at any level, most of the persecution originated with the media, increasingly part of the conspiracy. The media’s role had become obvious with the attacks on Senator Joseph McCarthy by the Communists “and their dupes and stooges whose influence extends into the newspapers, magazines, radio and television.”13 The drumbeat against what has come to be called the mainstream media stressed the need to “attack directly the lies, distortions and propaganda of the Establishment’s communications media . . . and entertainment industries.” The “good people,” as Gerald L. K. Smith pandered to them in a fundraising letter, “are in the majority, but they have been chloroformed, mesmerized, hypnotized and blinded by a news media that does not tell them the truth.” The idea of the media extended well beyond just the news. The “printed and electronic press” worked with “the pedagogy, the pulpit and the political sectors of society” in order to “orchestrate in concert, distortions, deceptions, deletions and demi-truths because truth is anathema to their grand design.” A few voices took this issue beyond the rhetoric of alliteration: “Mr. John Doe, Citizen, U.S.A., has been treated to the full effect of MASS CONDITIONING via the CONTROLLED COMMUNICATIONS MEDIA. The caldron of witches brew of news and views has been allowed to roll & tumble until the ordinary citizen, sitting in front of his ‘boob-tube’ has been bombarded into a state of conditioned confusion. He is now willing to grasp at any straw and believe anything as long as ‘THEY’ do something to end this mess. But THEY are not through with him!”14 This insistence that the media are not merely biased but an active participant in a conspiracy against the truth was a key part of the expansion of the hidden hand conspiracy twenty years earlier and has continued as an article of faith among conspiracists ever since. The news media have been the object of explicit attacks from such luminaries as Eustace Mullins and Michael Collins Piper, and their malfeasance has most recently been enshrined in the presidential “FAKE NEWS TROPHY!”15

The Threat of Mental Health

The most viscerally frightening arena in which intellectuals and experts threatened people was mental health. The problem burst into the public’s awareness in 1955 with the publication of The Brainwashing Manual by Kenneth Goff.16 Purportedly a “synthesis” of a Russian text on “psychopolitics,” introduced with a lecture to American students at Lenin University by Lavrenty Beria, head of the Soviet secret police, the book was entirely fraudulent.17 Regardless, Goff maintained that psychopolitics, practiced under the harmless-sounding cover of “mental healing,” provided the rationale for the plan “to subject to torture and imprisonment those who preach the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and who oppose the menace of Communism.” Others echoed Goff’s fears. Fred Schwarz, head of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, described how “the mind smashes into fragments” that can later be reassembled “for whatever Communist purpose is designated.” And in a wide-ranging anti-intellectual “challenge to the devotees of Freud, Pasteur, Darwin and Marx,” Herb Blackschleger warned of “an entire nation brainwashed for decades by mind-control experts.”18

This fear was applied immediately by conspiracists alarmed over the Alaska Mental Health Act, which would bring mental health services to what was then a territory. The costs of the services would be defrayed by giving the territorial government millions acres of federal land to develop (or even just sell). Conspiracists, however, saw the land as “Siberia, U.S.A.” “Is it the purpose of H.R. 6376 to establish a concentration camp for political prisoners under the guise of treatment of mental cases? The answer, based on a study of the bill, indicates that it is entirely within the realm of possibility that we may be establishing in Alaska our own version of the Siberian slave camps run by the Russian government.”19 The bill, “the most sinister, deceptive, subversive law ever, concocted, passed both Houses by 100% voice vote, like a cat in the stillness of the night.” For years afterward, however, opponents in the House continued to warn that mental health was being used “to railroad more and more people into mental institutions.”20

Despite its presumed origin with Beria, the psychopolitics literature did not feature Soviets very prominently.21 The primary concern was the psychological establishment itself as an arm of the new world order. Sometimes the menace of mental health seemed to spring up spontaneously, as in this 1957 “news” story: “In 1948 the mental health concept was originated for political use. At a World Citizenship Conference in London, it was agreed that any person who objected to one worldism should be stigmatized as mentally suspect.” The specter of forced mental orthodoxy was embodied by Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, of the World Federal Mental Health Association, who openly favored “eliminating such boundaries to brotherhood as color, creed, and geography”; this view amounted to “psychopolitics in the raw.”22 Aside from Chisholm’s organization, mental health was being forced on the American public by the World Health Organization, UNESCO, the National Association for Mental Health, and the recently established Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. In the face of all this, conspiracists decided that “we must draw the terrifying but logical conclusion that the conspiracy now has control of so large a number of psychiatrists and similar ‘experts’ that . . . the plan can be put into operation without effective opposition.”

