In the last article, I walked you through Cognitive Warfare, from documents and research papers from NATO itself (with several of the researchers and research groups I quoted from operating from US located NATO bases/shared facilities), and showed you what it is, and in rough lines how it works/what it targets.
But is Cognitive Warfare real, and do we really need to worry about it?
I think so, absolutely. Well, not worry, as there are some effective ways to counter it. But before we can counter an attack, we must first be aware we are under attack, and we need to understand the nature of that attack.
In short, we can see the following elements work together and align to allow massive cognitive warfare actions:
(1) Social Media platforms can parse their user bases with extreme granularity (accurate message targeting), with information we ourselves submit
(2) Social Media platforms’ censorship and shadow bans, and their susceptibility to astroturfing and synchronized troll farms (actually design features, believe it or not)
(3) Google’s ability to shape a user’s experience given their dominance as a search engine, controlling what you can and cannot see/find
(4) Mainstream media with a highly concentrated ownership (Six companies own 90%+).
(5) The 2012 Smith-Mundt Modernization Act which, in essence, repealed the earlier Smith-Mundt Act (SMA) of 1948, which opened the door to the State Dept to tailor and create fake news for use and dissemination within the US borders, previously prohibited by the SMA.
All of these elements are perfectly aligned, in place, and have indeed been activated for cognitive warfare. We can see it all around us. Let us take a look at several examples.
Education
We all know about the way the transgender agenda has been pushed upon us. It goes from kindergarten sex-ed and ‘meet the queer storyteller’, to trans athletes at college-level competition. Teachers who let their kids swear allegiance, not to the Stars and Stripes, but to the LGBTQ rainbow flag.
More than grooming, this is cognitive warfare. This is sowing dissent, weakening society as a whole. If you get away with making a population believe a man is a woman, that black is white, you have managed to weaken their perception of reality – in effect creating a cognitive shortcut - which will make it that much easier to run other psy-ops on that population. Luckily, this tactic is backfiring, and even gay people are defending the Florida bill, as self-identified gay Disney employees start fighting against the line of their own company:
Or Trans cyclist Emily Bridges was barred from competing, after the other, female, cyclists, threatened to boycott the events (See this DailyMail article).
Another example most people don’t think about: suddenly every child in public schools has a laptop, despite the many shortcomings of such devices as the main vehicle for education. The pandemic accelerated or completed that trend in many districts. But what do these laptops do? They link a whole group of children to the internet, and thus puts them under surveillance and within reach for targeted messaging.
Younger children are much more vulnerable to the tactics and methods used in cognitive warfare, as they are still learning HOW to perceive and analyze reality as it presents itself to them. They still believe in Santa, or the tooth fairy, in all their earnest and innocent desire to learn as much as they can, and in their trust towards parents, teachers and peers. Putting them behind laptops in school and for most of their homework is wrong on so many levels, and IS part of this cognitive warfare, ‘linking them to the matrix’.
Elections
“Cognitive warfare pursues the objective of undermining trust (public trust in electoral processes, trust in institutions, allies, politicians…). Therefore the individual becomes the weapon, while the goal is not to attack what individuals think, but rather the way they think.”
(Source)
You have all seen those who troll MAGA groups and message boards, telling people it is pointless to vote, since the system is broken. This is a direct example of what this study tells us cognitive warfare is about. They are not as much trying to influence in regards to what we think, but in our ACTIONS. By giving us the message that the situation is hopeless, pointless, they aim to give you a feeling of discouragement, with the hope and aim that this would keep you home come November.
I will keep repeating this, over and over: one of the main weapons we as civilians have, is knowledge. Since Cognitive Warfare attacks the capacity to know and actively thwarts knowledge, knowledge becomes the supreme shield. Why do you think there is so much push-back against the term ‘red-pilling’? Because the reality behind it is the perfect antidote against the attacks we have been under for years now.
