You Are The Psyop.
Why thinking about psyops makes you the prime target of one.
Critical thinking has sharply diminished in the last five years. People started becoming more aware of government operations post 911, living in an internet world, a process commonly called “waking up”, but Covid, well Covid really upped the ante. The public watched in real time as the government and media worked in collaboration with the pharmaceutical agencies and private interests to deceive and coerce the world into taking an untested, unnecessary product. The public, rightly so, lost trust with almost every institution around them and became increasingly paranoid. They rapidly turned to alternative sources for information. No longer watching the news, they scanned the internet for voices they could trust and find out what was so obviously being hidden from them. I know, I was one of them. But unlike so many, I backed up my information with legitimate data points and encouraged self-research and critical thinking even if it meant challenging me!
As the years dragged on and more information that was once labelled conspiracy was being confirmed by the mainstream as accurate, I noticed a pattern emerging. The public was hungry. Hungry for more hidden information, more conspiracy. What else was being hidden from them? How could they find it? They began to demand more things were in fact a conspiracy or a psyop. Their emotions were living in fight or flight, parasympathic nervous system disabled and overrun. A dopamine hit of “I told you so” every time they found out about another corruption or media cover-up. Their blind belief in the mainstream information that they had been unconsciously living in for the past twenty or so years never disappeared. In fact, permanent behavioral change is in reality notoriously hard to shift. They simply transferred all that beahvioural trust from mainstream media to alternative-media, mainstream medical, to alternative medical. Bought and paid for news anchors were out and Bob from Idaho was in. They trusted no-one except those who said they were happy to expose more information, accurate or not, it confirmed what their inner anxiety was already feeling. Someone was lying.
Since 2020 the word psyop has exploded in the online arena. A jump in trends so strong it demands to be noticed, an increase of up to 1000% in usage in some forums and on from data we have via Google trends. Far from it’s official terminology of something that targets the emotional and mental state of the enemy, the term has now expanded into a word of it’s own. In particular, in “conservative” circles, the term has become a catch-all for anything that plays out in the global arena that is reported upon in the mainstream (although even some conservative journalists and reporters are now being slapped with the term when their audience doesn’t like their particular take on a subject).
| Year | Relative interest (index) | Change vs 2019 baseline |
| --------- | ------------------------- | ----------------------- |
| 2018 | ~3–5 | baseline |
| 2019 | ~5–8 | baseline |
| 2020 | ~15–25 (spikes) | +200% to +300% |
| 2021 | ~20–35 | +300% to +500% |
| 2022 | ~30–50 | +500% to +700% |
| 2023 | ~40–70 (viral spikes) | +700% to +1000%+ |
| 2024–2025 | ~50–100 peaks | +800% to +1500%+ |
A Psyop, by dictionary definition is a military operation, usually aimed at influencing the enemy’s state of mind through noncombative means (such as distribution of media). Through the expansion of the internet and the publics access to these once private governmental operations, the whole concept of a psyop has gained exposure and validity in recent years. Old interviews that have re-surfaced with access to digital media, such as ex-Russian spy, Yuri Bezmenov’s 1984 testimonial, show that the Russians had a 20 year plan to demoralize and subvert the culture of Americans. A process he described as “the great brainwashing”. It’s not difficult to see that the fruits of this psychological warfare have been borne out in our modern age.
Yuri said “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.” Sounds familiar right? This could be said about both sides of the aisle right now. It’s Mattias Desmet’s theory coming true in the shape of mass formation psychosis. A phenomenon where individuals lose their personal identities to a collective mindset.
“Mass formation is something that happens in a society under very specific conditions. And the most important of these conditions, the first one, is that there has to be a lack of social bond.” - Mattias Desmet
A Yuri said “They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. 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.”
These exposes’ have rightly garnered attention and added validity to claims that the largest governments were complicit in creating fake-scenarios in order to manipulate a portion of the populations perceptions of reality. Russia wasn’t alone however, the US, in particular the CIA, had a heavy hand in implementing programs, to encourage and influence it’s population. From the mind controlling MK-Ultra to the media infiltration of Operation Mockingbird, programs which the US government claims are extinct and now shunned showed strong influence directed at it’s own population, often at times partnering with supposed enemy agents to create and implement these programs on unsuspecting American citizens. Backed up through whistleblowers like Assange or Snowden a shift in the publics trust of it’s government went from fringe to mainstream very quickly. Investigative journalist Trevor Paglen says “In 2014, when the Intercept published a remarkable slide deck from the Snowden archive revealing the operations of the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), a unit of the British GCHQ. JTRIG’s playbook of “dirty tricks” includes an array of psychological operations that blur the lines between physical and cybernetic worlds: false flag operations, fake victim blog posts, disinformation campaigns, malware, “honey traps,” and operations aimed at discrediting individuals and organizations. In short, the self-described goal of JTRIG operations is to use “online techniques to make something happen in the real or cyber world.
In the 2005 book "Information Operations: Warfare and the Hard Reality of Soft Power", it quotes US Army PSYOP commander Lt. Col. Michael Holmes who describes his role in the planning and execution of real government funded psyops; “My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave.”
