The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour

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The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour episodes

September 30 Dr. Peter Breggin Hour - 9-30-26
This week on The Breggin Hour, Peter and I sat down with one of the more wonderful men we know: Sheriff Richard Mack, founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, the Arizona sheriff who took the federal government all the way to the Supreme Court over the Brady Bill—and won.
He has a new book. The title is deliberately offensive. He said so himself, and he meant it that way.
The Democrat Murder of America: Demagoguery in the First Degree.
The cover is a jackass in a patriotic hat, a knife in its hoof, stabbing the Statue of Liberty in the back. Sheriff Mack admitted it is horrible. That was the point. He wanted your attention. The book site is murderofamerica.com. There is an ebook at $14.92, an audiobook at $17.76, and a paperback at $26.76. They planned those numbers. Columbus. 1776. 2026.
This is not a campaign pamphlet for a party. Sheriff Mack said it is not a pro-Trump book and not a pro-Republican book. It is a history book about what is being done to the country from within—and a manual for people who still believe the Constitution and the individual human being are worth defending.
You cannot have communism and freedom
That was the sentence he kept coming back to.
Those philosophies are not cousins. They are not “different paths to the same good.” They are the antithesis of each other. Communism does not recognize civil rights. It does not honor the person. It tells you how many children you may have, what you may say, what you may own, and what you must obey. The promise of forced equality is a lie. The individual is erased.
Peter and I have spent years saying the same thing in another language: collectivism—religious, political, or “scientific”—is the opposite of Christianity and of the American founding. The First Amendment begins with faith for a reason. A Creator who made each person in His image is not compatible with a state that claims ownership of the soul and rejects the individuality and unique qualities of each person.
Sheriff Mack asked a question the media will not ask the new crop of openly socialist and communist candidates: What will you do with the people who refuse to cooperate?
We already know part of the answer. We lived it.
COVID was the rehearsal
On the show, we talked about the last few years as if they were ancient history. They are not. Children locked inside. Playgrounds closed. Churches shuttered. Babies staring at masked faces for the first years of life. Australians held for months in camps. Planes on which you could remove the mask only to eat—so Sheriff Mack ate peanuts for hours, until they changed the rule to force the little ritual of pull-down, bite, pull-up. Control for control’s sake.
They learned that a “crisis of the day” can make Americans surrender schools, businesses, worship, and the Constitution. Justice Scalia, in the very case Sheriff Mack won, wrote that the Constitution protects us from our own best intentions. It divides power so we will resist the temptation to concentrate it as an expedient solution to the emergency of the moment.
Never let a crisis go to waste. That is not wisdom. That is a method.
If you think that chapter is over, Sheriff Mack’s warning is simple: wait until the people who admired that machinery hold still more offices.
**History they hoped you would forget**
The book is full of names younger Americans were never taught.
Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, told Americans they were gullible. You will not accept communism outright, he said. We will feed you small doses of socialism until you wake up and find you already have communism. We will not need to invade. We will destroy you from within. We will bury you.
Sheriff Mack’s argument is that a political movement inside the Democrat Party is fulfilling that threat—not because every Democrat is a villain, he said, but because the party’s dominant direction is to replace the Constitution with something closer to Marx.
He talked about Dorothy Kilgallen, the What’s My Line television game show panelist and journalist who interviewed Jack Ruby and then died the same night her JFK notes disappeared—barbiturates and alcohol, ruled an accident, the same pattern as Marilyn Monroe. Vince Foster. The sudden expansion of Vietnam after JFK was gone. The deep state is not a new invention.
He talked about CNN’s Sarah Sidner, who came to his daughter’s house, recorded eighty-five minutes, heard again and again why they were even talking—his Supreme Court victory against the Clinton Justice Department—and then went on Anderson Cooper and mentioned none of it. Peter and I know that pattern. We have been walked out of buildings we were invited into. YouTube banned us for life after we announced *COVID-19 and the Global Predators*. The media is not a referee. It is a participant.
Elections, cities, and the Senate
Sheriff Mack described a country in which a tourist from Buenos Aires can walk into a New York polling place, register without ID and without English, vote, and fly home to brag. He described the open talk of abolishing or neutering the Senate and packing the Court—so that a handful of giant cities decide the fate of small states. Destroy the Constitution, he said, and you destroy the country.
He also said something we hear too rarely: there are good Democrats, including Christians, who have been lied to. The book is written to be handed to them. Start with the epilogue, he suggested. Then talk.
That is not hatred. That is an invitation to wake up from indoctrination. The smartest person in the room, he said, is the one who can recognize his own brainwashing.
A peaceful manual, while peace is still possible
Peter’s closing on the hour was short: buy the book. You are not only buying pages. You are supporting one of the great living voices for constitutional liberty in this country.
Sheriff Mack and co-author Dan Perkins talked, while they were writing, about what happens if the book actually gains traction. They have already been smeared. They know the next step. Perkins told him he hoped their wives would be taken care of. That is not melodrama. That is what it costs now to say plain things in public.
The alternative they offer is still peaceful: know the history, refuse the next crisis-of-the-day, restore local accountability, protect the sheriff’s oath to the Constitution rather than to Washington, and come together as good people who still love this country.
We are of a generation that did duck-and-cover, that watched people shot trying to leave East Germany, that saw COVID used as a nationwide obedience drill. Younger people have been propagandized in school and have not seen the same failures with their own eyes. That is why a book like this matters. It is a history lesson and a warning in one.
Christmas will be here before we think about it. Give this book as a gift of freedom—one for you, one for the family member who still believes the slogans.
The website again: **murderofamerica.com**
*The Breggin Hour* airs on America Out Loud. We will keep talking. We refuse to stop.
The truth still sets people free. But first they have to hear it.
— Ginger, with Peter

________

Learn more about Dr. Peter Breggin's work: https://breggin.com/

See more from Dr. Breggin's long history of being a reformer in psychiatry: https://breggin.com/Psychiatry-as-an-Instrument-of-Social-and-Political-Control

Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal, the how-to manual @ https://breggin.com/a-guide-for-prescribers-therapists-patients-and-their-families/

Get a copy of Dr. Breggin's latest book:
WHO ARE THE “THEY” - THESE GLOBAL PREDATORS?
WHAT ARE THEIR MOTIVES AND THEIR PLANS FOR US?
HOW CAN WE DEFEND AGAINST THEM?
Covid-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey
Get a copy: https://www.wearetheprey.com/

