Only a government under foreign influence and control would wage psychological warfare on its own people with the objective of total collapse and disintegration, writes CIA and DOD veteran Ed Haugland and The Florida Standard’s editor Jonas Vesterberg.

https://www.theflstandard.com/who-directs-americas-war-on-its-own-population/

By taking a closer look at propaganda and how it is being used, we can find important clues to the character, objectives and and priorities of state and non-state actors.

It is common knowledge that propaganda is a key instrument of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, where leaders employ it to manipulate the population to go along with, and execute, programs that range from the nefarious to the genocidal. 

On the one hand, a more benign version of propaganda has traditionally been used by nation states to create and nurture societal cohesion and unity among the people. This comes with important benefits: less instability, higher trust – and plenty of citizens willing to do the hard work – even make the ultimate sacrifice – to preserve and protect their nation. 

If the overarching propaganda narrative suddenly shifts focus from internal cohesion and relative stability to disintegration and conflict – it is a clear indicator that a state has been infiltrated or overtaken by an enemy actor, such as a foreign government and/or a treasonous domestic fifth column.

In the case of the United States, such a shift occurred starting with the George Floyd incident. The state and other aligned elements – instead of promoting a common national identity and shared community – launched a battery of complex, multi-layered, sequenced and cumulative psychological operations, all based on a tactic old as time itself: divide and conquer. An anomaly was used to drive a narrative and perception of the nation as an illegitimate construct that must be torn down.

Key concepts and norms that defined America – the free exchange of opinions and ideas, the right to speak one’s mind – were suddenly clamped down upon by a complex, intricate architecture of public-private entities – a censorship apparatus that had been allowed to grow and develop out of view from regular citizens. Americans – civilians, scientists, journalists and others suddenly found themselves silenced, discredited, marginalized – and in some cases – under death threats.

An army of so-called fact-checkers, bots and Interactive Information Operations personnel were deployed against those who questioned narratives on Antifa, COVID, the 2020 election, and many other irregularities and lies propagated by a well-funded, gray-zone thought police with tentacles in academia, think tanks and our own intelligence agencies – reminiscent of the East German secret police, STASI.

These organizations claimed that critical perspectives held by dissidents – and their dissemination to the public – constituted “disinformation” and should be treated as threats to democracy and even national security. The censorship complex launched what they called a war on disinformation. The censors turned fiction into fact, and fact into fiction.

These controlling, authoritarian institutions spent years building a discursive framework and their own Orwellian language based on Marxist dialectics, then forced citizens to engage with this construct and thereby validate a repressive, divisive worldview that is the antithesis of traditional Western political culture. They secretly redefined key concepts and warped their meaning – like democracy. 

Instead of signifying people rule, democracy suddenly meant the unchallenged dictatorship of unaccountable government and globalist institutions. These actors embarked on a mass gaslighting campaign by brazenly attempting to redefine commonly accepted concepts – such as “science” – into politicized poppycock.

At the same time, various events and scandals involving top public figures were publicized without law enforcement or the justice system taking any action. Americans started to realize that they were now living in a state without the rule of law – or that the application of law only applied to the dissidents. Good for thee but not for me, said the self-anointed elites. 

And if they didn’t see it by simple observation, some of them found out the hard way by being designated “domestic terrorists” for attending a political rally or a school board meeting. To suck them in for tracking, tagging and tracing, the powers behind this coup likely created pied-piper list-making operations such as Q – a contemporary, digital version on the Bolsheviks’ Operation Trust – combined with a multitude of segmented gatekeeper and controlled opposition programs – plus offensive cyber measures like 6D (detect, deny, degrade, disrupt, destroy, deceive).

The bizarre decisions and behavior of those in power are further tactics that contribute to the degradation of trust among the population – leaving billions in U.S. military hardware to the Taliban; sending hundreds of billions in tax payer funds to one of the world’s most corrupt nations in order to support a meaningless (for Americans) war; forcing citizens to wear useless masks and accept mystery injections into their bodies; opening the border and funnel in millions of military-age males that hate us because our leaders destroyed their families and countries through illegal wars for oligarchic profits – the list is long.

Americans are being humiliated and their institutions broken down for a reason. A powerful force wants to destroy this nation and its people. The objective of these combined operations is the complete disintegration of the United States as a nation, and of Americans as individuals – mind, body and spirit.

Only a nation under foreign influence and control – with compromised leaders and institutions – would wage an all-out cognitive war on its own population.

We must now find out who they report to.

Edward Haugland spent over three decades in senior executive roles with the CIA, ODNI, DOD and other federal agencies. Read his new book: The Cognitive War – Why We Are Losing and How We Can Win.

Jonas Vesterberg is a journalist and political analyst with 25 years of international experience. He is the editor of The Florida Standard.