Another example is how Cognitive Warfare shapes not ‘what’ we think, but ‘how’ we think. We are allowed to be ‘conservative’ or ‘Republican’ or ‘Independent’ or ‘liberal’ or ‘Democrat’. For this particular attack it doesn’t bother with ideology. It lets us, the people, focus on that, so the actual attack remains undetected. It will simply take stock of the efforts made to subvert elections, falsify results, change votes, harvest ballots, etc. to put forward the desired candidates. To cover up for that fraud, the narrative is created and promulgated that, for example, ‘Texas is slowly turning Blue’. It makes the targeted side accept the defeat, as it was inevitable, given the demographic changes, immigration, etc. If some become radicalized against immigrants in the process: BONUS! For now further messaging can point at those extremists as additional reasons why moderates and well thinking people within the target party are leaving, and crossing over to the favored (fraudulent) party.
Political domain
Make no mistake, ‘radicalization’ is another key goal of cognitive warfare.
An article by the Johns Hopkins University & Imperial College London, titled Countering cognitive warfare: awareness and resilience, stated unambiguously that cognitive warfare “seeks to sow doubt, to introduce conflicting narratives, to polarise opinion, to radicalise groups, and to motivate them to acts that can disrupt or fragment an otherwise cohesive society.”
Catch that? To “motivate them to acts that can disrupt or fragment an otherwise cohesive society.”
Now, you know where I am going with this example. We all know what happened around J6, the ‘storming of the Capital’. The instigations. Antifa. The plainclothes and ‘feds’ among the demonstrators. The inexplicable opening of sealed and locked doors. Cops waving in people, removing barriers. The refusal to call in reinforcements from National Guard troops, as done earlier that year with other demonstrations. The presence of Ukrainian Neo-Nazis (!!!!) in the thick of the action. The attempt to have a follow-up demonstration in DC for ‘Armed Citizens’, sneaking in seductive 2nd Amendment language, playing into our feelings of anger.
We’ve all seen it. We all know it.
Part of this cognitive warfare attack was a success (people DID enter the Capitol building: they were motivated to act, and that act was then used to disrupt/fragment the nation, and the Trump movement in particular), part of it was a failure (there was no real violence and destruction, and peopled didn’t show up for the other fake events, in good part because many in MAGA country and among conservative groups strongly warned against those attempts to create an armed tinderbox).
The same was happening with the Truckers in Canada: Trudeau and his goons did everything they could to provoke and bully them, trying to elicit a violent response. The restraint and level headedness of those truckers has been epic, and greatly contributed to the success of their movement.
Societal domain
Another line of attack is sowing dissent.
The same John Hopkins article stated:
“It is useful to note that false information or fake news are not required to achieve the aims of cognitive warfare. An embarrassing government document, hacked from a public official’s email account, anonymously leaked into a social media sharing site, or dribbled out selectively to opposition groups in a social network, is sufficient to cause dissension.”
First, the obvious: DC has been like a sieve, leaking all over the place, which seemed to reach epidemic proportions during the Trump administration. This was not coincidence, and I think even on purpose, in line with the above strategy for cognitive warfare. Why else would people take classified info directly out of a SCIF, and share it with the media? We can never rule out stupidity, but this open breach of all rules seems too deliberate. It wasn’t a one-time thing, either, and not just Schiff, but multiple people, in multiple agencies and organizations.
Or, as Schiff has tried many times, they hid behind the secrecy requirements, to make false statements. “I have seen the classified evidence in the committee I am in, there IS evidence for collusion!”. Or remember the whole debacle with Trump’s call with Zelenski, which was blown completely out of proportion to allege malfeasance by Trump. How did Trump counter? By releasing the transcript, a highly unusual move, as such conversations are normally understood to be privileged.
Again, you see the antidote at work: counter cognitive warfare with knowledge and truth. Repair TRUST.
Now, not EVERY contrary article or statement is cognitive warfare. There are very legitimate reasons to blow the whistle on wrongdoing, or to voice disagreement. But when you see a concerted strategy to leak out of context snippets, and the collusion with media that enforces that, you know something more is going on.
In this case, think about what Ronald Reagan said, and what the unforgettable Rush Limbaugh kept reminding us: TRUST, but VERIFY. On any level, don’t lose a healthy trust, but don’t blindly accept everything, either.
The article continued:
“While fake social media accounts and automated messaging “bots” can augment this dynamic, they are not required. (A recent MIT study found that the emotions of surprise and disgust alone make messages go viral – and regular users, not bots, rapidly re-send them.)”
