Sutton Smith Has Important Advice For you.

Third in the "Why Is Everyone So Angry" series

The actress Sutton Smith is today’s Hedy Lamarr.

Lamarr, you may recall, was a ‘30’s – ‘50’s era actress known for her striking beauty. Lately she has also been recognized as the inventor of spread spectrum communication technology. That frequency-hopping technique is important for securing military communizations; just as remarkably you are in all likelihood using it right now via a wifi or cellular network. (More on Lamarr later, please don’t leave now…

Sutton Smith, in addition to being a beautiful actress, also has a beautiful, technically oriented mind, having once worked as a bot farm herder. And unlike her bot herding peers, she’s willing to talk about her experience.

Let’s start her story with the most important part, the advice she has for all of us:

“If you’re seeing nonstop videos posted with a certain agenda, someone is paying for that!

So when you see a dump / a ton of media that’s telling you all the same message, do not say wow, what a thing happening right now. Please instead say wow, who’s trying to buy my opinion on this topic?”

Bot farming is a key component of goebbelsology, which in turn is a key component of mafiology. We will explain those terms in a minute. Just know that calling the phenomenon “propaganda” is like confusing scalp dermatology with brain surgery. Goebbelsology is the science of crawling into your mind and altering your perceptions of reality. It is very scary stuff.

Before we go furhter with mafiology and its goebbelsology component, watch Sutton Smith tell her bot farming story in two minutes.

That video, originally from Tik Tok, was accompanied by another where Sutton answers a commenter who asked whether she does political bots. Her answer:

"No fam, I'm not THAT dirty!"

Perhaps I’m just missing it, but that video seems to have been taken down.

So, who might be the clients for those bot farms that are too dirty for Sutton Smith to work for? Let’s do some digging.

A good place to start is with the Donald Trump phenomenon. If you’re like me, you find it astounding that a person as clearly unfit for public office as Donald Trump is leading in the polls and is threatening to reprise his presidency.

One can dismiss the enthusiasm for Trump of cognitively impaired folks who simply lack the tools to make intelligent judgments about the necessary qualities of a leader. But you and I must face the fact that there are also intelligent people who have somehow fallen under Trump’s thrall.

How on Earth did that happen?

How do cults seduce normal, intelligent people into accepting and embracing their bizarre expectations and perceptions? In this document I will answer that question as it applies to one type of cult, and will offer a solution to the dire problem posed by this one instance of that type of cult: the one called MAGA.

The start of the answer is quite simple. While we have treated the Trump campaign as though it has something to do with party politics and government, it fact it has nothing to do with those. We are dealing with a mafia.

I use the term “mafiocracy” for its system of governance.

We’ve all seen portrayals of mafias in movies of course. We have an impression of how a mafia works, and that impression has a lot of truth in it. But because not all of the internal workings of a mafia lend themselves to dramatic movie scenes, important things we should be aware of are just not so visible in our entertainment-dominated ways of learning.

And as with all sorts of other processes, mafiocracy has become more sophisticated and powerful in recent decades, benefiting from developments in digital technology.

While it’s common for political power struggles to exhibit some mafiocratic methods, the legitimate ones take seriously things like constitutions, due process, parliamentary procedure, the rule of law, and some measure of civil behavior and integrity.

Mafias Do Not Care

Mafias care only about their own internal rules, as exemplified by La Cosa Nostra’s requirements for becoming a “made man.” For the rest of us, murder is not only illegal but way over the edge morally. For a mafia, it’s simply a procedural necessity and has nothing to do with rules from outside the organization.

Ideology is another point of distinction. Legitimate politicians tend to have sets of beliefs, particularly when it comes to economics. While the words “conservative” and “liberal” are regularly tossed around without a lot of definition, legitimate politicians tend to believe those words represent ends of a meaningful spectrum of beliefs, and they see themselves as advocates of policies based somewhere on that spectrum.

Mafias will pretend to observe ideologies in their efforts to recruit chumps, but under the surface it is pure brutal power struggle. A mafia does not care about ideology.

Hitler’s Nazi party and Stalin’s Communist party are purported to represent opposite ends of an ideological spectrum. In fact, their “ideologies” were identical. Their “set of beliefs” starts and ends with “I believe that I should have what is now in your possession.” They were mafiocracies.

Says your local crime boss: “My belief is that I should be in control of everything, capiche?” You won’t find him (never her) discussing the merits of parliamentary versus limited-term governance.

While we debate, or rather fight over, politics and ideology, the world’s richest and smartest mafioso is conquering us.

Vladimir Putin, world’s richest and smartest mafioso, has got us so distracted and dumbed down by fights between meaningless clubs built upon imaginary ideologies (left, right, conservative, liberal, progressive, woke, Tea Party, Libertarian, socialist, collectivist, etc.) that we’ve been made too stupid and busy to notice that he is taking over the world.

Mentioning details of how this works in America to an American audience would just play into the mafioso’s hand by provoking a fight. So let’s instead show how the mafioso has worked his skill in another culture, France, in this article entitled A Russian bank gave Marine Le Pen’s party a loan. Then weird things began happening.

In fighting this mafia, it’s important that we all understand mafiocracy. I have described mafiocracy’s eight components, eight sets of techniques used to aggregate power to a hierarchy headed by a single individual.

If I can contribute in some small way by promoting an understanding what’s going on under a mafia’s veneer of normality, that will help toward blunting its force.

More importantly, after I explain (again, as I listed these in an earlier post in the Why Are People So Angry series) the eight components of mafiocracy, I will offer a strategy for dealing with the one component that you and I can most immediately do something about.

Let’s explore each of those components of mafiocracy.

MAFIOCRACY COMPONENT 1 :

Recruitment of Stooges

The stooge strategy is a powerful method for permeating society with a mafia’s agenda, imparting to the mafia operation a veneer of respectability and acceptability.

A stooge is a stupid but well known businessperson whose failures have left them with an unworkable load of debt. It’s often used in “bustout” schemes, such as when a mafia wants to acquire an industrial property for the purpose of destroying it with arson (after stealthily removing valuable contents) in order to collect insurance payouts. To maintain the insurance policy through the purchase transaction, a well-regarded businessperson’s name needs to be associated with it, because no sane and non-corrupt underwriter will continue a policy that’s associated with the name of a known mafioso.

The mafia bails out the stooge with the understanding that he is now the property of the capo de tutti capi, that is, the big boss.

Trump As Stooge

Mafias seldom have as big a fish as Donald Trump to work with. The Russian mafia has other stooges in its stable, but MAGA Man is probably the biggest catch in the history of mafia stoogeology.

The outrageously incompetent businessman Donald Trump (here’s a partial list of his failures) was bailed out of billions of dollars of debt by the Russian mafia around 2003. While they did launder much of the payments through Deutsche Bank to give it a veneer of legitimacy, mafias try to avoid such auditable paperwork. The proposition is simple enough to obviate the need for documentation: “I bail you out, I own you. And I am known to resort to extreme measures with disobedient stooges in order to set an example for others.”

