Critical thinking in Republican America, is on the endangered species list
The role of influence operations in the American political landscape.
My friends,
First, my apologies for not publishing a second essay last week. I have been a bit under the weather for a couple of days. I now have a little wind in my sails and today, I wish to make a powerful point, elemental to the current threat capable of sinking our ship of state… critical thinking. For years, both professionally and personally, I’ve heard the warnings about how uninformed, most Americans appear to be. There are countless reasons for this but the most notorious are also the most nefarious, such as conspiracy theories, miss and disinformation, propaganda, etc.
There are plenty of culprits to blame but blame isn’t the only point of this essay. The point is that if we continue on the path we’re on, our ship of state will sink in a disaster, taking all of us with it. The point is, what are we going to do about it? A tangential point is that we must do it now, not next month, next week or otherwise, but right now as we read this. We must acknowledge that Americans have long been subjected to Pavlovian Conditioning, leading them to believe the narratives of dishonest propagandists, writers, journalists, politicians, marketers, religious leaders etc. Ironically, I feel as if the most responsible of the short list of who to blame above, is the advertising and marketing industries. Politicians, especially Republicans employ these unethical tactics to acquire power.
Marketers may not have done the most direct harm, but it was their methodology that created the severe weakness in the psyche of most Americans, that believe in narratives and concepts, without applying critical thinking. To this day, marketing just may be one of the most dishonest of professions. Their job is to sell things to people whether they need them or will in fact, be harmed by them. Politicians and their parties, saw the success of these tools and now, invest heavily in them to to make people believe absurdities.
The quote above from Voltaire, a preeminent philosopher, writer, actor of the Enlightenment era, sums up these thoughts in exquisite simplicity. That quote is but one of hundreds from him that reverberate with authenticity and brilliant insights. This first quote, perfectly describes the political approach to today’s Republican Party and its members. Although there are a couple of deep false narratives on the left, they do not threaten our republic, other than dividing the party, leaving it disjointed and dysfunctional.
Now that the marketers have shown dishonest leaders, politicians and unethical organizations how to instill false narratives into their campaigns, powermongers and their enablers, all too often use them for the most nefarious of purposes. Trump’s utterly immoral techbros, have turned all manner of technology loose on the American people, so that they can be predictably controlled to do their bidding. Professionally, this is called Narrative Warfare, an elite and poorly understood influence strategy. In my line of work as a deeply experienced influence operator, I can assure you that data and AI without strong oversight, is an unmitigated threat to the world, not just America. AI involvement in influence operations, will be a topic that I will address in-depth in an upcoming essay, and as time allows.
Narrative Warfare is the battle between competitors or adversaries to control the behavior of their audiences. - Cobaugh - 2024
Although AI and technology at the moment doesn’t understand human influence in a coherent manner, they will over time. Data is the future nuclear weapon of influence and the evidence is all over our political landscape. In 2016, Russia and complicit GOP operatives suppressed voting in select areas and promoted increased voting by the GOP concurrently. This gave Trump the win in battleground states. They did this via the platforms most Americans use daily, like Facebook, LinkedIn and then, Twitter.
Now, those specializing in influence operations especially for the Republican Party, permeate every platform available to us. Facebook and LinkedIn both were willfully ignorant and defenseless during the 2016 election and to a large extent, still are. Unless our national security community admits that they have failed us for over four decades, honest Americans stand no chance against adversaries of our nation’s true values due to tactics like, algorithms, bots, throttling, shadow-banning, moderation and far more. Truth-tellers are the first to be censored because they threaten not only politicians, but the American oligarchy financing the MAGA GOP’s un-American agenda.
Yes, marketers are now exploiting created vulnerabilities in our buying patterns, our religious and political beliefs, our favorite sports teams etc. Many of these alleged marketers have sold their soul to politicians and use their skills and tools to sell false narratives and conspiracy theories to assist those like Trump and the GOP, that are attempting to dismantle our constitutional republic. They have precise objectives that have turned the tide of American values, into a competition between those living in alternative realities, and those trying to restore our nation’s actual values via honesty. The GOP is by far the worst and in my professional opinion, represents an existential threat to our nation’s future. I’m not exaggerating this in any manner. I’ve been saying this publicly for at least a dozen years.
So if you are legitimately trying to figure out what all of this talk about influence means to “critical thinking,” it is as simple as it sounds; without credible facts, there can be no critical thinking about the content that our media feeds provide us 24/7. Half-truths, overt lying, perpetuating false narratives, conspiracy theories and more or their tactics, prevent many Americans from ever accessing the truths they require in order to think critically. For the reasons above, it requires work to find credible sources that provide you enough sound information required to follow the most basic steps in problem solving; 1. Define the problem, 2. analyze that information, data, historical precedent and countless other things and finally, 3. solve for a solution.
