How to Mount a Cognitive Insurgency: Know. Name. DISRUPT. — Part III
sabotage — deliberately destroy, damage, or obstruct (something), especially for political or military advantage
Author’s Note
The “Know. Name. Disrupt” (KND) method is largely based on my personal experience as a journalist and activist trying to disrupt QAnon, which uses techniques I helped pioneer for digital entertainment two decades ago, but added an entirely new psychological attachment infrastructure—which I have now studied, and battled, for five years.
The goal of writing this series is to drastically shorten that timeframe for others. I have had to learn a lot. I have interacted with countless people afflicted by the psychological enslavement system that has been built around Donald Trump. And I have personally done numerous tests and experiments in the field to see what is effective to combat it, and what is not.
In short, first you have to KNOW what you’re talking about. Then you have to be able to use that knowledge—to NAME it strategically and with precision. And then you have to DISRUPT it. That’s what this part is all about.
Introduction
Your brain is well protected, all things considered, from physical violence; your skull won’t stop a bullet, but it’s still pretty sturdy. However, violence to the function of the brain is far easier to do, especially at scale. Algorithmically-driven networked technology platforms have exponentially increased the use of mass psychological violence—defined here as the wide-scale, deliberate infliction of harmful mental disorders on a population.
The personality cult of Donald Trump was created by a well-developed system of mass psychological violence deployed against American citizens. This system has now evolved into a government attempting to exercise totalizing epistemic control over the population—to seize the means of knowledge. In later parts of this series I will explain how it was created, who contributed to its growth, and who stands to benefit most from it now.
With the knowledge gained in Part I and Part II, this article includes:
Why the complexity of the system both protects it and makes it vulnerable to disruption
How each step of the process of brainwashing can be combatted and interrupted
Strategies for disrupting the system in the field—individual to national
Applied cognitive dissonance as a tactic
Being a better mousetrap for people than the leaders and prophets of the system—hijack the operant loop
Using all three parts together to build national cognitive immune system
This is about legally and morally sabotaging a parasitic system of mind control
I. The Pros and Cons of Complex Systems
Seen from the outside, the Trump regime and its followers appear as a massive, chaotic minority of the US population that has gone haywire and seized near total control over the government. It clearly has a leader in Donald Trump, but it is also distributed across numerous layers of America, from entire families captured or split up, to radicalized communities and local governments, to a huge part of the media, to a large swath of Silicon Valley, to the entire billionaire class—which has either gone along with it. Or enthusiastically helped this chaos take hold.
Underneath that chaos, however, is a system of complex, interlocking, nameable parts—psychological strategies and tactics which the system uses to keep its victims under control. Systems theory is about how to understand, create, and manipulate them.
Environmental scientist Donella Meadows, in Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (1999):
“Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in ‘leverage points.’ These are places within a complex system… where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.”
“A negative feedback loop is self-correcting; a positive feedback loop is self-reinforcing. The more it works, the more it gains power to work some more. The more people catch the flu, the more they infect other people.”
“Reducing the gain around a positive loop—slowing the growth—is usually a more powerful leverage point in systems than strengthening negative loops, and much preferable to letting the positive loop run.”
The system of psychological control used by Donald Trump and others which takes the form of Trump’s personality cult, MAGA, QAnon, and a tangle of other operant conditioning loops disguised as “movements” or “social media platforms,” is an always-on magnet tailored to keep people constantly drip-fed—so they never leave. It is both a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop and a corrective negative feedback loop, overlapped to addict the target.
But loops can be interrupted. Leverage points can be leveraged. And truth can be spoken. The complexity of the system works as a way to conceal it. But it is also a weakness. It is brittle. It can be disrupted.
II. The Teeth of the Gears
To understand the system is to identify its weak points. Here are the five steps as I’ve outlined them for brainwashing people online:
Redpilling and Trauma — Without trauma the system doesn’t work. Trauma is a hack to people’s subconscious. It is the hook with a barbed end. Getting it out is much harder than getting it in. This is the most critical step to disable. Without trauma, there is no cult.
Dissociation — The goal of trauma. The “redpill” shocks the brain, which then enters “safe mode”—a psychological break between the identity of the person experiencing overwhelming trauma and a new identity which emerges to analyze the situation and make fast decisions to evade danger.
Salvation — The savior (Donald Trump) or his prophet (Q) is introduced while the targeted is dissociated and frozen with fear—and offers a solution. This begins the trauma bond between the leader and his cult. It is possible to inoculate against this step, but once the trauma bond starts, it is a deep, subconscious attachment.
The first three steps are separate and need to be understood that way—but in the field, they can take place within a single video, or a single session of exploring a “redpill” rabbithole.
The last two steps however, are public processes which can be interrupted.
Refreezing — The process of using cultic techniques like “love-bombing” and other reinforcement tactics to reintegrate changes that were introduced through trauma into a new identity. This is a visible social media dynamic, of first grooming the target, redpilling them with content, and then wrapping the target into the “community.”
