The Israel OpAn information warfare campaign tries to flip demoralized portions of the right into supporting Hamas and Obama’s Iran deal pI
Most people can’t see evil until it touches them directly. Some who cheered as they watched Obama’s spymasters split the country with Russiagate came to their senses only after COVID-19 protocols took the life of a loved one. Some supported attacks on the Second Amendment or unrestricted immigration, until they saw mobs on the streets of major cities and on college campuses calling for genocide. It’s nearly impossible for most normal Americans to believe that what’s happening in America is really happening, which is how these things usually go. No one can believe it until it’s too late.
Information warfare campaigns designed by the U.S. government to target Americans with the aim of splitting them apart from their countrymen through weaponized falsehoods are rooted in new methods of shaping and controlling the online communities that many Americans trust to interpret the world around them. From Russiagate to COVID-19 to Jan. 6, the newness and force of these campaigns has knocked the country senseless, with the left readily acclimating itself to third-world norms, and large parts of the right increasingly hopeless.
What the right has learned from a decade of information warfare targeting it is to distrust the media. Knowing, for instance, that the Justice Department interfered in the 2016, 2020, and now the 2024 elections, what else is phony? Was 9/11 an inside job after all? What about the moon landing? What haven’t we been lied to about? Our families are real, our kids are real. But what else is there to hold on to? It’s like reaching for a life raft and finding only splinters. Maybe America is fake all the way down.
But it’s not, and the right can’t afford to let itself be fooled into despair with so much at stake. The same U.S. government agencies and officials that pushed everything from Russiagate to the Russia bounty story and lied about the origins of COVID-19, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the character of Jan. 6 protests are now warning that Israel’s war against Hamas is likely to drag U.S. forces into WWIII. It’s another information operation designed to disorient and demoralize the America First camp. This time, however, there’s a big difference—an influential segment of the right is amplifying the left’s campaign against them.
The left claims that America is a fraud at its origins, a racist hoax perpetrated against nonwhites to this very day. The left tears down monuments, desecrates our heroes, replaces our holidays, and rewrites our history to suit their pathological grievances. It’s a whole-of-party effort to force the middle class to our knees in despair, so that the country’s ruling class and the oligarchs can continue running their high-tech monopolies while defunding police forces and opening the borders to depress wages, impoverish communities, and terrorize families.
But now, the right is in danger of transitioning into the left. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that amid the ruins, some of those capitalizing on the chaos and preying on the shell-shocked are themselves from the right. A year ago, for example, right-wing influencer Jackson Hinkle sounded like a normal Trump voter. After Biden delivered his infamous Philadelphia speech accusing his political opponents of terrorism, Hinkle called him a dictator, and said he was plunging us into fascism at the behest of George Soros and Klaus Schwab while using the intelligence agencies to target freedom-loving Americans. Most of that is true.
Today, however, Hinkle’s Twitter feed looks like nothing more than a Soros-funded operation, pumping out reports every hour enticing clicks via the eternal threat that is antisemitism, and promoting actual America-hating terrorists in the process. Hinkle’s business model?“Subscribe to my X Premium for $3 to help me DEFEAT THE ZIONIST LIES.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-israel-op