Where Americans go wrong is that they have allowed influencers like alleged news sources like FOX News to tell us what the so-called facts are, what they found with their ridiculously dishonest analysis and what the solution is. This does not just apply to the right, although they have taken conspiracy theories and overt lying to a whole new level. Between marketers conditioning us to buy into what are often fully dishonest sales tactics, this has made it far more difficult for Americans to discern truth. Marketers and their political acolytes have via those tactics and content, herded customers into echo chambers where they only acquire content from those chambers. This not only locks in customers but voters as well.
Once there are “captive audiences” already conditioned to only hear content from their daily “narrators” it literally evolves the identity of audiences into devoted and predictable victims. I use the word “narrator” because we are talking about Narrative Warfare. All narratives require narrators and those with some sort of innate charisma like Hitler, Mussolini and now Trump, use their narrator role to do precisely as Voltaire expressed in his quote, “Those who can make you believe absurdities and make you commit atrocities.” Many American voters, especially today’s Republican party have allowed themselves to be turned into lemmings, doing the dirty work for the regime in power in DC.
We see these atrocities daily from the administration and their voters, conditioned to accept the absurdities of the endless Republican conspiracy theories, and refuse to act on even the most basic values most Americans were raised with. They cheer on the cruelty of refusing to pay SNAP, food stamps and other benefits, etc. Republican voters sit in cowed silence while ICE and other Executive Branch thugs abuse tens of thousands of human beings without due process. Yes, they are violating the constitutional rights of American citizens, legal residents and undocumented aliens and even worse, in the most un-American and cruelest ways possible.
It didn’t just start with American marketers though. First of all, influence operations are as old as human beings themselves. Power and control have always seduced humans. While I would have to write a series of books to go back that far, what does matter at this point in our history is something called Active Measures, an old Soviet term for their covert influence operations. The primary objective of Active Measures is something called, Reflexive Control. In short, this simply means that their influence operations were designed to have enough control over their audiences, that they could predictably control them from afar. In modern times, this is precisely the war going on in our digital environment, and especially in regards to social media.
One tactic that the Soviets and now Russians have employed for seven or eight decades, is to plant seeds of hate and discontent between the cracks in the human fabric of our nation. Those seeds planted hate and friction between races, ethnic peoples, rich and poor, different religions, etc. Their objective was simple and also one of the oldest tactics in influence operations, “divide and conquer.” The Soviets and now Russians were never a true peer adversary, so they decided to unravel the rich human fabric of our nation in order to prevent America from unifying against their will. America, despite being a nation of immigrants and different religious beliefs, has long struggled in meeting our “everyone is equal” commitment, although we’ve made great strides. Unity threatens our adversaries.
One thing that you can be sure of, is that every divisive issue in the US today has been exploited by those Soviet and Russian seeds. Those seeds have grown and are now being exploited by our adversaries, and often because they were the ones who planted, watered and fed the seeds of division in the first place. Then along comes Trump and the Republican Party that found those divisive false narratives were valuable to acquiring power. This explains the overtly racist, Christian Nationalist values of today’s GOP. The so-called Mueller Report, actually the SSCI, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence called, Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence United States Senate on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election clearly states in detail, that Russia did in fact significantly interfere in our election. Volume 5, the CI/ Counterintelligence report is especially damning, all 966 pages of it.
We see this divisiveness today being amplified by dog-whistle propaganda from the right, or more accurately, today’s fully radicalized Republican Party. It doesn’t matter if it’s their insanity over all issues, partisan, gender, union, farmer, racial, religious, income, and all of their other diversionary culture wars. Right-wing media blares around the clock with these dog-whistles. Audiences long conditioned to absorb whatever their narrators say, internalize these concepts. They are confused too. For example, I have high school friends that are the kindest and most caring people I’ve ever known, yet they support racism, misogyny, cruelty and even an aberrant version of Christianity called Christian Nationalism, while still believing that they are those folks I knew a half century ago. They have been systematically deprived of their ability to think critically, via nefarious and destructive influence operations.
In lay terms, those who voted Republican/ Trump in 2024, are on the spectrum of those who’ve on some level, lost their ability to reason. Had this been his first term, I could give them a mulligan or a “do over” due to their unfamiliarity. Now, a decade later, every voter still capable of critical thinking, knows precisely who Trump and the Republican Party are, what they are capable of and just how dangerous they are to our republic. Herein lies the critical point, those who have internalized false narratives, are no longer capable of critical thinking. They are in some ways, Zombie-like. They stumble forward, driven by forces between their ears they cannot understand nor ever could. They are in the Russian sense, “reflexively controlled.”
