Tag: psyops

The Propaganda Model Has Limits

Normally, I let my pen rest during the summer months, but for some things, you set aside your habits. What has been happening in the context of the US presidential elections over the past few weeks is, to say the least, remarkable. We are witnessing a social system that – to use a term from complex dynamic systems theory – is heading toward a catastrophe. And the essence of the tipping point we are approaching is this: the propaganda model is beginning to fail.

It started a few weeks ago like this: Trump, the presidential candidate who must not win, is up against Biden, the presidential candidate who must win. After the first debate, it was immediately clear: Trump will win against Biden. The big problem: Biden and Jill are about the only ones who don’t realize this.

The media then turned against Biden. That, in itself, is a revolution. They had praised President Biden to the skies for four years, turning a blind eye to the fact that the man either seemed hardly aware of what he was saying or was giving speeches that could only be described as having the characteristics of a fascist’s discourse.

I’m thinking, among other things, of the 2022 midterm speech in which he, against a bombastic-dramatic backdrop and flanked by two soldiers with machine guns, more or less directly called for violence against the Maga followers. Not to mention the shameless prosecution and imprisonment of political opponents and the intimidation and excommunication of hundreds of journalists (carefully kept out of the media by journalists who sided with the regime).

Huxley would not be surprised that Biden claims in almost every speech that he had to save democracy, including his most recent speech. I’ve shared the quote of Huxley below before, but it doesn’t hurt to read it a second time:

By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms — elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest — will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial — but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

In any case, the media’s love for Biden was suddenly over when it became clear that he could not possibly win the election, even not with a little help from the media. If you want to know how that ‘little help’ worked in 2020, look at one of the most important interviews of the past year, where Mike Benz – former director of the cyber portfolio of the US government – explains to Tucker Carlson in detail how information flows on the internet were manipulated during the 2020 elections (and the Covid crisis). The guy eventually got disgusted with what he was doing and now runs a project striving for online freedom of speech.  I would recommend everyone to spend an hour watching that interview. Such an explanation is what we need: calm, expert, nuanced, and extraordinarily revealing.

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We Reap the Harvest of Lies

Public life has become disorienting. Most people, by and large, previously expected to hear the truth, or some semblance of it, in daily life. We would generally expect this from each other, but also from public media and authorities such as governments or international agencies set up ostensibly for our benefit. Society cannot function in a coherent and stable way without it, as so much in our lives requires us to place trust in others.

To navigate the complexity of existence, we generally look for guidance to certain trusted sources, freeing up time to sift through the more questionable ones. Some claim they always knew everything was fake, but they are wrong, as it wasn’t (and still isn’t). There were always liars, campaigns to mislead, and propaganda to drive us to love or to hate, but there was a core within society that had certain accepted norms and standards that should theoretically be followed. A sort of anchor. Truth is indestructible but the anchor cable connecting us to it, ensuring its influence, has been cut. Society is being set adrift.

This really broke in the past four or five years. We were already in trouble, but now public discourse is broken. Perhaps it broke when governments elected to represent the people openly employed behavioral psychology to lie to their constituencies on a scale we had not previously seen. They combined to make their peoples do things they rationally would not; accept bans of family funerals, cover faces in public, or accept police brutality and the isolation and abandonment of the elderly. The media, health professionals, politicians, and celebrities all participated in this lie and its intent. Virtually all our major institutions. And these lies are continuing, and expanding, and have become the norm.

We are now reaping the harvest of untruth. The media can openly deny what they said or printed just months earlier about a new candidate for presidency or the efficacy of a mandated vaccine. A whole political party can change its narrative almost overnight about the fundamental characteristics of its leader. People paid as “fact-checkers” twist reality to invent new facts and hide the truth, unflustered by the transparency of their deceit. Giant software companies curate information, filtering out truths that run contrary to the pronouncements of conflicted international organizations. Power has displaced integrity.

Internationally, we are pummeled by agencies such as the UN, World Bank, G20, and World Health Organization to give up our basic rights and hand their new masters our wealth on claims of threats that can unequivocally be shown to be false. Paid-off former leaders, grasping legitimacy through the legacy of greater minds, reinforce mass falsehoods for the benefit of their friends. Once aberrations that a free media might highlight, fallacies have become norms in which the same media is openly complicit.

The frightening part is not the lies, which are a normal aspect of humanity, but the broad disinterest in truth. Lies can stand for a time in the presence of a people and institutions that value truth, but they will eventually fail as they are exposed. When truth loses its value, when it is no longer even a vague guide for politics or journalism, then recovery may not occur. We are in an incredibly dangerous time, because lies are not just tolerated but are now the default approach, at the national and international level, and the fourth estate that was to shed light on them has embraced the darkness.

