In my exploration of fascism as a social movement, I came to the conclusion some time ago that propaganda is not only the vehicle of its message and its driver of activity but is actually the end goal. In that way, it is akin to a perpetual motion machine, in that its fervor feeds fervor, and propaganda is created to boost further propaganda. That’s really the cycle of movement.
So I’ve been studying propaganda very intently for the last few years, and there are many aspects worthy of scrutiny. You can look at rhetoric and language, iconography, advertising methods (ads are the flip side of propaganda’s coin), distribution, style, opinion strategies, etc. There’s a wealth of information one can unearth, to be sure.
Lately I’ve been exploring disinformation and misinformation, which is a natural extension of this work as QAnon is pretty much built on a disinformation model. That seems to be its whole raison d’etre. While looking into that, I came across adjacent information, such as that on deradicalization in terms of violent extremism. That’s also a deep well, chock full of information.
You get into that space, though, and you start bumping up against other things. You find you might follow other avenues.
One video on propaganda that I came across, for example, looked not only at that main topic but also how it relates to psychological operations (excerpted below).
So that was intriguing, and I started speculating, just as a way to generate questions for follow-up. (One must engage with one’s materials to get a fuller experience.) And I must admit that there’s been this hanging thread of information regarding January 6th that has been just sitting out there, waiting to be explained: Why was Phil Waldron on Trump’s coordinating team? He’s a psyops guy. Why was he involved? What material support did he supply?
I still don’t have the answer to those questions, but they drive my curiosity. And I must admit that psyops just seems extraordinarily interesting.
Well, I did a little bit of delving into the topic. I was surprised at some of the names I came across, people like Malcolm Nance and Steven Hassan. Those two are in very different fields, yet they were both talking about not just the same topic but the same bit of information.
So while I’m still just at the beginning of my exploration of this subject, I thought I’d share what I’ve come across so far. All of this info is publicly available; I’m just collating what I have so far into one place.
First, what is psyops?
“PSYWAR: What is PSYOP?” — 8th PSYOP Group (May 16, 2020) (YouTube)
~3:40, in response to the question “What is psyops, in layman’s terms?”:
So, simply put, it’s influence. We influence behavior. And that is of a foreign audience, whether that’s an individual, a group of people, an organization, a government. We find out their likes, dislikes, vulnerabilities, what persuades them to do certain things, and we use that to our advantage to get them to do what we want them to do, in the interests of US military and national objectives.
~4:31, in response to the suggestion that psyops can be understood to be like sales & marketing:
Yes, I would say it’s fairly similar. We are just like a marketer. We’re finding whoever we want to buy our product and we figure out what will make that product interesting to them.
So that is more of a physical aspect of this. For us, it’s more influence. It’s more you’re trying to change an emotion, a behavior.
“Evanna Hu. What is Information Warfare?” — NATO StratCom COE (April 24, 2018) (YouTube)
~0:06:
So before I was asked to actually explain what information operations and informational warfare is before we get started.
So, informational operations could be seen as a communications campaign, if you’re in the private sector, if you’re doing marketing. Information warfare is basically, you know, it could be a competition between bots that are online, between one party and then the other, both could be States’ actors, both could be non-state actors.
Typically, information warfare is seen as a part of the kinetic warfare, and if you’re doing a lot of stuff against Russia, it’s part of a hybrid warfare with a non-linear warfare that the Russian foreign minister really likes to talk about.
How Might Psyops Affect Us?
“Evanna Hu. What is Information Warfare?” — NATO StratCom COE
~0:50:
So we all know what physical security is. It’s protecting ourselves physically. Cognitive security is, how do we actually protect our minds?
So cognitive insecurity is basically when there are flaws in our own cognitive security.
So it typically exists due to carelessness, just not even caring. It could also be that someone’s naive, they’re innocent.
It could be that they have a target identity weakness, which basically means that they’re so loyal to one identity that they become blind to the flaws. You see this a lot with ISIS, with al-Qaeda groups.
There’s also groupthink. On average, when they—we’re grouped together like this [addressing the crowd], your IQ drops by about 20 points than if you were by yourself. And so if everyone around you—if 40% of people around will nod yes to an answer that you know is actually wrong, most likely you’re either not going to speak or you’re also going to go ‘Yes,’ because everyone around you is doing the same thing.
And then there are also biological and neuroscience. I’m not going to get into it . . . . There are specific hormones that are at work that are created when a consensus—when an echo chamber—actually occurs.
And then there [is] also the psychological or the emotional imbalance.
“The Power of Propaganda & Psychological Warfare” — In Human Form — Psychology (April 3, 2022) (YouTube)
~12:13:
Leaflets were unquestionably effective during the war, but military psychologists noticed two problems that emerged. Military psychiatrist James A. C. Brown was quoted as saying, “Propaganda is successful only when directed at those who are willing to listen, absorb the information, and if possible act on it, and this happens only when the other side is in a condition of lowered morale and is already losing the campaign.”