“No other book so comprehensively covers the details of COVID-19 criminal conduct as well as its origins in a network of global predators seeking wealth and power at the expense of human freedom and prosperity, under cover of false public health policies.”
58 min
September 02The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour - 9-2-26
In a world quick to prescribe electrical violence to the brain under the guise of “treatment,” it is a profound relief—and a moral imperative—to sit down with one of the clearest voices challenging this relic of psychiatric barbarism. On The Breggin Hour, my husband Peter Breggin and I spoke at length with Professor John Read, a clinical psychologist from the University of East London whose work has helped pierce the veil of denial surrounding electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
Professor Read is no outsider throwing stones. He comes from the heart of the clinical psychology establishment, yet he has become one of its most formidable critics on ECT. His recent international survey—the largest ever, with 1,100 participants from 44 countries—gives voice to the lived reality of those who have endured this procedure. The findings are damning.
What the Largest ECT Survivor Survey Reveals
The research team, which included ECT survivors like our colleague Sarah Hancock, asked hard questions about efficacy, memory loss, and informed consent. The results:
On five different measures of effectiveness, the “majority” of recipients reported “no improvement” or that their condition was “made worse”.
Two-thirds experienced significant memory loss—both retrograde (losing past memories) and anterograde (inability to form new ones). For most, this persisted for at least three years, which in practical terms means it is often permanent.
The vast majority were not adequately informed about these risks. Neither were their families.
Women continue to receive ECT at twice the rate of men, with 82% of the psychiatrists administering it being male—an observation that raises uncomfortable questions about power, empathy, and whose distress we choose to “treat” with electricity.
These are not abstract statistics. They represent shattered lives, erased memories, and families left picking up the pieces. As Peter has long documented, ECT is essentially a closed-head electrical lobotomy that exceeds OSHA safety thresholds for electrical brain injury. The brain is not “reset”—it is traumatized.
Professor Read put it plainly: we are inducing grand mal seizures in people while another branch of medicine works desperately to prevent them. The original 1930s theory—that schizophrenia and epilepsy were mutually exclusive, so inducing seizures could cure the former—was bizarre even then. That we continue this practice ninety years later, with so little rigorous evidence, is a scandal.
Legal Victories: Hitting Them Where It Hurts
Professor Read has served as an expert witness in key cases that are finally forcing accountability. In a 2023 Florida jury trial, manufacturer Somatics was found liable for failing to adequately warn about brain damage and permanent memory loss. A 2024 California case against individual psychiatrists and a psychiatric center—alleging negligence, fraud, malpractice, and battery—settled just before trial after surviving all dismissal attempts.
MECTA, another major manufacturer, has filed for bankruptcy amid mounting litigation and withdrawn its Spectrum device, only to introduce a near-identical “Sigma” model. The industry adapts, but the human cost remains.
Peter shared his own observations from decades of work, including the first successful ECT malpractice case (Salters, 2005). He described the visible horror: patients emerging confused, amnesic, and disoriented—much like victims of repeated concussions. This is traumatic brain injury, period. The temporary “euphoria” some experience is often the brain’s response to injury, not genuine healing.
The Deeper Problem: Over-Medicalization of Human Suffering
John Read situates ECT within a larger tragedy—the reduction of complex human distress to a purely biological problem solvable by pills or electricity. Poverty, trauma, abuse, loneliness, and loss are pushed aside while white coats reach for the shock machine. Many psychiatrists, he notes, lack the skills or willingness to sit with profound emotional pain, especially in women and older patients.
This resonates deeply with our work exposing psychiatric harm. Whether antidepressants, antipsychotics, or ECT, the pattern is the same: interventions that promise quick fixes but deliver dependency, disability, and despair. The public understands that life circumstances drive mental suffering. Too many professionals still do not.
A Call to Survivors, Families, and Truth-Seekers
If you or a loved one has been harmed by ECT, know that you are not alone. Professor Read’s survey papers are open access—search “John Read ECT survey” to read them directly. Share your story. Support organizations fighting for informed consent and bans on this outdated practice.
We must demand real informed consent, rigorous science, and an end to the normalization of brain damage as “therapy.” Peter and I continue this fight because human rights do not end at the psychiatrist’s door. The brain is not a machine to be jolted into submission.
Listen to the full conversation on The Breggin Hour (available on America Out Loud and major podcast platforms). Professor Read’s humility, clarity, and dedication shine through. We are grateful for his partnership in this long struggle and look forward to future collaborations.
Download and print this free brochure
“No One Should Be Given Shock Treatment“
To all who have suffered:
Your experiences matter. Your memories—however fragmented—are worth fighting for. The truth is emerging, one voice, one lawsuit, one honest conversation at a time. Share this widely. The more light we shine, the harder it becomes for these practices to hide in the shadows.
Peter and Ginger Breggin have spent decades exposing psychiatric harms. Subscribe for more unfiltered truth on mental health, freedom, and the defense of the human spirit.
About our Guest
Dr. John Read is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of East London.
He has published over 200 research papers, primarily on the relationship between adverse life events and psychosis; the negative effects of bio-genetic causal explanations on prejudice; anti-psychotic and anti-depressant medication; electroconvulsive therapy; and the toxic influence of the pharmaceutical industry on clinical research and practice.
John is Chair of the International Institute for Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal [https://iipdw.org] and is on the Board of Hearing Voices Network, England
He has been the editor of the scientific journal ‘Psychosis’ since 2009, and is the editor/author of several books, including:
Read J, Sanders P. (2022) ‘A straight talking introduction to the causes of mental health problems’. PCCS Books.
Read J, Dillon J. (eds) (2013) ‘Models of Madness’, Routledge.
Further Reading/Resources:
Professor John Read’s publications:
A large exploratory survey of electroconvulsive therapy recipients, family members, and friends: what information do they recall being given? Journal of Medical Ethics
A Survey of 1144 ECT Recipients, Family Members and Friends: Does ECT Work?, National Institutes of Health
Largest-ever survey questions ECT’s effectiveness, University of East London
Survey Findings on Electroconvulsive Therapy, Psychology Today
Models of Madness and Other Works by John Read
By Peter R. Breggin, MD:
Download and print this free brochure
“No One Should Be Given Shock Treatment“
Free Resource Center: Dr. Peter Breggin’s ECT and Deep Brain Stimulation Resources Center
Dr. Breggin’s two overview scientific articles: Breggin 1998 and Breggin 2010. The 2010 article contains a brief summary of ECT’s harmful effects, written to inform the FDA. Also read Jones and Baldwin 1992 for a powerful overview.
Read Dr. Breggin’s blogs on ECT. Like the brochure, these are also useful as an introduction for anyone who is just learning about ECT. See his blogs: “New Study Confirms Electroshock (ECT) Causes Brain Damage,” “The Stealth ECT Psychiatrist in Psychiatric Reform,” “FDA Panel Recommends Testing of ECT Machines,” “Electroshock for Children and Involuntary Adults.”
57 min
August 26 The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour - 8-26-26
We thought we would discuss critical thinking and how it applies to today’s propaganda-laden world. And we did. But the conversation quickly turned into a luminous, expansive exchange of knowledge, opinions, and faith, especially between Dr. Fox and Dr. Breggin. Dr. Fox has an open and warm demeanor that radiates care and affection when he greeted us.
Dr. Andrew Fox is an Anglican priest who now lives with his wife in the heart of Texas, where he has settled after immigrating from the United Kingdom. He became an American citizen and shared with us about how happy he is to be here in the United States. We exchanged stories about the unexpected and delightful joy with which recent World Cup tourists coming to America for the first time shared their experiences on social media. Europeans discovered how beautiful, engaging, friendly, welcoming, fun, and (the food!) delicious America is. Then they shared all of that on social media, red-pilling their friends and families and helping Americans feel proud again after these terrible post-COVID years. After the show, I enjoyed reading Dr. Fox’s blog on this topic, “The World Cup: America’s Greatest Untapped Form of Diplomacy.”
Dr. Fox introduced his forthcoming book: Truth in the Age of Applause: How Stupidity Is Ruining the American Dream. We discussed critical thinking and how it and civil dialogue are essential for challenging harmful ideologies while maintaining respect for authority—particularly said Dr. Fox– in scriptural contexts.
The conversation explored the differences between Old and New Testament perspectives on Jews as the Chosen people, with Dr. Fox commenting that while the Old Testament focused on a specific tribe’s witness to one God, the New Testament emphasizes an egalitarian approach where all people are children of God. We discussed how modern concepts of relativism [the philosophical belief that nothing is objectively true or universally applicable] have been misused to undermine truth, particularly in debates about biological reality and gender identity, with Dr. Fox noting that reality doesn’t change regardless of opinions.