The issue we have today though, is that through information overload and our lack of training or unwillingness to decipher what is real coupled with emotional hijacking and our inability to regulate we have become unable to discern what is a current program, remnants of an old program, a media viral sensation blown out-of-proportion, what is completely made up and what may be the current program running. To put simply, the problem is,
if everything is a psyop, then ultimately nothing is a psyop.
Through consistent over-use and misuse of the word, we’ve made it devoid of meaning, structure and value. A recent Washington Post article quoted Todd C. Helmus, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND. “It has connotations of malign influence, and so it’s a scary word they can use to negatively brand the things they want to negatively brand,”
“The cynical genius of calling something a ‘psyop’ is that such accusations ‘don’t really need to have any evidence, because there’s not going to be any evidence: It’s a secret operation,’” said Mike Rothschild, an expert in conspiracy theories who wrote a book on QAnon (ironic name I know, I also chuckled, but apparently no relation IYKYK).
Today we have Reddit forums and 4-Chan chats filled with every conspiracy known to man and platforms like TikTok and Instagram allowing supposed “conspiracy exposers” or as they are more commonly known “truthers” to monetize the term and their content, in gaining views and clicks. Some even selling, course, books, supplements, devices and peddling the latest rage bait in order to continually pique ones enthralled interest. You can even find Substacks and online forums dedicated to explaining how to spot a psyop and what to do to protect yourself from them. Psyop is big business and its business is your nervous system.
So the question begs, how deep are you? How hijacked are you emotions? Do you find yourself constantly doom-scrolling, sometimes late into the night? Do you find your feed littered with truther insight videos and multiple angles of Charlie Kirk’s assassination? Are you scanning necks and crotches for evidence that everyone is in fact secretly a man? Are you terrified of Wifi and seed oils and every bird silently sitting in the trees? Are Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson your trusted sources for everything? If anyone disagrees with you, do you immediately name them a Fed or a Mossad agent? Is it always and most certainly the Juice? In short, have you lost the ability to truly listen and discern for yourself?
I’m not here to espouse the virtues of media or tell you not to trust this person or that person, in fact I’m here to ask you, to come back to trust in yourself. In order to do that though we must first acknowledge what is real and tell the truth to ourselves. If you are in fact really worried about the ability of any government or media to greatly influence a society’s emotions, thoughts and behaviors I urge you to look at if you yourself have been subject to this influence. Either negatively or positively and if that might have happened not in fact, through mass mainstream sources, but by what you have allowed yourself to become exposed to in your anxious attempt to control your safety and feel secure in a world of lies.
Less than 24hrs after the latest shooting at White House Correspondents Dinner on a Instagram post from a mainstream publication, People Magazine, the comments were littered with people from both left and right finally agreeing on something and confidently announcing that this was indeed a fake psyop, designed to boost Trump’s ratings in the mid-terms or increase gun-control or whatever the agenda of the day might be. Less than 24hrs, whilst the news was literally still breaking. The internet was in a frenzy. It didn’t matter what was said or what information was countered or debunked. They simply KNEW it was fake.
Bezmenov spoke of this “As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. 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.”
So what do we do? How can we hold the tension of opposites? How can we stay grounded and centered, not allow emotions to be used against us? Some say log off completely and for some of you that may be necessary, only you know how deep this goes. If that is indeed you, take this post as your sign and permission to press ‘uninstall app’ for a little while. Go touch some grass, pick up a pre-internet hobby like reading, craft or puzzles, get in contact with real humans, have meaningful conversations, find your similarities rather than your differences, at least for a while. Because the problem isn’t just what we’re seeing online. It’s how we’re processing it. A dysregulated person is actually the easiest person to control. When everything feels like it might be coordinated, staged, or manipulated, the mind stops doing its job properly. It starts defaulting to pattern-matching under stress. And under stress, everything starts to look like a signal. So the real question becomes less about “what is real?” and more about “how do I stay mentally clear enough to even ask that properly?” That’s where regulation comes in. When you re-enter focus on things that will support your biology. Things that are slow and beautiful and positive. Deep breaths, somatic work to get you back into your body, enter into the space with a basis in real-life, grounded in real humans with compassion and empathy. Create safety through trust in your intuition, but only once your parasympathetic nervous system is active. Know that a brain actually is more accurate when it’s flexible not rigid, when it has the ability to see all sides and wait to decide, without flying off the handle at the first sign of a crisis. You know that you can’t trust big institutions to take care of you, so you have to take care of you. Your focus needs to be on protecting your mind and therefore your emotions, calming yourself and regulating your body, and regaining trust in regular humans again including yourself. True discernment is allowing space for all opinions, mainstream or not to have a place in the collective narrative. Take what works for you and leave the rest without a disturbance to your life force or happiness. True rebellion is not letting anyone steal your life away from you through rabbit-holes or fear. Clarity is not surrendering your mind to the noise. It is protecting your capacity to think, feel, and choose freely, without letting external narratives consume your inner life.
Lauren Renee