The idea that the mental health profession itself was part of the conspiracy to establish a global dictatorship grew rapidly, becoming a standard element of conspiracist thinking in only a few years. Eugene Pomeroy, listing the main threats to America in 1958, included the “subversive” psychiatrists who “developed the ‘Mental Health’ program that enables American patriots to be easily and illegally confined in mental institutions,” adding: “From these institutions there is no escape.” Revilo Oliver focused his attention on the Jews’ conspiracy to dominate America by “controlling the minds of the politically dominant majority of its population” under the guise of “mental health.” Americans, Oliver complained, were all too willing to “acquiesce in legislation to authorize the ‘legal’ kidnapping of troublesome Americans and their incarceration in prisons (to be called ‘hospitals’) in which ‘trained psychiatrists’ of alien origin and their brutish assistants can induce insanity, imbecility, or, if necessary, death by means of scientific tortures, . . . or mind-destroying drugs, such as the now famous L.S.D., which was only later produced by the Weizmann Laboratories in Israel and shipped to the United States for surreptitious sale to adolescents and children whose minds had been given a preliminary conditioning in the public schools.”23 An important advantage conspiracists imagined for the authorities’ declaring patriots to be “mentally ill” was that such an assertion allowed for “No martyrs!” since opponents of “one-world government are disposed of as members of the ‘anti-social, crack-pot fringe.’” However, whenever a case arose, as in the 1962 pretrial commitment of General Edwin Walker for his actions during the anti-integration riots at the University of Mississippi, martyrdom was immediate.24

The concept of mass brainwashing arose during this period most strikingly in the opposition to water fluoridation. While much of this opposition was based on medical criteria (whether sensible or “crack-pot fringe”), a surprising amount of it represented conspiratorial thinking. A relatively mild version hypothesized an economic conspiracy based on the power of the aluminum industry. Antisemitic conspiracists saw a Zionist plot, of course, similar to the one behind the Salk vaccine for polio. Charles B. Hudson was the first to see the true magnitude of brainwashing involved, in that “fluorination” affected “brain cells that are the source of resistance to slavery and a desire for freedom.” Fluorinated water, Hudson opined, was probably responsible for Britain’s electing a Labour government. He went on to claim that “the ancient civilizations were destroyed by such poisons fed the bodies and brains of the people by the ruling caste who desired to perpetuate their dictatorships by wiping out resistance in the people. It seems that the White Race bodies and brains react more disastrously to such poisons.”25 Everyone knew the power of fluorination. Kenneth Goff had, as a young Communist, conspired with his fellow cell members to poison water supplies with fluorine to “bring about a spirit of lethargy in the nation.” Fluoridated water was also reportedly used by the Russian secret police “to make their prisoners stupid so they can be more easily brainwashed.”26

The fear of fluoride poisoning was frequently connected with both polio vaccine conspiracies and the mental health threat. One flyer, with a weirdly frightening drawing of a little girl cringing before a grinning skeleton wielding a pawn shop sign, asked:

Are you willing to PUT IN PAWN to the UNHOLY THREE all of the material, mental and spiritual resources of this GREAT REPUBLIC? . . . 

1. 1. Water containing Fluorine (rat poison—no antidote) is already the only water in many of our army camps, making it very easy for saboteurs to wipe out an entire camp personel [sic]. . . .
2. 2. Polio serum, it is reported, has already killed and maimed children. . . . This vaccine drive is the entering wedge for nation-wide socialized medicine. . . . In enemy hands it can destroy a whole generation.
3. 3. Mental Hygiene is a subtle and diabolical plan of the enemy to transform a free and intelligent people into a cringing hoard of zombies. . . .

