It’s a Sign! — The Semiotics of Firing Artillery Over Protests
How Pete Hegseth couldn’t make a better sign than No Kings.
Semiotics is the study of signs, and how people make meaning from them. A sign can be explicit like a protest sign, or implicit like the symptom of a disease.
Saturday, October 18th was an extraordinary day for signs in America. A blossoming protest movement brought millions out in over 2,700 locations to give a collective political sign to the Trump regime of our national discontent; No Kings was a full-throated, countrywide exercise of the First Amendment right to peaceably assemble to petition the government.
Many of the protesters were also holding physical signs. These were explicit about their meaning; the context of the signs’ location at a protest only makes the desired message clearer. The cumulative signal to the Trump regime was unmistakable; it was simply two extended middle fingers from at least seven million people.
Semiosis
Semiosis—literally sign process—is any form of activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning. A sign is anything that communicates a meaning, that is not the sign itself, to the interpreter of the sign.
The process of meaning-making from signs, physical or symbolic, is called semiosis. In a healthy person who lives in a healthy society, semiosis is a moment of free choice.
By ‘semiosis’ we mean the process of choice-making between simultaneously alternative options. We define ‘semiotic learning’ as the leaving behind of such traces by choices, which could influence further choices. These traces of choices will be called ‘memory’. Further modification of traces from learning will be called ‘habituation’.
—Choosing and learning: Semiosis means choice, Kalevi Kull, Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu
When you see a sign, you have a menu of ways to interpret it, to derive meaning from it. In Kull’s formulation, the collapse of these different choices into a single decision is how people exercise free will, and how they derive meaning from the world.
However, it is the hijacking of semiosis, the destruction of the individual’s ability to create accurate meaning based on unaltered input, that causes people to behave in ways that don’t make sense in the observable world. People with delusions, for example, have had their semiotics broken.
Hegseth’s Russian Tie
I want to focus on two signs from Trump’s “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth in the last 24 hours—a small one, and a big one—to illustrate how semiosis works, and how it gets hijacked.
First, on Friday in the Oval, Hegseth wore a Russian flag tie to meet Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, who was there to discuss the state of the Russian war against his country and potential U.S. Tomahawk Missile sales to Ukraine through NATO. Those weapons would have put a severe stress on Russia’s war machine by creating a far larger attack surface for the Ukrainian military.
Before the meeting, Trump seemed, as he so often pretends, to be ready to send these weapons to Ukraine, but Thursday Trump took a last-minute call from Vladimir Putin, did several performative “Truths” about it, and gave Zelenskyy nothing.
“Very interesting, and cordial… NO MORE, GO HOME…”
Instead, Trump decided to do another summit, this time in Budapest, with war criminal Vladimir Putin—in “around two weeks.”
Budapest by itself is a sign. By holding a summit with Putin where Russia agreed in 1994 to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nukes—the Budapest Memorandum—Trump and Putin are trying to rewrite history.
The sign of Hegseth’s tie was unmistakable to anyone who understands geopolitics, but especially to Zelenskyy who—like all Ukrainians at this stage—sees the Russian flag as nothing short of a swastika, a symbol of terror and death. Hegseth deliberately gave himself a little bit of wiggle room, so people like JD Vance could wave it off as just “red, white and blue.” But the Russians themselves, and the Americans who love them, saw the sign loud and clear.
Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s personal aide and sovereign wealth fund manager, saw the same sign from Hegseth—a set of wide stripes of white, blue, and red on his tie—and Dmitriev’s semiosis, his interpretation, was different than JD Vance. Not only did he recognize the flag immediately, he mirrored it, and followed it up with the QAnon slogan “WWG1WGA.”
Liz Crokin, one of the most vile Pizzagate and QAnon propagandists of the last decade, a woman who Mike Flynn once said was “like my daughter,” also recognized the flag. She took it as an opportunity to portray Russia and the United States as friends—which Putin’s proxy was happy to acknowledge and agree with: “BOSS MOVE.”
This is malignant semiotics as psychological warfare: deliberately ambiguous signs that can be interpreted in just the way you want them to be by the right people. In this case, Hegseth was just showing his true colors; his white supremacist revanchist worldview is far more aligned with Putin’s than with the American protesters today.
Artillery Over the I5
The second sign was even bigger and more embarrassing. Pete Hegseth and JD Vance decided to attend a sudden, inexplicable event planned a few days ago at Camp Pendleton in Southern California for the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps—which is next month.
This event, which no one had heard of until last Wednesday, was upgraded to a live demonstration of military power for a White House production and scheduled for today—the day of the largest protests in American history.
To make this even more of a blatant sign, Hegseth deemed it necessary to fire live artillery over a major highway, through which 80,000 cars a day pass, an unheard of idea that drew deep alarm from Governor Newsom. The CHP shut down the freeway for four hours to accommodate this madness.
It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to read the sign. It’s spelled out: “LIVE WEAPONS OVER FREEWAY.”
Like the tie, this dangerous performance, was (slightly) ambiguous. You could see it as a great way to honor our Marine Corps—as they should be—but if your semiosis is working, you must also ask if this was really about the Marines at all.
The Signs Are Clear
The symbolism of the military shutting down a major civilian artery on the whims of the “War Secretary”—on a day where millions were marching against his regime—by firing live rounds into a Democrat-controlled state is as symbolically blatant as it gets.
The federal government and the civilian leadership of the military is at war with anyone who doesn’t agree with their authoritarian takeover of the United States. They’d rather shoot artillery over the protests and accuse the participants of terrorism than listen to a single word that was said.
Unnecessarily endangering civilians in order to make a political point against peaceful protesters—by abusing military power—is treasonous. Wearing the colors of an enemy in the White House to pressure an ally to surrender is also deeply un-American. These are the signs that the White House is giving us.
Well, today, we had our own signs to show, and there was very little room for interpretation. We are fed up. Not Antifa. Not “radical left terrorists.” Just America.
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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson
Threads: jimstewartson
One thing that no one can deny is Zelenski shows up, time and time again, no games, no charades, just shows up no matter how he knows things will go.
The “uncommon persistence” is a show of strength, while the unfitness of the US two players, play with the very lives they denounce that are utterly worthless, over the false gods and flags they serve, by virtue of their symbiosis, that is nothing more than a sign of weakness.
Yet, they’re in a position to continue to play death games, to appease the one they seemingly cannot, the Chess Master.
It’s easy to be Goliath when you do nothing but sit and deny David from behind the looking glass.
No one paying attention can ever deny a player who is consistent versus one who changes the game to cheat.
No political capital and I am more proud of the frog than I am the defiant acts of losing men in their ties and artillery arsenal paid for in BLOOD underneath the lily pad of betrayal.
Today was glorious! There are more of us than there are of them and it was obvious in red states as well.
My dad was ANTIFA. He fought fascism in North Africa in WWII.
Today I showed Trump and MAGA that I am ANTIFA too‼️🇺🇸