This brings us to another important point.
We ALL are susceptible to this.
It is in our human nature, it is inherent to the way the platforms we use work and how we perceive them. One might be ‘red-pilled’ on one topic, but not on another. There are so many areas where we have competing news and opinions, that this messy reality prohibits a nice black and white rendition of reality. We tend to prefer such nice and neat narratives, for they are much easier to understand than the nuanced mess of real life.
Remember the story that General Flynn somehow was a Satanist? People were disgusted, and surprised, and this spread like wildfire under the MAGA crowd. It would have worked to undermine the General in the eyes of his own base of supporters (perhaps did work, with some), but a counter-wave happened that effectively nullified that attempted cognitive attack. How? By offering TRUTH and knowledge. (You will keep hearing me say that).
And lastly, the war in Ukraine.
Several writers on Substack have pointed out the mix between the elites here in the US, the ‘deep state’, and the corrupt oligarchs in Ukraine, with overlapping interests (think Burisma and Hunter Biden, for example). So when the war broke out a month ago, we saw a massive apparatus kick into gear. Some new players, but most already in place, either for several months, or for years.
Their concerted efforts are in good part focused on one goal: to create empathy (remember from the NATO documents I quoted?). This supplants reason and critical thinking: when we see a child crying, or a pregnant woman in distress, we innately respond favorably towards those victims who need our help (empathy), and it fills us with rage against the evil that did this to those innocents (where rage works against reason, as well, amplifying the empathic response). When you don’t have truth to fight with (or when you want to divert attention or cover something up), you are forced to resort to such tactics and appeals to emotion.
The tactics are very powerful, strengthened through incredible scale, repetition, the use of emotional contagion (see my aside on the Facebook experiments in part 3), etc. They are all geared to introducing their desired emotion, reinforce it, and steer it, knowing it will then lead us, in that desired state of emotion (anger and hatred towards Russia, empathy and goodwill towards Ukraine, for example), to pressure public opinion, and so giving the policy makers cover to make policy decisions in favor of Ukraine, against Russia.
Since you reached this point in this article, that last paragraph should not come as a surprise, nor sound far fetched any longer. This is how cognitive war operates, in its most basic form. There doubtlessly are many other tactics and methods, but that are NOT published, and thus outside of reach for me to be aware of, at this point in time. Still, I think I was able to show from those NATO and other papers on what cognitive warfare focuses, to what ends, and then link that to what we see happen around us.
So I think that will suffice for now to show that we indeed have been under attack by cognitive warfare, for several years. The methodical nature of the attacks in the media and from other persons/institutions, the way those attacks align with stated tactics of cognitive warfare, the impact they have: there is no doubt.
Now, this does not mean every single one of those are orchestrated by the same people. Not at all. And some might not even know they are waging ‘cognitive warfare’, but are simply attempting to cover their tracks and fool the opposition. We cannot deny, however, that the nature of each of those attacks DO fall under cognitive warfare.
That article by John Hopkins and the Imperial College contained a chapter on ‘Weakened minds’, which I will provide here in full, as it is important for us all to read and understand.
“Our cognitive abilities may also be weakened by social media and smart devices. Social media use can enhance the cognitive biases and innate decision errors described in the Nobel-prize winning behaviourist Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
News feeds and search engines that serve results which align with our preferences increase confirmation bias, whereby we interpret new information to confirm our preconceived beliefs. Social messaging apps rapidly update users with new information, inducing recency bias, whereby we overweight the importance of recent events over those of the past. Social networking sites induce social proofing, wherein we mimic and affirm others’ actions and beliefs to fit in with our social groups, which become echo chambers of conformism and groupthink.
The rapid pace of messaging and news releases, and the perceived need to quickly react to them, encourages “thinking fast” (reflexively and emotionally) as opposed to “thinking slow” (rationally and judiciously). Even established and reputable news outlets now post emotional headlines to encourage viral diffusion of their news articles.
People spend less time reading their content, even as they increase the frequency in sharing them. Social messaging systems are optimised to distribute short snippets that often omit important context and nuance. This can facilitate the spread of both intentionally and unintentionally misinterpreted information or slanted narratives. The brevity of social media posts, in combination with striking visual images, may prevent readers from understanding others’ motives and values.”