FIGHT COMMUNISTIC WORLD GOVERNMENT It is later than you think!27

The flyer further declared the U.S. Public Health Service to be “heavily infiltrated by Russian-born doctors, according to Congressman Clare Hoffman.” This idea caught on with antifluoridation groups around the country, like the one in La Crosse, Wisconsin, that said: “Considering the recently-exposed infiltration of the many departments of our federal government by Communists, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the fluoridation-program could be subversive, since the U.S. Public Health Service has mothered the fluoridation program in the U.S.” Unreasonable or not, such fears were widespread. A study of the local referendum that stopped fluoridation in Northampton, Massachusetts, concluded that the defeat “resulted largely from growing anti-intellectualism and the ‘current suspicion of scientists, a fear of conspiracy, the tendency to see the world as menacing.’”28 Suspicion of government agencies spread rapidly on the conspiratorial Right. Alarmed by data collection by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Jo Hindman expanded on the “years of surreptitious planning and experimental action on the part of social engineers embedded in our various school systems, professions and agencies.” These experts were secretly “dedicated to reshaping American society into an alien, unconstitutional, and collectivist State mould.” Buttressing Hindman’s claim, Revilo Oliver told a meeting of the Illinois Daughters of the American Revolution that the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare employed a full third of “the top echelon of international conspirators in this country.”29

The “Menticide” of Our Children

Of particular concern was the victimization of children and youth. W. Cleon Skousen lectured parents on “the so-called ‘Mental Health,’ program and the dangers of coercive control psychiatry.”30 More impressionable than adults, children did not need to be institutionalized to be brainwashed; schools could be used for that purpose. Moreover, mental health professionals seemed to be singling children out for treatment. In 1959, a Houston youth study evoked several “bogeymen” of the Right—“the outside agitator, the academic expert, and the philanthropic foundation”—and generated a massive backlash. A local newsletter placed the blame on “the foggy advocates of federal control, the socialists, the do-gooders, and especially the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health—that perversion of a great Texas family tradition through the ill-advised, tax-exempt use of its fortune. This meddlesome, misguided outfit, long aggressive in sinister mental health intrusions into private affairs, is pushing seminars at chosen colleges throughout the state . . . with six-week courses for pseudo-psychiatrists, hand-picked in accord with U.S. Office of Education ‘criteria,’ and financed individually by federal grants.” Local opposition to the survey was so intense that the results were publicly and ceremoniously burned.31 Nationwide opposition was led by the Minute Women, a group devoted to ferreting out subversive influences in public schools. In a magazine article, Minute Woman Gene Birkeland, California “chairman” of the group, delved into the problem with an anecdote about a child sociopath, asking, “Why was there no saving voice of conscience in this child-strangler?” and answering by pointing to the “‘revolutionary’ doctrine” of G. Brock Chisholm and the half dozen organizations that embody his views. Chisholm’s actual “doctrine” was that sex education should be taught in schools, which was not merely deemed immoral but which also underlay “the Soviet use of unrestrained sexual license as a key weapon in subjugating the youth of captive nations.”32

The menace of psychology rejuvenated what had become a relatively moribund area of conspiratorial interest: the public schools. Fear of Communist subversion had faded along with the Red Scare, progressive education based on the ideas of John Dewey was perhaps too arcane a threat to capture the public’s imagination, and the Daughters of the American Revolution had been reduced to declaring textbooks of being “guilty of special pleading from the liberals and internationalists.” In the absence of any other serious threats, mind control fears loomed large.33 The increasing use of psychology in schools led to a wave of books and articles, starting with E. Merrill Root’s Brainwashing in the High Schools and Matt Cvetic’s articles about “thought control” in the magazine the American Mercury. Dan Smoot revived anti-UNESCO rhetoric by portraying a ten-year-old series of its booklets on education as mind control, expounding the “urgent duty to develop informed and competent world citizens.” Smoot found certain UNESCO statements to be un-American, such as, for instance: “As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can only achieve precarious results.”34