As a businessman, Trump was a loser – over and over again. His net worth is likely less than yours or mine or that of anyone else reading this. The billions of dollars of debt he racked up before 2000 qualified him for the stooge role so familiar to mafiosos throughout history.

MAGA is a mafiaist organization, and it is the creation of Russia.

Arron Banks As Semi-Stooge

Arron Banks is perhaps not a classic stooge, as it appears that his obedience to the Russian mafia has as much to do with his other ties. Nevertheless, he contributed more money to the Brexit campaign than any accounting of his net worth would indicate was available to him.

Why would Russia care about Brexit?

Why would Vladimir Putin care about Brexit?

The answer is that both the Russian leadership, and particularly Putin, are extraordinarily jealous of “the West,” where “the West” includes Japan and India and all nations where individual freedom is respected and protected (though not always to the extent one would like.)

This is not a new thing. Today’s Russian leadership continues a tradition that goes at least back to the reign of Peter The Great, whose slavish envy of European culture had him compel members of his court and of the St. Petersburg elite to speak French instead of Russian.

According to Robert D. Kaplan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2023, “Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, pressed by an oligarch to explain how Mr. Putin could have planned such an invasion without his inner circle knowing, reportedly replied: ‘He has three advisers. Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.’”

Russia has worked hard over at least a century to drive competence out of its system, through gulags, extermination, or de facto exile. The result is an incredibly incompetent culture, saved from economic ruin only by abundant natural resources, the extraction of which was engineered by Western contractors. However, somehow in the midst of that Russia has developed one extraordinary competence: they are far and away the top theorists and practitioners of mafiology. The Sicilian mafia are amateurs by comparison.

Years after Brexit, the UK’s Channel 4 reported¹ that “Mr Banks is currently under investigation by the National Crime Agency over the source of money used to fund his Leave.EU referendum campaign… His [Arron Banks’s] companies are also subject to an investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office. Leave.EU has been found to have breached electoral rules and was fined by the Electoral Commission.

Mr [Nigel] Farage has repeatedly denied Mr Banks has made any donations to the Brexit Party, or has any involvement with it.

He has previously refused to name a donor to the party claiming he would be “hounded” if his identity was revealed.

Another donor, Jeremy Hosking, has revealed he donated £200,000 to the group.

Farage has consistently defended Mr Banks, claiming that the allegations surrounding his business deals, his campaign and his relationship with Russia are ‘unfounded’.”

If it’s not purely as a stooge, where does Banks’s loyalty to Russia come from?

New Statesman reported² that “In 2001 he [Banks] married again, this time to Ekaterina Paderina, known as Katya, a Russian from Yekaterinburg ... Katya came to Britain in the 1990s to study marketing at Portsmouth University. She overstayed her visa but married Eric Butler, a merchant seaman who, at 54, was more than twice her age. The marriage ended within months, prompting officials to investigate whether it was a sham.

Years later the tabloids discovered that Michael Hancock, a disgraced former SDP/Liberal Democrat MP for Portsmouth with a history of assisting dubious young women from eastern Europe, had intervened to help Katya stay in the UK. That, plus her fluency in six languages and the fact that Yekaterinburg was once a closed city, led to suggestions that she was a spy. Banks responded by buying a personalised number plate for her Range Rover: X MI5 SPY.”

MAFIOCRACY COMPONENT 2 :

Recruitment of Kompromats

It’s well known that FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover held onto his power for decades in spite of his obvious deficiencies because he knew about all the skeletons in the closets of Washington legislators and bureaucrats.

Dirt on your opponent, or for that matter your ally, can provide a lot of power. All that’s necessary to exercise that power is to make it clear what you want from them, and that if you don’t get it their misdeeds will be disclosed to the public.

Is this a mafiaist technique? Well, there’s a lot of this kind of thing wherever political power aggregates, so perhaps the point is that there’s always a bit of mafia in politics.

Once again, however, the Russians show that they’re the real pros in yet another mafia technique:

GOP Lawmaker Says His Colleagues

Are Compromised

https://politicalwire.com/2023/12/21/gop-lawmaker-says-his-colleagues-are- compromised/

By Taegan Goddard December 21, 2023

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) said on a podcast that some of his colleagues have been compromised by the Russians using drugs and prostitutes.

Said Burchett: “You know the old honeypot. The Russians do that and I’m sure Members of Congress have been caught up. Why in the world would good conservatives vote for crazy stuff like what we’ve been seeing? Here’s how it works. You’re visiting, you’re out of the country or out of town or you’re in a motel or at a bar in DC and, whatever you’re into – women, men, whatever – comes up and they’re very attractive and they’re laughing at your jokes, and you’re buying them a drink.”

He added: “Next thing you know you’re in the motel room with them naked, and next thing you know you’re about to make a key vote, and what happens? Some well-dressed person comes up, whispers in your ear, ‘Hey man, there’s tapes out on you. Were you in a motel room on whatever with whoever? And you’re like, ‘Uh, oh.’ And they say, ‘You really ought not to be voting for this thing. And what do they do? It’s human nature.”

And more: “No man or no woman is an island, and they know what to get at. If it’s women, drugs, booze, it will find you in DC and in most elected offices. And that’s what people in power and influence do.”

From Reddit - Posted by u/MMccLLoovviinn

Alabama Mayor Kills Self After Right-Wing Blog Outs His Cross-Dressing

https://www.thedailybeast.com/alabama-mayor-bubba-copeland-kills-self- after-right-wing-1819-news-outs-his-cross-dressing

I’m starting to believe that the right wing politicians are all being selected based on backgrounds that can be blackmailed.

When Russia hacked the DNC during the 2016 elections. It wasn’t only the DNC that got hacked, the RNC was hacked as well. From what I know, only the DNC’s information was revealed by the hackers. Seems the RNC information was better kept a secret and used as leverage. So your point seems to have merit.

Lindsey Graham’s actions over the last 5 to 7 years only make sense if you look at it through the lens of blackmail. The man literally bent over backwards to do things that made no sense at all and benefited no one but our enemies.

When Russia hacked the DNC during the 2016 elections. It wasn’t only the DNC that got hacked, the RNC was hacked as well. From what I know, only the DNC’s information was revealed by the hackers. Seems the RNC information was better kept a secret and used as leverage. So your point seems to have merit.

Lindsey Graham’s actions over the last 5 to 7 years only make sense if you look at it through the lens of blackmail. The man literally bent over backwards to do things that made no sense at all and benefited no one but our enemies.

MAFIOCRACY COMPONENT 3 :

Recruitment of Discreditors

When it comes to the study of the manipulation of perceptions, Americans are in pre-K while Russians are post-docs. The leaders of Russian government and media are the undisputed champions of the game of getting others to believe what they want them to believe.