The second issue that arose from the messages on leaflets was a failure to understand how the target audience best receives information. Leaflet propaganda had to be planned with great attention to the variables of the situation at hand, including the culture, language, and the history of the target audience, which, in turn, affects the attitudes and behavior elicited from the message.
“Rise of Religious Nationalism & the Politics of Contempt ⦁ Katherine Stewart” — Lake Washington United Methodist Church (June 13, 2020) (YouTube)
~1:27:02:
So how to understand it . . . . I mean, I think we can’t overlook the role of the right-wing propaganda sphere in all of this. Once you sort of—the right-wing propaganda sphere, you know, including multiple platforms from Fox Television on over, off to the right—you know, Breitbart and it goes on and on, QAnon, and so overlapping with some of that stuff. [...]
You know, they work really hard to separate their—the people who follow them from facts. Because if you can separate people from commonly agreed-upon facts, you can control their behavior. And frankly I think that’s the best way to understand it.
Are We in a Psyop Campaign?
“How social division is being used against us - and what we can do about it | David Troy | TEDxArendal” — TEDx Talks (October 17, 2017) (YouTube)
~7:28:
Yeah, so Cambridge Analytica. I love this quote: “There are no longer any experts except Cambridge Analytica. They were Trump’s digital team who figured out how to win” (Frank Luntz, political pollster).
I mean, this is from their website. This is propaganda that they put out, and I use that word for a specific purpose, because this is an actual propaganda firm. You may not know that Cambridge Analytica is a subsidiary of a firm called Strategic Communication Labs, or SCL, and that company has a 20-year background in running psychological operations, or psyops in military contexts, around the world, including in Afghanistan and other recent wars.
So let’s take a little look at what Cambridge Analytica actually is doing in order to try to tip elections, both in the US and Brexit and in Kenya and other places where they’ve been involved.
So what they do is, they try to derive an OCEAN score—this is a personality score—for every adult that they can sort of cram into their database. And OCEAN is another—another word for it is the Big 5 personality score, and it stands for openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. And depending on how individuals score on each of these axes, you can create targeted advertising that will modify your behavior.
Now, that’s an important point. We’re not talking about necessarily changing your opinion about what candidate to vote for. We’re talking about modifying your behavior. And that might include getting you to argue with people; it might include getting you not to vote; and a whole variety of other potential behaviors.
So if we take a look at some other materials that SCL has put out over time, this is a slide that was included in a deck talking about work they were doing in Afghanistan. And it’s sort of complicated mumbo-jumbo on here, but the key thing to recognize with this is this one element here, TAA, target audience analysis. And what they’re doing there is basically saying, “There’s a slice of the population that we would like to get to behave in a certain way. How do we send them messaging, how do we give them information that’s going to get them to behave the way that we want them to behave?”
Okay, so this is the technology that’s being deployed in elections in open democracies.
“LIVE: Top CULT EXPERT on Trump Movement reveals SECRETS of MAGA Brainwashing | The Weekend Show” — MeidasTouch (July 16, 2023) (YouTube)
~18:41:
Anthony Davis, host: Does Mike Flynn know that he’s applying all of these techniques that you describe, or is Mike Flynn a victim as well—he’s been radicalized, so he just is preaching the gospel? You know, what’s the deal? Is there a level of consciousness with those people where he’s like, “Right, I need to get as many of these people on side as I can”? Or does he genuinely think, like, this is the truth and he’s just preaching the truth?
Steven Hassan: I don’t know. I can tell you he’s always been religious, Catholic. And I can tell you that for, when he was involved with American intelligence, he was using what’s known as fourth-generation warfare on other countries to disrupt them, to overthrow leaders that the US thought was not in our best interests.
Fourth-generation warfare is something your listeners should really look into. I’ve done a number of blogs; I wrote about it in The Cult of Trump. But it’s a concept in military strategy that was written up in the ‘80s by a guy named William Lind, L-I-N-D, and he said you need to create chaos, you need to create uncertainty in experts, in science, in institutions. In other words, disorient people so they’ll be more easily persuaded to follow that authoritarian voice that gives certainty (“I’ve got this, I know more than the generals” kind of thing). And I should say that he paired up with a Christian Right strategist named Paul Weyrich in the ‘80s. And I’ll add that William Lind, I’m told, met Donald Trump in the White House. So we have a direct link with Flynn, fourth-generation warfare.
What the public needs to understand is that we’re not under—only under threat of information warfare from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, but from within, through people who want to overthrow our system of government and regulation, rule of law, and want to disrupt and distract our attention. And, if I may come back to the beginning of your intro, I really believe the Saudis, the Putins, the Kochs and the other oil, fossil-fuel people have been embarking in a very well-funded campaign of mind control to distract and confuse and disorient and to put out disinformation so they can’t be stopped from continuing to kill our planet for their greed.