If we are honest, we ALL have fallen prey to this, as well, one way or another. I did see a great counter arise, lately, the 48 hr rule, or the 96hr rule, to wait for at least a few days after ‘shocking and surprising’ news breaks, to see what the actual reality is, if there are nuances, or updates that we need to know before making any judgment. This goes straight back to the difference between fast and slow thinking. We need to relearn to stop ‘reacting’ fast, based on emotion, but rather use our reason, calmly, slowly. Especially if the news is ‘damaging’. It will also require discipline to apply that equally to news that is damaging to OUR side, as evenly as to news that is damaging to the OTHER side. We get trapped both ways (look at how they now tried to trap and smear the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, for spreading a tweet that afterwards was proven incorrect).
That brings us to another aspect of our defense: STOP “thinking fast” (reflexively and emotionally) and START “thinking slow” (rationally and judiciously). Think of the ’48hrs rule’.
Another great writer and vlogger on Substack, Just Human, echoes this, when he repeatedly reminds us that Understanding>Reacting.
The John Hopkins article also spoke about how to defend against cognitive warfare. They spoke on the level of states or militaries, of course, but what they brought up, at least in essence, applies to us, as well. It incorporates several of the elements I have already highlighted.
“A proper defense requires at the very least an awareness that a cognitive warfare campaign is underway. It requires the ability to observe and orient before decision-makers can decide to act. Technology solutions can provide the means to answer some key questions: Is there a campaign going on? Where did it originate? Who is waging it? What might be its aims?”
Another article by Hopkins and the Imperial College, Hybrid Warfare – New Threats, Complexity, and ‘Trust’ as the Antidote, provides further insight. They use the word ‘hybrid attacks’, but it is clear they are talking about cognitive warfare.
“Ultimately, what hybrid threats undercut is trust.
It is for this reason that building trust must be deemed the key bulwark against hybrid threats, especially ones that are geared towards undermining democratic states and polities. Moreover, trust remains the sine qua non for any policy or strategic response to hybrid threats to come to fruition. In other words, nothing will work or produce the desired results in the absence of trust.
Trust must not be understood as a single-layered or unidimensional phenomenon. It is needed on several levels and multiple domains. For instance, people must have confidence in the state organs for governments to ensure compliance with their decisions. It is alarming that in a lot of Western countries as evidence suggests - state institutions are losing their credibility owing to diminishing public trust. In the United States, public trust has declined from 73 percent in the 1950s to 24 percent in 2021. Similarly, in Western Europe, trust levels have been steadily declining since the 1970s.
It is not just public trust in the state that is paramount. People’s trust in each other remains equally important. The rise of populism in different parts of the world—including the Western countries—is symptomatic of greater socio-political polarisation within political communities. This results in jeopardising not only harmony at the societal level but also a community’s social and political fabric, thereby making it difficult to develop consensus in decision-making processes on all levels.”
A thought on this: We have seen how the ‘state’ has tried to set us up against each other in the whole Covid-19 pandemic, trying to have citizens rat out others who are not vaccinated, not masked, not social distancing…
(Or to set us up against the police… This is one of the saddest developments the last 2 years, where I haven’t seen all that many good and solid responses to. People either ‘back the blue’, or ‘oppose the brownshirts of the regime’, with an appalling lack of nuance and understanding of what the police are and aren’t, neglecting to make the proper distinction between what Police ought to be, and how they can and are being abused. The abuse that happens, at the hand of individual officers or of whole departments, is real, but is that grounds to undermine the whole idea of the police, as a whole? I am not so sure, lest you want to fall into the trap of being led into objective partnership with ‘defund the police’. Think about it.)
This is a larger trend, all over the world. It is very reminiscent of the Soviet era policies, where such betrayal of even your own parents or children was glorified. It does lead to a complete breakdown of society as a cohesive unit, and as a cohesive force…
This bring us to this list of counter-moves that is accessible and important to us all, as civilians:
1) AWARENESS that this is going on. Which is exactly why I wrote this article. We ALL are targets in this new warfare domain.
