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Same techniques used to flush Iran’s hidden ayatollah and burn 30 Canadian churches are now being aimed at the Trump administration. Today: a field manual for spotting the bait before you bite.
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Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! It is now June, which used to be heralded as ‘Pride Month’— an Orwellian historical fixture that is rapidly fading into memory (but more on that tomorrow). Today, our roundup focuses on the 21st Century Mind War into which we have all been recruited against our will: the New York Times’ latest “news analysis” piece, courtesy of 30-year deep state mouthpiece David Sanger, declaring Trump’s foreign policy a “stalemate”; a quick tour of Fifth Generation Warfare and the velocity-of-information revolution that made it possible; an embarrassingly prescient warning from the progressive Brennan Center, published in October 2019— months before they would have needed it; the bizarre “gay ayatollah” psyop the intelligence community ran at Mojtaba Khamenei in March; the Globe and Mail’s astonishing late-arriving walkback of the Kamloops “mass graves” hoax that torched over thirty Canadian churches and moved hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars; and a clear-eyed look at the three conflicts Sanger says Trump is losing— and which Trump is actually winning. Let’s connect some dots!
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Yesterday, the Times ran another one of its stinky “news analysis” pieces, headlined, “Trump Hits the Stalemate Phase of His Interventions in Gaza, Ukraine and Now Iran.” It is a grotesque piece of deep state propaganda. The byline —David E Sanger— was a dead giveaway. Sanger has so many intelligence community contacts that it is fair to ask whether he’s really a 30-year Times veteran or actually a rotating shift worker. His extensive body of work is perfectly consistent with deep state goals. His fingerprints decorate every major Times foreign policy push. President Trump has called Sanger “treasonous.”
An invisible war rages all around us. It is endless and infinite. It is unlike any other war in history. It is a constantly evolving chimera, a shape-shifting, many-headed beast, where groups of nations and well-funded supranational groups suddenly coalesce into allies of convenience.
Then the groups fracture and all become enemies again.
Sometimes, combatants are both allies andenemies at the same time. Other times, separate parts of the same governments oppose each other, and combine with other nations or other groups. Attacks spur counter-attacks which lead to skirmishes which provoke attacks all over again— all to capture and hold territory measured not in miles or kilometers but in grey cells. The war is for our minds. There is no victory. ‘Winning’ means only momentary advantage.
🚀 You can deplore it, but there’s no good reason to anguish over what analysts euphemistically call Fifth Generation Warfare. It is what it is. Human conflict is just as eternal as the planetary stage on which it plays out— and always will be. The good news is that, while the constant fighting now wields the most powerful weapons ever created —words— the hostilities are much less … barbarous and destructive than in previous global conflicts.
We are all participants in this great war. We are simultaneously targets and involuntary soldiers. We’ve been press-ganged into service just as effectively as if we’d drunk too much in a Shanghai dive bar and woken up on a container ship headed for Morocco with a new job scrubbing the poop deck.
The rational response to this —the only way to effectively fight back— is to learn as much as we can about the tools of propaganda, and become literate in their mind-control techniques.
🚀 Fortunately, the New York Times is good for one thing, at least. It provides us with plenty of educational material. And it gives parakeet owners something to line their cages with.
We can argue about whether there have ever been any effective safeguards to prevent the government’s public and secret agencies from emotionally and psychologically manipulating the same Americans who pay the bills using information, misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies.
From time to time, some libertarian group or another will mount a push to rein it in, especially when obvious or egregious psyops appear, like this morning’s example from the Times. Here’s one such hopeless effort, published by the progressive Brennan Center for Justice — ironically in October 2019, right before the pandemic and the stolen 2020 election:
Technology has made this 5G war possible. What changed, compared with, say, the Cold War period, is the velocity of information. In 1960, you could only watch the news at 6 or 11. Now, breaking news is pushed to us in real time, 24×7, with chimes and buzzes on miniature computers that we lug around in our pockets and purses. Artificial Intelligence, especially with its fictional but real-looking video, audio, and photo, has further complicated an already crowded digital battlefield.
Let’s glance at a few examples. We’ll start with an obvious one.