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Kamala’s Fabricated Gen Z Appeal

“kamala IS brat,” tweeted singer Charli XCX on Sunday, following Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascension to the presidential nominee slot left vacant by President Joe Biden. Despite Charli XCX’s own advanced age of 31, she was speaking in slang immediately obvious to anyone under 30, especially the girls and the gays: brat is the album of the summer, with a distinctive neon green cover, full of references to Dimes Square podcaster-provocateurs, Julia Fox, party-girling hard, and—somehow, simultaneously—the lady anxiety that sets in when you’re on the wrong side of your twenties and have not yet had a child.

Harris’ team eagerly turned what they believed to be a pop star endorsement into a branding strategy; the X account “Kamala HQ” (1.1 million followers) adopted the distinctive color, font, and lowercase style Charli XCX’s brat to craft their own banner image, reading “kamala hq.“ Meanwhile, the gay guys of New York City, who received the news of Biden pulling out whilst in their natural habit (Fire Island), quickly made crop tops in the exact same style of brat. A mashup cut of one of Harris’ cringiest lines—some anecdote about coconut trees—was set to Charli XCX’s song “Von dutch.” It has received over 4 million views.

“The internet is going crazy for Harris’ campaign,” declares The 19th, a gender and politics website. Harris’ “meme stock is bullish,” adds CNN, which devoted a panel to the topic, in which a suit-wearing boomer tried, inartfully, to explain the craze to the rest. “Is Kamala Harris ‘brat’?” asks The Economist, calling 2024 “America’s TikTok election.” “Younger celebs are aiming to help Harris by tying her to their viral and loyal social media brands,” explains the Associated Press rather clinically.

“A brat should exude the je ne sais quoi of the famous-but-not-A-list women,” writes Shirley Li, giving the phenomenon an overly intellectualized treatment typical of The Atlantic. “The brat is a classic feminine archetype, right up there with the jezebel, the crone, the bimbo, the career girl,” writes Kat Rosenfield for The Free Press. “Brats are Cinderella’s stepsisters, lacking both social graces and appropriate gratitude for the privileges they enjoy.”

But what the hungry internet, full of writers looking for takes, and the Harris campaign miss is that being “brat” is not really a compliment.

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The Deceived vs. the Indoctrinated

The American public has been subjected to massive propaganda efforts by both our government and our media for years. It’s important to understand the impact this has on the current presidential campaign.

That starts with understanding the difference between deception and indoctrination.

Those who have been merely deceived may be surprised when the deception is exposed. They may even be angry. But they will change their positions when confronted with facts that contradict them.

The indoctrinated will not.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “indoctrinated” as “accepting a set of beliefs without question, refusing to consider any others.” For the indoctrinated, those beliefs become part of their identity; they will not let go of them, even when faced with contrary evidence or explicit falsehoods.

Millions of Americans have been propagandized to believe that former President Donald Trump is “literally Hitler” and “a threat to our democracy”; that he will “destroy this country” or “start World War III.” You can provide all the proof to the contrary you want; it will not change their minds.

I’ve had conversations with friends and loved ones who profess to be terrified about the possible perils of another Trump presidency. In those, I point out just some of the actual conduct of the Biden administration:

— Imprisoning Americans and depriving them of their constitutional rights to due process

— Collaborating with Big Tech companies to censor truthful information about the 2020 elections, the origins of COVID-19, the United States’ role in funding gain-of-function research at the international virology laboratory in Wuhan, China, the efficacy of drugs like ivermectin in treating COVID-19, and the illness and deaths caused by the mRNA vaccines that were forced upon Americans

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Total Control: Weaponized Psyops And How The Government Normalizes Totalitarianism

“The biggest mistake I see is people waiting for A Big Sign that’ll tell them that things have gone too far. One Big Thing that police or lawmakers or the president/leaders will do that will cross the line. It’ll never come because they won’t cross it. They’ll move the line. That line you think you stand behind is shifting everyday with little actions, bills, legislations… That line will stop moving one day, & it’ll be too late… Every day, your sensitivity is being eroded by these willful atrocities. The envelope for what you’ll accept is being pushed. One day, all of these things will be your new normal.”—Nigerian writer Suyi Davies Okungbowa

The U.S. government is working to re-shape the country in the image of a totalitarian state.

This has remained true over the past 50-plus years no matter which political party held office.

This will remain true no matter who wins the 2024 presidential election.

In the midst of the partisan furor over Project 2025, a 920-page roadmap for how to re-fashion the government to favor so-called conservative causes, both the Right and the Left have proven themselves woefully naive about the dangers posed by the power-hungry Deep State.

Yet we must never lose sight of the fact that both the Right and the Left and their various operatives are extensions of the Deep State, which continues to wage psychological warfare on the American people.

Psychological warfare, according to the Rand Corporation, “involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of opposition groups.”

For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the government’s various efforts abroad and domestically.