One of the most effective ways to discredit an organization that represents an obstacle to the implementation of one’s plan is to influence appointments to that organization’s leadership positions.

Example: how did a drunken incompetent, Joseph McCarthy, get elected Chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations by his fellow Senate Republicans? As it turned out, his inept hearings succeeded in tarring all the people fighting Russian subversion with the brush of his own paranoid ineptitude. Let us imagine a conversation about that...

Comrade, surely you learned answer to question back in Perception 101. Is very simple.

Step one: Survey all who have figured out what we are doing.

Step two: Find the stupidest big a__hole among them.

Step three: Let Commisar of Adversary Appointments know your selection. Oh, you already did that?

Senator McCarthy? Da, is good one. McCarthy is perfect stupid a__hole. Is a drunk for good measure. Good catch, Comrade. Sorry I misjudged you. Commisar will ensure that idiot McCarthy leads opposition.

Step four: Enjoy as stupid a__hole McCarthy discredits his own movement, our opposition. Have another vodka.”

Good job, Russia! You got America to bifurcate into two echo chambers, those who imagined communist subversives everywhere, and those who felt victimized by the first group. Each was unwilling to listen to anything the other had to say. Peter the Great would be proud!

Consider that the “Russian threat” used to be the threat of communism. Then Russian communism failed so they became a capitalist state. Today the “Russian threat” perseveres, showing that ideology is just a smokescreen.

The Russian ideology is the same as the ideology of the Third Reich. It is the absence of ideology, as in a mafiocracy simple brutality replaces ideology.

Russia has lulled the masses of America and Europe into believing that politics is driven by the tension between two ideologies. Call it right vs left, conservative vs liberal, Tory vs Labor, Republican vs Democrat, etc. etc. In fact the intellectual foundation of that belief are as significant as the intellectual foundation of Red Sox vs Yankees. In other words, there is no intellectual foundation.

Hitler’s party was called “Socialist,” and Stalin’s party was also characterized with the same word. Their “ideologies” were in fact the same. They were neither “left” nor “right,” conservative nor liberal.

They were mafiaist.

MAFIOCRACY COMPONENT 4 :

Insertion of Allies

The tactic of getting people who are friendly to one’s own agenda appointed to influential positions is certainly not unique to mafias. It’s used across the integrity spectrum, from the lying, cheating mafioso to the honest citizen trying to get some productive changes approved.

Plenty of other organizations besides mafias try to move things to their own benefit by influencing the appointments of management and boards of committees, regulators, etc.

While this may appear to be like the insertion of discreditors tactic, there is an important distinction. With the insertion of discreditors, the incompetent appointee need only continue their incompetence and is otherwise not depended upon for anything. By contrast, the inserted ally must be depended upon to toe the party line after their appointment, and they must be continually updated on changes to that party line.

The most obvious method of inserting allies into an organization is with bribery, as Putin did to get Akhmad Kadyrov, his adversary (noted for pronouncing that "There are a million Chechens, and 150 million Russians. If every Chechen kills 150 Russians, we will win") to switch sides and become his loyal subordinate as the President of the newly puppetized Chechen Republic. All it took was carrots ($millions) and sticks (“Akhmad, would you like to see the sun rise tomorrow…?)

A significant part of the Republican Party of the United States of America has been taken over by people who show a startling level of loyalty to Russia. How did that happen?

Insertion of Allies is at work here of course. But look to Items 1, 2 and 8 for an explanation of how this tactic has been implemented by the Russian mafia.

MAFIOCRACY COMPONENT 5 :

Deployment of Goebbelsology

If something you read online makes you really angry, stop for a moment and ask yourself: Am I being played by a goebbelsian troll factory?

The despots who control everything in the un-free nations of this world are very jealous of the West. In fact, their fondest wish is to watch the West collapse into a thousand raging civil wars.

Social media is more than eager to help them because, you know, outrage creates page views and clicks. That in turn builds their database about you and me – and that database not only sells ads but generates revenue from access to the database itself.

The most valuable information about you – and therefore the information that advertisers pay the most for – is information about sociopolitical echo chambers whose members share a passionate belief in some world view. The feeling of mutual us-against-them trust that is share by members rubs off on ads for ridiculously overpriced miracle diet supplements, bogus investment schemes, and other super-high-margin products and services. Indeed, the same vendor might have ads in polar opposite echo chambers – selling under different brand names of course.

The skilled goebbelsian trolls work all sides and the middle. Anywhere there’s a half-truth they can parlay into anger on the left or right, MAGA or Woke, they’ll do it skillfully in a way that generates peak outrage.

So before you play the sucker by engaging in that outrage, think: Who is it that would like me to react this way? And also think: Are those people skilled in the art of what I will call goebbelsology?

OK, I slipped this neologism in for a reason. Josef Goebbels was of course the propaganda minister of Hitler’s Third Reich. But Goebbels himself learned the art of manipulation of the masses by studying the work of someone else, a pioneer in the art of manipulation.

That someone else was Edward Bernays.

I call it goebbelsology rather than bernaysology because, first, Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, is a recognizable brand for the art of manipulating perceptions; and second, we’re talking about the dark side of this set of tools. Edward Bernays naively believed, as did the pioneers of nuclear fission and fusion, that his discovery would be used for the good of mankind (well, perhaps also to sell women the idea that smoking cigarettes is chic.)

In his essay “The manipulation of the American mind: Edward Bernays and the birth of public relations”, Richard Gunderman tells about the source of this incredible set of power tools.

Gunderman notes: “Often referred to as ‘the father of public relations,’ Bernays in 1928 published his seminal work, Propaganda, in which he argued that public relations is not a gimmick but a necessity:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.”

Gunderman continues, “Bernays came by his beliefs honestly. Born in Austria in 1891, the year Sigmund Freud published one of his earliest papers, Bernays was also Freud’s nephew twice over. His mother was Freud’s sister Anna, and his father, Ely Bernays, was the brother of Freud’s wife Martha… he chose a career in journalism, eventually helping the Woodrow Wilson Administration promote the idea that US efforts in World War I were intended to bring democracy to Europe.

Having seen how effective propaganda could be during war, Bernays wondered whether it might prove equally useful during peacetime.

“Yet propaganda had acquired a somewhat pejorative connotation (which would be further magnified during World War II), so Bernays promoted the term ‘public relations.’

“Drawing on the insights of his Uncle Sigmund – a relationship Bernays was always quick to mention – he developed an approach he dubbed ‘the engineering of consent.’ He provided leaders the means to ‘control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.’ To do so, it was necessary to appeal not to the rational part of the mind, but the unconscious...”

“Bernays’ publicity campaigns were the stuff of legend. To overcome ‘sales resistance’ to cigarette smoking among women, Bernays staged a demonstration at the 1929 Easter parade, having fashionable young women flaunt their ‘torches of freedom.’