“What is in your child’s textbook?” is a question that was applied to much of the curriculum, where even game preserves and fish hatcheries were among the “government tentacles” intruding into “every walk of life.” And, of course, the science that “teaches as fact the theory (man’s guess) that man ‘evolved’ from lower animal [sic], contrary to Bible teaching” was indoctrination at its worst.35 Thus, it was not only the campaign of desegregation that led some to advocate the abandonment of public education but what the students were forced to learn as well. Private schools without federal interference would ensure that “every parent and every child can keep a close watch on the ‘materials’ of education” to protect students from “any left-wing National Education Association . . . trying to brainwash American children to accept a one world, one race, one color super-state set up with Jew control at the top.”36

The threat posed by psychology went well beyond the textbooks and curriculum, sometimes to areas too delicate to mention. Gene Birkeland had some difficulty finding “printable quotes” in an instructor’s guide on sex education, which she viewed as Pavlovian “mind-conditioning.” Even Dan Smoot, no-nonsense ex-FBI agent, found a UNESCO paper “too obscene to read publicly,” hinting at surveys in which children were asked about their parents’ sex lives.37 Sex education in schools was, to some of its opponents, part of a larger conspiracy against morality. An article lionizing the opponents of “blatant” sex education in Anaheim, California, schools described the forces mobilized against them under the heading, “Leftists Defend Programs”:

The behaviorists, entrenched in major universities all over the country, were in a perfect position to bring up their big guns. And so they did. Clergymen of the liberal persuasion rushed to the defense of SIECUS [the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States], while doctors and educators vied with one another to secure favorable comment about the sex programs from the mass media.

Psychology Today, with expensive packaging and seemingly limitless funding from mysterious sources, ran a series of articles ridiculing all those gallant little people who had fought so hard for their children.

Playboy Magazine ran laudatory reviews of books written by the sexologists and carried a lengthy interview with Dr. Mary Calderone, during which she was given ample space to attack her critics.

When the issue began to wane, generating less press coverage, this was interpreted as the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States going “underground.”38

Even more menacing than sex education was “its twin”: sensitivity training. Ezra Taft Benson, apostle of the Mormon Church and former secretary of agriculture, lumped sensitivity training in with the other “atrocious, destructive evils” perpetrated by the “Communist conspiracy, fellow-travelers, and dupes.” The evils could be found “in our music, in our art, in sex perversion and so-called sex education in the schools, in destructive sensitivity training—a powerful form of Pavlovian brainwashing.” Others who found sensitivity training conspiratorial included Gary Allen, Don Bell, and the Ku Klux Klan, which declared it to be “mental suicide!”39 The deepest conspiracy was unraveled by Ed Dieckmann Jr., San Diego policeman and pulp fiction author. Dieckmann’s conspiracy involved all the expected participants: psychologists (Carl Rogers) and psychiatrists (G. Brock Chisholm), the “leftist” American Psychological Association, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, the National Training Labs, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and at least a dozen other organizations. Dieckmann declared that sensitivity training “is the most poisonous legacy the Illuminati left us,” and so we should not be surprised to learn that

the “sex ed” of the kind now being pushed is sensitivity training and that’s what is wrong with it! All the ingredients are there: self-confession, the lack of right and wrong, group consensus, the “New Morality,” and the only loyalty that toward One-World, as condensed in the World Citizenship Credo of the United Nations: “World Citizenship and Mental Health.”

Get it? If you are so blind as to not perceive the blessings of One-World, you are less than healthy and ready for shock treatments.40

The 1960s saw a variety of “sensitivity trainings”: Gestalt therapy, human relations workshops, Esalen, psychodrama. To conspiracists, the point of them all was the same: people would lose their individuality and “become homogenized into a group . . . subject to the will of a leader.” In this context, self-criticism forms the basis of “voluntary” confessions of the type used by tyrants who want people’s minds “influenced, tamed and broken down into servility.” This Pavlovian “brainwashing” technique is, according to the conspiracists, a variety of “menticide.” It can even be “used through the mass communications media . . . to turn the U.S. into a nation of mental robots.” Even the most harmless versions, such as that practiced under the aegis of the National Council of Churches, could generate an editorial charging that “sponsors and participants could have called it appropriately a workshop on How to Recruit and Brainwash Teenage Children.”41

