Josh, you have articulated this about as well as I can imagine. I don't know how many conversations I've had with others where I'm trying to tell them that what is being reported in the news is just kabuki theater - that we are watching marionettes being controlled by higher forces out of view. They call me a conspiracy theorist and call it "implausible". I have no answer. Now I have one: read Josh Stylman's article on Trauma and Scapegoats. Nice piece of work. Keep 'em coming.
If all wars are bankers' wars, then who sits at the head of the table? Why, the Rothschilds do. It's the same family mentioned 12,000 times in the Epstein files, who has a great deal of control over our monetary system. Why aren't they being investigated? The Rothschilds must be in front of a jury, and the "Federal Reserve" must be shut down. Many problems would be solved. It should never be about Israel, or Jews. This is just in my own words; I agree with Josh 100% - about to check out his MKULTRA series
You have a wonderful way of bringing what is slogging around in the back of my mind to the forefront. It was a very necessary reminder to all of us. Thank you.
Mr Stylman , an excellent article, it makes one see and feel what really is happening around us. Especially how we are all being used in one form or another for political gain as one example. It illustrates basic fundamentals that most people regardless of their cultural heritage want the same things a good life for themselves, family and their neighbours.
The genocide narrative is, I think, the most dominant educational narrative we have. In the US, where the entire educational establishment treats history as something that started in 1492 and only existed in North America and northern Europe (and occasionally Africa if convenient), and was exclusively perpetrated by European Christians, the most relentless stories told are the ones that teach children they are exclusively either executors, or victims, of genocide. Academia has dispensed completely, at this point, with even a veneer of generational removal, and there never was more than lip service for nuance.
Children indoctrinated into this framework are made constitutionally susceptible to perceiving proto-genocide everywhere, in a lose-lose scenario where they are shame-ridden and terrified no matter their perceived identity. This meta-structure is applied to every event and observation to activate submission to the "larger effort" at the "necessary" cost of individual rights, curiosity, or the messy pursuit of truth.
My own sons are unabashedly free-thinking in ways that often make me uncomfortable; I feel myself wanting to intervene and minimize their politically-incorrect observations and jokes, and it's MUCH harder to restrain that than it was to allow them a larger sphere of physical risk than is socially and psychically acceptable for children in our culture. That tells me a lot about the true drivers of human behavior. The rider is an individual but the elephant is part of an herd.
This is key: “I care a lot less about who the good guys and bad guys are than I do about understanding the game itself. The ideas matter to me regardless of who espouses them, with the full understanding that I may be being manipulated. Surety is one of the biggest weaknesses one can have in a perception war.”
The playbook is being used time and time again to divide and conquer the masses for the few in power and owners of the systems to prevail.
Barbell theory is spot on. About 80% or more of us are reasonable and want our friends and family to thrive - we are more alike than different and more powerful if we realize it. Hence why populist movements are such a threat to large institutions. Our leaders create false the sense of differences to try to “force us into cages” on the left or the right based on fear that the division is real.
Covid and post- Covid division campaign playbooks have been exposed as they are deployed in a whack a mole manner.
Staying sane and grounded requires refusing to hate and recognizing the theater for what it is. Love and empathy are required, but naivety is a real threat. The powers that be are becoming more sophisticated which requires us to live in the real world and offline.
It is extremely dangerous to dehumanize and to go with hate toward other human beings - it is us that gets open up for dying, injuring a/o ptsd. In truth, there is no enemy, we’re all one. Until we see brother/sister in every other being, it is still a night…
“How do we watch news clips from supposedly ‘competing’ outlets and hear anchors using identical phrases - not just covering the same story, but the exact same words, in the exact same order - and not ask how that happen”- this is a brilliant quote Josh and what you reference here is what caused me to become fully awakened to the nature of our reality. I was still reading left leaning news outlets until January 6th, 2021. After this event every damn site I went to all kept calling trumps claim of a rigged election “the Big Lie”. When you have “journalists” all using the same description, on many sites, it tells you that they are being told what to say in their reporting as a way of forcing a narrative into being. It also shows how important narrative management is to those in power, without a prevailing narrative in place their control of society weakens and fractures erupt. Can see this first hand with what’s going on in the Middle East, trump and company have lost control of the plot and are scrambling to get it back under their control.
