Welcome to PSYOP Season

They Gave You a Script. You Called It Conviction.

They're not selling you beliefs. They're selling you identity. And you're buying.

After this week's chaotic scenes in the Middle East, I posted a story on Instagram suggesting that our first reaction shouldn't be to go to war, and that we should question the motivations and actions of the Israeli government. Someone sent me a direct message calling me "a dangerous leftist Jew who hates Israel" and accused me of breeding antisemitism. That's the level of discourse now. You say, "maybe don't kill people," and suddenly you're the enemy.

That's the cost of identity-based programming. It turns neighbors into enemies, disagreement into heresy, and war into a loyalty test. When belief becomes a badge, you'll defend anything just to keep wearing it.

Welcome to PSYOP season, where every crisis is a product launch and your outrage is the purchase.

The Script Never Changes

Take Iran. For over two decades, we've been sold the same product: imminent nuclear threat requiring immediate action.

Same threat, same timeline, same sense of urgency. Different administrations, different decades, identical script.

Cue the usual suspects tweeting stuff like “Hit Iran now. Hit them hard.” War is a business, and their tweets might as well be stamped with Raytheon's logo. The customers get to feel patriotic. The shareholders get defense contracts. The people who die don't get polled about customer satisfaction.

The Art of Selective Outrage

But the real genius isn't in selling external threats. It's in programming selective outrage that keeps us fighting each other instead of recognizing the pattern. Take immigration — the perfect case study in how the same actions get completely different reactions depending on who's in charge.

Obama deported 2.67 million people over eight years — roughly 333,300 per year. Trump deported about 1.01 million over four years — roughly 252,000 per year. Yet somehow Trump became the face of immigration cruelty while Obama was the compassionate progressive. Where was the outrage then? Where were the protests? Where was the moral clarity that now burns so bright?

When I mentioned these numbers recently, someone said, “Well, at least Obama did it with compassion.” But here's the deeper problem: most people don't even know the basic facts. The kids in cages? Obama built them. Same warehouse, same chain-link fencing, same cold concrete floors. Trump’s zero tolerance policy was new — deliberately separating families — and arguably more inhumane, but the images that sparked public fury, the one the person was referring to, were from 2014. Under Obama.

That's the power of narrative laundering — the facts don't change, just who's allowed to feel morally superior about them.

The same dynamic played out during COVID. Many of the people at this weekend’s "No Kings" rallies — protesting government overreach — cheered when people were banned from society by government decree for refusing an experimental medicine. According to one Rasmussen poll, half the Democratic Party wanted to put the unvaccinated in camps.

Conversely, many of those now calling for ICE to round people up were screaming about federal tyranny just a few months ago.

This is the beauty of brand loyalty. The Freedom Brand sells you security and constitutional rights. The Compassion Brand sells you safety and collective responsibility. They look like opposites, but both deliver the same product: more power to the state, less autonomy for you. Different packaging, same outcome. When your team does it, it's justified. When their team does it, it's authoritarian.

So maybe forgive us if we can't take the performative outrage seriously, even when the consequences are very real.

The Hegelian Dialectic on Repeat

This is the classic formula, and we've been watching it play out for years.

The problem? A manufactured crisis. Immigration worked imperfectly but functionally for decades — then suddenly it falls apart and nobody asks why. Iran gets the same nuclear weapons timeline for 30 years. Social tensions that simmer for generations suddenly explode into the streets.

The reaction? Chaos. Protests that — depending on your vantage-point — are either heartfelt resistance or people torching cities. But either way, the story is the same: pallets of cinderblocks appearing overnight, outside agitators, organized chaos that requires logistics and funding. The George Floyd playbook: “spontaneous” uprisings that somehow have supply chains. The only thing I'm sure of: there's nothing organic about any of it. This isn't new. It's the same cycle that keeps resetting like clockwork.

The solution? More surveillance. More crackdown. More control. The technocratic state expands regardless of which party holds power, fed by the fear generated from the chaos that always seems to benefit the same interests.

Trump shows up as the prepackaged reaction, and whether or not you believe he's in on it, the reality is: he walked right into the script.

Both sides are being played. Again.

Manufactured Chaos Feeds Manufactured Control

The more chaos they stir up, the more control they can justify. The playbook is always the same: break the system, blame the chaos on a convenient scapegoat, introduce a new layer of surveillance or control to "fix" it.

Wash, rinse, repeat. Doesn't matter if it's immigration, race, pandemics, foreign policy, or digital identity — the destination is always the same: total control.

Not The Enemy

The most devastating part isn't that we're being manipulated — it's that we're so eager for it. We choose our reality tunnels based on tribal allegiance rather than principles. We select our outrage based on which team is in power rather than what's actually happening.

Your neighbor who thinks differently about immigration policy isn't your enemy. Your coworker who voted for the other candidate isn't a threat to democracy. The person on social media with different political views isn't trying to destroy America.

Their perspectives might be shaped by their upbringing, life experiences, or media diet — but they're still people. Regular people. We should be able to discuss how complex problems get solved, but instead it typically resorts to othering and ad hominem attacks. They're caught in the same fog you are.

The real enemy — if we must have one — isn't your fellow human beings. They're just propagandized foot soldiers. It's the figures behind the curtain who orchestrate it all - shaping the stories, manufacturing the crises, moving the pieces. The apparatus profits from chaos, needs us pointing fingers at each other while the same interests consolidate power regardless of election outcomes. As I covered in Divided We Fall, the strategy is simple: keep us fighting each other instead of looking up.