All these elements were seen as part of one conspiracy to destroy the will to resist subjugation. It was orchestrated either by Communists or by one-worlders and was particularly responsible for what had gone wrong with America’s young people. It was centered in psychology, but the conspirators also pointed to “their scientists, educators, and entertainers. . . . rendering a generation of American youth useless through nerve jamming, mental deterioration, and retardation.” This, too, was menticide: “a literal suicide of the mind.”42 Sex education and sensitivity training were only one part of the plan. There were drugs (“it is generally accepted that Communism is behind the narcotics drive”); movies (“naked women, blasphemous portrayals of the Lord Jesus, and certain avowals that automation will deprive these youth of their future”), folk songs (with “subtle, Marxist content”), and, of course, rock and roll. Representative James Utt of Orange County, California, explained: “The Beatles, and their mimicking rock-and-rollers, use the Pavlovian technique to produce artificial neuroses in our young people. Extensive experiments in hypnotism and rhythm have shown how rock-and-roll music leads to a destruction of the normal inhibitory mechanism of the cerebral cortex and permits easy acceptance of immorality and disregard to all moral norms.” Hardly surprising, then, that “the Beatles ability to make teenagers take off their clothes and riot is laboratory tested and approved.”43

The public school as purveyor of psychopolitics persists in mind-control conspiracy theory. In 1976 Jo-Ann Abrigg’s account of “psycho-social education” explicitly connected humanism and Pavlovian behaviorism, a combination that turned classrooms into “mental health clinics” devoted to “behavior modification.” Ten years later, New Age philosophy opponent Constance Cumbey reiterated the menace of humanistic principles in schools, calling these “the exact same beliefs with which our children are brainwashed in public schools beginning in kindergarten. . . . No conspiracy?” And long-time public school opponent and Reagan administration education adviser Charlotte Iserbyt agreed. The “brainwashing for the acceptance of the ‘system’s’ control,” she wrote, “would take place in the school—through indoctrination and the use of behavior modification.” Iserbyt singled out for particular opprobrium “critical thinking” as “nothing but pure unadulterated destruction of absolute values of right and wrong.”44

Mind-Control Conspiracism

Mind control was a growing area of conspiracism outside education as well, particularly as an outgrowth of concern over the military and intelligence agencies’ forays into psychological operations. In the 1980s, allusions to the military’s “mind war” program of psychological operations began to proliferate, “with its ‘sinister’ title quickly winning it the most lurid conspiracy theory reputation.” The psychological operations program was becoming a conspiratorial “blueprint . . . for world domination.”45 Early on, in what he called “an exercise in citizens’ intelligence,” Walter Bowart had laid out the connections between the CIA’s MK-Ultra, or mind control, program and the “lone nuts” behind various assassinations. In his foreword to Bowart’s book, Richard Condon (author of The Manchurian Candidate, the bestselling thriller about a mind-controlled assassin) summarized the case against educators, the military, the medical profession, lawyers, and “our esteemed statesmen”: “Each one of those groups is involved in this dismembering of the mind. Taxes and the collective conscience make the urination of the secret police upon the human mind possible. ‘Brainwashing’ per se is no news to any of us. Controlled assassins are not known to us only through fiction. Advertising assaults on behalf of poisonous materials to induce us successfully to buy and consume are early bastions of mind control.”46 While Bowart and Condon were attacking the mind-controlling police state more or less from the Left, it was more regularly being attacked by the well-established right-wing new world order conspiracists. Antigovernment stalwart William Pabst once filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of the American people against “various personages that had a key part in a conspiratorial program to do away with the United States as we know it.” Pabst’s lengthy argument swept up UNESCO, the Alaska Mental Health Bill from twenty years earlier, and the abolition of state governments by executive order under the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration’s objective of “Controlling the Masses.” Pabst described the federal prison camps being built to house patriots in ways that became the template for Federal Emergency Management Agency camps. There, government “psycho-surgery” would make you “as cooperative as an adding machine,” and drugs, such as “something called anectine (phonetic spelling)” could be used to torture you. To ensure that people go willingly to the camps “in a tranquil state of mind,” incapacitating nerve gas could be released from aircraft as an aerosol.47