Definitely not each other, but a few at the top that need to be toppled. Money is their weapon, and our leverage point for changing the system. Psychopaths should not have weapons.
Thank you for sharing this. I think people forget that the Jews were historically made to deal with money because touching it was thought of as evil - especially lending at interest - to Christians. They were also prevented from doing anything else that might have made them money and therefore they went into the arts.
The pressure to choose a side, take on its whole worldview, and treat any leftover ambiguity as weakness or betrayal is indeed one of the core ways polarization works. That part seems right to me. But the jump from that insight to a much larger theory of hidden design suggests a degree of coordination the essay never really demonstrates. “Not a coincidence,” “psyop,” “part of the architecture”. Those phrases gesture at explanation but they don’t provide it.
Which is important because the piece says it wants to resist scapegoating, while repeatedly drifting close to its edge. Once you start pulling suggestive names, group patterns, elite over-representation, and shadowy coordination into one breath, you’re getting awfully close to the old habit of making diffuse structural problems feel attributable to a semi-visible set of people. Even if the stated point is to look deeper, the rhetoric still inculcates the reader into a style of suspicion that meshes very easily with scapegoating.
TL/DR -- The use of a speculative framework weakens the very caution the essay wants to defend.
Fair point Ben. While I sincerely do appreciate the honest feedback, I'm going to push back, even if slightly.
To be clear... I'm not saying there aren't bad actors. I'm saying they're simply not one ethnic group. This piece wasn't meant to prove who the cage-builders are - I've written about that extensively in this space and linked to others who've gone deep as well.
What I will say is that until people start looking seriously at institutions like Tavistock and the history of social engineering, the 'it's just human nature' explanation - while partly true - ends up being another way of not looking up. The human nature is the reaction to the seeds that are planted, IMHO.
My only hesitation is that once you start using terms like “psyops,” “architecture,” and “cage-builders,” the evidentiary bar rises, and I’m not sure the essay quite clears it. Human nature and institutional manipulation can both be true at once, and in a piece trying to resist scapegoating, that distinction matters. The more sweeping the frame gets, the more careful it has to be.
I think we've found our point of friendly disagreement and that's cool. My sense is that the people reading something like my Substack largely accept these premises as starting points, not conclusions. If the language feels sweeping, I'd genuinely encourage pulling on some of the threads I linked and/or other pieces I've written (or, the Epstein Files for that matter).
Appreciate you engaging with the material in earnest, either way.
Fair enough, and I appreciate the tone. I only mean that shared priors among readers aren’t the same thing as an argument. In a piece trying to resist scapegoating, I think that distinction matters.
You're right that precision matters, and I do take that seriously. But scapegoating means directing blame at an identifiable group of people. This essay goes out of its way to refuse that. Naming systems is the opposite of scapegoating.
True, naming systems isn’t the same thing as scapegoating. My point was just that broad, suggestive rhetoric can still drift toward some of the same habits of thought, even when it formally avoids blaming a group. In a piece trying to resist that pull, precision matters even more.
Ben Giordano, I have been thinking about the same thing. I have recently realized that I have spent a good part of my life trying to decide who are the good guys and picking the right team to be on. Now, I am trying to avoid that, as Joshua said, "I can hold a position without letting it conscript me into a tribe." However, as you mention, the jump from insight about the pressure to choose a side, to a theory of hidden design, isn't convincing to me. It seems to me it is a tendency to try and find some explanation and then blame it on some sort of bad guys. I don't know, but sometimes I think that it is just the way people are, or at least some people, perhaps those that were abused by their parents as the Swiss psychologist Alice Miller writes about.
Yes, I think that’s part of it. There’s a real pull to explain all this by finding the bad guys behind the curtain, because that makes the world feel more legible. But sometimes the harder answer is that people are quite capable of tribalism, projection, cruelty, and self-deception without needing to be centrally managed into it. That doesn’t mean manipulation never happens. It just means “someone designed this” can become a shortcut past the messier and more ordinary truths about human beings.
Divide and conquer, as a strategy of the ruling elite, is as old as time. And it IS a strategy. And that strategy is a manipulation or a psyop or whatever term you like. It exists, and our rulers (previously nobility, now the billionaire class) use it. We go along with us, yes, but to pretend there isn’t a plan to conquer is dangerously naive.