I discovered after the interview that Dr. Fox has spoken the truth very actively rather than seeking applause. Dr. Fox had served eight years as Austin City Fire Chaplain when, in 2021, he wrote a blog arguing that men should not compete in women’s sports due to biological differences between the two sexes. According to the Christian Post:
Months later, Fox was dismissed when officials decided that his efforts to apologize to unnamed offended parties were not sufficient, as he refused to recant his views on LGBT issues.
In August 2022, Fox filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, alleging that AFD officials “retaliated against him for exercising his First Amendment rights, violated his First Amendment right to free speech and free exercise of religion, and violated the Texas Constitution.”
On March 3, 2026, the city of Austin reached a $78,000 settlement with former Austin City Fire Chaplain Andrew Fox, according to the Alliance Defending Freedom.
Dr. Fox does not seek applause. He seeks truth. We are sure his book will be as engaging as our hour visit with Dr. Andrew Fox!
57 min
August 19 Dr. Breggin Hour 8-19-26
In the past months, the world has watched as the people of New York City elected Zohran Mamdani to office as mayor of the largest city in the United States, with over 8 million residents and international cultural and economic centers such as the financial sector and performing arts realm. Youthful, charismatic, and bold, he won the election by over 50% in a 3-way race. Mayor Mamdani started making changes from his first day in office. His political philosophy, however, is the same old package the world has seen fail in socialist countries around the world, including Cuba and Venezuela in our own hemisphere.
In the name of fairness, Mamdani planned to pay for the universal daycare, the subsidized housing, the price-controlled groceries, the public transportation through various taxes and other fees, especially on the very rich, the celebrities and billionaires who call New York City home, or own property there. Despite being targeted as the cash cows that would pay for the party, the wealthy did not just pack up and leave on the day that Mayor Mamdani was sworn in. They appeared to be holding their breath, waiting to see if they could afford to stay.
Then Taylor Swift posted two short social media items, neither one long and neither one declaring she was leaving New York City, but containing an air of wistfulness and a hint that leaving might be an option. Within 48 hours, there was a surge unlike any seen in living memory in new listings of high-end residences for sale. Values of the listings totaled $2.3 billion. Should even a portion of those owners who are listing depart from the city, the financial repercussions for New York City and for New York State will be enormous.
Meanwhile, on the heels of the Mamdani victory, new political hopefuls who are declared far-left socialists, many under the banner of Democrat Socialists of America(DSA) are running in primaries around the US. The DSA party and the DSA National Election Commission are hip, excited, and trying hard to be fun.
But all the charisma, the self-declared desire to be kind, to be fair, and all the taxes in the world will not create a more productive, liberty-oriented, vibrant environment able to nurture ingenuity, growth, and opportunity for all.
The Democratic Socialists of America have totalitarian goals that they share with their sibling revolutionaries, Communists, Socialists, and the Woke Left
Under all the hype and the slogans of the Democratic Socialists of America and other far-left groups is a desire to tear down the America we grew up in. They want another American revolution. Like basic Communist tenants the far left wants to abolish private property (or tax it to death), put religion in a closet or abolish it altogether, make everyone “equal” – not in opportunity, but in outcome, and embrace the policies promoted by globalist entities such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization which have lots of goals and targets aiming at fairness and equality on an international scale and at the expense especially of the United States. We have tried in the West to be so kind, so tolerant, so darn nice in the face of destructive policies and hate-filled rhetoric and actions that we have allowed the destruction of our own culture.
So, we invited a genuine survivor of the totalitarian communist USSR who was born in Moscow and immigrated with his family as a young child to Canada. Our guest brought his memories of long food lines, the fear that sits like a stone in a family of dissidents, and his awareness that those who make trouble can be shipped off to Siberia.
We met with Jamie Glazov for an episode of The Breggin Hour. It was one of those rare conversations that feels less like an interview and more like speaking with family. Jamie’s presence, his clarity, and the depth of his lifelong study of totalitarianism left us both strengthened and sobered. The perspectives Jamie shares are fresh, straight from the news headlines.
Jamie is the Russian-born Canadian author, historian, and managing editor of FrontPage Magazine. His updated and expanded book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas, is not merely a must-read. It is a work of truth-telling that explains phenomena many of us have watched with growing alarm but struggled to fully name.
The Left’s Romance with Murderous Regimes and Movements
In United in Hate, Jamie traces a continuous thread through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the Western Left’s repeated romance with the most murderous regimes and movements of their time. The first half of the book examines the “political pilgrims” and fellow travelers who traveled to Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, and the killing fields of Cambodia and Vietnam, returning to praise the very systems that produced mass graves.
The second half shows how that same psychological and ideological pattern transferred, almost seamlessly, to embracing radical Islam and groups such as Hamas. After the collapse of Soviet communism, the Left did not abandon its hunger for a totalitarian alternative to the West. It found a new object of adoration.
October 7, 2023, became the catalyst for the revised edition of United in Hate. Jamie told us that the moment he saw the celebrations and justifications erupting across Western campuses, streets, and media, he knew the book had to be updated and expanded. The ecstasy some on the Left displayed at the rape, mutilation, and murder of Jews was not an aberration. It was the logical continuation of a long romance with tyranny and terror.
A Profound Alienation from the West
Jamie does not stop at documentation. He examines the inner life of what he calls “the Believer.” The hard Left, he argues, is driven by a profound alienation from the West, a self-hatred that seeks external enemies to destroy, and a quasi-religious need for a purifying utopia that requires blood sacrifice. Communism once supplied that vision. When it failed, radical Islam offered a new version: a death cult that openly rejects the Judeo-Christian foundations of the civilization the Left already despises.
In our conversation, he described two layers of the problem. There are the malicious actors who knowingly work to dismantle Western civilization. And there are the many more who simply cannot emotionally bear the truth. To acknowledge what radical Islam teaches and practices would shatter the comforting narrative that “everything will be okay if we just show more tolerance.” So, they choose willful blindness. They sacrifice Jewish and Christian victims on the altar of their own psychological comfort.
Peter, who has spent decades studying the psychology of power and vulnerability, was particularly struck by how accurately Jamie captures the leftist mindset of alienation turning into passionate identification with those who attack the West.
A Spiritual Battle
Jamie spoke openly about the spiritual dimension of what we face. He reminded us that we are in a battle that cannot be reduced to politics alone. The hatred directed at Jews and at the Christian West has a demonic quality. The same forces that once celebrated Stalin and Mao now celebrate those who butchered families on October 7 and who openly seek the destruction of Israel, Christianity, and, ultimately, Western civilization.
Peter and I felt an immediate kinship with Jamie. He is the son of Soviet dissidents. His heart has always been with the persecuted. That same impulse—the refusal to look away from suffering—has driven our own work for decades. When Jamie said he felt he was among family while speaking with us, we felt the same.
Listen and Read
I urge you to listen to the full interview. Jamie’s passion, his refusal to soft-pedal, and his moral clarity come through powerfully. Then get the book. United in Hate will equip you to understand not only the present moment but the deeper currents that have brought us here.
We are living in a time when large portions of our cultural and institutional elite have chosen sides against the civilization that produced them. Jamie Glazov has given us a map of that betrayal. The least we can do is study it carefully and refuse to look away.
Order United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas by Jamie Glazov.
57 min
August 12 Dr. Breggin Hour 8-12-26
The story told by our guest Patrick Hahn of how the medical industry has taken advantage of people who wish they had been born a different sex is appalling, heartrending, and a lesson from the extremes to which modern medicine can become perverted against the very people it is supposed to serve. Anyone who thinks they were mistakenly born into the wrong body has a tragic story to tell about how they became alienated from themselves while growing up. Instead of helping people recover their identity as a male or female human, in all its glory, and with all its complications, modern medicine is making billions of dollars by taking advantage of this vulnerability and pretending that the proper approach is to medically attempt to change their sexual identity by mutilating their bodies through highly dangerous and permanent surgical and medical interventions.

