Okay resistance, this is the time to strike!
Some military strategy for crippling the GOP’s coup
TAT readers,
Today, a little lesson on “exploiting an adversary’s weakness.” I will pepper this essay with some classic military quotes, but only so far as to reinforce why, now is the time to strike back at the very heart of this GOP coup and its components; Trump, the Republican Party and Republican voters. Typically, I’m the last person to endorse stuffy military doctrine however, some of the most enduring and iconic historical military minds, have some excellent insights on winning battles, especially the cognitive ones. Win enough battles and yes, you can win the war. The Epstein issue, is one such major battle.
In professional military education, there are two men, one a 19th century Prussian officer named Karl Von Clausewitz and a roughly 2,500 year-old Han Chinese general, philosopher and military strategist named Sun Tzu, that seem to always be at the heart of the military strategy taught to all. Von Clausewitz’s, On War, specifically explains, “that War is nothing but a continuation of politics by other means," Sun Tzu, the name history assigns to him, is largely credited with writing, “The Art of War.” This book is taught not just to military personnel, especially the officer corps, but in business schools and many other fields as well. Both discuss conflict management in and surrounding conflict. There are critical insights in both men’s texts that matter a great deal right now. We should listen. The quotes below bring us to the topic of today’s essay.
By his own words, lawsuits and the stories of dozens of young women, Trump is one of Epstein’s close friends where both have a weakness for women, especially young and often underage women.
The Von Clausewitz quote is fully accurate. Unless we are immortal, we all have weakness or as I prefer, an “Achilles Heel.” This applies to nations, allies, organizations etc. as well.
All war presupposes human weakness and seeks to exploit it. - Carl von Clausewitz
Sun Tzu is correct about the enemy providing exploitable weaknesses. Trump and the GOP brought this onto themselves via years of conspiracy theories about Epstein, Trump and underage women
The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself. - Sun Tzu
One last quote that drives this opportunity home, is from none other than Napoleon Bonaparte.
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake - Napoleon Bonaparte
Now, let’s talk a bit, about these iconic quotes, relative to the GOP, Trump and Republican mistakes and how to “exploit them.”
Why do I say “now is the time to strike?”
For decades, Teflon Don has been skirting connectivity to Jeffery Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, both human traffickers of young girls, not only for sex with Epstein but his friends and associates as well. But a far wider global network where billions of dollars changed hands, is also part of this inhumane assault on children. Trump and his Party have launched a barrage of mini and major conspiracy theories about Epstein, his relationship with him and the sexual abuse of underage girls. Those conspiracy theories became a bizarre but expected mainstay of his base’s support for him. In the past couple of weeks, all of this turned into a major disaster for him, his party and oligarchs, besides inflicting major cognitive dissonance into the “base.”
In recent weeks though, as Trump and his sycophantic GOP congress, have spent all of their time looking for but not finding, a way out of this debacle of their own making, things have gotten worse. Trump’s changes to his promise to unveil the so-called Epstein files and his angry outbursts at his base for believing his own conspiracy theories, are causing that angry cognitive dissonance among GOP politicians and their base. It isn’t only confusing to them, but their emotional response is best defined as anger, and plenty of it. Things are so bad that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson sent congress home for the summer, trying but failing to quell that anger.
This is the type of mistake that Napoleon’s quote suggests, we should allow them to bury themselves in. This is a dumpster fire issue and all that we must do… is to continue to stoke this fire for it to continue to consume the conspiratorial bonds between Republicans and their leadership. Right now, this administration is fully committed to their Project 2025 coup attempt and this issue provides us opportunity to degrade their efforts. We have rarely, if at all, had such an opportunity, due to his base being “brainwashed” or “conned”. What gives us this opportunity is part of how Narrative Warfare/ NW works. As my parents would have said, “let’s make hay, while the sun shines.” In other words, it’s time to pull out the big guns and go on the offensive like never before. News cycles close quickly and I implore the opposition to waste no time at all, strategizing and losing precious time.
Narrative Warfare
Narrative Warfare is the employment of influence campaigns, revolving around connecting to audience's identities, better than your opposition. In short, a war of influence for the control of the identities of all relevant audiences. It is our identities that control the meaning of all that we experience, whether true or not.
Today's GOP has had their identity conditioned over 30 + years by right-wing media, especially FOX News. Conspiracy theories are key elements of their identity. That identity is no longer patriotic by traditional standards, but has been converted into a reality that only allows them to believe in the fake-patriotism of their narrators, such as Trump, elected representatives and all right-wing media. This is precisely why that Republican voters are completely dethatched from our truth and reality. To them, whatever their narrators say, is reality.
