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Please enjoy – to the extent you can – my Foreword to ‘The Indoctrinated Brain’, by Dr Michael Nehls. The book, which explains the neuroscience of propaganda, will chill your soul, but may explain a great deal.

‘The fact that the brain is plastic—modifiable—has become much better understood by the public in the past few decades.

General readers understand by now that the human brain can be altered; and that experiences can modify its reactions and processes. We understand now for example that PTSD leaves lasting changes in brain functioning. It’s been established that motherhood changes the brain and that bonding itself is a chemical process modified by the brain.

We also understand, as general readers, that propaganda is real.

Some of us have studied propaganda in the past. We have a working knowledge of Joseph Goebbels, and of the artistry and craft that underlay his manufacturing of National Socialist consent. The work of Edward Bernays, one of the earliest practitioners of what became the field of public relations, has been widely read in English. Decades-old bestsellers such as Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key exposed the fact that advertisers use every tool at their disposal to alter our reactions to their products—down to the level of the subconscious mind.

Modern general audiences also understand that governments use “messaging”—and often, heavy-handed propaganda—to lead us to take actions that can be against our interests or our better conscious judgments; to create prejudices and divisions that may not otherwise exist; to heighten fears and to trigger a sense of vulnerability in us, so that we can be better manipulated and guided to goals that are not our own.

But Dr. Michael Nehls’s thesis in this book is revolutionary because it brings together all of these fields of inquiry and proposes a set of questions so radical that they make the mysteries of the past three years fall into place. This is the indispensable book. In The Indoctrinated Brain, Dr. Nehls brings these areas of study together in a way that has never been done before. By applying neuroscience to the otherwise bizarre events of the recent past, he explains what has happened to humanity.

Many of us have noted that our loved ones and colleagues have changed. Post- mRNA injection rollout, we notice that people who were highly educated critical thinkers, have become unable to think outside of two simple binaries. We watch in astonishment as formerly sophisticated loved ones and friends regurgitate talking points with no self-awareness. We wonder why there is a sense of something inchoately missing when we sit with a vaccinated or COVID-fearful friend. We cannot fathom what has caused this sea change.

Dr. Nehls’s hypothesis can explain it.

“The Indoctrinated Brain introduces a largely unknown, powerful neurobiological mechanism whose externally induced dysfunction underlies these catastrophic developments,” as the publisher notes.

Dr. Nehls argues that the spike protein, along with other COVID measures, represents an intentional attack on the human hippocampus—where autobiographical memory and individuality itself originate—and that “fear porn” keeps us from holding on to the autobiographical memories that encompass our former selves. As a result, humans have become deindividualized, more suggestible, more forgetful, more compliant, and less able to engage in critical thinking and creative reasoning. This argument utterly accords with what many of us are seeing, to our horror, every day. Dr. Nehls’s The Indoctrinated Brain is an indispensable book because it applies neuroscience to politics and especially to the politics of fascism. The need for that has existed for as long as modern fascism has existed.

Neuroscience should be applied to politics and to social change, but it is rare indeed when those fields of analysis meet. By bringing these fields of knowledge together and mapping neurological science against propaganda, and vice versa, Dr. Nehls brings vast new insights to the reader that would not have been attainable previously.

After you read The Indoctrinated Brain, you will think: Of course. Of course, the propaganda of the past few years must have been predicated upon intensive study of the brain and its reactions. Of course, the hundreds of millions of dollars that were recently spent and are currently being spent by the US and other governments on behavioral science and behavior modification would result in insights that would be applied by the US and other governments to making populations more tractable, less able to reason, less creative and more compliant.

Why else would they so heavily have invested in such studies? Of course, the constant messaging, especially about fear, over the past three years, would have an effect that is not just about public health or perhaps not at all about public health—but that it is rather about making humans in free societies more tractable—with public health as the excuse, the proxy, for this deployment of life-altering and consciousness-altering fear. It is not the fear porn about the specific scary thing that matters, Dr. Nehls persuasively argues here: the fear itself is deliverable. The fear itself changes and indeed damages the brain.

I’ve long been interested in the psychiatric effects and, as I guessed, intentionalities behind “lockdowns” and “pandemic” messaging. But I did not have the neuroscientific background to understand exactly what was being done to people via “lockdowns” and the “fear porn” of the pandemic years related to the virus—to other human beings.

Through my study of the psychiatric effects of torture and isolation, that I took on for a book about closing democracies, I realized that isolation causes profound and sometimes permanent changes in the brain. I knew intuitively in the post-9/11, “Global War on Terror” years, that constant fear would wear down faculties needed for critical thinking. And I applied those insights to the isolation and fear messaging of 2020–22. But I did not have the complete picture.

This book provides it. It is the “aha” hypothetical for our time.

The Indoctrinated Brain provides the missing practical knowledge of neuroscience, that explains why isolating people creates a more befuddled, more easily manipulated population. It explains exactly why a message that closeness with other human beings can kill you, or you can kill others (especially your grandma) through physical closeness, might rewire the human brain to create the vulnerability to delusion and bad science and cultlike thinking, that many of us observed in formerly critically thinking loved ones and friends, post-2020. It even raises the question of whether the spike protein contributes to brain fog and to the erasure of a sense of an autonomous, resilient, individuated, and questing self.

If Dr. Nehls is right, his theory here will be as important as Dr. Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the subconscious, if not more so. If he is right, his theory explains why governments around the world mandated “lockdown” measures and mRNA injections, which would not ultimately then be about public health but about creating manipulable, passive citizens.

If Dr. Nehls is right, it explains so many baffling features of the past three years—notably the fact that formerly thoughtful, highly individuated leaders of institutions, down to rank-and-file citizens, followed cultlike dicta without a mur- mur, and pursued nonsensical goals such as isolation, masking, and submission to vaccine mandates, without protest. Dr. Nehls’s thesis would explain the bizarre experience many of us are having of watching our formerly analytical loved ones, find themselves unable to keep two thoughts in their heads at the same time, unable to engage in calm debate without exploding emotionally, unable to maintain contact and connection with people with whom they disagree.

As I write, another global crisis is being spun up, this one in the Middle East. Within a day, highly educated and formerly skeptical loved ones of mine are repeating glaring legacy media talking points without any self-consciousness. It’s upsetting not to know why they would change in this way—and it is even more upsetting, though incredibly enlightening, to read Dr. Nehls’s argument and realize what the cause may be of their submissiveness to propaganda narratives. It makes it both easier and harder to contend with loved ones, friends, and colleagues who have been intellectually blunted in this way, to understand Dr. Nehls’s point of view and realize that this sad change in cognition might be simply physical—the spike protein—and neuropsychiatric: the repetition of fear messages and their impact on the brain.

In my social media feed today—on a day when the news has brought images of endless atrocities to our media streams, and when we are being told that this Friday will be a “Day of Jihad” with plenty of stabbings—someone wrote, “Protect your amygdala.” That meant, do not expose yourself to endless scenes of rape, murder, beheadings, atrocities, and horrors.

Dr. Nehls’s book is ultimately a hopeful one, since if we understand the damage to our brains from both spike proteins and fear pornography, we can find ways to prospect ourselves and our conscious minds. I appreciate the practical suggestions Dr. Nehls gives us to do just that.

It is scary that we are living in a time in which there is, as Dr. Nehls so powerfully points out, a war on our brains. But it must be less scary to understand what is being done to us, with Dr. Nehls’s help, so we can protect and strengthen our autobiographical memory and critical thinking, and so we can survive this onslaught with the full range of our intelligence—and our humanity—intact.‘

By Dr. Naomi Wolf and Dr. Michael Nehls

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