Stop Bringing a Picket Sign to a Psyop Fight

Yesterday's tactics can't win today's information war.

Many of us now see the full-scale fascist takeover for what it is. We see the relentless attacks on democracy, the weaponized cruelty, and the dismantling of our institutions. The alarm bells are ringing.

But seeing the threat is one thing; understanding the battlefield is another. We are still treating this like a political disagreement. We bring facts to a feeling fight. We expect reason to work on a movement that runs on repetition and rage. We are fighting a psychological war as if it were a debate, and we are losing badly.

Their goal is not to win an argument; it is to rewire reality. They have mastered the art of propaganda, hammering their lies until they become “truth.” They understand there are no neutral parties here. In this information war, there are only two types of people: the victims, and the ones who fight back.

So, the question is not if you see the threat, but how you will fight it.

The Science of Surrender: How Repetition Becomes Reality

If you think a fact can, on its own, defeat a lie, you have already lost. The enemy we face knows a much darker and more powerful truth about the human mind: say something loud enough, long enough, and often enough—and it becomes truth. It doesn't matter if it starts as a lie. What matters is that it sticks.

This isn't a cynical political slogan; it's a documented psychological principle called the Illusory Truth Effect¹. The science is clear: the more we are exposed to a statement, the more fluent it becomes to our brains, and the more likely we are to accept it as true, regardless of the evidence. The first time you hear a lie, you might ignore it. The tenth time, you repeat it. The twentieth time, you might think it was your own idea.

This is the engine of the right’s propaganda machine. Think of how they operate. They don't just state a talking point; they drill it in until it becomes background noise, an unquestioned assumption. Lies like "tax cuts grow the economy" or "Democrats are the real racists" are hammered relentlessly across every speech, ad, and social media post. They took a meaningless insult—"woke"—and through sheer force of repetition, turned it into a political cudgel used to attack everything from schools to the military.

This strategy has a terrifying pedigree. It is the perfection of Joseph Goebbels’ “Big Lie” philosophy in Nazi Germany, which understood that a falsehood of colossal scale, repeated with absolute conviction, could swallow a nation’s reality². It is the modern-day equivalent of Russia’s “Firehose of Falsehood” propaganda model—a relentless, high-volume stream of multichannel messages that overwhelms and confuses its audience until truth becomes irrelevant.³

What we are facing is not a political strategy. It is a psychological one, tested in the most brutal regimes in history and now deployed through modern technology at a scale the original architects could only have dreamed of.

The End Game: From Narrative to Violence

It’s tempting to believe that words are just words. That a war of information is a metaphorical one, fought with memes and talking points, not with fists and weapons. This is a fatal miscalculation. An information war is not the conflict itself; it is the prelude to a physical one. Its purpose is to create a narrative so powerful that violence becomes not just possible, but permissible and even necessary.

To understand how quickly a narrative can curdle into cruelty, look no further than the Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971⁴. In this infamous study, ordinary, psychologically healthy college students were randomly assigned the roles of "prisoner" or "guard" in a simulated prison. The researchers intended to study the situation for two weeks, but they had to shut it down after only six days.

Why? Because the participants didn't just play their roles; they became them. The "guards," given a uniform and a position of power within a manufactured narrative, rapidly devolved into sadistic tyrants. They subjected the "prisoners" to psychological torture, humiliation, and abuse. The "prisoners," in turn, became submissive, broken, and traumatized. These were not evil people; they were ordinary people who had fully internalized the roles a story had assigned them.

This is the end game of the information war. The relentless propaganda is designed to cast us, their political opponents, into a specific role: not as fellow citizens with different ideas, but as an illegitimate, dangerous, and subhuman "enemy." They are the "patriot guards"; we are the "traitorous prisoners." Once that narrative is cemented in the minds of millions, the brutality of the Stanford experiment will not be confined to a university basement. It will become the reality of our streets.

The violence isn't a bug in their strategy; it is the feature. They aren't just "owning the libs" for laughs. The cruelty is the foundation for a fascist system built on fear, division, and raw power. The information war is how they build the psychological prison. The physical violence is what comes next.

This Is How You Build a Fascist Army

Let's be brutally clear about what the science and history we've just covered actually mean. They provide a two-step formula for turning a citizen into an executioner.

Step one: Reprogram the mind. Use a "Firehose of Falsehood" to flood the information space with a simple, emotionally charged narrative. Repeat the lies relentlessly. The Illusory Truth Effect guarantees that with enough repetition, this new narrative will overwrite the old one, creating an alternate reality where facts are irrelevant and only the story matters.

Step two: Assign the roles. Once this new reality is established, populate it with heroes and villains. As the Stanford Prison Experiment proves, this is all it takes to unlock the human capacity for brutality. The human mind is highly malleable. Given the right circumstances and a persistent narrative, you can take a perfectly normal person and turn them into a rabid fascist, ready and willing to commit acts of violence against the "vermin" they’ve been told are threatening their way of life.

This isn't a theory. It is a playbook. And it is being run against us right now.