In an especially tragic twist, the sex change industry has now targeted children, some as young as toddlers, beginning with indoctrination and leading to “puberty blocker” hormones to prevent the natural maturation of the individual. These early medical interventions often lead to surgery to remove breasts, vaginas, or penises as if in collaboration with the psychological demons that these individuals need to overcome.

It’s gotten so bad that one state has just authorized interchangeable body parts in an “anatomically correct doll to be used in public school sex education.

The industry of so-called “gender affirmation” continues to be a “third rail”—dangerous to touch in any critical manner. People are stifled publicly and privately from speaking about this issue in a critical manner because they have been told they will cause so much pain and prejudice if they do. But the real suffering is being perpetrated by medical professionals, hospitals, and therapists who encourage the fantasy that one can change their sex to improve their quality of life. The reality is quite dismal in terms of outcomes.

In every area in which our guest Patrick Hahn addresses the real science behind medical and psychiatric interventions, including his most recent book on the sex change industry, Patrick Hahn writes the most comprehensive, interesting analyses available. Where our books dovetail with his, and they often do, we nonetheless learn a great deal from him. If you’ve never heard him speak before, listen to this show simply for the pleasure of hearing one of the most brilliant and thoughtful critical researchers in the field of medicine and psychiatry today.

This week on The Breggin Hour, Patrick Hahn joins us to discuss his powerful new book, Irreversible. Patrick is a careful researcher and a clear writer who has spent years documenting the medicalization of ordinary human suffering. His latest work traces how the obsession with “sex change” moved from a tiny fringe subculture to a multi-billion-dollar industry in the United States alone—and how that industry rests on a mountain of lies and deceptions.

Patrick does not mince words. “There is nothing good about this industry. Nothing,” he told us. “The whole industry is based on lies.” In biology and medicine, he reminds us, nothing is more certain than this: there are two, and only two, sexes. It is impossible to turn a man into a woman with a surgeon’s knife. When an entire medical enterprise begins with that lie, the rest of the story unravels into incoherence. Activists insist that “trans women are women,” then demand fantastically expensive surgeries and lifelong cross-sex hormones precisely so those same individuals can resemble women. If they already are women, why the need for the knife and the drugs?

The most comprehensive long-term study ever conducted, from Sweden (one of the most “trans-friendly” countries on earth), found that after surgical transition the suicide rate was elevated by a staggering nineteen times compared with matched controls from the general population. Not nineteen percent higher—nineteen times as many suicides. There is no credible data showing that these procedures reduce suicide risk. The “transition or die” claim pushed on desperate parents is itself a lethal lie. As Patrick put it, “Trans and die” would be more accurate.

Most gender-distressed children simply outgrow the distress if they are allowed to go through natural puberty. That is why the industry is so eager to block puberty. The “cure,” as Patrick observed, is puberty itself. When clinics rush children onto blockers and then hormones, they are manufacturing lifelong medical patients out of young people who would otherwise have resolved their confusion.

How did this twisted field get its beginning? The founding figures—Harry Benjamin, John Money, the early directors of the Johns Hopkins clinic—were often more candid than today’s activists about the role of childhood trauma, family dynamics, and social rejection. The first gender clinics in the United States and Europe eventually closed after their own research failed to show meaningful improvement. Those early practitioners had the intellectual honesty to admit failure. Their successors had a simple self-serving answer: if adults do not improve, start younger.

The human toll in the sex change medical industry is incalculable. And the financial remuneration is staggering. An industry estimate of two billion dollars a year in the United States is almost certainly a gross undercount; it leaves out hormones, blockers, the cascade of complications, the “affirming” therapy that keeps families compliant, and the repeat surgeries required to repair damage from previous ones. Projections of five billion by 2030 still understate the true cost—human as well as monetary.

We heard heartbreaking stories of families torn apart in court when one parent seeks to medicalize a child, and the other resists. We discussed the strange cultural power of celebrities who treat their children’s bodies as fashion statements. And we noted the encouraging signs that the political tide is finally turning– federal funding streams are being cut, and people are less afraid to speak the obvious truth.