The dialectic is wicked and efficient. It takes understanding of its purpose and architecture to be able to extract oneself from the divisions and find ways NOT TO PLAY the game. A hard task, almost impossible to achieve for the grand majority of humans. But it is a task worth the effort for those who, first of all, understand what it is all about. Most do not and find meaning in being pitted against each others, again and again.
This is a keeper. Thanks for really good article. Let us be like water, not fire. Seeing each other as humans even when we disagree. " what unites the cage builders isn't heritage. It's shared interst in keeping the rest of us at each others throat while they consolidate power" Thanks for mentioning Derrick Broze Pyramid of Power. I have watched a few episodes.
The truth of the matter is simple: All is Divinity. All persons and things. No exceptions. When we deliberately create 'An Enemy' we have just taken the first step that leads right into its own hell. Thus, the existential reality is that we in truth have no enemies. Your right arm cannot hate your left arm, or your big toe hate your small one. The whole picture is ridiculous. We are the Human Family born from Divinity and when we separate ourselves into something else we are not only being wrong but comically pathetic.
It is a mind/spirit virus distortion and corruptions of spiritual software that creates the base gross Earthly appearance of ‘Enemy’ and ‘Other’. This is a colossal failure to understand one’s true nature which causes immeasurable pain and suffering – and from outside point of view looks comically silly and a big waste
“I was blown away at the dissonance of my friends and neighbors...”
They have not had a personal awakening which is necessary to find truth and equanimity. For whatever reason, these people are unable or just unwilling to unwrap themselves from their painful (even for Them) delusions about Life and other people’s and cultures and beliefs. You cannot force them to awaken. It is only – and IF only – on their own time clock and the openness or closed-ness slavery within their minds.
“When my reply was that antisemitism wasn’t in the top 100 things I’m concerned about in the world today, I often got looks of amazement.”
Those who believe that God has ‘favorites’ and that They are ‘The Chosen’ have a big problem. In doing so, They have condemned everyone else into a subservient position of relative worthlessness. They have falsely separated out the human family into those who have value and those who don’t. And that is about the most fundamental blasphemy that anyone can commit. True Divinity does not have favorites – the whole concept is ridiculous.
ALL persons have equal value and fundamental worth. But those who separate themselves out as The Chosen have so incorporated this henous delusion into their doctrines, believes, theology, culture, and End Times vision that They could never in a million years separate Themselves from this wrong turn. They treat these theological and cultural beliefs as fundamental to their survival. All creatures have a powerful survival instinct and by this mis-marriage of self-promoting belief and Their instinctual sense of survival awakening and understanding is virtually impossible except for an enlightened few. And those enlightened Few quickly become outcasts and traitors in the minds of those who prefer to live within Their fundamental delusions.
Those who do wake up and are willing to be ‘Outcasts’ deserve our respect and admiration for the courage to pursue the right path regardless of the social and cultural hell that they will be subjected to.
“The Holocaust wasn’t just history for families like ours. It was the shadow that shaped dinnertime conversations, the reason certain discussions happened in whispers, the fear that lived behind our grandparents’ eyes.”
Enduring a Holocaust does not give someone the right to inflict a new Holocaust on someone else. That’s what The Holocaust Culture Industry does not seem to understand. And remember, there have been many holocausts on this Planet... from Native Americans to the Gaza and Iranian fields of death.
We have misery on this Planet because those who rule over us choose this to be so. But we as individuals can have the wisdom to not be lead into a hell that is not our choosing nor any place anyone sane would want to be.
When you always remember your Divine Nature – the Darkness can’t claim your body, mind, and Spirit. And ‘Hell’ is anywhere that one is separated from their own Divinity.
'Heaven' or 'Hel' are States of Mind. That's always our choice... isn't it?...
Thanks great article as always, truly analyzing the root cause of the problem, also in the case of Mexico you mentioned, here it is. Theres a second revolution in MX right now, and is not the narco violence, it's a literal Coup d Etat by it own" government. https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/bis-blackrock-digital-mexico/ Read and weep, this is what coming for us in America too.
Josh, you have articulated this about as well as I can imagine. I don't know how many conversations I've had with others where I'm trying to tell them that what is being reported in the news is just kabuki theater - that we are watching marionettes being controlled by higher forces out of view. They call me a conspiracy theorist and call it "implausible". I have no answer. Now I have one: read Josh Stylman's article on Trauma and Scapegoats. Nice piece of work. Keep 'em coming.