Fighting Yesterday's War: Why the Old Battlefields Are Now Traps

Before we can forge a new strategy, we must ask a fundamental question: Why do we march? When we pour into the streets, signs in hand, what is the ultimate goal? It isn't just to vent our anger. The core purpose is to capture the nation’s attention—to force society to look at our message, to think about our cause, and ultimately, to change the direction the country is going.

This is the strategic genius of the giants on whose shoulders we stand. The leaders of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements faced a media landscape controlled by a handful of powerful gatekeepers. The only way to get their message past the censors at the big TV networks and newspapers was to create a spectacle so massive it could not be ignored. Marches were the perfect weapon for that war. They forced the cameras to turn and broadcast the fight for justice into every living room in America.

But that was a different war, fought on a different battlefield. Today, attention is decentralized, scattered across the infinite scroll of a dozen different apps. The right understood this shift years ago. They realized that a tactic requiring immense personal sacrifice—time off work, the cost of travel, child care, and even the risk of arrest or bodily harm—yields a stunningly low return in the modern information war.

This is why they have worked so hard to capture social media. They know that from the comfort of their homes, they can get their ideology onto the screen in your hand dozens of times a day. They can relentlessly repeat their message, multiplying its power with every share, while we spend weeks planning a single, fleeting event. He who can repeat his ideas in front of the most eyes controls the direction of society. He who surrenders this ground is guaranteed to have his ideas wiped from the collective mind, even if they live on in small, isolated echo chambers.

The strategic mismatch is staggering. The race is for the future of the country, and by clinging to the tactics of the 1960s, we are choosing to lose. We are proudly riding on horseback, patting ourselves on the back for our authenticity, while they are lapping us in rocket cars.

The Well-Intentioned Surrender: Ceding the Digital Battlefield

As the right was colonizing the digital world, a parallel movement was taking root on our side: the Great Digital Retreat. It was a mass exodus from platforms like X and Facebook, and the reasons for it were, and are, entirely valid. The daily barrage of rage, disinformation, and performative cruelty is genuinely corrosive to the human spirit. And the moral offense of generating revenue for the very platforms amplifying the propaganda is undeniable. It felt like the only clean, principled stand to take.

But the data reveals a brutal truth: the exodus failed. According to the Pew Research Center, as of mid-2024, the vast majority of Americans remain on the very platforms many pro-democracy voices abandoned. YouTube is used by 83% of U.S. adults, and Facebook by 68%. Among the crucial 18-29 age demographic, a staggering 93% use YouTube, 76% use Instagram, and 59% use TikTok.⁵ Meanwhile, alternative platforms like Bluesky, where many retreated, have yet to break through 40 million global users—a fraction of the U.S. population alone, even before accounting for bots, duplicates, and inactive accounts.⁶

We must ask a devastating question: what if this retreat was exactly what our opponents wanted? Whether the "leave social media" movement was a deliberate psyop or a happy accident for them, the result is the same. The data shows it was a self-imposed exile that successfully convinced a large portion of their opposition that the best way to fight a war was to leave the battlefield.

This is the brutal calculus of our situation. We were encouraged to protect our individual mental health, a noble goal that tragically overlooks the collective, permanent mental health crisis that comes from living under a consolidated fascist regime. We were told to measure our impact by the pennies in ad revenue we could deny a billionaire. But this prompts a different question: Granted, you can deny the owners of these platforms a few dollars a year by exiting, but if you truly believe they are fascists intent on using their platforms for evil, how many thousands of dollars in ideological damage could you do to their movement by staying and preventing their narrative from taking hold?

The result was a strategic catastrophe. Voices of reason, compassion, and democracy vanished from the primary battleground of ideas, creating a vacuum that was immediately filled by the loudest and most extreme voices on the right. It was a strategy born from principle that resulted in a catastrophic strategic loss, leaving the most important battlefield of our time almost entirely uncontested.

The Rocket Car Playbook: A Simple, Brutal Strategy

The right’s strategy isn't complicated. Its genius lies in its ruthless simplicity and its perfect attunement to the modern media landscape. While we were debating the merits of showing up, they were mastering the art of winning. Their playbook is built on a few core principles they execute relentlessly.

First, they keep it simple and repeat it endlessly. They know that paragraphs don't spread, but punchlines do. Their slogans are short, emotional, and easy to chant: "Lock her up," "Build the wall," "Stop the steal". They hammer these simple lies until, through sheer repetition, they feel like truth. This is the Illusory Truth Effect deployed as a weapon of mass persuasion.

Second, they tell a story, not a lecture. They understand that facts don't win; stories do. They don't engage in complex policy debates. Instead, they craft a simple narrative with clear heroes (themselves, the "real Americans") and villains (immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, "elites"). Every event is filtered through this story, making it easy for their followers to know who to cheer for and who to hate.

Third, they give the enemy a name. The right doesn’t fight against abstract concepts like "corruption" or "liberalism"; they attack tangible targets. They name names—Soros, Pelosi, Fauci, Hunter Biden, Barack “Hussein” Obama—turning them into avatars for everything their base fears. They elevate specific tragedies, like the death of Laken Riley, and now Charlie Kirk, to embody their entire narrative on immigration. This makes the threat feel personal, real, and immediate.

