Monday, September 1, 2025

Is It Accurate to Say ‘PsyOp?’ – HotAir

September 1, 2025
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Is It Accurate to Say 'PsyOp?' – HotAir
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A term that frequently appears is ‘PsyOp,’ which is an ominous-sounding term used to describe efforts by the establishment to persuade the public of various things. Is it an accurate description of what is happening, or just a loaded term used by people like me as part of what amounts to a PsyOp to alienate you from the establishment? 





Like many of you, I was taken aback the first time I saw the term. It has the whiff of conspiracy theory to it. Are we interpreting well-intentioned, if misguided, actions by public figures as part of a dark conspiracy to convince people of things that are not true? Are we seeing simple incompetence and interpreting it as something much worse?

It’s a reasonable question. Hanlon’s Razor asserts that we should “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” In most cases, that makes a lot of sense.

Yet, if you have been reading my writing, you can guess that I am in the camp that we are being subject to a PsyOp to convince us of falsehoods, and that they are doing so to manipulate us into compliance with policies that are not intended to benefit us. That is a dark view, and one that I have not always held, but I do now. 

First, a definition. A Psychological Operation, or PsyOp, can be defined as “planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to target audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, their behavior.” Now apply this definition to what we have experienced over the past decade or so, with all the hoaxes, misinformation, scare tactics, lies about Russian collusion, election hacking, repetition of mantras such as “nobody is above the law” (which has been reversed, suddenly), and censorship. 





One of the key tactics is to shape the information you do and do not see. An MS-13 member is referred to as a “Maryland Man” and a “Father,” not a human trafficker and wife beater. When a criminal gets shot for trying to grab a policeman’s gun, we see a picture of him at 12, instead of the man of 19 or 20. We are presented with incomplete or wholly deceptive stories about what happened in order to manipulate our emotions. 

During the COVID pandemic, Western governments literally deployed their psychological operations units from their militaries to manipulate the public, and mobilized “misinformation” NGOs to suppress facts and discussions by people. Our public health establishment commissioned a scientific paper–written by people who believed that COVID was likely engineered–to “debunk” the lab leak theory of COVID’s origin. Anthony Fauci prodded Nature–one of the most prestigious journals in the world–to publish a paper without review in order to suppress the truth about COVID.





The UK government deployed SAGE to create a program explicitly designed to scare people into compliance with government diktats, while government officials obviously knew the warnings were ridiculous. If Boris Johnson and company really believed their hype, they wouldn’t hold regular parties at Downing Street. 

Nobody in public health believed what they were saying. We know that, because none of them behaved as if they did. And it wasn’t mere hypocrisy–it was the result of understanding that reality was utterly divorced from what they told us.

Currently, we are being subjected to a PsyOp about how Trump and Kennedy are destroying the CDC. I can’t say whether the changes being made at the Department of Health and Human Services will fix what ails the agency, although when we get Marty Makery and Jay Bhattacharya over the boobs who were there before, I will take a wait-and-see attitude on all the other changes. 





What I do know is that the former crop of people were, to a man and woman, liars with contempt for us. As former heads of the CDC complain about the changes, I am reminded of this former CDC leader explaining how policy was made:

Is that what was presented to us? Our lives were upended, we were bullied, people were persecuted, because we didn’t want to submit to a vibe. A majority of Democrats wanted to put non-vaccinated people IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS and have them taken away because of The Science™. 

The steady drumbeat that makes up The Narrative™ works on the majority of the population, not because they are stupid–in fact, it is often the case that the smarter the people, the more susceptible they are to the manipulation because of their bias for believing in credentials–but because they trust authorities. They rely on consensus and take their opinions from the elite.

Psychological Operations are about creating a fake “consensus,” reinforcing it, and then attaching emotional significance to it. You see this with the climate change Narrative™, where scientism is mixed with terror tactics to create hysteria.  “The Earth is Burning!” 





Here is a weather map in Great Britain. The temperature is 64 degrees Fahrenheit. 

It is designed to scare people, nothing more. 

The hoaxes, the censorship, the suppression of dissent, and the whipping up of hysteria are all intended to create compliance with an agenda. That fact was clearest during COVID, but it is just as true in politics–racial politics over the past decade has been designed to create racial tensions and resentment, and the serial Trump hoaxes to discredit him and his followers–and in economic policies such as climate change.

It is not conspiracy theorizing to call it a PsyOp, because it is a PsyOp. They are even deploying psychological warfare officers in many cases, when they can justify it as they did during COVID. 

There is a playbook. They employ that playbook. And you are the target. We can argue about whether they are doing it to benefit themselves or in a misguided attempt to help everybody, but there is no question that they are doing it. 







  • Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.

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