The Invisible Hand

We're living through what might be the most sophisticated psychological operation in human history, and most people don't even realize there's an op at all. Every protest, every viral video, every news cycle — it's all carefully orchestrated noise designed to keep us trapped in reactive mode.

The media doesn't show us reality. It shows us the script. And we're not just watching the performance — we're participating in it.

This week, global elites from all political tribes are meeting at Bilderberg to discuss "Depopulation and Migration," "AI, Deterrence and National Security," and the "Authoritarian Axis." It's on their public website. The media is silent. You know it's important because they're all there talking about it, and it's not in “the news.” Meanwhile, they've got you arguing about immigration and foreign wars — the very topics they’re quietly planning behind closed doors — while you think you’re debating them freely.

While we argue about whether to fund wars or seek peace, whether to deport immigrants or grant amnesty, whether to expand or contract government power, the same interests profit from every conflict. The same surveillance apparatus expands under every administration. The same technocratic agenda advances regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.

While everyone has their own theories, we don't truly know who pulls the strings. We only glimpse middle management — the politicians, the pundits, the celebrities reading their lines, the corporate class spinning through the same revolving doors. The real power operates in the shadows, shielded by our refusal to look up.

The same agencies run the simulations. The same banks fund the breakdown. The same platforms steer the outrage. And the same names are always at the ribbon-cuttings — no matter who you vote for.

The Enforcement Layer

You don't just get manipulated into outrage — you get monitored once you're activated.

Palantir — the company building surveillance systems for ICE, police departments, and battlefields — just embedded its CTO into the U.S. Army Reserve as a lieutenant colonel. Meta and OpenAI executives joined the same program. Tech oligarchs now wear military uniforms.

This weekend’s 250th anniversary celebration of America was sponsored by Goldman Sachs, Oracle, and Raytheon. The same financial, tech, defense, and media institutions that shape culture and engineer beliefs are literally funding the pageantry while their executives join the military command structure. The Freedom Brand customers are cheering. Apparently loving Big Brother is patriotic now — as long as he wears your team's uniform.

Robot surveillance dogs patrol our cities. AI systems analyze our posts for "threats." From DARPA's neural interface experiments to Palantir's predictive policing algorithms, the surveillance isn't coming — it's here. Both sides are ushering it in: Freedom Brand customers want it for "security," Compassion Brand customers want it for "safety." Different marketing, same control grid.

The same Silicon Valley institutions that engineer your beliefs are now helping decide who gets targeted for having the wrong ones. You're being watched by the same people who sold you the outrage. The machine doesn't just want your attention — it wants your compliance.

You're Not a Citizen. You're a Customer.

Think about the last time you got excited about a political candidate.
Or furious about a news story.
Or felt that righteous surge of being on the right side of history.

That wasn't civic engagement. It was brand engagement. You experienced the same neurochemical hit as getting a notification that your post went viral or that your crypto portfolio mooned.

You didn't arrive at your political beliefs through careful reasoning. You were targeted by algorithms, served content designed to trigger specific emotional responses, and guided toward pre-selected conclusions. Most people's ideological identity isn't self-determined — it's manufactured.

If I'm paying $20 a month for ChatGPT and it can analyze my psychology this effectively, imagine what tools have been perfecting the art of manufacturing consent for decades.

Recognizing the Cage

The first step toward freedom is recognizing the cage.

Every major crisis follows the same pattern. Every manufactured outrage serves the same masters. Every division benefits the same interests. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

This doesn't mean becoming cynical or checking out. It means becoming discerning. It means asking better questions: Who benefits? What's the historical pattern? Why now? What's the solution being offered, and who does it empower?

It means refusing to participate in selective outrage. If government overreach was wrong during COVID, it's wrong during immigration enforcement. If deportations were inhumane under Trump, they were inhumane under Obama. If war profiteering corrupts our foreign policy, it doesn't matter which party holds the contracts.

Principles over parties. Patterns over propaganda. Truth over tribal allegiance.

The Choice

We're at an inflection point. The old script is losing its power because too many people are starting to see through it. The manufactured divisions are becoming too obvious, the contradictions too glaring, the selective outrage too transparently manipulated.

People seem angry, confused, betrayed — but directing these emotions at wildly different targets depending on which dialectical track they choose on particular issues. Their feelings are the same; where they're directing them is different. But the underlying sense that something is heating up, that something fundamental is moving in the broader consciousness, cuts across all tribal lines.

Perhaps this is the last game before something breaks open. I don't know what that something is. I have theories like everyone else, but the real question isn't what's coming. It's whether you feel it, and what you're going to do about it.

As I explored last week in Fractured Realities, we're all trapped in different scripts, but the same director's calling the shots.

You can keep playing your assigned role in their theater, fighting your neighbors over problems the power structure created with solutions they've predetermined. You can keep feeding the machine that profits from your anger, your fear, your willingness to believe that your fellow humans are the enemy.

Or you can step outside the script.

Recognize that the person across the political aisle isn't your enemy — they're your fellow prisoner. The system needs you divided to survive. Your unity threatens their control more than any protest, any vote, any petition.

The revolution isn't left versus right. It's those who see the script versus those still reading their lines.

Welcome to PSYOP season. The question isn't whether you're being sold to — the question is whether you're still buying.

You bought the chains.
You're still wearing them.
The receipt was burned.