“He promoted Lucky Strikes by convincing women that the forest green hue of the cigarette pack was among the most fashionable of colors. The success of this effort was manifested in innumerable window displays and fashion shows… But at home, Bernays was attempting to persuade his wife to kick the habit… While promoting cigarettes as soothing and slimming, Bernays, it seems, was aware of some of the early studies linking smoking to cancer.”

“Bernays also used fear to sell products. For Dixie cups, Bernays launched a campaign to scare people into thinking that only disposable cups were sanitary. As part of this campaign, he founded the Committee for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary Dispensing of Food and Drink.”

“In the 1920s, Joseph Goebbels became an avid admirer of Bernays and his writings – despite the fact that Bernays was a Jew. When Goebbels became the minister of propaganda for the Third Reich, he sought to exploit Bernays’s ideas to the fullest extent possible. For example, he created a ‘Fuhrer cult’ around Adolph Hitler.

“Bernays learned that the Nazis were using his work in 1933, from a foreign correspondent for Hearst newspapers. He later recounted in his 1965 autobiography:

‘They were using my books as the basis for a destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me, but I knew any human activity can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones.’

“Today we might call what Bernays pioneered a form of branding, but at its core it represents little more than a particularly brazen set of techniques to manipulate people to get them to do your bidding.

“Its underlying purpose, in large part, is to make money. By convincing people that they want something they do not need, Bernays sought to turn citizens and neighbors into consumers who use their purchasing power to propel themselves down the road to happiness.

“Without a moral compass, however, such a transformation promotes a patronizing and ultimately cynical view of human nature and human possibilities, one as likely to destroy lives as to build them up.”

It would be a disservice to Russian manipulation skills to suggest that all those skills were learned at the feet of Bernays and Goebbels. Of course neither Bernays nor Goebbels had television and social media available to amplify their manipulation of popular perceptions. More important, than those, however, was the discovery of the amplifying effect of the use of what has been called the limbic brain.

It would be a disservice to Russian manipulation skills to suggest that all those skills were learned at the feet of Bernays and Goebbels. Of course neither Bernays nor Goebbels had television and social media available to amplify their manipulation of popular perceptions. More important, than those, however, was the discovery of the amplifying effect of the use of what has been called the limbic brain.

While there’s plenty of controversy around the subject of the “triune brain,” one thing that has become clear is that every one of us is motivated by two often conflicting parts of our awareness: the thinking part, often called the “neocortex” and the fight-or-flight part, often called the “reptilian” or “limbic” brain.

If you have ever wondered why you continue to do things that aren’t good for you (eat half that bag of chips) while knowing what’s good for you (protein, vitamins, etc.) then wonder no more: it’s your limbic brain in pursuit of feel-good dopamine overruling your rational neocortex. Whether or not they understand the scientific terminology, every addict-recruiting drug dealer knows how that works.

But the real experts in the mass promotion of the limbic brain over the neocortical brain are the goebbelsologists of Russia’s FSB and their troll farms led by that devoted disciple of Yevgeny Prigozhin, Vladimir Putin. (Pregozhin was to Putin as Mozart was to Salieri.)

And the one tool that Trumps all others in that effort is: fear.

If you can get an effective fear-inducing message in front of an audience for a few months, you can get that audience to believe whatever you want. The induced belief may be completely unrelated to the fear-inducing message. You are now their oracle and their god.

If that sounds far-fetched, consider for a moment that we now have millions of people who believe that Earth is not spheroid; rather, it is flat. They can look out the window of an airliner at 10,000 meters, clearly see the curvature of the horizon; they can watch a solar eclipse with their own eyes; and it doesn’t matter. Someone induced fear in them, and the source of that fear told them that Earth is flat, and so Earth is flat, period. All evidence to the contrary will be ignored. They are owned by the source of the fear, just as much as the thoughts of a squirrel being pursued by a coyote are owned by the coyote.

If you have wondered why many evangelical Christians, who understand the principles of their faith better than anyone, have embraced as their leader the very exemplar of the violation of those principles, then wonder no more. It’s simply the application of protracted fear to push the limbic brain into dominance over the neocortex.

It’s not an ideology that Russia is promoting.

It’s their own dominance over everyone, using advanced goebbelsology.

And it’s working.

***

Ever since Peter the Great replaced the Russian language with French in his court, and probably before that, the Russian culture has included intense jealousy of Western culture. And every century they get better at finding methods to undermine Western culture. Those methods include manipulation of more than perceptions. They involve manipulation of power structures.

MAGA is a mafiaist organization, and it is the creation of Russia.

Where ideologies maintain political positions that are at least purported to come from truthful representations of fact, mafias are built on credible lies. In other words, goebbelsology.

The first rule of post-Bernays goebbelsology is that its practitioner must never let its rules be written, or recorded in any form. However, that rule ceases to apply when a KGB officer defects, and does so so skillfully that he manages to avoid getting shot.

Such a smart KGB defector is one Yuri Bezmenov. According to Nicolas Marshall, “Mr. Bezmenov was a Soviet informant and KGB operative who defected to Canada and the United States in the early 70s. In an increasingly difficult to find 1984 interview with G. Edward Griffin titled “Deception Was My Job”, he laid out the four stages of “ideological subversion” created by radical Marxists to indoctrinate and weaken nations from within.”

Bezmenov explained that the most striking thing about ideological subversion is that it happens in the open as a legitimate process. “You can see it with your own eyes,” he said. The American media would be able to see it, if it just focused on it.”

Of course it’s not the media’s job to observe patterns and propose theories, but rather to report facts about events. It’s the job of writers and bloggers to offer observations as to what it’s all about.

In its article entitled 39 years ago, a KGB defector chillingly predicted modern America, subtitled “A disturbing interview given by a KGB defector in 1984 describes America of today and outlines four stages of mass brainwashing used by the KGB”, available, with the original video, at https://bigthink.com/the-present/yuri-bezmenov/ , Bezmanov defined ideological subversion:

“What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.”

Bezmenov described this process as “a great brainwashing” that has four basic stages. The first stage is called “demoralization” which takes from 15 to 20 years to achieve. According to the former KGB agent, that is the minimum number of years it takes to re-educate one generation of students that is normally exposed to the ideology of its country — in other words, the time it takes to change what the people are thinking.

He used the examples of 1960s hippies coming to positions of power in the 1980s in the government and businesses of America. Bezmenov claimed this generation was already “contaminated” by Marxist-Leninist values. Of course, this claim that many baby boomers are somehow espousing KGB-tainted ideas is hard to believe but Bezmenov’s larger point addressed why people who have been gradually “demoralized” are unable to understand that this has happened to them.

Referring to such people, Bezmenov said:

“They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern [alluding to Pavlov]. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.”

Demoralization is a process that is “irreversible.” Bezmenov actually thought (back in 1984) that the process of demoralizing America was already completed. It would take another generation and another couple of decades to get the people to think differently and return to their patriotic American values, claimed the agent.

