Shock & stress are used to make people more susceptible to propaganda, says David A. Hughes, PhD

David A. Hughes, PhD interviewed by James Delingpole on June 4, 2025.

"You describe a phenomenon called Permanent Social Turbulence."

"It comes from the Tavistock Institute in the 1960s..."

"It's all to do with techniques of shock and stress and keeping... entire societies in states which render them more susceptible to propaganda, and thereby, more controllable."

"It all goes back originally to World War One and shell-shock, and the realization that individuals with shell-shock were more psychologically susceptible and programmable..."

"In the mid-20th century they had MKUltra which was just kind of 'upping the ante' in terms of, the brutality of experiments on individuals.”

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[ MKUltra was an illegal human experimentation program designed by the CIA to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. ]

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"But what's significant about the second half of the 20th century, particularly with the Tavistock Institute, is attempts to apply similar techniques at the group and... societal levels, and they did a lot of work on this.”

"Later on, Naomi Klein traces some of these ideas as well in her book, The Shock Doctrine."

"That through wars or natural disasters... entire societies could be disrupted and shocked."

"The COVID lockdowns, 9/11, all of these are examples at which something extraordinary, something suddenly happens, and the ordinary rules just go out the window."

"Democracy and the rule of law go out the window."

"This idea of permanent social turbulence coined, I think, in 1963."

"Then in the 1970s... we had the oil price shocks, Operation Gladio, false flag terrorism, later globalized through the so-called war-on-terror."

"And really... the entire 21st-century... what has it really been?"

"A millennium of fear governed through emergency rule based on a series of disasters... 2008 financial disaster, 2020 disease [Covid], false flag terrorism…”

"Whatever it may be, there's always some excuse to have to do something that's supposedly exceptional."

"[But] that state of exception is actually permanent."

"The normal rules can just be suspended at any moment, in which case, democracy is essentially a charade."

"So these are the techniques by which they are essentially corrupting and dismantling liberal democracy."

"I imagine that if you try to explain this to most people... look, there are these incidents which are staged to frighten you, and that in your frightened state, you are susceptible to brainwashing and other forms of manipulation."

"Most people would go, no."

"Some of the mechanisms are extremely crude."

"You shock people — you put them into that state — and then it's just wall-to-wall propaganda.”

"Anyone old enough to remember, it was nothing but terrorism, terrorism, terrorism... in the news... for years after 9/11."

"And that's enough, actually, to work on most ordinary members of the public."

"It's just the power of propaganda..."

"What was scary about COVID and... what I argue in my book is that it wasn't really a public health crisis."

"It was a psychological warfare operation deployed against the public."

"What's scary about it is it worked on multiple different levels, involving all kinds of psychological techniques which have been developed over the course of the 20th century and beyond, and... rolled out simultaneously, all at once, against the publics of countries transnationally."

"So this is what we are faced with now."

"I call it a transnational Deep State, which is waging what I call an Omni War against the rest of humanity in an attempt to preserve the ruling class rule."

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The full 1:52 hour interview is posted here:

https://rumble.com/v6vfii5-david-a.-hughes.html

The book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" by Naomi Klein can be found here:

https://www.amazon.com/Shock-Doctrine-Rise-Disaster-Capitalism/dp/0312427999

One book about The Tavistock Institute, which David A. Hughes, PhD talks about, titled "Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the Masses", can be found here:

https://www.amazon.com/Tavistock-Institute-Social-Engineering-Masses/dp/163424043X

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David A. Hughes, PhD is author of the book

"Covid-19: Psychological Operations, and the War for Technocracy : Volume 1",

which can be downloaded for FREE here:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-41850-1

David A. Hughes, PhD is also author of the book “Wall Street, the Nazis, and the Crimes of The Deep State”, which can be found here:

https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-Nazis-Crimes-State-ebook/dp/B0CL5BW8K4

David A. Hughes's Substack is here (the best place to keep up with his work):

https://dhughes.substack.com/

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