The government is so confident in its Orwellian powers of manipulation that it’s taken to bragging about them. For example, in 2022, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

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EXPOSED: Israeli Documents Reveal Concerted Effort By Government to Put Out Zionist Propaganda in the US Media

Amichai Chikli, a member of the Likud Party and a minister in the Israeli government, has been leading a campaign to spread pro-Israeli propaganda in the United State corporate media. 

According to a report by The Guardian, Chikli was brought before the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, to inform elected officials on what could be done about the growing set of anti-war protests from young people all over universities across the US.  

Chikli and his team relaunched the “Concert”, a controversial program initially branded as Kela Shlomo in Hebrew. The program has the ostensive aim of carrying out what the Israeli regime has deemed as ““mass consciousness activities” primarily targeted largely at the US and Europe.” This specific iteration is part of a broader public relations drive to target US institutions of higher learning and change the definition of antisemitism according to US law. 

Concert is currently known as Voices of Israel. Previously, it teamed up with groups leading a campaign to enact so-called “anti-BDS” state laws that sanction Americans for participating in boycotts or other non-violent demonstrations against Israel.

The latest iteration of the program is a concerted effort, often run covertly, by the Jewish state to push back against university protests, human rights organizations and other dissenting voices. 

Voices’ most recent activities were carried out through non-profit organizations and other bodies that often do not reveal their donor information. From October up until May, Chikli has presided over at least $8.6m for a budget that’s allocated towards government advocacy to change the public debate.

One American pro-Zionist group that has been working with Chikli’s ministry, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, or ISGAP, was able to achieve a major victory in recent times. The ISCAP allegedly received the bulk of its funding in 2018 from the Israeli agency that was in charge of operating Concert. At an April 7 event at the Palm Beach Country Club, ISGAP boasted about a congressional public relations victory that it achieved. 

In this instance, they were referring to hearings led by Republicans such as New York Congressman Elise Stefanik designed to grill prominent university presidents such as then-Harvard President Claudine Gay and her counterparts in other elite universities. 

Gay ended up resigning earlier this year for engaging in alleged acts of plagiarism. 

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UK Technocrats Sharpen The Knives Of Manipulation

My recently published research into the UK Government’s deployment of behavioural science strategies – ‘nudges’ – leads to a startling conclusion: in every sphere of daily life, our thoughts and actions are being psychologically manipulated so as to align them with what the state’s technocrats have deemed to be in our best interests.

It seems that open, transparent debate is no longer considered necessary.

How did my nation, a purported beacon of freedom and democracy, descend to such a position? While there have been multiple participants in this journey into behavioural science-fueled authoritarianism, a historical review of the key players indicates that American scholars have contributed in crucial ways to this trajectory. 

The Ubiquity of UK Behavioural Science

The research to which I refer sought to reveal the actors responsible for strategically frightening and shaming the British people during the Covid event. Focusing on the controversial ‘Look them in the eyes’ messaging campaign – involving a series of close-up images of patients on the cusp of death and a voice-over saying, ‘Look them in the eyes and tell them you are doing all you can to stop the spread of coronavirus’ – my critical analysis uncovered a series of disturbing findings in regard to the UK government’s deployment of often-covert behavioural science strategies during times of ‘crisis.’ These revelations included:

  1. State-sponsored nudging is ubiquitous in the UK, seeping into almost every aspect of day-to-day life. Whether responding to a health challenge, using public transport, watching a TV drama, or interacting with the tax office, our minds are being psychologically manipulated by state-funded technocrats.
  2. The rapid expansion of UK behavioural science has not occurred by chance; it has been a strategic goal. For example, a 2018 document by Public Health England (the forerunner to the UK Health Security Agency) announced that ‘The behavioural and social sciences are the future of public health,’ and one of their priority goals was to make the skills of these disciplines ‘mainstream in all our organisations.’
  3. Throughout the Covid event, UK government communications – as guided by their behavioural science advisors – routinely resorted to fear inflation, shaming, and scapegoating (‘affect,’ ‘ego,’ and ‘normative pressure’ nudges) to lever compliance with restrictions and the subsequent vaccine rollout.
  4. The UK government’s bar for legitimising the terrorising of its own people has been set incredibly low. For instance, one official justification for inflicting further fear inflation onto an already scared population was that, in January 2021, the populace was not as frightened as at the start of the Covid event in March 2020: ‘Fearful but much less panic this time around.’  

As things currently stand, the UK Government can draw on several providers of behavioural science expertise to sharpen their official communications with the British public. In addition to the multiple nudgers embedded in transient pandemic advisory groups, since 2010 our policymakers have been guided by ‘The world’s first government institution dedicated to the application of behavioural science to policy:’ the Behavioural Insight Team (BIT) – informally referred to as the ‘Nudge Unit.’