In what is perhaps a most striking passage in the interview, here’s how Bezmenov described the state of a “demoralized” person:

“As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore,” said Bezmenov. “A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his balls then he will understand. But not before that. That’s the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.”

It’s hard not to see in that the state of many modern Americans. We have become a society of polarized tribes, with some people flat out rejecting facts in favor of narratives and opinions.

Once demoralization is completed, the second stage of ideological brainwashing is “destabilization”. During this two-to-five-year period, asserted Bezmenov, what matters is the targeting of essential structural elements of a nation: economy, foreign relations, and defense systems. Basically, the subverter (Russia) would look to destabilize every one of those areas in the United States, considerably weakening it.

The third stage would be “crisis.” It would take only up to six weeks to send a country into crisis, explained Bezmenov. The crisis would bring “a violent change of power, structure, and economy” and will be followed by the last stage, “normalization.” That’s when your country is basically taken over, living under a new ideology and reality.

This will happen to America unless it gets rid of people who will bring it to a crisis, warned Bezmenov. What’s more “if people will fail to grasp the impending danger of that development, nothing ever can help [the] United States,” adding, “You may kiss goodbye to your freedom.”

It bears saying that when he made this statement, he was warning about baby boomers and Democrats of the time.

In another somewhat terrifying excerpt, here’s what Bezmenov had to say about what is really happening in the United States: It may think it is living in peace, but it has been actively at war with Russia, and for some time:

“Most of the American politicians, media, and educational system trains another generation of people who think they are living at the peacetime,” said the former KGB agent. “False. United States is in a state of war: undeclared, total war against the basic principles and foundations of this system.”

Marxism was indeed what Bezmenov was directed to promote when he was on the job in the sixties. Then after he defected to Canada and told the world about the sophisticated techniques used by the Russians, Russia ditched its failing Marxism in favor of a market economy.

What Bezmenov and others could not have have anticipated was that after Russia abandoned its communist ideology, its use of the techniques he described continued virtually unchanged. The KGB itself may not have realized that what they were selling was not communism but rather Russian mental imperialism.

In a particularly intriguing part of the interview, Bezmenov noted that

“The main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. Only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage and such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures… or psychological warfare.”

Did those techniques described by Bezmanov sound familiar? Do they not resemble the cult propaganda that has relentlessly taken over the minds of the MAGAs?

If so, consider this: MAGA is generally considered to be a right-wing organization. A right wing organization that has fallen under the spell of… what? Socialist / communist propaganda?

What was being sold wasn’t a political ideology at all. Certainly the end-justifies-the-means philosophy of Lenin and Stalin was responsible for Russia’s dispensing with civilized standards of truthfulness and civilized behavior, but what was really being promoted, and is still being promoted, is mafiocracy. Mafiocracy is simply the rule of the jungle, applied to governance. It’s the use of lies, theft, murder – and especially the manipulation of perceptions – to get what one wants.

Propaganda; Goebbels’ Principles

From https://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/Propaganda/goebbels.html

A mafiocracy must deny its own existence, just as the capital-M Mafia always denies its own existence. Similarly, its methods must never see the light of day; training is almost entirely face-to-face and verbal. For that reason a lot about this list of rules is speculative, assembled from sources such as Goebbels’ Principles of Propaganda, Leonard W. Doob, Public Opinion Quarterly, Fall 1950 pp. 419-442 and Propagation and Persuasion; Jowett & O’Donnell

Following is from a Southern Methodist University synopsis of the Doob work:

Dr. Joseph Goebbels was the Propaganda Minister for Hitler’s Third Reich. He was recognized as a master of propaganda as his work was studied after WWII. Goebbels did not survive to enjoy the recognition; he and his wife committed suicide on 1 May 1945, a week before the final collapse of the Third Reich.

After the war, US personnel discovered a very large diary dictated by Goebbels. In it are his principles of propaganda. Leonard Doob’s 1950 article details them from a translation of the diary by Louis Lochner (1948).

Hitler’s Basic Principles

These principles are abstracted from Jowett & O’Donnell:

• Avoid abstract ideas - appeal to the emotions.

• Constantly repeat just a few ideas. Use stereotyped phrases.

• Give only one side of the argument.

• Continuously criticize your opponents.

• Pick out one special “enemy” for special vilification.

Let us not, however, give Bernays and Goebbels all the credit for the formulation of the principles of goebbelsology. Certainly Niccolò Machiavelli and Saul Alinsky deserve their share of the credit.

Alinsky, for example, is famous for putting into print a fundamental principle that all practiced goebbelsologists understand about accusation. His specific quote, from Rules for Radicals, is "Accuse your opponent of what you are doing, to create confusion and to inculcate voters against evidence of your own guilt."

For his part, Machiavelli invoked the use of religion in the pursuit of power, urging his audience of power seekers to not be religious himself, but to ensure that his people are religious.

For three of the points that I have used to relate cults to goebbelsology, I used Steven A. Hassan’s “Understanding Cults: The Basics” from Psychology Today June 5, 2021 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-mind/202106/understanding-cults-the-basics

These Rules of Goebbelsology were derived from those works¹:

Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.

• Accuse your opponent of what you are doing, to create confusion and to inculcate audiences against evidence of your own guilt.

• The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious.

• This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.

• The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.

• Propaganda must facilitate aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.

• Not every item of news should be published. Rather must those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose.

• It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.

• It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.

• The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never escape from it.

• There is no need for propaganda to be rich in intellectual content.

• It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.

• We have made the Reich by propaganda

• Propaganda is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. If the means achieves the end then the means is good... the new Ministry has no other aim than to unite the nation behind the ideal of the national revolution.

• During a war, news should be given out for instruction rather than information.

• That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.

• To attract people, to win over people to that which I have “realized” as being true,

1 References

• Goebbels’ Principles of Propaganda, Leonard W. Doob, Public Opinion Quarterly, Fall 1950

• Propagation and Persuasion; Jowett & O’Donnell

• Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky

• Discourses on Livy by Niccolò Machiavelli

• “Understanding Cults: The Basics” from Psychology Today

• that is called propaganda.

• No one joins a cult; they are recruited by systematic social influence processes. Seek out individuals who are in a time of emotional stress such as an illness, the death of a loved one, breakup of an important relationship, loss of a job, or moving to another city, state or country.

• Use deception and undue influence to make people dependent and obedient.

  “Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true. But many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly—and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.”

  Thomas Sowell

• As a cult leader, you are likely a malignant narcissist. Your mission is to recruit people who will be obedient to you.

“Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true. But many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly—and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.”

Thomas Sowell

Goebbelsology in action:

a script for a very short play

“Yuri, that is half liter of vodka speaking. You are full of it.” “Evgeny, I tell you I can do it.”

“OK, Yuri, let us make interesting. I bet you hundred thousand rubles, even money.”

“Evgeny, you are on.”