- Cobaugh - July, 2025
The reason that this opportunity is rare for those opposed to this GOP regime, is because in Narrative Warfare, the break between the identity of the Trump/ MAGA GOP and their primary narrators such as Trump and other high-profile “influencers” is a very rare occurrence. The best part of this moment is that the GOP knows just how cancerous this topic is for their base’s allegiance, even though they have no idea why. Every day this simmers without a solution, they are risking voters abandoning them and disillusioning others.
For well over a decade, the GOP has been employing rudimentary NW tactics. For 30 years, FOX News has “conditioned” voters to believe in a very specific meaning of patriotism and Christianity. Right now, that “brand” is being threatened, leaving them confused, hesitant and without a functioning narrative. In other words, they are so conditioned to have their narrators tell them what to think, that they no longer can on the topic of Trump and their aberrant version of “conservatism.”
This brand of warfare is not new and has had different names over the millennia. Most recently, this type of warfare from adversaries, is best aligned with what the Russians and the Soviets called, Active Measures. The idea in Active Measures is to achieve what is called, reflexive control or in other words, “predictably triggering a response in their audiences, simply by way of a specific message, color combination, number or otherwise.” This is how the now infamous Troll Factory operated in St. Petersburg, Russia during the 2016 election cycle. It still operates in a variety of ways, simply to sustain that reflexive control over American voters. Republican influencers often mirror and parrot Russian talking points and conspiracy theories, even verbatim.
FOX News and later their companion far-right media on TV, streaming, social media and otherwise, conditioned their audiences much as Pavlov conditioned his dog in a now famous experiment that proved his psychological conditioning theory. Yes, that same experiment most of us learned about somewhere around seventh grade in science class. When such conditioning becomes the identity of a person or a group of people, they can be reflexively controlled and quite easily. This is why our family, friends and neighbors who voted Republican in the Trump era, have no understanding of reality. Reality to them is exclusively what their narrators tell them it is.
Next, let’s talk about targeting and yes, the non-violent kind.
How do we capitalize on this opportunity?
In military strategy, we are now at the “targeting” stage. There are two basic types of targeting in conflict, 1. kinetic or rather, killing people and breaking things and 2. non-kinetic targeting, influence operations. We are not yet in a civil war so number one is out of the question… thank goodness. Number two is something the the GOP has been using for roughly 20 years, with input to select individuals and entities from Russian influence operators. Now there is a powerful combination of Russian influence tactics and immoral GOP “influence operators” wielding digital media to further ensnare voters with their rapidly advancing skills and tactics. The most common users of non-kinetic targeting, are the marketers we can’t seem to escape from these days.
Brad Parscale of first Trump administration infamy, is one such operator. Lately he’s been hanging out in Midland Texas supporting two White Christian Nationalist, male-dominated billionaires financing the Texas Republican Party. These men are Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. Yup, no wonder the TX Taliban or TX GOP is so unconstitutional, racist and oligarchical.
Still, we in the opposition have something more powerful than these influence operations and it’s called truth and morality, based on real, traditional American values. These are long accepted to be our national values, even when we have often lived them imperfectly. In the Trump/ MAGA era truth and morality have been omitted from the Republican identity and replaced with something along the line of, God, guns and Trump." That is their reality, not what we all see, hear, watch and experience. As far away from reality our family and friends are currently, we still have a secret weapon called NW/ Narrative Warfare.
Ironically, this is the easy part and all of us can contribute to opening the recently developing cracks in GOP identity caused by the Epstein issue. Yes, it would be nice if the DNC or other entity willing to finance a campaign would help, but the DNC has been and continues to be relatively useless, often to the point of being counter-productive.
One reason that we must get onto the cognitive battlefield now, is that the Republican Party and especially the GOP-led Congress, has retreated from the battlefield in disarray. Another is that it is not just the break between the GOP administration and their voters but FOX News has been a primary trusted narrator for them for decades. FOX is now partially at war with Trump too, after he sued the Wall Street Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch who also owns FOX. Again, Napoleon would say, “not to interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.”
So, one of the things you can do in your own world that will help, is to try to reconnect to the old identity of your MAGA family and friends via a variety of methods. This is one of the few times that I will say that guilt and shame cards can be played, albeit carefully so that there is no lasting emotional injury. For example, as a father of two girls and grandfather to two little girls, I placed a righteously angry, “shaming” post on social media last evening where family and friends could easily see it. It is below.
"I love my daughters and see their faces when I see the girls that Epstein trafficked for men like trump and others.
Yes, we are angry that those who voted for this cruel, unconstitutional MAGA GOP, imposed a lifelong sexual predator and pedophile onto our nation. Don’t you care about other people’s children? You knew but refused to protect our children. You knew that he was aligned with Putin. His USAID cuts have already murdered nearly four hundred thousand people from those cuts and now it gets worse. Two thirds of those deaths are children.
