The true tragedy of MAGA, is the loss of family and friends... a personal story

How I lost so many high school friends, to MAGA and Russian propaganda

TAT readers,

Welcome back to a new week. First up, a short administrative note. Through the end of September, my schedule will be exceptionally hectic, and this will make writing, a bit chaotic. I will still write of course, but who knows when and how much I can write. What is of critical importance to me, is that in conjunction with new essays, I will be including restacks of previous essays, relevant to what is going on in the news. This is important throughout these final crazy weeks of a presidential election season.

Introduction

Just a bit of predictive caution, regarding a party built on conspiracy theories and baseless propaganda. The introduction of the Harris/ Walz team into the race, has tossed the Trump/ MAGA campaign into an even deeper disarray than they were previously. Trump is walking and talking chaos by nature but now… things will get even crazier. Yes, I know that “crazy” is not a clinical term but with him and his base attempting to live in an alternative reality, I’m not quite sure how else to describe them, in lay terms.

Trump only has a tactic or two and sensational, out of the norm actions and accusations are one of them. The other aspect that should sharpen the focus of those in opposition to MAGA, is that he has in the past, demonstrated tactics and approaches straight out of the Putin playbook. Let’s not forget that his 2016 campaign was heavily influenced and supported by Russian intelligence professionals.

Russia knows this game well and when they are unopposed on the battlefield of influence, they succeed. Hence, in my opinion and that of other respected experts within the national security influence community, it was precisely Russia’s strategy and efforts, that swayed to 2016 election to Trump. We must not allow that to happen again. As that our national security community is and has been impotent for roughly four decades when it comes to influence, it is up to all voters, to ensure that truth is the foundation of voters, not conspiracy theories and supporting propaganda. In fact, this is one of the foundational reasons that I began writing these TAT essays.

All influence campaigns are Narrative Warfare, a professional term for the handful of true influence operators with real-world experience. I am one of these few. In my recent second edition of, Modern-Day Minutemen and Women, The Art of Influence: Narrative Strategy I explain a great deal about this complex profession, why we failed in 2016 and still do, along with recommendations on how to reverse this decades long failure.

Today’s story is my personal experience with those from my hometown and surrounding area, still acutely under the influence of those well-established Russian and MAGA/ GOP influence campaigns. I tell this story because most US families experience what I describe in my story, and until we all better understand, it will be difficult to bridge the severe hyper-partisanship cancer, eating away at our nation.

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Urbana, Ohio, town square, little different today from the days, Model-Ts roamed the streets and roads. Photo, Champaign County Library.

I was raised in and around small-town Ohio, and consider the idyllic small community of Urbana, Ohio, my hometown. I cannot recall any real controversy in town and in true Midwestern fashion, people were painfully polite and never discussed politics or religion in public. Truth be told, our moderate Republican congressman, “Bud” Brown, lived on the main, east/ west street that like all small Midwest towns, becomes a highway at the city limits. In my day, there were roughly, if we round up, 10,000 residents and we were the “County Seat” of Champaign County, as well as the biggest town. At least in my mind’s eye, I grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting of Americana.

When we moved into town at the beginning of 7th grade for me, I felt as if I had moved to the big city. Dad became a principal of one of three elementary schools in town and I made new friends playing football, basketball, running track and playing Pony League baseball in the summer. I loved it then and love it now. The warmth and politeness of my youth, in the wake of the Trump era, has changed all of that, at least for those not, “on the Trump train.” I care deeply for those I went to school with and the families that they came from. These days though… this is not a two-way street in about half of those I went to school with.

Like most remaining in today’s, MAGA, Republican Party, my old friends from school, have been “conned” or if you will, “brainwashed.” The technical diagnosis is more along the line of; they have had their identity conditioned by a rudimentary form of Narrative Warfare, into accepting the foundational conspiracy theories of the Trump world or MAGA. Once an influence target’s identity has been so conditioned, they are manipulated as easy as your TV remote. In this case, Russia employed a strategy based on Active Measures, or influence campaigns, where something called Reflexive Control, gives them the remote control to the target’s behaviour. To achieve this control, it would take a skilled, Narrative Warfare operator, roughly six-nine months to achieve this. Because the only other approach is conditioning, it took FOX News thirty years.

To be clear, when an audience is properly conditioned to the point that they can be controlled by simple, pre-programed false narratives, they will be easily manipulated to reject anything that does not come from their primary “narrators and speak to their cultivated identity.” MAGA, with Russian guidance, has created a variety of dissemination networks. No, it’s not just FOX, NewsMax, OAN, Breitbart and other such propaganda outlets, but FB groups, non-domestic online networks and far more. At this point, a dishonest MAGA media system of networks, with support from Putin, pump Trump narratives and supporting propaganda into their audiences, 24/7. The most dangerous aspects of this are that any and all content will be rejected unless it fully complies with what they have conditioned to accept as truth. This is the case that I am experiencing with so many of my high-school friends.

To rub salt into the wound of this national security crisis, the US national security community remains willfully clueless about Narrative Warfare. They instead depend on fraudulent and nepotistic defense contractors who have been at the heart of our decades of failure. He is their prime narrator, and he is controlled by those who know how to manipulate him. These include but are not limited to, Putin, Xi, Modi, Oligarchs, domestic and foreign, organized crime and his own malignant narcissism.

They engage in antisocial behavior, idealize their sadistic nature, enjoy causing other people suffering, have an excessive need for admiration, lack empathy for others, and have a deeply paranoid attitude.

The term “malignant narcissist” is not an official psychiatric diagnosis as it is not recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). However, this psychological concept is considered a severe form of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), used to characterize individuals who exhibit extreme narcissistic traits with particularly harmful or malicious intentions.