Conceived in the Cabinet Office of the then Prime Minister David Cameron, and led by the prominent behavioural scientist Professor David Halpern, the BIT functioned as a blueprint for other nations, rapidly expanding into a ‘social purpose company’ operating in many countries around the world (including the US). Further behavioural science input to the UK government is routinely provided by in-house departmental personnel – for instance, 24 nudgers in the UK Health Security Agency, 54 in the Tax Office, and 6 in the Department of Transport – and via the Government Communication Service, that comprises ‘over 7,000 professional communicators’ and incorporates its own ‘Behavioural Science Team’ located in the Cabinet Office. 

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A Real-Life Psyop: How the U.S. Military Spread Anti-Vax Conspiracy Theories

A government agency was spreading dangerous rumors about the coronavirus vaccine, playing on people’s religious beliefs to sow chaos, Reuters revealed last week. Was it Russia? China? Iran, perhaps? The culprit turned out to be someone closer to home: The U.S. military.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations signed off on a psychological operation aimed at discrediting Chinese-made vaccines, using fake social media accounts to target foreign countries, Reuters reported. The program ended in late 2021, after executives at Facebook and officials from other U.S. government agencies raised concerns about the content.

It’s far from the only time Washington spread dodgy rumors and straight-up lies through fake online accounts. The anti-vax campaign is the latest in a series of pro-American disinformation campaigns that have been exposed over the past few years. While the U.S. government warns about the use of “fake or misleading personas” to “amplify conspiracy theories,” it also uses the exact same tactics to sow distrust against China, Russia, and Iran.

A 2023 strategy document by the U.S. military, for example, calls on U.S. forces to “weaponize information to manipulate an adversary’s perception of reality by influencing and disrupting social systems and technical connections that are foundational to a modern society. Disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda can trigger a chain of events in an adversary’s society that gradually degrades its domestic unity, undermines societal trust in its government and institutions, and diminishes its international stature.”

Such chaos is an opportunity “to prevent [enemies] from opposing U.S. actions, or to better position U.S. joint forces in the event of armed conflict,” the document states.

But the anti-vax campaign stands out because of the subject matter. The U.S. government has long been worried about “vaccine hesitancy” and people’s mistrust of medical authorities at home. But they encouraged vaccine hesitancy and sowed doubt about medical authorities abroad—as if foreigners’ reactions to the pandemic would not have an effect on America.

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U.S. Government PSYOP Needs to be Zeroed Out and Re-started Under Constitutional Principles

Special Operation Forces Week in Tampa is the premier gathering event for all things related to Special Operations.  On May 9, 2024, at the most recent event in Tampa, there was a session on “Operations in the Information Environment (OIE) Symposium”.  This title is simply another name for Psychological Operations (PSYOP).

Having been to the PSYOP Course at Ft. Bragg (now Ft. Liberty) in 1984, this panel caught my attention.  The name, functional areas, doctrine and tactics have evolved a bit since PSYOP was first introduced in the 1950s to fight Soviet Communism that was on a post-World War II rampage to topple the Western System.  The Doolittle Report, the founding strategy and document for the CIA roles and missions, emphasized the need for methodologies and capabilities to tell the American story and defeat the aggressive Soviet propaganda efforts.  PSYOP was key to the early CIA and the nascent American military special operations community.  It was quite effective in those early and heady days of a battle for survival against Communism.

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Academic Validation: “Covid-19,” Psychological Operations, and the War for Technocracy

Finally, academia weighs in on Technocracy. David A. Hughes has released his massive book, “Covid-19,” Psychological Operations, and the War for Technocracy. He says, “Technocracy has been incubated for decades in China with the support of the Rockefellers and various technology transfers, and, with proof of concept having been established, the aim is now to roll it out in the West.”

Catherine Austin Fitts recognized David Hughes on the Solari Report:

Our Hero of the Week, the brilliant David A. Hughes, is a university lecturer on security studies, international relations theory, foreign policy analysis, globalization, and U.S. exceptionalism. With dual doctorates in German Studies and International Relations, his wide-ranging research interests include psychological warfare, 9/11, Covid-19, the deep state, intelligence crime, technocracy, resurgent totalitarianism, and global class relations.

Hughes frequently cites my work on the Trilateral Commission, Technocracy, and Transhumanism, keeping the whole body of thought in proper context.

If successfully implemented, technocracy will be worse than anything imaginable by Hitler or Stalin, because it amounts to the biodigital enslavement of humanity through biometric technologies, the “Internet of Bodies,” constant surveillance and monitoring, central bank digital currencies, and a Chinese-style social credit system. Moreover, if allowed to happen, such a control system could prove irreversible. Technocracy has been incubated for decades in China with the support of the Rockefellers and various technology transfers, and, with proof of concept having been established, the aim is now to roll it out in the West.

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