Mimetic synchrony — The instantaneous, contagious mirroring of a trauma-bonded cult of its leader. When Trump “Truths” or makes an appearance on Fox, his followers aren’t listening to his words, they are imitating how he feels. But like a school of fish, or a flock of birds, the group behavior can be disrupted, sometimes by an asymmetric input into the system aka “The Butterfly Effect.”
Put together, this process has trapped millions, but once you see it how it works, it’s just another system that can be probed for vulnerabilities and leverage points.
III. Legal, Moral Sabotage
sabotage — deliberately destroy, damage, or obstruct (something), especially for political or military advantage.
The psychological system that has trapped so much of America is not a legitimate institution of any kind. It has no legal standing. It was created extra-legally to influence American opinions in elections. It is a perfectly legitimate target to take down. As long as the tactics involved remain moral and legal, it should be dismantled by any means necessary.
As a personal example of legal sabotage, in 2021, I was watching Mike Flynn perform in front of a Christian church and I noticed he had the congregants repeat a prayer that didn’t sound terribly biblical. So I figured out that he was reading from a prayer by a theosophical cult leader named Elizabeth Clare Prophet and used it as a wedge.
By doing a direct comparison of the two cult leaders, pointing out that Flynn’s Christianity is questionable, at best, and telling people to share the content, I created cognitive dissonance in his movement that he never fully recovered from. Flynn lost a large part of his Christian audience and ultimately a significant part of his QAnon followers.
Cognitive dissonance is one of the primary weapons of the cognitive insurgent. To break down the cognitive dissonance I created in Flynn’s followers, by showing the video to his believers, I forced them to hold both these thoughts at once.
Mike Flynn is a patriotic, God-fearing Christian
Mike Flynn led a Christian church in occult heresy
That was a lot for them to integrate—and many of them couldn’t. It disrupted the attachment to him.
IV. Mimetic Judo: Redirecting Force Into Demolition
The martial art of Judo is unusual because it largely relies on the redirection of your opponent’s force to gain an advantage. Martial artists call this kuzushi—off-balancing. Use the force of the system to collapse it from within.
Online, defeating an enormous system like Trump’s may seem impossible, but it is remarkable what is possible by using its own energy and momentum against it, much like a judo black-belt does. One simple example of this is to strategically hijack trends, hashtags, and memes to create cognitive dissonance.
A couple of years ago there was a traumatic “redpill” movie and a huge series of videos and memes about people who “Died Suddenly,” falsely attributed to the COVID vaccine. It used a very simple fallacy, but also a pretty simple marketing campaign which was easy to feed off using a hashtag. The payload of my message was designed to NAME the fallacy and to DISRUPT the loop.
The basic pattern here is:
Identify where the energy is in the system
Find a place you can hijack it
Construct a message that causes cognitive dissonance or another desired outcome
Deploy, Test, Revise, Repeat
V. Operational Disruption
Once you understand how the gears work together, the next goal is to break the teeth off, one by one.
Defeat the Redpill
Without trauma, none of this works. Trauma is the essential hack that opens the door to the subconscious. It creates dissociation and allows the false prophet to come in and take over.
The simplest form of disruption to the system is, as Donella Meadows said, “Reducing the gain around a positive loop—slowing the growth—is usually a more powerful leverage point in systems than strengthening negative loops”
The easiest way to do this is explain it to people—for people who may be at risk, especially—like kids and others who may not have the psychological armor required to deal with an unexpected “redpill.” Tell them to avoid content from any untrusted source, and explain how traumatic content works to harm people. Tell them about dissociation and how it alters your identity. It is far harder for the hook to catch the fish, if the fish knows what a hook is.
Depending on who you are, perhaps this is just close family, but maybe you have a social media account with a few followers and you can share this simple fact with people: Unexpectedly violent, highly emotional, or transgressive content can cause trauma, especially when repeated. This can cause damage to the brain resulting in a dissociative disorder which is exploited by abusers, authoritarians and cult leaders.
Or, let’s say you know a politician, or sit on a school board, or have some other way of inoculating a larger population about this extremely common, and devastating phenomenon. Imagine if you prevented one person from being infected by this psychological contagion by inoculating them with a bit of simple information. Then imagine how many people that person might prevent from getting it.
The same social media dynamics that were weaponized to psychologically enslave a large minority of the population can be used to prevent further spread, and start the process of recovering the millions who are lost.
Operant Destruction
Operant conditioning loops are another hack, but for the conscious part of the brain. They seize command of your executive function, your attention, by giving you an addictive regime of rewards and punishments. Examples of this are domestic abuse, internet addiction, and gambling addiction—a slot machine is basically an idealized operant conditioning loop, designed by scientists, psychologists and statisticians to keep you trapped as long as possible, to extract the most money.
Operant means “an item of behavior that is initially spontaneous, rather than a response to a prior stimulus, but whose consequences may reinforce or inhibit recurrence of that behavior.” For example, a baby cries (the behavior), it either gets fed or it doesn’t (the consequences). This may have an effect on how it behaves in the future aka an operant behavior.