Erich Fromm called malignant narcissism “the quintessence of evil.”

Malignant narcissists are aggressive, arrogant, and cold individuals with an excessive desire for power and high social status. They may exhibit a sense of entitlement, believing that they are superior to others and deserve special treatment or privileges.

They tend to exploit and manipulate others for their own gain, showing no remorse for their villainous behavior.

- Malignant Narcissist: How to Spot Them and How to Cope
- Simply Psychology
- Ann Drescher
- January 23, 2024

Back to the story…

So… I didn’t join Facebook until somewhere around 2012 and only because it made it easier to spend a few minutes here and there with family and friends at home. I enjoyed catching up with friends from school whom I had not seen hardly at all, since my 1974 graduation. Of course, there was very little that I could say due to being cautious about security. My relationships were building again, and I was delighted. I continued off and on the use the platform sparingly until retiring from the Army in 2015. I then spent a little more time on the FB platform and my old friends list, grew and grew and grew some more.

After 2015 and especially the 2016 election debacle, I strictly adhered to family and the hometown tradition of not discussing politics or religion publicly. I bit my lip and sojourned on despite the mountain of MAGA conspiracy theories and insanely dishonest memes and quips. This was painful in the extreme. I was literally watching the identity of my old friends change into MAGA sheep, with seemingly no ability to discern reality from their conspiracy theories. I knew what has happened and who was responsible but a high security clearance that still held in civilian defense work, kept my lips harshly at the rudeness and aggression. To this day, many of these folks still don’t see their actions in the same light as I do. Their friends that are not conned, are supportive but I also must remember, they still live in the area and must get along

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Somewhere around 2020, I intentionally, let my clearance expire. I did this because, I wanted to reach out publicly to see if I could assist in returning these formerly common-sense people, back to the polite, sensible people that I remembered and still care for deeply. I started slowly and quite infrequently, never provoking with harsh comments or asserting blame on them. After all, professionally, I knew that they had been manipulated professionally and by America’s worst enemies and their MAGA collaborators.

My cautious input was met at first by disbelief. Who could imagine that anyone raised with my friends, could hold such radical views that discussed a truth that they saw as “liberal propaganda.” My experience in national security that they had previously admired, now made me into a “government, deep-state propagandist.” I doubled down on restraint and continued to occasionally post professional insights, hoping against hope that some of what I was writing would slowly sink in. It did not and I am not surprised, based on my professional experience.

As we entered into the 2022 election, I told myself that I had two choices, I could honor my oath to the nation to; protect and defend the constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic or… I could ignore the threat. In my family of Veterans and those who live a life of giving back to the greater good, I chose to post my essays from these first months of writing TAT. I still did not take a harsh approach but stated the truth in succinct fashion, accompanied by all of the credible links that I could find in my research. This decision would serve to throw fuel on the fire. Sometime shortly afterwards, several of my “friends” unfriended me and then left for Truth Social, the preeminent Trump scam and conspiracy theory central.

Now, in just the past few months, polite, FB posts, other than jokes and family and friends’ content, the MAGA troops rally to beat up on their crazy liberal friend. They don’t know what my political views are, because like all of those conned by MAGA influence operations, they see everything that doesn’t conform to their regularly updated new batch of propaganda, memes, conspiracy theories and even new false narratives, as “liberal.” Their identity is now impenetrable. In the world of attempting to deradicalize extremists that are fully shutdown, I know all too well that the data says, there is little hope for recovery. How very, very tragic. I miss and still care deeply for my friends’ wellbeing.

There is no happy ending to this story and what bothers me powerfully from the perspective of national security, is that my story is the same for most families in America. All of us have lost family, friends, work colleagues and more to this insidious but preventable threat. The US national security community still refuses to learn from experienced and well-versed academically… operators. They continue to go down the same paths that have led, almost exclusively to failure, in the post, Cold War era. Like I noted earlier, writing these essays is my way of helping to fill the massive hole that they have left in US national security.

You and I cannot fix the intransigent national security community, but we can help others to understand what we are up against. Knowledge is power but must be followed up by continue reaching out and maintaining a relationship with those we feel are lost to us. There are small signs that this post-truth era is beginning to wane. Few people have patience for such fairy tales any longer. Those still willing to air their Trumpy conspiracy theories publicly, have come to recognize that they are less tolerated as they were for the first six or seven years of MAGA.

Just because some of the MAGA propagandists are quiet, doesn’t mean that they will not vote against America. They absolutely will and this is a factor that most polling, “experts” don’t get either. Like 2016 and 2020, Trump voters will quietly go into voting booths and vote MAGA and they may even lie about it afterwards but still, they will vote in accordance with their conditioned Trump identity. That is how it works when you lose at Narrative Warfare. It is a disease that may go publicly dormant but will always resurge given the right conditions. Case in point, the ideology of oligarchism and White Christian Nationalism is much along the lines of Confederate ideology leading up to and during the civil war. It has never died.

Yes, we would all love to have our friends and family members lost to MAGA back. We want them to be sane and grounded in reality again too. This is too much to ask for at this time, tragic as it is. What we can all do though, is keep the door open should they want to walk through it. We can insist our local small-town papers, or those left of them, report accurately and we can ask our congressmen to break up the media monopolies that stir the pot dishonestly for their own bottom line. So long as there only six primary media conglomerates, we remain at risk. The same goes for campaign finance reform that takes oligarchs out of the drivers’ seat, when it comes to media content. This is an essay for another day.

These are big objectives, but we must first survive the November election. It is the only way that we have a chance to save our constitutional republic and return it to its founding principles. More importantly, it’s how we give our loved ones, a fighting chance to recover. That is the sole purpose of writing this essay today… I miss my friends.

All my best this evening,

Paul