Media plays a role in this as well, especially media that claims to be a news source. With only 6 or 7 primary international, multimedia conglomerates controlling nearly everything we see, read, watch or hear, their over-simplified narratives for complex issues, often provides us little of the nuance required to define the problem. This type of media monopoly, often deprives us of what we need, to make informed decisions.
Finally, public education has struggled for decades. Budget, curriculum, management, historical revisionist curriculum, social issues, vouchers and of course, the Republican Party’s decades-long war on education, are just some of the painful realities facing our constitutionally guaranteed access to quality public education. Coming from a family that includes a couple of dozen professional educators, being the son of one and being the father or father-in-law of professional educators, it frightens me greatly, to see the demise of what used to be one of the best public education systems in the world. We cannot allow this war on public education to continue. To do so, is to cripple the future for our children and grandchildren.
Summary
I’ve covered a lot of territory in this essay and yet, have just scratched the surface of the threat to our nation, if we cannot collectively see reality and think critically. We have several obstacles, of which the most prominent ones are the focus of this essay. We must look at what we can do rather than cannot based on the realities discussed, but not forget about all of the obstacles either. They will have to be addressed once we have restored our republic. As I often mention, I have distilled our primary faults as, The four horsemen of the MAGA Apocalypse: Autocracy, Oligarchy, Christian Nationalism and Political Violence.
All of what I’ve discussed here can be found in these four categories and every one of these are enabled by false narratives, conspiracy theories and are enforced by political violence, such as ICE and CBP operations in our streets. Most of our family and friends that voted Republican are both enablers and victims at the same time. They have been victimized by decades of influence operations that have convinced them that up is down, black is white, truth is a lie etc. etc. etc. Their psychological conditioning now denies them any chance of seeing reality. Most will never fully recover from their radicalization. We cannot change this without expertly restoring our media environment. This administration won’t do this so we will have to elect those who will. Tragically, our national security community has failed us for decades, by failing in their mission to protect Americans from cognitive assaults.
I have nearly erased my fingerprints by writing in-depth essays and white papers about the failures in our national security community, tasked with fighting what is professionally called, foreign and domestic malign influence. In short, malign influence simply means that others are attempting to control your behavior in order to convince you to do something against your own best interests. Every single Republican voter and roughly 20% percent of voters on the left can no longer distinguish reality on certain issues and topics. For this reason, the most important tactic at this time, is to extend a hand to the silent minority in the political middle ground that we need them to overthrow the administration and their party, via every legal means possible. Anyone that is making this about left vs. right or Republican vs. Democrat is working against the resistance, not for it.
Background on our national security community’s failures in influence.
Combat ineffective, the rusted, broken-down hulk of US Influence Operations
The US National Security community is incapable of managing mis/ disinformation threats
Protecting our nation from Mis and Disinformation, requires true expertise at Ethical Influence
Historically speaking, Americans that see our founding principles as their core beliefs, have rallied to the cause when our nation was at threat. It’s in our DNA to overcome such threats from tyrants and we’ve always succeeded. I have every confidence that we will again, but like the Civil War, 1861-1865, not without suffering and hardship. The longer we wait, the more painful.
This is a long essay and it’s filled with food for thought and a perspective that you won’t find often elsewhere. Please ponder these thoughts and then apply those critical thinking skills, while concurrently helping others to do so as well. In the name of our nation, the word “United” is the key. We have never agreed with each other completely and democracy is a messy pursuit, but if we follow our real values and lend our support to the fight to restore them, we’ve got this.
E Pluribus Unum
Paul
100% correct!! Critical thinking did not die. It was harvested for ad spend and fed back to us as a form of dopamine. In my “Epistemic War Reports,” I refer to this as SECSV: saturate attention, enclose discourse, capture identity, and then apply selective violence to dissent. Voilà. Reflexive control in a red hat.
The fix is not vibes. It is operations. Treat propaganda like pollution. Regulate emissions. Fund local news. Teach bullshit detection alongside algebra. Cut algorithmic throttle on rage bait. Break the data brokers. Unionize teachers and pay them like neural infrastructure. Stop performing “dialogue” with people whose worldview is a subscription product. Organize the reachable middle and starve the click farms.
You do not bargain with a con. You break the Bezzle! You deplatform it, then you build a better on-ramp to reality. Pack your critical faculties and your running shoes. The house is on fire. We are the water.
That disconnect from reality is why my last vote for a Republican is twenty three years in the rear view mirror. I can’t abide religious nutters who think government is a tool they can use to insert their obsessions into my life.