2) This also supposes restoring access to KNOWLEDGE/TRUTH: the attack aims to actively thwart this, so bolstering it will help soften or fully prevent the intended effect of the attack.
3) QUESTION what is going on. Which is, in essence, ‘THINK SLOW’, or the 48hr rule.
4) TRUST is key. Trust in our institutions, trust in our leaders, trust in each other.
With this, each of us can counter specific aims and methods of this Cognitive War. Of course, this is my first, and rather rough, version.
I call upon you all to think and explore this new field of cognitive warfare, as those documents laid it out, and to attempt to identify tactics and impact. That way, we can then work on more effective ways to counter it as we fine-tune the above basic list.
All is well.
_______________________________________________________________________
One last important observation.
Studying all this, I was forced to think differently on what Trump is doing.
Look back at the above list with 4 counter-moves. Trump is doing the same, on a much larger scale. He knows the nature of the war being fought, and he is responding in kind.
1) Awareness: he keeps all those topics alive: fraud, corruption, incompetence, his messaging is still on point, and relentless. First on his Twitter account, and now on his own website, https://www.donaldjtrump.com. People can directly go there, and see what he has to say, without a middle-man.
It allows him to shed light on the topics HE wants to be in the news, such as the disastrous oil policies by the Biden Admin:
and keeping focus on how the accusations he colluded with Russia are now being proven false! “Where can I get my reputation back?”
2) Knowledge/truth: He is building up Truth Social. A way to counter all the messaging and information ops by his opponents. He felt how he got shackled by the likes of Twitter and the media, undercutting his own communication, not just with his own base, but with the country and the world as a whole. Not ideal, and definitely a brake on what he attempted to accomplish.
Now, with his own Social Media platform, he can simply bypass all that. Tellingly, he is making sure there are no bots, which are a design feature on so many other platforms.
From their website,
https://truthsocial.com/
: “Truth Social is America's "Big Tent" social media platform that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology.”
(Add here the emergence of Elon Musk’s Starlink system, keep in mind Elon Musk’s courageous stand for actual free speech, and you see a match made in heaven, creating an unstoppable mix of hardware and software that falls outside of the control any other Social Media platform is under. It cannot be shut down, it cannot be censored. For more information, see this absolutely excellent write-up by CognitiveCarbon, Truth Social and Starlink.
His conclusion: “Going back to the home and neighborhood analogy: it’s as if Elon Musk gave you a flying car that lets you take off from your driveway and land at work without ever having to drive on the old roads — and under the Intel Agencies sensors — anymore. Blockades by the cancel culture mob no longer works; you can fly around any obstacle.
I can talk to you, and you can talk to me, over a new “Internet” that isn’t cancellable, and the Truth Social media platform that we use as our community cannot be shut down, either.
And that, dear friends, is why StarLink and Truth Social are such a threat to the powers that be.”
This comes with a very interesting update I had to make, after completing this article a few days ago: Elon Musk has bought almost 10% of the shares of Twitter, and has been appointed to the Board of Directors. This is developing fast, and in light of what I was writing here, I have to admit that I am impressed, but not surprised.
One quick thought on this: if Musk manages a hostile takeover of Twitter, and brings back Trump on his Twitter account, this is NOT to be seen as ‘against’ Truth Social. Truth Social was never meant to be the only social media platform. More platforms that each offer proper freedom is the ideal situation.
3) Questions: With a slow drip-drip, Trump keeps various important topics alive, and very often does so in a very Socratic manner. Questions. Forcing us to look again, and closer.
More importantly, he isn’t trying to solve everything himself, for us, but he asks questions, points at problems, so WE can step up, and step in. The best example is how so many grassroots people and groups have dug into the fraud question, and have come up with incredible evidence. Trump just seems to have in his MI rally that the documentary 2000 Mules will be out in 2 weeks! This, together with the tireless work of Seth Keshel, Catherine Engelbrecht with True The Vote proving through cell phone pings, coupled to camera footage, how hundreds of people were involved in ballot stuffing, and the incredibly active work of the indomitable Scott Presler, registering hundreds of thousands of Americans to vote, in the Republican column, to name a few of the high profile names, combines with the thousands of citizens who stepped up to run for local office, to be Election official or monitor, to fill in so many important roles, taking back school boards and party boards…
It isn’t ‘Me, Trump’, but ‘We, the People’, that is the answer, and Trump, of all people, and despite his braggadocious style of talking and turning the spotlight on him, knows that very well.