If all wars are bankers' wars, then who sits at the head of the table? Why, the Rothschilds do. It's the same family mentioned 12,000 times in the Epstein files, who has a great deal of control over our monetary system. Why aren't they being investigated? The Rothschilds must be in front of a jury, and the "Federal Reserve" must be shut down. Many problems would be solved. It should never be about Israel, or Jews. This is just in my own words; I agree with Josh 100% - about to check out his MKULTRA series
Looking forward to this one from one of the clearest writers and most comprehensive thinkers i’ve come across on Substack so far.
He really nails it. Our first impulse should never be to fight someone with a different, and oftentimes implanted, viewpoint. Be calm, be kind...
So brilliantly written. Thank you for always asking the hard questions.
You have a wonderful way of bringing what is slogging around in the back of my mind to the forefront. It was a very necessary reminder to all of us. Thank you.
Mr Stylman , an excellent article, it makes one see and feel what really is happening around us. Especially how we are all being used in one form or another for political gain as one example. It illustrates basic fundamentals that most people regardless of their cultural heritage want the same things a good life for themselves, family and their neighbours.
The genocide narrative is, I think, the most dominant educational narrative we have. In the US, where the entire educational establishment treats history as something that started in 1492 and only existed in North America and northern Europe (and occasionally Africa if convenient), and was exclusively perpetrated by European Christians, the most relentless stories told are the ones that teach children they are exclusively either executors, or victims, of genocide. Academia has dispensed completely, at this point, with even a veneer of generational removal, and there never was more than lip service for nuance.
Children indoctrinated into this framework are made constitutionally susceptible to perceiving proto-genocide everywhere, in a lose-lose scenario where they are shame-ridden and terrified no matter their perceived identity. This meta-structure is applied to every event and observation to activate submission to the "larger effort" at the "necessary" cost of individual rights, curiosity, or the messy pursuit of truth.
My own sons are unabashedly free-thinking in ways that often make me uncomfortable; I feel myself wanting to intervene and minimize their politically-incorrect observations and jokes, and it's MUCH harder to restrain that than it was to allow them a larger sphere of physical risk than is socially and psychically acceptable for children in our culture. That tells me a lot about the true drivers of human behavior. The rider is an individual but the elephant is part of an herd.
This is key: “I care a lot less about who the good guys and bad guys are than I do about understanding the game itself. The ideas matter to me regardless of who espouses them, with the full understanding that I may be being manipulated. Surety is one of the biggest weaknesses one can have in a perception war.”
The playbook is being used time and time again to divide and conquer the masses for the few in power and owners of the systems to prevail.
Barbell theory is spot on. About 80% or more of us are reasonable and want our friends and family to thrive - we are more alike than different and more powerful if we realize it. Hence why populist movements are such a threat to large institutions. Our leaders create false the sense of differences to try to “force us into cages” on the left or the right based on fear that the division is real.
Covid and post- Covid division campaign playbooks have been exposed as they are deployed in a whack a mole manner.
Staying sane and grounded requires refusing to hate and recognizing the theater for what it is. Love and empathy are required, but naivety is a real threat. The powers that be are becoming more sophisticated which requires us to live in the real world and offline.
Thanks, Josh. I really appreciate your writing.
It is extremely dangerous to dehumanize and to go with hate toward other human beings - it is us that gets open up for dying, injuring a/o ptsd. In truth, there is no enemy, we’re all one. Until we see brother/sister in every other being, it is still a night…
“How do we watch news clips from supposedly ‘competing’ outlets and hear anchors using identical phrases - not just covering the same story, but the exact same words, in the exact same order - and not ask how that happen”- this is a brilliant quote Josh and what you reference here is what caused me to become fully awakened to the nature of our reality. I was still reading left leaning news outlets until January 6th, 2021. After this event every damn site I went to all kept calling trumps claim of a rigged election “the Big Lie”. When you have “journalists” all using the same description, on many sites, it tells you that they are being told what to say in their reporting as a way of forcing a narrative into being. It also shows how important narrative management is to those in power, without a prevailing narrative in place their control of society weakens and fractures erupt. Can see this first hand with what’s going on in the Middle East, trump and company have lost control of the plot and are scrambling to get it back under their control.
