In the United States PSYOPs (psychological operations) “have been part of the nation’s military strategy for decades”, according to the New York Times. In a 2013 op-ed about epistemic warfare, Peter Ludlow wrote:
“The military’s “Unconventional Warfare Training Manual” defines Psyops as “planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.” In other words, it is sometimes more effective to deceive a population into a false reality than it is to impose its will with force or conventional weapons. Of course this could also apply to one’s own population if you chose to view it as an “enemy” whose “motives, reasoning, and behavior” needed to be controlled.”
Operation Earnest Voice
In 2011 The Guardian reported that the US military was developing software capable of creating fake online identities, commonly known as “sock puppet accounts”, that could be used to spread propaganda:
“A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom)… to develop what is described as an ‘online persona management service’ that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world…The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations ‘without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries’… Once developed, the software could allow US service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with any number of co-ordinated messages, blogposts, chatroom posts and other interventions… The multiple persona contract is thought to have been awarded as part of a programme called Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), which was first developed in Iraq as a psychological warfare weapon…OEV is reported to have expanded into a $200m programme.”
Using pseudonymous identities to spam people with propaganda is not just an American endeavour. In evidence to the US Senate's armed services committee, Gen James Mattis said Centcom was collaborating with "our coalition partners" to develop new techniques "to counter the adversary in the cyber domain". In 2011 the primary adversary of the United States was Islamic extremists. Today, along with Russia, it’s white identitarians and right-wing convervatives. Mattis told the committee that Operation Earnest Voice "supports all activities associated with degrading the enemy narrative, including web engagement".
One can only assume that since the publication of these revelations, these seedling endeavours have expanded in line with the military’s swollen budget. It's worth asking: what narratives are they now trying to degrade?
To gain some understanding of the worldview of the national security beauracy of the United States, one only need look to the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot (concocted by the FBI), the Russian bounties disinformation, the career of ex-CIA director John Brennan, or the response to Hunter Biden’s laptop.
After The New York Times belatedly acknowledged the Hunter Biden laptop was real, ex-CIA spook John Sipher tweeted “I take special pride in personally swinging the election”.
These people are happy to pull the strings in pursuit of their own ideological agenda.
The German government compiles a list…
Karlstack, a Substack I’d recommend reading, recently ran a highly-researched piece about the notorious Washington Post gossip journalist Taylor Lorenz. The article makes it pretty clear that Lorenz is the most morally malignant journalist we've seen since Walter Duranty. The most interesting piece of information though isn't about Lorenz, but rather in regard to an ex-Twitter employee and Antifa operative by the name of Travis Brown. Brown, a software engineer, is the man who garnered the information that enabled Lorenz to dox the individual behind the Libs of TikTok Twitter account. Here's what Karlstack had to say about him:
“He hasn’t updated his LinkedIn in 2 years, and from as far as I can tell, this is because he is a full-time Antifa hacker dude now. He calls himself an “archivist” and in practice what this means is that he creates bots, scripts and automated code to compile databases and lists of anyone he deems an enemy of Antifa. That is his full-time focus. Creating lists, upon lists, upon lists. Brown then weaponizes these lists to attack anyone he possibly can. One of Brown’s many lists is the “Hate Speech Tracker,” a program whose explicit purpose is to aid Antifa extremists in tracking and archiving statements by its enemies and find “connections” between them to aid in doxxing.”
This hate speech database includes people like evolutionary biologist Heather Heying, the mainstream vaguely conservative homosexual Douglas Murray, homosexual Asian Andy Ngo, liberal Jewish atheist Sam Harris, and Marc Andreessen, the programmer behind the world’s first widely used web browser. It also includes Wesley Yang, author of The Souls of Yellow Folk, selected as a notable book of the year by The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post.
What does any of this have to do with psyops, you may ask. Creepy cyber-stalker Travis Brown compiled his list with funding from the German government. One must ask, if the governments of Western countries use taxpayer money for such endeavours, what can we imagine they use they psyop capacity for? If you're considered dangerous enough to be put on such a list, one can only assume your considered dangerous enough to be the target of the military industrial complex. If mainstream liberals with one ‘wrong’ thought in their head like Sam Harris are considered enemies of the state, what does that bode for actual conservatives?
With Russiagate paranoia still swirling wildly throughout the Democrat party, any individual spreading the wrong opinion is viewed not just as misinformed or wrong, but as a de facto agent of a foreign state. Ideological disagreements are reimagined as matters of national security.
In January 2022, the Financial Times ran the headline “Psy-ops are a crucial weapon in the war against disinformation”, congratulating Sweden on launching it’s Psychological Defence Agency. Mikael Tofvesson, head of the agency’s operative division, told the newspaper that aggressors are trying to sow division by targeting areas of public concern such as immigration. Question open borders and your an agent of Putin. We are the enemy now. There's a lavishly funded cyber-war going on, and we can't even see it happening.