And coming back to Michael Flynn? My guess is he wants to recruit as many people as he wants, but he believes that his cause is just, he thinks he’s doing God’s bidding, he thinks he’s fighting Satan—which, by the way, includes the Jews and the Muslims and the gays and everyone who’s an atheist, you’re also an enemy of God.
So it—has someone been a puppetmaster to him and hypnotized him without his awareness? Possibly. But I’m a solutions guy—I don’t want to just make people upset and fearful. I want to say, there’s a way to undo this. It will take a lot of very strategic, organized resource effort, but it comes down to psycho-education, Anthony. It’s pulling the curtain back to the Wizard of Oz and going, “This isn’t God, this isn’t aliens from another dimension or emissaries of divine light.” This is a very orchestrated information warfare, now using social media, our data and algorithms to mass-scale persuade people to do things (like who they’re going to vote for or who they’re not going to vote for), to polarize, so that the other authoritarian forces in the world can do whatever they want without thinking about it.
“Defending Democracy Together with Malcolm Nance and Ruth Ben-Ghiat” — DemsAbroadGermany (January 9, 2022) (YouTube)
~29:53:
Malcolm Nance: We’re in a very, very serious disinformation war in the United States. I wrote my first book about that eight weeks before the 2016 election, in a book called The Plot to Hack America, in which I saw the Russian operation with Hillary Clinton’s emails as a psychological operation warfare attack on the United States using every component of Russian government power. I was called a conspiracy theorist for almost two years. I was, you know, there was a famous case where Andrew Sullivan, on the very show where I was on, on Hardball, where he said I was a fabulist and a conspiracy theorist. Until the Mueller report came out, and every word was validated.
But I was looking at it from the perspective of an intelligence analyst, and intelligence perspective, and how they attacked us. One of the things that came out of this was, the Trump campaign so attached themselves to using the Russian wave of disinformation that by 2018 they had taken over that mission. You didn’t need foreign powers to do this for you. The Trump digital campaign had become so powerful in the right-wing information sphere, had moved from having just Fox News as the amplifier and cheerleader to creating two other organizations: One America News Network, OANN—they’re crazy. They are as close to Radio Mille Collines—for those of you who might remember Rwanda. Okay, the radio station that was calling for them to go out and exterminate their neighbors. That’s what OANN is. And then you have Newsmax, which is like a lighter version of—a right-wing version of Fox News.
We have a disinformation sphere in this country that has captured one-third of the population. They will not believe anything an expert like Ruth [Ben-Ghiat] will say. Not a word of hers. In fact, you [Ruth] are obviously a part of the elite deep state. They will not believe anything I say as a defender of this nation, because obviously I’m part of the CIA/NSA cabal that is out to overthrow the government, fill it full of Negroes and, you know, other brown people. Who knows? All I know is this: We have got so far behind the ball, and that we have so many Americans now who are steeped in this destructive ideology that views Trump as their Mussolini. —Well, maybe Ruth is going to correct me on this. Okay—late-stage Mussolini, early-stage Hitler. Right? I mean, he likes the buffoonery of Mussolini! Right?
But he prefers the hands-on machinery of a guy like an early Adolf Hitler, which would bring him into the Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin sphere of strongmen. Right?
But that doesn’t mean that it’s all lost for us. But with regards to that 30% of the population, including a large number that would like to use armed force to overthrow the government, you’ve got to understand something: we cannot talk to them now. I think even if the United States were attacked today by a foreign power, they would solidly side with the foreign power, as long as they’re not Muslim, Arab, or—you know, terrorists. But if it came from Russia, if it came from, you know, somebody that was giving [the] Joe Bidens their comeuppance, they would side with them. Because that is the entire reason the Russians developed this disinformation warfare strategy called the Gerasimov doctrine.
Arm Yourself, Cognitively
As Evanna Hu stated, what we need to focus on is cognitive security. One major mechanism for defense is critical thinking. Here are two videos that detail how to utilize critical thinking when interrogating and evaluating one’s sources of information:
Intelligence Analysis Skills: Critical Thinking (Part 1 — Definitions and Standards)
Intelligence Analysis Skills: Critical Thinking (Part 2 — A Useful Taxonomy)
Another skill you can develop is taking propaganda apart piece by piece to look at its component parts.
Lessons in Propaganda: Slavko Martinov at TEDxChristchurch
Deconstructing Information and Propaganda: an interview with Slavko Martinov
Also, be aware of your emotions and whether others are trying to manipulate them (in order to manipulate you).
The dark magic of communication — How we manipulate others | Christopher Cummings | TEDxNTU
So, are we in a psyop?
I can’t say one way or the other, because I honestly don’t know. I am just now scratching the surface of this entire topic. But I bring this diary because the little I have encountered so far has intriguing correspondences and alignments that I found striking. I hope you puzzle over them as much as I have, or even more so.