Definitely not each other, but a few at the top that need to be toppled. Money is their weapon, and our leverage point for changing the system. Psychopaths should not have weapons.
Thank you for sharing this. I think people forget that the Jews were historically made to deal with money because touching it was thought of as evil - especially lending at interest - to Christians. They were also prevented from doing anything else that might have made them money and therefore they went into the arts.
The pressure to choose a side, take on its whole worldview, and treat any leftover ambiguity as weakness or betrayal is indeed one of the core ways polarization works. That part seems right to me. But the jump from that insight to a much larger theory of hidden design suggests a degree of coordination the essay never really demonstrates. “Not a coincidence,” “psyop,” “part of the architecture”. Those phrases gesture at explanation but they don’t provide it.
Which is important because the piece says it wants to resist scapegoating, while repeatedly drifting close to its edge. Once you start pulling suggestive names, group patterns, elite over-representation, and shadowy coordination into one breath, you’re getting awfully close to the old habit of making diffuse structural problems feel attributable to a semi-visible set of people. Even if the stated point is to look deeper, the rhetoric still inculcates the reader into a style of suspicion that meshes very easily with scapegoating.
TL/DR -- The use of a speculative framework weakens the very caution the essay wants to defend.
Fair point Ben. While I sincerely do appreciate the honest feedback, I'm going to push back, even if slightly.
To be clear... I'm not saying there aren't bad actors. I'm saying they're simply not one ethnic group. This piece wasn't meant to prove who the cage-builders are - I've written about that extensively in this space and linked to others who've gone deep as well.
What I will say is that until people start looking seriously at institutions like Tavistock and the history of social engineering, the 'it's just human nature' explanation - while partly true - ends up being another way of not looking up. The human nature is the reaction to the seeds that are planted, IMHO.
My only hesitation is that once you start using terms like “psyops,” “architecture,” and “cage-builders,” the evidentiary bar rises, and I’m not sure the essay quite clears it. Human nature and institutional manipulation can both be true at once, and in a piece trying to resist scapegoating, that distinction matters. The more sweeping the frame gets, the more careful it has to be.
I think we've found our point of friendly disagreement and that's cool. My sense is that the people reading something like my Substack largely accept these premises as starting points, not conclusions. If the language feels sweeping, I'd genuinely encourage pulling on some of the threads I linked and/or other pieces I've written (or, the Epstein Files for that matter).
Appreciate you engaging with the material in earnest, either way.
Fair enough, and I appreciate the tone. I only mean that shared priors among readers aren’t the same thing as an argument. In a piece trying to resist scapegoating, I think that distinction matters.
You're right that precision matters, and I do take that seriously. But scapegoating means directing blame at an identifiable group of people. This essay goes out of its way to refuse that. Naming systems is the opposite of scapegoating.
True, naming systems isn’t the same thing as scapegoating. My point was just that broad, suggestive rhetoric can still drift toward some of the same habits of thought, even when it formally avoids blaming a group. In a piece trying to resist that pull, precision matters even more.
Ben Giordano, I have been thinking about the same thing. I have recently realized that I have spent a good part of my life trying to decide who are the good guys and picking the right team to be on. Now, I am trying to avoid that, as Joshua said, "I can hold a position without letting it conscript me into a tribe." However, as you mention, the jump from insight about the pressure to choose a side, to a theory of hidden design, isn't convincing to me. It seems to me it is a tendency to try and find some explanation and then blame it on some sort of bad guys. I don't know, but sometimes I think that it is just the way people are, or at least some people, perhaps those that were abused by their parents as the Swiss psychologist Alice Miller writes about.
Yes, I think that’s part of it. There’s a real pull to explain all this by finding the bad guys behind the curtain, because that makes the world feel more legible. But sometimes the harder answer is that people are quite capable of tribalism, projection, cruelty, and self-deception without needing to be centrally managed into it. That doesn’t mean manipulation never happens. It just means “someone designed this” can become a shortcut past the messier and more ordinary truths about human beings.
Well put!
Thank you!