🚀 Alert readers will recall that, back in March, the Iranian hardliners, the ‘IRGC’ corporation, admitted that a strike killed the country’s long-time ayatollah. They replaced him with his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, whom I’ve called Schroedinger’s Ayatollah, since he has never appeared in public or even in recorded video or audio.
Here’s the thing, though. Staying invisible might be smart. Israeli and US intelligence might find him, even if he just released a short video message.
Also in March, after Mojtaba’s appointment was announced, a bizarre story about the new ayatollah spread across regional and foreign media. For example, the UK International Business Times ran this headline on March 17th:
If you read the article critically, you find all the classic hallmarks of a psyop, the same ones I’ve been teaching you about for years. This example is so obvious it will seem comical, but remember: they all work the same way. Even the less obvious ones. Here’s the gay ayatollah story in a few paragraphs from the article:
Be a lawyer. Think about how the story might be tried in court. Think claims, evidence, witnesses.
Ask yourself: what is the evidence? The evidence is: “claims” (testimony) about a “relationship” with “a male acquaintance” “earlier in life.” Plus “unusual behavior,” and “additional suspicions.” The ‘male acquaintance’ lacks any name that could be verified. Definitive evidence ‘does not exist.’ The “unusual behavior” wasn’t described. The time period “earlier in life” is less clear than the fine print on a Hertz rental agreement form.
I hope you can see that the evidence is thinner than Barry Sotero’s birth certificate.
Now ask: who are the witnesses? Here, the witnesses are unnamed “US intelligence officials.” It’s weak enough that the witnesses are anonymous —which would never work in a US court— but they outright admit the whole thing came from the intelligence community.
And … which part of the intelligence community? The propaganda part? Just asking.
Finally, what is the claim? The claim here was Mojtaba is “probably gay.” Probably. The witnesses aren’t even sure. The ‘claim’ is on par with office gossip.
See? There’s literally nothing to it. It’s hearsay stacked on Grindr-bio plausibility.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I admire this fine bit of military propaganda. Its clumsiness actually speaks favorably; the team that put it together aren’t experts like David Sanger. The purpose was obvious: flush Mojtaba out of the Persian underbrush, so he’d pop up and righteously denounce the claims he was gay as propaganda. Then shoot him.
Just like hunting wild turkey. Or wild mullah.
Anyway. Mojtaba and the IRGC wisely (for them) ignored the bait. It was always a long shot. The Iranians are some of the best propagandists and 5G warriors around. But note the connection between words —rumors about Mojtaba’s sexual appetites— and violence— the Patriot Missiles that would instantly have incinerated a denouncing ayatollah, had he swallowed the hook and appeared somewhere.
The Gay Ayatollah story is classicpropaganda, the kind that’s been part of war for centuries if not longer. The 21st-century innovation is the rapid spread of information on social media. This one is perhaps easier to see since it wasn’t aimed at us.
Let’s now consider a slightly more ‘successful’ and dangerous example.
🚀 Two days ago, the Editorial Board of the Canadian Globe and Mail ran an astonishing limited hangout, a half decade into the so-called “scandal,” headlined, “Globe editorial: There is no reconciliation without truth.” We are now looking at a successful propaganda operation from the back side; as it finally falls to pieces like an old car giving up the ghost after 500,000 miles.
I’ll let the Globe’s article explain the backstory:
Consider how this story actually lived and grew. A single press release became, almost overnight, a settled fact across Canada’s corporate media. They credulously reprinted the tribe’s language, except they swapped “anomalies” for “graves” and “remains.” They allowed a hypothesis to harden into certainty through sheer repetition.
Five years later, there was no “justice” for Canadian indians. Even the original tribe retreated in February this year to calling the sites “potential burials.” The Globe admitted its own failure in a super short paragraph I was tempted to frame and hang over my desk:
Whoopsies. Never mind! But the smoldering ruins of over 30 burned-down churches and over 100 more vandalized —unmentioned by the Globe— were the real harvest. In the months and years that followed the 2021 story, arson and vandalism targeted dozens of churches and other religious sites across Canada, alongside threats and attempted attacks. Many, if not most, of these incidents remain uncharged.
