Yesterday Tucker Carlson announced that the CIA has been reading his text messages and may be preparing a criminal referral against him to the Department of Justice. As he explained.

The other day I found out that the CIA is preparing some kind of criminal referral against me, a crime report to the Department of Justice on the basis of a supposed crime I committed. What's that crime? Well, talking to people in Iran before the war. They read my texts.

Carlson further explained that the alleged violation pertains to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), the 1938 law requiring individuals acting on behalf of foreign governments or entities to register with the DOJ and disclose their activities. He emphatically denied any wrongdoing, insisted he is NOT a foreign agent and has always been fiercely loyal to the United States.

News of this incident has prompted me to post the following excerpt from my forthcoming book, Mind Viruses: America's Irrational Obsessions, about WAR, and how it is the father of all mind viruses.

On February 23, 1942, a submarine of the Imperial Japanese Navy, commanded by Kozo Nishino, fired its 14-cm deck gun at an oil field on the coast of Ellwood, California near Santa Barbara. The crew fired around twenty shells, destroying an oil derrick and pump house. Commander Nishino believed that, despite doing almost no damage to the oil field, he accomplished his mission—namely, to spread fear of a Japanese attack among the residents of California. Nishino was aware that the residents and military personnel in Southern California were already suffering from highly inflamed "war nerves" after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and his objective was to throw fuel on the fire. For as Nishino correctly understood, fear causes people to do extremely foolish things.

Fear is a critically important emotion for rapidly detecting and reacting to mortal dangers and avoiding them in the future. Fear keenly sharpens one's focus on a threat and prepares the body to fight it or flee from it. Within the hostile natural environment in which humans evolved, fear kept people alive. Without it, the human species would not have survived. However, as the conditions of modern life have become more secure and complex, fear may greatly impair the ability of individuals and societies to respond to events in a rational manner that serves their best interests. Unless fear is checked by strong mental habits, it can quickly take over the brain and suppress critical reasoning and perspective. A mind gripped by fear sees the world in categorical, black and white terms and may interpret ambiguous, neutral, and even good-intentioned signals as threatening. Fearful people find it difficult to grasp complexity and nuance, and they may grossly overreact to a perceived threat in destructive and dangerous ways.