“Good. You shall see… Um… what was it again I am going to get them to believe? (You are right, I am drunk.)”

“(sigh) You were going to get ten thousand Americans to believe world is flat.”

“Da. That. I start tomorrow. Get ready to pay, Evgeny.”

“Yuri. Please. Americans gullible, not that gullible. You get ready to pay.”

* * *

Addiction is a disease.

Power is an addictive substance.

Goebbelsology is the recruitment technique used by dealers of all kinds of addictive drugs.

(How else would you get people to try something that everyone knows is destructive?)

* * *

Goebbelsology And Nature

Cordyceps fungus infects the brains of ants and gets them to sacrifice themselves to the capo di tutti capi, cordyceps.

The rabies virus takes over the brains of mammals, getting them to sacrifice their self-interest while turning them into genuine zombies with no purpose in life other than to increase the power of their sentient capo di tutti capi, who is Rabies.

Goebbelsology infects the brains of humans and gets them to sacrifice their human thinking capability to their capo di tutti capi. In this case the capo di tutti capi is Vladimir Putin.

MAFIOCRACY COMPONENT 6 :

Trolling of Social Networks

As was described earlier by Sutton Smith, social network trolling is a new, powerful application of goebbelsology. Goebbelsology on steroids. While its practitioners have a clear interest in practicing their craft, thankfully prime practitioner always had difficulty keeping his mouth shut.

In the words of the (assumed) late restaurateur, convicted felon, caterer, brutal military commander, and creator of three St. Petersburg based troll farms, Yevgeny Prigozhin, from a 23 Aug 2023 story by Shaun Walker and Pjotr Sauer in The Guardian:

“An indictment resulting from Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election alleged Prigozhin and companies linked to him were behind a network of pro-Donald Trump Facebook and Twitter profiles, apparently part of a slew of Russian efforts to boost Trump’s candidacy.

The fake profiles shared pro-Trump content and even made payments to unsuspecting real Americans to buy equipment for rallies.

The US indictment was later withdrawn, but when asked about allegations of electoral interference last November, Prigozhin appeared to admit them, with a characteristically gruesome metaphor (emphasis is mine):

“Gentlemen, we interfered, we interfere and we will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once.”

Prigozhin’s goal with his skillful use of goebbelsology was clearly to remove both kidneys and the liver of free societies, starting with the United States of America.

If you think that the tactic is to promote a “far right” (whatever that means) agenda, dare I say that you, dear reader, are naive and gullible?

What is being promoted is strife. To accomplish that, the mafiaist finds a cause that serves the interests of a particular industry and creates strife that serves that industry’s interest.

Thus, a social network’s marketable inventory of views and clicks and social graph data is supercharged by rabidly active echo chambers of any variety: “right” or “left” or Earth-is-flat ranters or insecure teenagers whose concern about their social standing has them living on the network on the verge of depression. It makes no difference what the actual beliefs are, as long as they arouse passions, that is, views and clicks and social graph data.

For example, the transition industry generates an average of one million dollars per physical trans patient, and a lesser but significant amount for non-physical gender transitioners. At the same time, the whole subject of gender transition, particularly among insecure adolescents, arouses lucrative flame wars for social networks and lots of disruption of Western society for Russia. If you’re a member of one of those three constituencies, what’s not to like?

Then there’s this:

Kristofer Goldsmith was managing social media for a major veterans’ organization when he found an impostor version of his site:

At first he thought it was one of his own users who created a site to amplify his organization’s message. But it turned out that it was an impostor site run by Russians.

“Foreign adversary that was targeting American veterans using Veterans’ grants...”

“This led me to a two year investigation into all the ways that foreign adversaries target troops, veterans and families online.”

MAFIOCRACY COMPONENT 7:

False Flag Operations

When a mafia wants to create popular outrage against its adversaries, the false flag is a useful tool – but only when used with competence.

In September 1999, as Russia sought to build popular support for its invasion of Dagestan and its second Chechen War, a series of explosions destroyed four apartment buildings in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk. The handling of the crisis by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin boosted his popularity and helped him win the presidency a few months later.

While the explosions appeared to be the work of Chechen rebels, a number of telltale signs indicated that that was not the case. Perhaps the most telling, and most incompetent, of those signs revealed itself when on 13 September, Russian Duma speaker Genadiy Seleznyov made an announcement in the Duma about receiving a report that another bombing had just happened in the city of Volgodonsk – three days before the bombing actually took place on September 16.

The type of explosives used, as well as other details, indicated that the bombings were the work of the Russian government, which stonewalled all attempts at an objective investiagation.

A standard practice of Russia is to orchestrate protests and violence in the name of opposition in order to destabilize the government of a country they want to control, creating a pretext for annexation and / or installation of a puppet regime.

Another false flag technique is to offer ridiculously generous contracts in the name of an adversary (Ukraine) to a naive close relative of the leader of the adversary (Hunter Biden), for services for which the relative is obviously unqualified. At an opportune later time, the resulting appearance of corruption is brought to the attention of the adversary’s voters.

MAFIOCRACY COMPONENT 8 :

Signaling The Consequences Of Opposition

One of the modus operandi of the MAGA mafia is illustrated in Mitt Romney’s decision to vote for acquittal in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, as reported in a story By McKay Coppins about his book Romney: A Reckoning in The Atlantic and also in Huffington Post .

During the Senate trial of the then-president, Coppins wrote, an unnamed member of the Republican leadership told Romney “he was leaning toward voting to convict” but “the others urged him to reconsider.”

“‘You can’t do that,’ Romney recalled someone saying. ‘Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children.’ The senator eventually decided they were right,” Coppins added.

A GOP congressman had earlier told Romney he chose not to vote for Trump’s second impeachment “out of fear of his family’s safety.”

“The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him — why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome?” Coppins wrote.

“On Wednesday, Romney, a fierce critic of Trump, announced he would not be seeking reelection in 2024.”

There’s also this story “It begins with a text message from Angus King, the junior senator from Maine: ‘Could you give me a call when you get a chance? Important.’”

Romney calls, and King informs him of a conversation he’s just had with a high- ranking Pentagon official. Law enforcement has been tracking online chatter among right-wing extremists who appear to be planning something bad on the day of Donald Trump’s upcoming rally in Washington, D.C. The president has been telling them the election was stolen; now they’re coming to steal it back. There’s talk of gun smuggling, of bombs and arson, of targeting the traitors in Congress who are responsible for this travesty. Romney’s name has been popping up in some frightening corners of the internet, which is why King needed to talk to him. He isn’t sure Romney will be safe… He’ll want to know about this, Romney thinks. He’ll want to protect his colleagues, and himself.

Romney sends his text: “In case you have not heard this, I just got a call from Angus King, who said that he had spoken with a senior official at the Pentagon who reports that they are seeing very disturbing social media traffic regarding the protests planned on the 6th. There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol. I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator—the President—is the one who commands the reinforcements the DC and Capitol police might require.”