Patrick’s larger point is one we have long shared. The sex-change industry is only the sharpest edge of a broader medicalization of life. Once institutions stop caring whether people are productive and start treating them primarily as consumers of medical interventions, almost any human distress can be turned into a lifelong customer base. The damage done to children in the name of “gender affirmation” is irreversible. That is why the book is titled as it is.

We urge you to read Irreversible. It is thorough, carefully documented, and written with genuine compassion for the people caught in this industry. You can find it, along with Patrick’s earlier books on psychiatric drugs, ADHD, COVID policy, and genetic determinism, at patrickhahn.net.
57 min
August 05 Dr. Breggin Hour 8-5-26
In 2021, Dr. Ron Elfenbein, MD, operated urgent care centers in Maryland, testing and treating COVID patients with monoclonal antibodies. The treatment was so successful that he was able to test and treat patients, see them recover, and watch them go home. Dr. Elfenbein went on Fox News sharing the great news of how successful the treatment of monoclonal antibodies was for COVID.
Four months later, he was criminally indicted on 5 counts of fraudulent coding and billing at his clinics. A matter that should have never been brought in criminal court—at most deserving of some administrative action.
He is still fighting these charges today.
That is the stark outline of what happened to a good doctor. The fuller story is even more revealing—and more troubling.
He is the kind of doctor you would want for your own care or for the care of your family. Dr. Elfenbein is an emergency physician with more than two decades of experience. When COVID arrived, he did what physicians are trained to do: he looked at the evidence in front of him and treated the patients in front of him. Monoclonal antibody infusions—technology that has been used safely since the 1970s for a range of conditions—produced dramatic results. Patients who arrived looking “on death’s door” often improved while still sitting in the infusion chair, with rapid turnarounds during the treatment itself. Lives saved. Hospitalizations prevented. Families spared further illness. No ventilators. No funerals.
Displaying ingenuity and personal drive along with organizational skills, he built infusion centers and quickly became one of the largest providers in the Mid-Atlantic region. Patients traveled from neighboring states because they could not obtain the treatment closer to home. He saw the technology work with his own eyes. So did the patients and their families. Who needed any mRNA vaccines? Patients were being treated inexpensively and were able to return home.
But there was a pandemic and a vaccine blueprint we documented in our book COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey that had been developed for more than a decade, involving many billions of dollars in profits and offering the potential to finally exercise control over free and feisty American citizens. Led by Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab, both working with Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Deep State, careers and billions in research had been invested in shoehorning the “next generation” of vaccine technology past FDA approval requirements and into the marketplace. The “Universal Vaccine” was the holy grail before 2020. The mRNA vaccine model was considered a strong candidate with tremendous support from Bill Gates and others.
“Why don’t we blow the system up? Obviously, we can’t just turn off the spigot on the system we have and then say, ‘hey, everyone in the world should get this new vaccine we haven’t given to anyone yet.’ But there must be some way…”
Michael Specter, Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Moderator at the Milkin Institute’s Future Health Summit 2019 panel titled “Making Influenza History: The Quest for a Universal Vaccine.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, an Emergency Use Authorization was issued for the mRNA COVID vaccines. It was based on the legislative condition that there were no preexisting “adequate, approved and available alternatives.” And that was the wrinkle. There were adequate, approved, and available alternatives to a rushed, unapproved, mRNA vaccine system already documented to be toxic.
Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies, and even the basic medical treatments for respiratory viral conditions that are a part of any general practitioner’s armamentarium (albuterol and Budesonide inhalers, analgesics, oral steroids, cough suppressants, and antibiotics for secondary infections or other available tools that were not being recommended by the government when patients began to exhibit viral respiratory symptoms thought to be caused by COVID). None of these treatments were recommended for COVID by the CDC. Bill Gates, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the pharmaceutical industry pushed a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle for experimental vaccines, all of which depended upon the absence of early effective treatments.
But there were good doctors who stood against the pressure on behalf of their patients and patients everywhere, speaking truthfully through media outlets to inform citizens about their care options and treating their own patients.
Dr. Elfenbein is one of those good doctors, and the Biden administration noticed, especially after he made a couple of media appearances talking about the successful treatment of COVID with monoclonal antibodies. A simple, outpatient monoclonal antibody treatment that could be provided in test/treat facilities and scaled up to provide care to thousands in a community should have provided strong evidence against any need for “vaccines.”
But the Biden government was in the middle of their single-minded drive to get mRNA vaccines for Covid into “every arm.”
Then federal authorities shut the monoclonal antibody program down nationally, citing that it was less effective with the newer Omicron variant. Dr. Elfenbein went on national television and said what many physicians believed, but few dared state publicly: people would die as a result of that decision. He was right. Hospitalizations and deaths followed. The monoclonal antibodies were eventually pulled from the market entirely, while the mRNA vaccines remained available.
Four months after Dr. Elfenbein’s public criticism of COVID policy and the mRNA vaccines, the Department of Justice indicted him. The charges were not that he invented patients or fabricated services. The charges concerned how certain COVID-related evaluation and management visits had been coded for insurance reimbursement—technical billing questions that arise routinely in medical practice and are normally handled, when necessary, through civil or administrative channels.
A jury convicted him in August 2023. Then something almost unheard of occurred. Chief Judge James K. Bredar of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland—the same judge who had presided over the trial—issued a detailed 93-page opinion vacating the convictions and entering a judgment of acquittal on all five counts. The judge found that the relevant CPT coding guidance was ambiguous, that the government had failed to prove the Level 4 codes were false beyond a reasonable doubt, and that no reasonable jury could have reached a guilty verdict on the evidence presented. He also conditionally granted a new trial because the evidence weighed so heavily against the verdict that it would be unjust to enter judgment.
The government appealed. The Fourth Circuit later reversed the pure judgment of acquittal while acknowledging the evidence was “thin,” leaving the new-trial order in place. Judge Bredar subsequently recused himself from the case with a one-line notice and no explanation.
Dr. Elfenbein now faces a second trial. The legal costs of the first prosecution nearly bankrupted him and his family. A second trial threatens to finish what the first began.
Major physician organizations have stood with him. The American Medical Association—the very body that authors and maintains the CPT code set the government claims he violated—filed an amicus brief in his support. So did the Maryland State Medical Society, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and the Independent Medical Alliance. These groups have made clear that differences of interpretation over complex, pandemic-era billing rules should not be criminalized, especially when the underlying medical services were actually provided, and no patient harm is alleged.
This case is not an isolated bureaucratic error. It fits a larger pattern we have watched for years: physicians who questioned official COVID narratives, who prioritized early treatment, or who spoke publicly about what they were seeing in their clinics often found themselves investigated, deplatformed, or professionally attacked. When a doctor can face decades in federal prison over disputed coding of real services, the message to the entire profession is unmistakable.
Dr. Elfenbein’s website is dropthecase.com. There you will find information about his legal defense fund. If you are able to help, please do. If you cannot give financially, share his story. Write to the Department of Justice. Let the current administration know that continuing this prosecution does not serve justice, public health, or the integrity of medicine.
We have seen too many good physicians pay a heavy price for putting patients first and telling the truth as they saw it. Ron Elfenbein is one of them. He is a good and great man who should not have to stand alone. Go to Dr. Elfenbein’s website, DroptheCase.com, and contribute to his legal costs through GiveSendGo.
57 min
July 29 Dr. Peter Breggin - 7-29-26
