How Gavin Newsom’s Tweets Unzip MAGA
A New Phenomenon in American Digital Warfare
My work is divided into two parts: fighting in the ongoing psychological war being waged against American democracy—and reporting on it. Much of my understanding of how the enemy attack operates comes from direct engagement, both offensively and defensively. While I don’t usually write about my own online skirmishes here, I’ll make an exception.
A New Phenomenon in American Digital Warfare
The social media accounts of Gavin Newsom during his campaign to redistrict California to counter Texas represent a new phenomenon in American digital warfare—a stroke of genius that, by accident or design, is slipping past MAGA’s heaviest shielding, entering the bloodstream of their ecosystem, and detonating bomb after bomb inside enemy territory.
By mirroring Donald Trump’s Truth Social account in form and style, Newsom’s team bypasses the defenses of MAGA’s insular ecosystems. Like a vaccine that carries the virus’s signature without the lethal payload, his messages fly through places like Twitter unimpeded by the usual immune reaction—until they reach the host. On Fox, the process is even clearer. They cannot quit him, desperately mocking him while unwittingly broadcasting his message over and over for days in a row.
Part of the brilliance of this campaign is that by mirroring Donald Trump, Newsom is communicating the key point—that this is a response to Trump’s own actions—without even saying it. The medium is truly the message. For example in these tweets, the medium is the exact style and format of an unhinged Trump Truth, except delivering the message that Gavin Newsom is going to fight back.
In other tweets Newsom’s team will mirror something Trump already did, like attacking Taylor Swift or referring to himself as a King, wait for the reaction, and deliver a devastating counterattack.
Other times, Newsom’s team will weigh in on things purely as a way to contradict the core narrative being driven by MAGA. For example, over the last 24 hours there has been a minor controversy of the remaking of the Cracker Barrel logo to remove an old-timey drawing. Seemingly every MAGA propagandist has weighed in on how Cracker Barrel is being “woke.” So, in a perfect example of what I have called mimetic judo, Newsom agreed with MAGA about the logo, loudly stealing their energy and stopping them in their tracks—and giving people like me the ability to build on his idea.
In every case, Newsom’s team is using Trump’s own tactics against him. I wrote about many of these ideas in my series about how to mount a cognitive insurgency, especially Part III: Disrupt, including how to use live action role play (LARPs) and gamification techniques (ARGs). Essentially, Newsom is creating his own addictive variable-ratio operant conditioning loop to counter Trump.
Unzipping MAGA
But I think there’s something more going on here. Newsom’s social media accounts are a massive cognitive dissonance delivery system which operates at every level of the five-step process of online brainwashing that I’ve described, in a sort of unzipping process. Let me briefly touch on each:
Redpilling → Bluepilling
Online, to brainwash a target, you generally need some form of traumatic content, a shock that causes the brain to appeal to the amygdala, the fear center.
While Newsom’s tweets don’t shock with violence, or calls for the imprisonment of his opponents, taken out of context, they are shocking. The governor of the fourth-largest economy on the planet is behaving like a child, posting memes, all-caps screeds and so on—this is shocking on its face, but to MAGA it creates a deep wave of cognitive dissonance, colloquially known as getting triggered. This is easy to see on any of Newsom’s tweets.
Dissociation → Cognitive Dissonance
The phenomenon of dissociation as a result of trauma is a primary attack surface in psychological warfare. It represents effectively two identities competing for primacy in the target—one undergoing a traumatic experience, and one that’s depersonalized to evaluate the right course of action. This is a vulnerable state which can be exploited.
Newsom’s account delivers cognitive dissonance which works in much the same way. There are two realities being presented in the same person—someone who sounds like Trump, but is saying things that contradict him. This is why Fox hosts sputter—they are caught between laughing at him, and realizing it isn’t him at all.
Salvation → Archetype
Online, the way people are “imprinted” with the idea that someone as amoral as Donald Trump could be somehow holy or divine, is that when the targets are dissociated, traumatized and searching for answers, the savior—be it Trump, “Q,” or some other designated prophet, arrives with a false solution.
Newsom’s team leans into this idea, as mockery of Trump, but it is also psychologically disruptive to someone who has been conditioned that only Trump can be treated this way. It’s a parody savior replacing a false savior—and in that inversion, the archetype itself is revealed as a hoax. I personally have found this line of attack to be extremely potent.
Refreezing → Touching Grass
It is long established in psychology that the way cults indoctrinate their victims is through a repetitive series of unfreeze→change→refreeze steps in which the target is traumatized to “unfreeze” them, changed through coercion, and then “refrozen” through techniques like love-bombing and community rituals to lock in the changes to the psyche.
What Newsom’s accounts do is create an entirely different set of rituals, social dynamics and operant loops which mirror Trump but don’t impose any of the same restrictions. Instead of refreezing into grievance and misplaced idol worship, the loop coalesces into joy and participation.
Mimetic Synchrony → Asynchronous Mimesis
The final state of someone who has been captured by an online cult like Donald Trump’s is what I have referred to as mimetic synchrony, which is a hijack of the tendency of humans to mimic those they admire, to make them unconsciously mirror the behavior of the cult leader.
Newsom’s team has created a large enthusiastic group of followers, who engage in mimesis of their faux cult-leader, but do it for fun—because they’re in on the joke. It’s comedy, not slavery. This is a fundamentally different and disruptive environment for people used to a homogenized information ecology like MAGA, where being part of the movement is actually involuntary emotional servitude.
No Panacea
While Gavin Newsom is not a perfect man, I happen to have lived in San Francisco when he was the first mayor to give out gay marriage licenses and perform a gay wedding—before it was federally legal. He has guts and a sense of history.
But to pull off what Newsom has with his social media campaign would not have been effective had it not been paired with real stakes—and real action. He saw an extraordinary moment like the one he saw over two decades ago, a way to make an impact, and he seized it.
As I was able to vote for gay marriage two decades ago, now because of Newsom’s team’s brilliant campaign, I will be able to vote this November to counter a blatant attempt by Donald Trump to steal another election. If nothing else, that makes this story worth celebrating. But I think the Governor has done something more; he has shown us that the system that created Donald Trump is not permanent or unbreakable. In fact, it is fundamentally brittle, incoherent, and prone to being unzipped.
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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson
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This is one of your best articles because it’s simple enough for me to really understand it. Fantastic insights. I’m a huge fan, and you just keep getting better. I’m very happy about Newsom’s attacks. They’re a model for the resistance, bringing us hope and joy while fighting back effectively. Kudos to your governor and his team.
Jim, I appreciate your take on this. Very insightful.