The absolute upset in Virginia’s latest state election is proof that this approach not only works, but will create a Red Tsunami come November 2022.
Count on it! (And go VOTE! Become involved!)
4) Trust: Trump set into motion investigations that aimed to (or will result in) restore trust in the institutions. A probe into the leaks. A probe into the treason committed by law enforcement (FBI, courts) and the intelligence world, when they spied on him before, during and after his election. A continued push about the elections, to clean that up, encouraging people to step up themselves and reform the system from the ground up (which, as a side-effect, restores trust: you, the citizen, build it up again, yourself, restoring it, so of course you will trust it a whole lot more than before!).
Look at how Kash Patel is pointing us in that direction, when he discussed the FEC fines against the Clinton campaign. Instead of merely using it to bash Clinton, or the corruption that allowed that to happen, or any other quick and easy shot, he wants us to think how this is “a massive step in the right direction to restore faith to some of these institutions”! Not build back better, but Bring back trust.
For the video: https://t.me/drawandstrikechannel/36054
Step by step, Trump seems to be countering specific elements of this cognitive war that has been waged, for years, on both the American people, and the world. This seems to corroborate some of the theories that have been proposed, both of devolution and government in exile.
If indeed the cognitive warfare surround the 2020 elections reached certain proportions, it most definitely would classify as an act of war, and we would be in a state of war, even if not openly declared (which should not be a surprise, given the very covert nature of the cognitive attack that is such a huge part of it, necessitating similarly covert counter-attacks).
And there is plenty that would suggest cognitive warfare has been used, combined with plain fraud. The whole Covid-19 situation was abused to elicit an emotional response to blatantly unconstitutional and unlawful measures, taken under ‘emergency powers’ by governors or state secretaries or election boards of the different states. All the while playing into our empathy (you don’t want grandma to die, do you?), bombarding us with so many alarming news flashes (remember the counter at the bottom of the news shows?), and so on. I am sure you already begin to see the many ways how what I described in part 3 and part 4 up to now apply, in so many ways, to what we underwent regarding the elections.
I have no hard proof, indeed. I am, again, no James Bond, with such inside access. But I can read, and I can connect the dots.
I do see such cognitive warfare all around us, and I do see Trump moving very meticulously. I really think he knows (true, an assumption on my part, I never had the honor of talking with him). And he is acting on it (that, I can see). The complete match between the tactics of cognitive warfare, the steps we can take to counter it that can be derived from those stated tactics, and the steps we see Trump take, is well beyond coincidence.
Which leaves me very hopeful: this whole situation WILL be turned around.
If anything, because in this war, truth and trust are central. And because those waging this cognitive war on us, seem to have started from the assumption that man is malleable. They think they can simply repeat Robbers Cove, and set us up against each other, manipulate us, with a certain outcome. But they seem to forget that there also was a Middle Grove, where the boys resisted the manipulation, and saw through it. (See my article Our Middle Grove Moment for some more background). Humans are not just the sum of our biological and cognitive parts, it seems (Ha, this truly is for another article), and in their very materialistic worldview, they cannot comprehend that.
Which makes me realize this: we are at a crossroads.
Will we, as a people, as a nation, as a world, go down the path of Robbers Cove, and be manipulated against each other, and submit to control and oppression?
Or will we rise up, stick to our morals, to what we know to be true and right and worthy, and reject the attempts of those puppeteers who try to submit us to their ends?
I hope that I have done my part, by presenting this article, and raising awareness of this war that is being waged for our minds, offering or bolstering the awareness and tools we need to effectively counter it.
Meanwhile, Trump is tirelessly working, and fighting back against this massive and multipronged cognitive warfare attack we are all under. Countering on every level. Aided by, and inspiring, We the People. This makes me proud to be American.
“And the Truth will set you free!”
👏👏 Thank You Arn, God bless You and Your's 🙏
As my brother always says, respond, do not react.