Dr. Juliette Engel is a living witness and victim of some of the most vile hidden Intelligence programs ever devised. She has survived and even thrived since her brutal childhood, going on to offer brave eyewitness testimony to the depravity that can result when persons in power decide that they can violate any morals and acceptable behavior in the pursuit of control. The justification, as warped as it can be, is to say that we must sacrifice some people/children in order to preserve the greater good.
From being delivered by her parents into the arms of CIA handlers at the age of six, to meeting Jeffrey Epstein on the San Juan Islands in the 1980s, when he was talking of buying islands in the Caribbean, Dr. Engel has encountered evil and survived.
On this week’s “Breggin Hour,” Peter and I had the privilege of sitting with Dr. Juliette Engel. At 77, she carries herself with a quiet radiance that Peter described as angelic. After hearing her story, I understood why. What was done to her as a child would have broken most people. What she has done with her life since then is a testament to the best of the human spirit.
Juliette was born into a family of OSS, CIA, and NSA operatives. At the age of six, in 1955, her own father sold her into the MKUltra Monarch program. There she endured mind control, satanic ritual abuse, and the deliberate fracturing of a child’s mind through repeated trauma. The program’s goal was to create a dissociated, highly controllable person—someone who could later be used as a prostitute or intelligence asset. She was trained in what she calls “sex magick,” prepared for a future of exploitation.
She escaped at seventeen. With no memory of her childhood, she put herself through university and medical school and became a physician in Seattle. For decades the past remained locked away. Only later, in her sixties, after twenty years of extraordinary humanitarian work in Russia, did she begin the long, painful process of opening those sealed rooms in her mind.
What she discovered there is almost unbearable. Yet she has chosen to tell it—first in her memoir *Sparky: Surviving Sex Magick as I Lived It*, written from the magical thinking of the ten-year-old child she once was, and later in *Angels Over Moscow*, the story of her twenty years building an underground railroad for trafficking victims across the former Soviet Union.
While working to improve medical care for children in Russian orphanages, Juliette uncovered a trafficking network that moved young girls to Scandinavia and the United States. She followed the trail. What she found changed the course of her life. With the MiraMed Institute and the Angel Coalition she founded, she helped create a network of villagers, police, educators, journalists, and officials who rescued more than 70,000 children and young women. She did this at great personal risk, often traveling alone through dangerous territory. She did it because she knew, in a way few of us can, what it means to be a child with no one coming to save you.
In our conversation, she spoke of creating “Sparky”—an internal role model, a tough, courageous little girl warrior she invented at age ten because she had no trustworthy adults. Sparky was everything Juliette longed to be: strong, pretty, smart, able to stand up for herself and others. That imagined self became her compass. Decades later, when Jeffrey Epstein and his brother approached her at a private gathering on the San Juan Islands—offering her a house, naming the exact amount in her bank account, inviting her into their world—something deep inside said no. She credits Sparky. The protective programming that had once kept her silent also, in that moment, kept her safe.
She spoke, too, of the suicide programs that are deliberately installed in survivors—the overwhelming voices that rise up when a person begins to remember or to speak. She has faced them more than once. She has learned to recognize the attack when it comes and to pull it through what she describes as the eye of a needle until it becomes manageable. She offers this knowledge freely to other survivors, because she does not want another person to be lost to a programmed death.
Peter reminded us that whether intentionally programmed or programmed by traumas of childhood and tragedies of life, one must resist an urge toward suicide. He said:
“First of all, somebody probably put that idea in your head on some level. And also it is something you can definitely leave behind. People can leave being suicidal behind, but you can’t leave dead behind. So you’ve got to work to overcome the pain. And we’re getting a wonderful lesson today in how a fine person can overcome that pain. Dr. Engel actually has done amazing work in setting up networks to save children in different parts of the world. What an amazing outcome for somebody who’s been about as abused as a person can survive.”
How to Help the Suicidally Depressed Person—Dr. Peter Breggin’s 5th Simple Truths About Psychiatry’
Once again we see a pattern that Peter and I have seen throughout our decades of work: the same systems that harm children also work hard to keep the truth from being believed. For years, people who reported MKUltra experiences were told they were delusional. People who tried to expose the dark operations of the CIA were called “conspiracy theorists.” But now that the CIA has finally released thousands of pages admitting the program’s existence, survivors can no longer be so easily disparaged. The scale of what was done and, many believe, continues today, is coming into the light.
Despite the horrors Juliette endured and witnessed, she persevered. A child who was meant to be broken became a doctor. A woman who had every reason to remain silent spent twenty years rescuing other people’s children. A woman recovering her own stolen memories continues to stand with those still finding theirs. Dr. Juliette Engel found the courage and created the safety net for herself that made it possible to survive and build a life of compassion, science, healing, and reform.
Her courage opens a window which we must look through. From facing the suffering of children through the hidden programs of the past or the open trafficking of the present, we must refuse to turn away. We need to build our empathy, not our defenses. And we need to remember that the human spirit, even after the most deliberate attempts to destroy it, can still choose love, courage, and service.
We are grateful to Dr. Juliette Engel for trusting us with her story. Listen to the full interview on “The Breggin Hour.” Her books Sparky and Angels Over Moscow are available for those who wish to go deeper. You can learn more about her work at www.JulietteEngel.com.
May her example strengthen every person who has ever felt broken by forces larger than themselves. Survival is possible. Healing is possible. And sometimes, out of the worst soil, the most luminous lives grow.
57 min
July 15 The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour - 7-15-26
We thought we would discuss critical thinking and how it applies to today’s propaganda-laden world. And we did. But the conversation quickly turned into a luminous, expansive exchange of knowledge, opinions, and faith, especially between Dr. Fox and Dr. Breggin. Dr. Fox has an open and warm demeanor that radiates care and affection when he greeted us.
Dr. Andrew Fox is an Anglican priest who now lives with his wife in the heart of Texas, where he has settled after immigrating from the United Kingdom. He became an American citizen and shared with us about how happy he is to be here in the United States. We exchanged stories about the unexpected and delightful joy with which recent World Cup tourists coming to America for the first time shared their experiences on social media. Europeans discovered how beautiful, engaging, friendly, welcoming, fun, and (the food!) delicious America is. Then they shared all of that on social media, red-pilling their friends and families and helping Americans feel proud again after these terrible post-COVID years. After the show, I enjoyed reading Dr. Fox’s blog on this topic, “The World Cup: America’s Greatest Untapped Form of Diplomacy.”
Dr. Fox introduced his forthcoming book: Truth in the Age of Applause: How Stupidity Is Ruining the American Dream. We discussed critical thinking and how it and civil dialogue are essential for challenging harmful ideologies while maintaining respect for authority—particularly said Dr. Fox– in scriptural contexts.
The conversation explored the differences between Old and New Testament perspectives on Jews as the Chosen people, with Dr. Fox commenting that while the Old Testament focused on a specific tribe’s witness to one God, the New Testament emphasizes an egalitarian approach where all people are children of God. We discussed how modern concepts of relativism [the philosophical belief that nothing is objectively true or universally applicable] have been misused to undermine truth, particularly in debates about biological reality and gender identity, with Dr. Fox noting that reality doesn’t change regardless of opinions.
I discovered after the interview that Dr. Fox has spoken the truth very actively rather than seeking applause. Dr. Fox had served eight years as Austin City Fire Chaplain when, in 2021, he wrote a blog arguing that men should not compete in women’s sports due to biological differences between the two sexes. According to the Christian Post:
Months later, Fox was dismissed when officials decided that his efforts to apologize to unnamed offended parties were not sufficient, as he refused to recant his views on LGBT issues.
In August 2022, Fox filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, alleging that AFD officials “retaliated against him for exercising his First Amendment rights, violated his First Amendment right to free speech and free exercise of religion, and violated the Texas Constitution.”
On March 3, 2026, the city of Austin reached a $78,000 settlement with former Austin City Fire Chaplain Andrew Fox, according to the Alliance Defending Freedom.
Dr. Fox does not seek applause. He seeks truth. We are sure his book will be as engaging as our hour visit with Dr. Andrew Fox!