This simple form of behavior modification is used in overlapping loops online. For example, a typical MAGA may be addicted to multiple loops at once:
Trump himself
Twitter/X, Facebook, Truth Social, Telegram, Rumble, Discord chats
QAnon
Fox / Newsmax / OANN
Designated prophets of the leader
These overlapping loops, when they are following a unified message, reinforce each other. If one slows down, another is there. If one is not giving you dopamine, another one will.
However, just as they reinforce each other when aligned, when they are not synchronized, they punish each other with cognitive dissonance.
That’s why pitting one loop against another works. The Epstein case is a perfect example of this. When certain influencers objected to the burying of the Epstein Files and other obvious signs of a cover up, it made the system, and the leader, unbalanced. The cognitive dissonance between different loops meant to reinforce each other, turned the operant conditioning on its head. That’s why MAGA is so deeply divided, and why it’s such a powerful story.
This type of loop-jamming can be deployed at all scales where addictive behavior is present.
Create Your Own Loops
Alternate reality games (ARGs), which I helped to pioneer, are large interactive experiences which involve “puppetmasters” who “run the game” and “players” who do activities as directed, usually in order to consume a story. As an example, my former company 42 Entertainment developed an ARG for Nine Inch Nails for the album Year Zero in 2007.
For this ARG, we took a narrative provided by Trent Reznor, of a dystopian world that looks not too different from our near future today, and built an experience that ranged from casual clue-hunting to a full concert by Nine Inch Nails that was performed in full character within the world of the story.
This video shows how the players experienced it first-hand.
The message of the story, and the experience—that Bush-era surveillance and government overreach was destined to create a fascist state—was delivered in context and through emotion.
As an example of how ARGs and narrative loops can exponentially build attention, in the Nine Inch Nails project, we received a new song from the Year Zero album that no one had heard before, a deeply prized commodity to the fan base. To promote it, we put the song on a single thumb drive and put it on a bathroom stall at the end of a NIN show in Lisbon, Portugal with a clue. And waited.
Within 90 minutes, someone had taken the drive home, downloaded it and uploaded it to the fan forums, asking “Is this real?” The fans took the song apart, including running it through an audio analyzer—a spectrograph—and found a picture of a phone number that we had added silently to the audio.
The phone number led to a creepy viral story bit that was very shareable. Within a week, the phone number was up to 4 million calls, and was costing us $80,000 per day to keep running. From a thumb drive to near-disaster-level growth is the kind of thing that ARGs can do to promote a narrative.
QAnon, as I’ve written, is a bastardized ARG, one flipped on its head and weaponized. It’s a fractured, incoherent narrative, that uses the ideas we had as a poison pill to hoax people into a much darker process.
It is my hope that people with a far better idea of what the future should look like than “Q” will build better stories, better worlds, and better games.
Build your own loops. Be a better model. Be a better addiction.
VI. Putting It All Together
Every part of the system is a real phenomenon, but none of it emerged by itself, none of it is magical. It was engineered. And everything that can be engineered can be reverse-engineered. What was built to enslave can be retooled to liberate.
The goal of this framework is to provide a straightforward way to help do that—to provide a roadmap which can relieve some of the feeling of despair and powerlessness that many of us have.
KNOW — Study the system. Understand how it hacks the brain and hijacks identity. Identify the tools, triggers, and reinforcement mechanisms. Protect yourself and those around you. Create a firewall.
NAME — Speak it. Label the tactics both to yourself and out loud and in public. Use the precision naming to surface cognition, interrupt trance states, and reactivate the conscious mind.
DISRUPT — Break it. Interrupt it. Jam it. Use mimetic judo, cognitive dissonance, viral injection, operant sabotage. Build better loops, ARGs, hijack their trends, create stories that inoculate instead of infect.
All of these things can be done at any scale. You don’t need Nine Inch Nails to do an ARG, you just need some creativity and some time. You don’t need a large social media presence to institute any of these tactics. You just need to know what you’re looking at, be able to name it, and know the best way to disrupt it.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
—Buckminster Fuller
Conclusion: From Resistance to Renaissance
The psychological war that has been waged on America for at least a decade by Donald Trump and his allies, foreign and domestic, is one of the most obvious and least understood phenomena in modern times. Everyone sees the symptoms; everyone knows someone affected; it not a secret—and yet it is.
No one in power in America has actually admitted this problem exists. We heard euphemisms like “MAGA extremists” from the Biden administration and we get lots of outrage from Democrats about the behavior of the Trump regime, but none of them have actually said the quiet part, which is that this feels so unreal because in some ways it is. The people who have been pulled into this system live in a different reality than you and I. Not theoretically or metaphorically, an actual alternate reality where the “woke mind virus” is a threat and fluoride is mind control.
Until we internalize this fact, face the system that projects this reality head on, and build a movement to dismantle it from the ground up and the top-down at the same time, it will continue to do its work.
However, none of us are powerless: Know. Name. Disrupt. Repeat.
Remember, the system hasn’t won—yet.
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Still need to read the latest just want to say thank for not playing it safe. hang on but protect yourself too we need you.
Excellent, as usual, Jim. Thank you.