Finally, they dominate every channel. Republicans figured out years ago that legacy media was dying and that the real power was in social media, podcasts, and online influencer spaces. They built a propaganda machine that operates 24/7 on YouTube, TikTok, and X, ensuring their message is the loudest and most persistent voice on the platforms where people actually spend their time.

This is the rocket car they are driving. It is a simple, brutal, and devastatingly effective machine for waging information war. It isn't built to persuade through reason but to dominate through repetition, emotion, and omnipresence. This is the strategy we must understand and prepare to counter.

The Fight Is Here. The Choice Is Yours.

We have laid the facts bare. This is not politics as usual; it is a psychological war, waged with scientifically proven propaganda techniques. Its goal is not just to win elections, but to reprogram reality and build a fascist army, paving the way for real-world violence. We have seen how our old tactics—honorable but obsolete—are failing, and how our principled retreat from the digital battlefield has become a catastrophic surrender. We have watched our opponents master a simple, brutal, and effective strategy on the very ground we've abandoned.

So what now? The comfortable illusion of neutrality is gone. The choice is no longer whether to participate in this war; that choice was made for you the moment they made you a target. The only choice left is how you will fight. Will you be a victim, a bystander to the collapse of democracy? Or will you be in this fight?

If you are waiting for a politician, a party, or an institution to save you, you will be waiting until the lights go out. The courts will not save you. The media will not save you. The solution isn't coming from Washington.

The solution is you.

And there has never been a better moment to launch this counteroffensive. The regime’s recent actions have exposed their incompetence and cruelty, causing their public support to crack. Their grip on the narrative is weakening. Now is the time to press the advantage in the battleground of ideas.

"Fighting back" does not mean you must take on every troll in a head-on conflict. It can be simpler. Go back to the platforms that have been largely abandoned by our side. Follow the voices who are still fighting. Like their posts. Repost them. Contribute one pro-democracy message a day and, if you are concerned about the toxicity, never look at the replies. You don't have to fight every battle. But we need you in the information war, amplifying the idea that democracy is still worth pursuing. Someone else will push your message forward, just as you do for theirs. Some will take on the trolls directly, so you don't have to—myself included.

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This article is more than an analysis; it's a strategic briefing for the information war. The American Manifesto is where we draw up the battle plans. If you're ready to stop fighting yesterday's war and start winning today's, join us. Every subscription strengthens our counteroffensive, sharpens our messaging, and helps us build an army of digital fighters.

Subscribe. Share. Fight Back. The future is the battlefield.

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Because if you don't, then those who seek to end democracy will succeed in building an army that wants to end it. And when they succeed, you will not be safe, no matter where you choose to retreat.

This is our fight. Let's own it. Let's win it.

Let's get to work.

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Your move — join the counteroffensive

• Which of our old tactics (like street protests or digital retreats) do you think is the hardest for our side to let go of, and why?

• What is the most effective piece of their propaganda you've seen recently? How did it work?

• What's a simple, pro-democracy message you could commit to sharing this week?

• Do you agree this is a psyop? If you have a counterpoint, share it.

Keep it focused. This is a strategy session, not a shouting match. No calls for violence.

1. The Illusory Truth Effect: A principle demonstrating that repeated exposure to information increases its perceived truthfulness. This effect is powerful even for statements known to be false.

• Source: Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., & Toppino, T. (1977). Frequency and the conference of referential validity. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16(1), 107–112.

• Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022537177800121

2. The "Big Lie" (Große Lüge): The propaganda technique based on the principle that a lie of audacious size, repeated relentlessly, is more believable than a small one. While described by Hitler in Mein Kampf, it was masterfully employed by his Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels.

• Source: Jewish Virtual Library. "Joseph Goebbels: The Big Lie."

• Available at: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joseph-goebbels-on-the-quot-big-lie-quot

3. The "Firehose of Falsehood": A Russian propaganda model characterized by high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless disregard for consistency. It entertains, confuses, and overwhelms audiences, leading to apathy and a distrust of all sources.

• Source: Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews (2016). "The Russian 'Firehose of Falsehood' Propaganda Model." RAND Corporation.

• Available at: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

4. The Stanford Prison Experiment: A 1971 study led by psychologist Philip Zimbardo that demonstrated how quickly individuals conform to social roles, especially in situations of unequal power. The experiment's guards rapidly exhibited authoritarian and abusive behaviors, while prisoners showed signs of extreme stress and passivity.

• Source: Zimbardo, P. G. (1971). The Stanford Prison Experiment: A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment.

• Available at: https://www.prisonexp.org/

5. Social Media Usage Statistics: Data from a survey conducted from Feb. 1-June 10, 2024.

• Source: Pew Research Center (2024). "Social Media Fact Sheet."

• Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/

6. Bluesky User Statistics: A real-time tracker of user count and platform statistics for the social media site Bluesky.

• Source: Realtime.blue

• Available at: https://realtime.blue/