He rounds up legal residents and citizens without due process, via cowardly alleged ICE officers in masks, who proudly beat anyone in their path. They wear more kit than I ever wore in a couple of hundred missions in combat zones.
Anyone who has ever been on a playground, knows that bullies are cowards.
If you still support this administration of insurrectionists and spineless congressmen, you are no patriot or Christian. Yes, I said this and please think hard about who you are, and whether this is what you claim to be."
- Cobaugh
- FB post
- July 25th, 2025
Where I come from, even this example at one time, would have been considered too blunt a criticism but now, after more than a decade of abuse from the Republican Party devoid of conservatism, it no longer seems so. That old midwestern culture of my youth, where folks did not often discuss politics in public, has given way under the pressure of the threat that a GOP built on MAGA conspiracy theories poses to our republic. It must be opposed as un-American and not Christian. Our backs are now, against the wall, leaving us no choice but to respond as reasonable as possible but also when required, righteous anger. Some folks would say and I would concur, that “the gloves are off.”
When I say reconnect to the “old identity of family and friends” it goes something like this; “The person I knew years ago would never have acted like this.” “They never would have supported, _______.” Insert any issue in the blank space. For example, the recent DOGE cuts to USAID have already killed roughly four hundred thousand people, two thirds of them children. No serious person would support this and by appealing to that person you used to know, you won’t “cure” them but you will insert doubt into their thinking. That doubt then must be nurtured in order to slowly break with the GOP’s reflexive control over them. This can also be phrased as temporarily detaching them from their MAGA narratives.
This tactic would be even more successful if news media and a competing influence campaign would be funded, in order to saturate media with similar narratives. At the moment, our mainstream press with few exceptions is kowtowing to this MAGA regime. Paramount, just this week made Stephen Colbert a martyr in order to have the administration bless their merger with Skydance Media. Just because these multinational media conglomerates have no moral spine, doesn’t mean that we have to follow suit.
The next step and as I have argued for months, take the fight directly to your GOP congressmen’s home district offices and drag your local media with you. Demand they answer the hard questions and when they refuse, (they always do) the media will be right there watching and reporting. Ask why they continue to support a lifelong sexual predator and especially about the young girls that make him a pedophile. Ask why they support DOGE’s murder of hundreds of thousands of human beings or even why they allow DHS to behave as thugs in masks, warrantless and wearing more tactical kit than I wore on a couple of hundred of missions in combat zones. Ask if their former self would have supported such.
The other tactic is to appeal to the good side they had before MAGA influencers kidnapped their identity. Something along the line of, “hey, let’s go and support this or that cause, that does good for people who need it.” This reconnects them to their human side that includes care, compassion etc. Once they can see snippets of their old self, introducing reality incrementally back into their lives, helps them block out some of their far-right influence narrators like FOX, NewsMax, Breitbart, OAN etc.
Then, there are those news clips where Trump and party leaders lash out at the base for being angry about things like the Epstein files. His tossing his base under bus is happening at an ever increasing rate, the more power and money he acquires. The place for these news clips are on social media and the more of us who engage there, the more visibility these pieces of Narrative Warfare get. If the DNC won’t do it, we must. They remain frozen in their “deer in the headlights” act at the moment, just when the opposition needs funding and a network of support the most.
Narrative Warfare is much like, “death by a thousand cuts.” There are very rarely any major battles that will make a big difference. Evolving identities of human beings is a long process. Hell, it even took FOX News over thirty years to create an audience of lemmings. Only a few serious practitioners have ever even operated in NW, me being one of them.
Our national security community says they understand it but there is zero evidence that they do. In fact, the criminally negligent waste, fraud and abuse in my natsec community is one of the reasons that we are in this mess in the first place. Had they been good at their professions, Russian influence would never have tipped the scales in favor of the MAGA GOP. DHS and the FBI domestically are responsible for the homeland and neither of them were effective either, but that is a story for another day.
We are the cavalry my friends and we must do what the DNC and other opposition groups can’t and won’t. Don’t forget, by EO/ Executive Order, the US can no longer operate against Russian influence operations any longer. I will continue to provide insights that will help us but we must all do the work. I use this platform as my way of contributing, plus quietly support some other pieces of the opposition. We all have something to contribute.
I need to wrap this up now because this essay includes a great deal of dense and complex material. Trust in your ability to become influencers with family and friends and in a non-confrontational way. I have used these tactics for years, especially in combat zones. They work if we all do just a little. The last thing I will say is that in the influence world, we must act quickly when we have exploitable opportunities. This is one such opportunity. Fast means tonight, tomorrow and daily until this issue fades into the next Republican abomination. Remember, those old friends truly believe what they say. Head on conflict and fact-checking fails unless delivered to the part of the old identity of your family and friends. If they were good people before, that is the identity that you must talk to. It’s the only way to lead them back and our nation forward.
Enjoy your weekend,
Paul