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Learn more about Dr. Peter Breggin's work: https://breggin.com/

See more from Dr. Breggin's long history of being a reformer in psychiatry: https://breggin.com/Psychiatry-as-an-Instrument-of-Social-and-Political-Control

Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal, the how-to manual @ https://breggin.com/a-guide-for-prescribers-therapists-patients-and-their-families/

Get a copy of Dr. Breggin's latest book:
WHO ARE THE “THEY” - THESE GLOBAL PREDATORS?
WHAT ARE THEIR MOTIVES AND THEIR PLANS FOR US?
HOW CAN WE DEFEND AGAINST THEM?
Covid-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey
Get a copy: https://www.wearetheprey.com/

“No other book so comprehensively covers the details of COVID-19 criminal conduct as well as its origins in a network of global predators seeking wealth and power at the expense of human freedom and prosperity, under cover of false public health policies.”

~ Robert F Kennedy, Jr
President Trump’s Director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the largest health agency in the worl
57 min
July 08 Dr. Peter Breggin Hour 7-8-26
The healing power of love, creativity, and faith
Peter Breggin MD & Ginger Breggin
Mon Jul 6
The Breggin Hour
Cultural Wars, Faith, Family Life, Health

It was one of those recording sessions that lingers in the heart long after the microphones are turned off. On a recent afternoon, Peter and I had the profound privilege of speaking with Dr. Francis Christian—a gifted surgeon, poet, professor, and thinker whose life embodies the integration of science, art, and deep faith. His latest book of poems, To a Nurse Friend Weeping, published by a small Canadian house, and his Substack (francischristian.substack.com) reflect a man who sees the full spectrum of human experience: suffering, joy, and the creative spark that connects us all to something greater.
Dr. Christian joined us as we explored themes close to our own lives—especially in this season of recovery and reflection following Peter’s stroke. The conversation flowed naturally from the personal to the cultural, touching on what it means to be fully human in a world that often fragments us.
Reconnecting Medicine to the Human Story
As a professor of surgery at the University of Saskatchewan, with expertise in trauma and oncology, and a former director of patient safety and quality improvement for the province, Dr. Christian could easily have focused solely on technical excellence. Instead, he founded the Surgical Humanities program and served as founding editor of the Journal of Surgical Humanities.
He explained it beautifully: “Unless you’re acquainted intimately and engaged with the human story, how can you actually treat the human being?” The humanities—literature, poetry, music, and visual arts—remind physicians, residents, and students of the narratives behind the patients they serve. He shared how he witnessed talented young people set aside their creativity under the pressures of training, only to become cynical. The program sought to reconnect them: through an annual musical evening with an orchestra of physicians, nurses, and students, and a journal that welcomed high-literary-quality pieces from medical voices or non-medical perspectives on medical themes.
Creativity isn’t a luxury; it is essential to wholeness. As Dr. Christian noted, we are created in the image of God, the Master Creator. To be fully alive is to create—to engage with joy, sorrow, suffering, and relief in ways that science alone cannot teach. For those of us who have faced illness or cared for the sick or wounded, a physician who is truly present—who hears you, respects your humanity—becomes part of the healing itself.
Sexuality, Sublimation, and the Gifts of Commitment
A recent essay on Dr. Christian’s Substack moved me profoundly. In it, he explores the sublimation of sexual energy into creativity and the devastating cultural costs of the sexual revolution. He spoke with poetic respect about human desire—not as mere biology or casual encounter, but as a profound drive that, when channeled with reverence, fuels art, poetry, family, and civilization itself.
He drew on John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where the lover’s unfulfilled yearning becomes eternal beauty: “Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss… yet do not grieve… for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair.” For centuries, Christian civilization elevated this longing toward the prize of marriage—a sacred house of fulfillment, commitment, and creative partnership in raising the next generation.
The sexual revolution of the 1960s, he observed, lowered the “price” of sex, especially for men, through the pill, abortion, and cultural shifts influenced by feminist and Marxist ideas. What was promised as liberation has delivered falling birth rates, crashing below replacement levels, declining testosterone, less satisfying relationships, sky-high divorce rates, and energies diverted from family into ideologies. Birds, he noted wryly, often show more fidelity than this new mammalian norm.
We spoke of the sadness for young people today—burdened by debt, indoctrinated to view children as encumbrances, and offered casual encounters via apps instead of the depth of lifelong trust. Yet there is hope. Some younger generations seem to be turning toward virtue, early commitment, and building families with community support. Peter and I shared from our own journey: the joy of treasuring one another, the self-sacrificial love that grows stronger through trials, and how God’s grace sustains it.
Peter reflected movingly on how, since his stroke, he has seen God’s love through my care for him—and how it has drawn us both closer to the Divine. “Treasure other human beings,” he urged, especially the young. “Dare to love. You’ll get hurt, but the more you love, the more you help others become loving.”
Dr. Christian echoed this in referencing agape love—the selfless, giving love modeled on the cross. He reminded us of St. Paul and Jesus’ mission: to heal the brokenhearted, set the bruised at liberty, and proclaim good news. His hope, like ours, is that people find new life at the foot of the cross and in the resurrection’s promise of eternal meaning.
A Call to Treasure What Matters
This conversation left us refreshed and reminded of what civilization truly rests upon: deep respect, creative fullness, committed love, and faith. In a time when so many forces seek to cheapen human connection, we are called to nurture love like a garden, to greet “that of God” in one another (as the Quakers say), and to resist the fragmentation of modernity.
Dr. Francis Christian’s life and work stand as a witness: a surgeon who operates with skill and soul, a poet who finds beauty in the weeping and the joy. I encourage you to visit his Substack and explore his poetry. In a world hungry for authenticity, voices like his point us back to what is true, good, and life-giving.
Peter and I continue to learn, day by day, about the miracles of recovery, partnership, and grace. We pray this hour of reflection blesses you as it blessed us—to love more boldly, create more freely, and trust in the God who made us for relationship.
Thank you, Dr. Christian, for sharing your wisdom and your faith. Our audience—our wonderful community—is richer for it.
______