Divide and conquer, as a strategy of the ruling elite, is as old as time. And it IS a strategy. And that strategy is a manipulation or a psyop or whatever term you like. It exists, and our rulers (previously nobility, now the billionaire class) use it. We go along with us, yes, but to pretend there isn’t a plan to conquer is dangerously naive.
The dialectic is wicked and efficient. It takes understanding of its purpose and architecture to be able to extract oneself from the divisions and find ways NOT TO PLAY the game. A hard task, almost impossible to achieve for the grand majority of humans. But it is a task worth the effort for those who, first of all, understand what it is all about. Most do not and find meaning in being pitted against each others, again and again.
This is a keeper. Thanks for really good article. Let us be like water, not fire. Seeing each other as humans even when we disagree. " what unites the cage builders isn't heritage. It's shared interst in keeping the rest of us at each others throat while they consolidate power" Thanks for mentioning Derrick Broze Pyramid of Power. I have watched a few episodes.
“The Enemy Is Not Each Other”
The truth of the matter is simple: All is Divinity. All persons and things. No exceptions. When we deliberately create 'An Enemy' we have just taken the first step that leads right into its own hell. Thus, the existential reality is that we in truth have no enemies. Your right arm cannot hate your left arm, or your big toe hate your small one. The whole picture is ridiculous. We are the Human Family born from Divinity and when we separate ourselves into something else we are not only being wrong but comically pathetic.
It is a mind/spirit virus distortion and corruptions of spiritual software that creates the base gross Earthly appearance of ‘Enemy’ and ‘Other’. This is a colossal failure to understand one’s true nature which causes immeasurable pain and suffering – and from outside point of view looks comically silly and a big waste
“I was blown away at the dissonance of my friends and neighbors...”
They have not had a personal awakening which is necessary to find truth and equanimity. For whatever reason, these people are unable or just unwilling to unwrap themselves from their painful (even for Them) delusions about Life and other people’s and cultures and beliefs. You cannot force them to awaken. It is only – and IF only – on their own time clock and the openness or closed-ness slavery within their minds.
“When my reply was that antisemitism wasn’t in the top 100 things I’m concerned about in the world today, I often got looks of amazement.”
Those who believe that God has ‘favorites’ and that They are ‘The Chosen’ have a big problem. In doing so, They have condemned everyone else into a subservient position of relative worthlessness. They have falsely separated out the human family into those who have value and those who don’t. And that is about the most fundamental blasphemy that anyone can commit. True Divinity does not have favorites – the whole concept is ridiculous.
ALL persons have equal value and fundamental worth. But those who separate themselves out as The Chosen have so incorporated this henous delusion into their doctrines, believes, theology, culture, and End Times vision that They could never in a million years separate Themselves from this wrong turn. They treat these theological and cultural beliefs as fundamental to their survival. All creatures have a powerful survival instinct and by this mis-marriage of self-promoting belief and Their instinctual sense of survival awakening and understanding is virtually impossible except for an enlightened few. And those enlightened Few quickly become outcasts and traitors in the minds of those who prefer to live within Their fundamental delusions.
Those who do wake up and are willing to be ‘Outcasts’ deserve our respect and admiration for the courage to pursue the right path regardless of the social and cultural hell that they will be subjected to.
“The Holocaust wasn’t just history for families like ours. It was the shadow that shaped dinnertime conversations, the reason certain discussions happened in whispers, the fear that lived behind our grandparents’ eyes.”
Enduring a Holocaust does not give someone the right to inflict a new Holocaust on someone else. That’s what The Holocaust Culture Industry does not seem to understand. And remember, there have been many holocausts on this Planet... from Native Americans to the Gaza and Iranian fields of death.
We have misery on this Planet because those who rule over us choose this to be so. But we as individuals can have the wisdom to not be lead into a hell that is not our choosing nor any place anyone sane would want to be.
When you always remember your Divine Nature – the Darkness can’t claim your body, mind, and Spirit. And ‘Hell’ is anywhere that one is separated from their own Divinity.
'Heaven' or 'Hel' are States of Mind. That's always our choice... isn't it?...
Thanks great article as always, truly analyzing the root cause of the problem, also in the case of Mexico you mentioned, here it is. Theres a second revolution in MX right now, and is not the narco violence, it's a literal Coup d Etat by it own" government. https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/bis-blackrock-digital-mexico/ Read and weep, this is what coming for us in America too.