Somehow this tribe called MAGA is purported to have an ideology. Remarkably, many call it “conservative” even though it has nothing to do with conservative ideology. It is no more ideological than La Cosa Nostra. The mafia.

Need I explain how a mafia works? There’s a power addict at the top, the capo de tutti capi, who creates a fear-driven cult of personality. Everything the party does serves to enhance the capo de tutti’s power and wealth. All human values other than loyalty are simply dispensed with.

Since before the Russian Revolution, the governance of Russia has been in the hands of a mafia. Human beings who challenge power, people such as Alexei Navalny, are simply poisoned or shot.

Stalin had seven secret police chiefs. Of the seven, four of them (Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov, Lavrenty Beria and Viktor Abakumov) were ambushed and executed. Yagoda’s execution was supervised by his successor Yehzov, whose own execution was supervised by his successor Beria. Then Beria was executed after Stalin’s death.

Who actually pulled the trigger to kill Beria? Wikipedia attributes that to General Pavel Batitsky, but for years it was attributed to none other than Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev was certainly present in the mob that kidnapped Beria and had him killed.

One of the chiefs, Vasily Blokhin, was especially efficient in organizing mass executions, having personally pulled the trigger on 15,000 of them. So feared was he that he was actually allowed to live to the ripe old age of 60.

That’s the way it works in a mafia. Whether your name is Batitsky, Khrushchev or Blokhin, you rise in prominence in proportion to your brutality. Fear equals respect; there are no other factors in that equation.

You And I Are Targets Of Mafiocracy

Perhaps as you read about goebbelsology you felt a bit of self-congratulation that as an intelligent, educated, literate, non-MAGA person you are not a target of Mafiocracy.

But it would be a huge mistake to think that sums it up. Because goebbelsology targets the pain buttons of the “woke” as well as those of the “far right.” (Those terms are in quotes because this author does not believe they are meaningful as words to describe anything but groups pain team fans. A pain team very similar to a professional sports team, and pain team fans are very similar to sports team fans. They like to support their team with noisy rallies and they like to find fault with the judgment of officials. But there’s hardly more ideological substance to left vs right than there is to Red Sox vs. Yankees.)

Example: twenty years ago the content of public debate about abortion centered on the question “When does life begin?” Since then, abortion has become a team sport, the opposing sides being “Pro Life” and “Choice” – ignoring the fact that there are people on both sides who agree on many issues, such as the conditions when abortion is and is not acceptable as a matter of public policy. But regardless of one’s thinking about the nuances of the matter, one must choose a side and shout at the other side.

What accounts for the fact that abortion has become a team sport? Was it just spontaneous, or is are the social media trolls working overtime to fan the fans?

The answer can be seen in articles such as Buzzfeed’s “This Is How Your Hyperpartisan Political News Gets Made” by Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed News Media Editor , Posted on February 27, 2017. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/how-the-hyperpartisan-sausage-is-made The article shows that the very same news story can presented, using variations of headlines and graphics, to inflame the passions of both MAGAs and Wokes.

Goebbelsology and Wokeism

Recall Hitler’s last point about propaganda: “Pick out one special ‘enemy’ for special vilification.”

Bill Maher says it well: “Part of the appeal of a Herschel Walker or a Donald Trump or any number of egregious a__holes Republicans have backed is in their mind the worse a candidate is the more it says to Democrats ‘Do you see how much we don’t like what you’re selling, all that socialism and identity politics and victimhood and oversensitivity and cancel culture and white self-loathing and forcing complicated ideas about race and sex on kids too young to understand it? Literally anything would be better than that.’ That’s their view, that’s why you can be a really bad dude in Republican politics and it’s not a deal breaker.”

There are many sources of America’s polarization, and some carrier frequency of it has always come about organically. All populations have their joiners, and joiners will join wherever they find a group with which to rant. It might even be because they actually believe in what is being ranted, though just as often the choice involves no more ideology than in choosing whether to be a fan of the 49ers or the Chiefs.

Goebbelsologists understand that, and in the case of the jealousy-driven Russian Mafia, the point is to raise the level of shrillness as the fans scream at each other. And they do that with incredible subtlety and skill. (Russians are good at four things: aircraft engineering, ballet, manipulation of perceptions, and brutality. Over the years they have either driven to exile or executed those who display other competencies. The gene pool in Russia is getting shallow.)

An even more striking illustration of the skill of Russian goebbelsologists is in their masterful orchestration of fear of a repeat of Nazi dictatorship. We have all seen “the left’s” (whatever that means) version of the rise-of-fascism fear story (I happen to share that concern.)

But did you know that very same fear story is used by goebbelsologists, with necessary slight changes in the script, to inflame the passions and fears of “the right” (whatever that means) over the threat of a rise in fascism?

A distasteful part of writing involves subscribing to distasteful publications to see what they’re telling their minions. After paying for one of them I saw that they depend on their not-so-observant subscribers that a paywall-protected video of theirs is available on another site for free. That site presents their “Letter to the American Church.”

That video uses the same tactics as Goebbels and Hitler skillfully used alarms over communists to drive the masses as well as as the kingmakers Hindenburg, von Papen, von Schleicher to make Hitler Germany’s chancellor.

Think about that. The same message, the same images, the same alarms, are used to inflame both sides against each other! Josef Goebbels would be proud!

* * *

Following is a strategy for dealing with the one component of Mafiocracy that you and I can most immediately do something about.

You and I can blunt the force of goebbelsology in an individual. And when that individual starts questioning the articles of faith that goebbelsology sold to them, others in their group will notice and will start asking their own questions.

What You And I Can Do About It

If you agree that Donald Trump is unfit for public office, and that any candidate, “conservative” or “liberal” (whatever those terms mean) would be a better U.S.

President than Trump, then consider this approach to helping his followers understand what is happening and what is at stake.

Operation Enlighten

Here’s a strategy for dealing with the one component of Mafiocracy that you and I can most immediately do something about.

Look for opportunities to engage your MAGA and Woke friends and family members with a discussion about behavior, mentioning nothing about politics, media, etc.

Start with something like this:

“Have you ever found out that some jealous family member has been feeding you untrue gossip about another family member? You had no reason not to believe it until you came across something that showed they were lying to you. Have you experienced that? Plenty of people have.

Or have you watched as a co-worker put all their energy into skillfully discrediting an office rival whose success and effectiveness aroused their jealousy?

Why do people do that?

Well, jealousy is just a hard thing to explain, and it’s typically hidden so you don’t see where all that lying is coming from.

Whole groups of people often behave that way. Look at the way the fans of sports teams can get at each others’ throats as though the sport is a matter of life and death.

Often, those jealous folks do it in an amateurish way. But others have picked up skills in the dark art of manipulation of perceptions, so that the people they’re talking to have no idea that their view of the situation has been expertly engineered.

In fact, it’s not uncommon. Sad, isn’t it.