By the 1990s, the prospect of mind-controlled slaves had become a well-established element of conspiracism. Jack Mohr’s “Talmudic/Communist” assessment of “psychopoliticians” led him to see their work as part of a much larger conspiracy. For example, in 1996, Alaska Representative Don Young’s emergency American Land Sovereignty Protection Act, intended to protect the United States from the establishment of any World Heritage Sites, failed to pass the House. Mohr’s take on this was that representatives had “voted in favor of the New World Order over the rights of their constituents,” and he wondered whether “psychopoliticians have had a part in this?”48 Mohr’s psychopoliticians were hard to identify, though Eustace Mullins predictably identified them as Freudians working for the Zionist-controlled CIA. The high visibility of Kurt Lewin, a behavioral scientist from Germany, was used to establish psychopoliticians as ex-Nazis brought to the United States by the CIA during the Cold War. Aside from the CIA and behavioral science organizations such as Lewin’s Tavistock Institute, the military was the only institution widely credited with having a mind-control agenda, although Martin Cannon, in his book The Controllers, included the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Atomic Energy Commission to buttress his argument that “the ‘UFO abduction’ phenomenon MIGHT be a continuation of clandestine mind control operations.”49

Mind control is applicable to any purpose, and, thus, it turns up in many conspiracies. Cannon’s hypothesized UFO abductions were critical to the government’s MK-Ultra mind-control experiments, in that they solved “‘the disposal problem,’ i.e., the question of ‘What do we do with the victims?’” More typically, mind-control victims are turned into assassins and superhuman agents who do the bidding of intelligence or military organizations. Often, the victims are serving deeper, occult forces, but sometimes they are merely victims of “research” such as that conducted by the CIA into cannibalism and “blood rituals.” Regardless, the danger is severe. Cisco Wheeler and Fritz Springmeier preface their book on Illuminati mind control with a “WARNING . . . If there is any chance you the reader have had mind control done to you, you must consider the following book to be DANGEROUS. . . . The complications that could result for those under mind control learning the truth—could be fatal.”50

Mind-control conspiracy theory has also come to play a significant role for those who believe in child ritual abuse and Satanic and cult-related abuse. When the premise behind repressed and recovered memories was shown to be fraudulent by researchers associated with the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, believers called the researchers mind-control agents who had helped perpetrate the abuse in the first place and were now trying to cover it up.51 Walter Bowart explained this in remarks to the Society for the Investigation, Treatment and Prevention of Ritual and Cult Abuse. According to a reporter: “Bowart claimed that the False Memory Spindrome [sic] Foundation . . . is a Central Intelligence Agency action. It is an action aimed at the psychological and psychiatric mental health community to discredit you, to keep you in fear and terror. Bowart stated that everyone connected with the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) will be shown to be ‘spooks or dupes.’ According to Bowart, the CIA is currently conducting a campaign of mind control against the American public and wants to discredit victims of these experiments so that their stories will be seen as false memories.”52 Beyond all this, the idea of a mind-controlled slave naturally led to visions of perverse sex. Thus, the military used mind control to create “a coterie of hypno-programmed soldiers” and to brainwash women to “reward” them with “unlimited sexual access.” One Brice Taylor wrote an account of her brainwashing subtitled “The Memoirs of Bob Hope’s and Henry Kissinger’s Mind-Controlled Slave. Used as a Presidential Sex Toy and Personal ‘Mind File’ Computer.” Similarly, CIA-created slave Cathy O’Brien was placed in “forced prostitution (white slavery) with those in the upper echelons of world politics,” and orphans from Boys Town were programmed and forced into prostitution “with several of the nation’s political and economic power brokers.”53 And, as Jack Mohr made clear, you are merely naive if you thought Christian faith would protect you from such a fate: “‘Just as a dog can be trained, so a man or woman can be trained . . . Sexual lust, masochism, . . . and other desirable perversions (such as Sodomy), can be induced by pain-drug hypnosis, to the benefit of the psychopolitical operator.’ Don’t be so naive as to believe that you will be able to withstand the use of pain-drug hypnosis.”54

Aside from the creation of sex slaves, mind-control conspiracism is generally subsidiary to some other conspiracy theory. Presumably, conspirators are trying to brainwash the public to go along with some malevolent plan. But over the years a mind-control conspiracy theory with its own raison d’être began to take shape, at least to the degree that conspiracists became increasingly fixated on the techniques of mind control while paying less attention to its purpose.