Learn more about Dr. Peter Breggin's work: https://breggin.com/

See more from Dr. Breggin's long history of being a reformer in psychiatry: https://breggin.com/Psychiatry-as-an-Instrument-of-Social-and-Political-Control

Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal, the how-to manual @ https://breggin.com/a-guide-for-prescribers-therapists-patients-and-their-families/

Get a copy of Dr. Breggin's latest book:
WHO ARE THE “THEY” - THESE GLOBAL PREDATORS?
WHAT ARE THEIR MOTIVES AND THEIR PLANS FOR US?
HOW CAN WE DEFEND AGAINST THEM?
Covid-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey
Get a copy: https://www.wearetheprey.com/

“No other book so comprehensively covers the details of COVID-19 criminal conduct as well as its origins in a network of global predators seeking wealth and power at the expense of human freedom and prosperity, under cover of false public health policies.”

~ Robert F Kennedy, Jr
President Trump’s Director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the largest health agency in the world.
57 min
July 01 Dr. Breggin Hour - 7-1-26
We had such a wonderful conversation with Rainer Zitelmann on The Breggin Hour — the kind that leaves you feeling hopeful about the future while reminding you how important it is to keep fighting for truth, freedom, and justice.
Rainer is a historian, a sociologist, and an author who has written more than thirty books, including two that really caught our attention: In Defense of Capitalism: Debunking the Myths and his latest, New Space Capitalism. He joined us from Berlin, and right away, you could feel his warmth, curiosity, and genuine excitement about big ideas.
Why Capitalism Still Matters

Rainer has been sounding the alarm about the dangers of socialism for years. When he warned about it eight years ago, some people rolled their eyes and said, “Who believes in socialism anymore?” Well… here we are. The financial heart of the US and one of the greatest American cities, New York City, has now elected its first Democratic Socialist Mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Rainer would have preferred to be wrong, but events keep proving his point.
He loves good discussion — even when people push back hard. As he put it, the stages are: first, they ignore you, then they attack you, and eventually, they say they knew it all along.
The Space Revolution Happening Right Now
One of the most exciting parts of the interview was hearing Rainer talk about the new space age. He told the story of Elon Musk’s early dreams of making humanity multi-planetary — a vision that started with a crazy idea and a trip to Russia to buy rockets (where they apparently weren’t too impressed at first or maybe thought he was a US agent trying to steal their space technology!).
Fast-forward, and SpaceX is now launching more rockets than entire countries. Rainer pointed out that last year, SpaceX alone did more launches than all other nations combined in many categories. The reusability of those rockets — something governments struggled with for decades — has dramatically cut costs.
He explained the difference in incentives: under the old government model, higher costs often meant higher profits for contractors. With private companies like SpaceX, lowering costs means bigger success. That simple shift changes everything.
The Power of Private Property — Even in Space
Rainer made a strong case that private property rights will be essential if we really want to open up the Moon, Mars, and beyond. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty says nations can’t claim sovereignty over celestial bodies, but Rainer believes treating space like a giant “commons” won’t work any better than it has on Earth.
He imagines settlers claiming manageable areas (think the size of Singapore on Mars), turning them into investment and shared-ownership opportunities. His vision is optimistic — not just for billionaires, but for regular people who could one day own a piece of humanity’s future in space.
Unbreakable Spirit
We also talked about Rainer’s book Unbreakable Spirit, about people who overcame enormous challenges — born blind, paralyzed, or facing other severe obstacles — yet lived lives of remarkable achievement. He shared the story of Ray Charles, who took full responsibility for both his successes and his struggles. That kind of spirit moved us deeply, especially given Peter’s own recovery journey after his stroke.
Rainer’s admiration for people who refuse to see themselves as victims really comes through. It’s the same attitude he sees in the great entrepreneurs pushing humanity forward.
A Warm Message of Hope
Listening to Rainer feels like talking with a friend who still believes in big dreams and human potential. He loves the American spirit of bold goals and personal responsibility. As he quoted Robert Zubrin: “Freedom will give us space. Space will give us freedom.”
Whether it’s defending capitalism here on Earth or imagining humanity’s next steps among the stars, Rainer reminds us that real progress comes from freedom, courage, and the willingness to take responsibility for our own lives.
We thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and highly recommend checking out Rainer’s books — especially In Defense of Capitalism, Unbreakable Spirit, and New Space Capitalism. They’re full of that rare quality, hope, as well as clear thinking and fresh perspective at a time when we need both.
Meet the Guest
Rainer Zitelmann is a historian, sociologist, entrepreneur, investor, and internationally bestselling author. He holds doctorates in history and sociology and has authored or edited 31 books translated into 35 languages.
His books include New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars, In Defense of Capitalism, The Power of Capitalism, and How Nations Escape Poverty. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Newsweek, Fox News, The Daily Telegraph, Le Monde, and numerous international publications.
______

Learn more about Dr. Peter Breggin's work: https://breggin.com/

See more from Dr. Breggin's long history of being a reformer in psychiatry: https://breggin.com/Psychiatry-as-an-Instrument-of-Social-and-Political-Control

Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal, the how-to manual @ https://breggin.com/a-guide-for-prescribers-therapists-patients-and-their-families/

Get a copy of Dr. Breggin's latest book:
WHO ARE THE “THEY” - THESE GLOBAL PREDATORS?
WHAT ARE THEIR MOTIVES AND THEIR PLANS FOR US?
HOW CAN WE DEFEND AGAINST THEM?
Covid-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey
Get a copy: https://www.wearetheprey.com/

“No other book so comprehensively covers the details of COVID-19 criminal conduct as well as its origins in a network of global predators seeking wealth and power at the expense of human freedom and prosperity, under cover of false public health policies.”

~ Robert F Kennedy, Jr
President Trump’s Director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the largest health agency in the world.

57 min