You know how it is with jealous people, right? They just can’t stand the presence, or even the existence, of others who have their lives more together than their own. Rather than focusing on improving their own situation, they spend seemingly endless amounts of energy on a variety of tactics just to cut others down.

With practice, sadly, they get good at causing turmoil in the life of their target or targets. At the same time, they learn how to keep themselves and their own role in that turmoil out of view.

Whole nations can behave like individual people, consumed with jealousy about the success and the freedoms enjoyed by people of other nations.

One thing I wonder about is why Americans all seem to be so angry.”

* * *

At this point they will start talking because they have been encouraged to exhibit their anger. Do not argue. If you agree with one or more of their positions, say so and reinforce that agreement with examples and stories that show you’re on the same page.

For example, if they say something about men competing in women’s sports and you happen to agree that that is bad, cite your own examples and enthusiastically agree with them. If on the other hand you don’t agree with them on that or another issue, let it go and find one that you do agree on. Make that the main subject of the conversation. After that, find something else that you can agree on.

Your purpose is to get them to see that you, the person outside their cult, are actually a reasonable human being, in contrast to what they have been relentlessly taught about “people like you.”

Keep the conversation going as long as possible. Find an activity you both like to do, like bowling or hiking, or board games, and try to find a time to do it together.

Ease into talk about goebbelsology, but only in a historical context: how it started with Edward Bernays and was adopted by Goebbels. Talk about the principles of goebbelsology and then say something like “when I read about goebbelsology I started to understand how important it is to get information from a variety of sources.

When you think the time is right, bring up the previous conversation about the behavior of jealous people, and mention how dictatorships tend to be jealous of people in democracies. Don’t mention Russia until you feel the time is really right.

When that time comes, there will be an attempt to argue. Don’t do it. Don’t advocate anything. Just speak as someone interested in history.

With some luck, eventually they will start to see how their perceptions have been manipulated. If and when that happens, you are most of the way there. Stop there unless they are receptive to further exploration of the sources of their beliefs.

If the person you’re speaking with does signal a willingness to continue, gently ease into this process offered by Melanie Trecek-King, associate professor of biology at Massasoit Community College and creator of Thinking Is Power

https://thinkingispower.com/

.

Ms Trecek-King notes that “facts don’t work because it’s not about facts. There are underlying motivations for why someone believes what they believe, and those motivations are helping them find reasons to support why they think they’re right.

Here’s a paraphrase of her method:

First, start by asking them to put their belief on a spectrum of confidence, from zero to 100%.. Generally speaking, people will try to avoid zero or 100% because they avoid extremes. We want to proportion our confidence, so just say “How confident are you in your position from zero to 100%?

The next step is important. Instead of asking them why they’re right, ask them “Why is your confidence not higher than what you gave me?” This process forces them to come up with their own reasons for why they might be wrong.

You could tell them why you think they’re wrong, but they’re not going to listen to your reasoning. You can’t just upload your reasoning into their brain. Instead what you want to do is to get them to generate their own reasons; allow them the space to figure out for themselves why they might be wrong.

It’s important to do this in a kind and empathetic way; this isn’t adversarial. Ms. Trecek-King ends with “You goal shouldn’t be to change someone’s mind.”

Um… well… perhaps just this once, because, you know, our democracy and rule of law and our freedoms are at stake… let’s change someone’s mind!

De-programming a cult member is never quick and easy. And remember, Woke can be as much a cult as MAGA, and in fact many Woke echo chambers were planted, fertilized and cultivated as a source of food for MAGA anger – and vice versa. The goal is to erode our society, not to promote any ideas or principles in either MAGA or Woke. A mafiocracy has no principles other than “I intend to own you.”

Here’s another approach

Melanie Trecek-King is an associate professor of biology at Massasoit Community College. Her website is www.ThinkingIsPower.com.

Script of Facebook reel (short video) transcribed by WK 240519

Thinking Is Power

It’s impossible that everything you believe is true.

Why don’t facts change minds? Instead of facts, try this exercise!

Learn more:

-Is what you believe true? Use these 6 questions to find out: https://thinkingispower.com/the-power-of-questioning-our-beliefs/

-David McRaney’s book “How Minds Change”: https://amzn.to/3c8LN2E

-Street Epistemology International’s (free!) Navigating Beliefs course: https://streetepistemology.com/learning-course

-Anthony Magnabosco SE’s youtube channel: https://youtube.com/@magnabosco210?si=HZTfo7jH68SIGND9

Facts do not change minds.

Have you ever tried to change someone’s mind with facts, and it didn’t work?

Let me give you an exercise to try

Here’s what to try instead:

First, facts don’t work because it’s not about facts.

There are underlying motivations for why someone believes what they believe.

Those motivations are helping them find reasons to support why they think they’re right,

Instead, I want you to try this:

First, start by asking them to put their belief on a spectrum of confidence, from zero to 100%.

And generally speaking, we try to avoid zero or 100% because those are the extremes, right?

So we want to proportion our confidence

So you might say

“How confident are you in your position from zero to 100%

The next step is important.

Instead of asking them why they’re right, ask them why they might be wrong.

“Why is your confidence not higher than what you gave me?”

This process forces them to come up with their own reasons for why they might be wrong.

You could tell them why you think they’re wrong, but they’re not going to listen to your reasoning.

You can’t just upload your reasoning into their brain.

Instead what you want to do is to get them to generate their own reasons; allow them the space to figure out for themselves why they might be wrong.

It’s important to do this in a kind and empathetic way; this isn’t adversarial. You goal shouldn’t be to change someone’s mind.

What you want to do is help them explore their reasoning.

This was framed as how you can talk to someone else that you disagree with.

But you can of course apply this to your own reasoning as well, and hopefully it will help you come to a more reliable conclusion.

If you agree with the aims of this effort, please take a moment to share this post with others who might share our mutual concerns.

Trump must be stopped.

About the Author

In 1981 Wes Kussmaul, working with friends at the MIT Joint Computer Facility, created the world’s first online encyclopedia, implemented using what he calls “the world’s worst business model.” Over the the next year the addition of social features transformed the encyclopedia into the more sustainable Delphi social network, which in 1993 was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News America Corp.

Wes is the author of four books about bringing accountability with privacy back to social networks. One of those books caught the attention of a group at the ITU, a United Nations agency, while it was building a global PKI-based source of trust that resembled what the book advocated. Wes announced its re-launch as The City of Osmio in a 2008 presentation to the United Nations World Summit on Information Society. Wes is also the creator of Stoanova, an approach to Stoicism as it applies to problem solving.

Wes is the founder of The Authenticity Institute, a provider of a PKI platform to licensed Authenticity Enterprises, which may be seen here. The outcome of the work of those Authenticity Enterprises may be seen at Authentiverse.

¹https://www.channel4.com/news/nigel-farages-funding-secrets-revealed

² https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2016/10/arron-banks-the-man-who-bought-brexit