Within three days of the original 2021 press release, before a single body was exhumed or forensically identified, Canadian Prime Minister and Fidel Castro lookalike Justin Trudeau rushed to order the Canadian flag be flown at half-mast at all federal buildings “to honour the 215 children whose lives were taken at the former Kamloops residential school.”
Over the next few years, Canada gave various tribes hundreds of millions of dollars“to establish whether the soil anomalies were human remains.” Five years in, the confirmed body count stands at zero. No accounting of how the tribes spent the money was ever provided or even required. “Canadians are owed an explanation,” the Globe weakly conceded.
In other words, the tribe’s conspiracy theory-reported-as-fact created real, ongoingstochastic violence against innocent Christian churches and a massive financial transfer from taxpayers to progressive groups. Words → violence. Words → money.
This is clearly not journalism. It’s something else. What went wrong?
Editors should have: separated real evidence from allegations, resisted parroting the framing of biased sources, brought in neutral independent forensic and archaeological voices, and updated headlines as the picture changed. In other words, basic journalism vanished like the alleged mass graves.
It was a complete failure of what is supposedly the media’s most important function: to separate interested gossip from facts. Maybe I should say, that used to bemedia’s most important function. Now, corporate media’s most important function appears to be distributing clever propaganda that destabilizes countries, spurs stochastic terrorism, and permits politicians to effect massive wealth transfers.
🚀 Now let us return to the original Times story about the “stalemates” David Sanger reported in his “news analysis” story. Basically, Sanger claims that Trump has “failed” to end three major conflicts: Iran, Ukraine, and Gaza. This, Sanger claims, proves that Trump has no capacity for sustained diplomacy.
Even the piece itself concedes that Iran, Ukraine, and Gaza are the kind of “complicated and enduring international problems” that normally require “long and difficult” efforts, not quick wins.
Sanger doesn’t even try arguing that, if his preferences were adopted, these “complicated and enduring” conflicts would have looked any different at this point.
Nor does he account for Trump’s successes in the same conflicts. OPEC is falling apart. U.S. energy producers are enjoying a windfall. Europe is being forced to fund its own defense. The entire Middle East is being maneuvered toward a regional peace deal.
Instead of marveling at these potential world-changing victories, Sanger is trying to keep the Democrats’ “forever war” complaint on life support. Why? It’s not like he hates forever wars. Over his 30-year career, Sanger has byline-co-piloted every major Times push for forever wars, including the 2002–2003 WMD softball coverage that helped sell Iraq.
David Sanger spent twenty years cheering wars he liked, then discovered the moral cost of war the moment a Republican was ending three of them at once.
The New York Times and David Sanger have an unstated objective: to stop Trump from succeeding at any of these grand ambitions. They probably also want to injure him for the midterms, because they think those historically low-turnout elections will be a partisan referendum on the president.
This kind of story is bait. Just like the Gay Ayatollah story was bait. It is stitched together with plausible sounding claims, just like the Canadian mass graves psyop. Sanger hopes to flush out the Trump Administration into doing something reckless trying to counter the Times’s “forever war” criticisms. If Trump pops up and does something reckless, they will politically shoot him. Then Trump’s carefully engineered plan might all fall apart, producing violence, money transfers, and chaos.
The truth is, who cares? Who cares how long Ukraine takes to resolve, now that we are substantially out of the fight? Who cares how long Iran takes to surrender, now that the heavy lifting is done? Especially considering two obvious facts: (1) Trump is taking every possible advantage of the conflicts in America’s favor; and (2) the potential win —regional or even world peace— more than justifies it.
Once we stop treating “fast closure” as the only acceptable outcome and start measuring whether we will be safer, richer, and less entangled five or ten years out, Sanger’s entire premise collapses. At that point, the length of the endgame is just the price of letting history finish baking in a set of structural changes—on energy, alliances, and European and Middle East security—that the old permanent‑war establishment never wanted to see in the first place.
We were press-ganged into this war. We did not ask for it. But we are learning to recognize the bait— and an enemy that cannot get us to bite is an enemy that cannot win. Courage!
Have a magnificent Monday! Roll back here tomorrow for even more essential news and caffeinated commentary that helps prepare you to survive the post-millennial mind wars.
Rose Rambles... 