You can see it in the worship of [Ronald] Reagan, which portrays him as somebody who saved us from government. Actually he was an apostle of big government.

Somebody puts up some weird thing and somebody else thinks yeah maybe that's the way things work and pretty soon you have some cult going. Its not the fault of the internet, it's the fault of a social and culture system that doesn't educate people properly and in fact on purpose. They don't want to educate people properly.

Let's take Pravda in the 1980s. I mean you could have read things in Pravda saying that it was a stupid error to invade Afghanistan: "it was a dumb thing to do, we have to get out, it's costing us too much." I mean that U.S. analog of that would be "extreme liberalism," and it has been pretty well studied.

If you want to scare people, you talk about evil.

You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.

In fact, it's pretty dramatic when you get to 1975, very revealing, the [Vietnam] war ends. Everybody had to write something about the war, what it meant. You also had polls of public opinion, and they're dramatically different.

The Left, in a general sense, is very much atomized. We live in highly atomized societies. People are pretty much alone; it's you and your iPad.