How Psyops Are Killing Republican Voters
There’s no doubt it’s happening. The question is why.
Hollywood thrillers and science-fiction flicks are made for this: A successful psyops operation, decades in the making, turns a significant portion of a population into robotic warriors for its cause.
Huge throngs of people join lockstep in doing whatever their masters order, whether it’s a rejection of a large segment of its population1 or mass self-immolation in the form of a hysteria-based rejection of science.2
The organization controls the media landscape, with celebrity media stars blitzing the airwaves with Orwellian3 propaganda.
The ultimate goal of the psyops operation is a complete takeover of the world.
But then, something strange happens.
Just as the psyops operation seems on the verge of success, it begins killing en masse the very people it needs for its final victory lap.
But it’s not a science fiction movie. It’s real life.
In the United States, the SNAP program (food stamps) and Medicaid are on the chopping block in the newest Republican budget. These programs already have absurdly low-income eligibility numbers: For one person, about $1800 per month, and about $2400 per month for two.
We don’t yet know what the final bill will look like, but so far it looks like there will be drastic cuts to both programs.
The SNAP program now typically provides about six dollars per day to live on. Cutting that in a way that impacts current budget deficits (induced by ever-increasing tax cuts and a 40-year evisceration of social welfare programs) will be an interesting mathematical exercise.
SNAP recipients would be advised to stock up now while they can:
Under the most recent proposals, as much as $1 trillion would be cut from Medicaid, a program that 72 million Americans are currently enrolled in, over the next decade.
This will obviously affect every state in the country, but it will hammer red states especially hard, as they are traditionally the biggest consumers of anti-poverty programs such as Medicaid.4
Flyover country is poised to become a flyover gravesite.
But the mood of the psyops operations’ victims never seems to change. The more Republicans take away, the angrier its victims get at the progressive wing of the American public. In their minds, the cities become ever filthier and more violent. The educated elite, now dominated by DEI infestations, are determined to demean, chastize, and, eventually, eliminate their culture.
When the Trump Virus,5 aka Covid, metastasized across the land, the psyops operation went into full gear by using its vast media arsenal to fire off explosive rounds of dismaying lies, such as the evils of masking and vaccines.
The anti-mask and anti-vaccination insanity promoted by the right wing wasn’t its first killing floor.
The opioid and meth epidemics came first, and have been at least as devastating to their target audience.
To understand why the psyops operation is killing off its foot soldiers, we need to understand what psyops is. Then, we need to explore one of the odder characteristics of the psyops manual: the strategy of sowing confusion.
Wikipedia6 defines psyops as:
…operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.
That seems like as good a definition as any to me.
George Orwell, in his book 1984, also had a name for it. He called it Doublethink.7
The one difference between Orwell’s Doublethink and psyops in our case is that in 1984 it was a direct function of government. We’re not quite there yet, but it manifested fully during the 2024 presidential election season when Elon Musk purchased Twitter and turned it into a 24/7 blast of far-right propaganda to his new audience of more than 300 million people.
Without saying so directly, Musk told his new audience, “We plan to kill you, and I’m going to show you exactly how, and you are going like it.”
The regime’s actions during its first several weeks are making it clear that there is a concerted effort to adhere more precisely to Orwell’s definition and instill propaganda into every facet of government communication.
In the ten years or so that the malevolence of Mar-a-Lago has been on the scene, the U.S. has turned into an idiocracy fueled by a mass of lies so profound that it is almost impossible to document them all.
The regime’s most ardent followers are ripe for the pickin’, and that’s precisely what is about to happen. While most of us refer to our current condition as an idiocracy, the people who will suffer the most from it yell into their cyber canyons, “It’s about time.”
Fox News and the Fox Network
You might think of Fox News as a well-known instigator of the psyops operation. But, surprise, 73% of Americans consider Fox News part of mainstream media, according to a Pew Research Center Poll.8
The number of people like me who consider it a right-wing propaganda ministry is actually not particularly large.
The alternatives to Fox aren’t much better. The sanewashing of the mad king is well documented elsewhere, but at the center of all that is a media operation controlled by six corporations. These corporations control 90 percent of American media.
In 1983, fifty companies dominated the media scene.9
So I guess that most Americans have either accepted psyops as part of their mainstream media, or they’ve been duped. Either way, Sean Hannity and other psyops operatives get to spout lies every night with impunity.
Psyops’ frontline soldiers of Fox News: a brief history
Fox News was started in 1996 by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation when he asked NBC’s Roger Ailes to head a new news network.
This happened about ten years after Australian immigrant Murdoch started the Fox Network, which began life as a group of six affiliated TV stations in major markets and was Murdoch’s attempt to disrupt the three major TV networks of that era.
Fox Network began as an edgy network with shows like “Tracy Ullman,” “In Living Color,” and a subversive version of “The Simpsons” that bears no resemblance to today’s commercialized Disneyesque version.
“The Simpsons” was developed by Matt Groening and James L. Brooks as a series of shorts on the “Tracey Ullman Show.” Groening had cut his artistic teeth by syndicating Life in Hell comic strips in alternative newspapers, mostly the Los Angeles Reader and Chicago Reader.
Life in Hell was a comical look at life in America through the eyes of two sentient rabbits and a doomscrolling gay couple.10 Its characters look Simpsonish partly because Tracey Ullman’s producers wanted to use the Life in Hell characters as the basis for the new cartoon shorts. Groening decided to create new characters instead.
The Chicago Reader and Los Angeles Reader in those days were the antithesis of conservative thought. They were filled with things like references to Ronald Reagan as “Raygun”.
Likewise, the early versions of “The Simpsons” were nothing less than countercultural. I’ll let former president George H.W. Bush describe what the early episodes of the beloved cartoon were like through one simple panicked reference:11
“We are going to keep on trying to strengthen the American family, to make American families a lot more like the Waltons12 and a lot less like the Simpsons.”
Early Fox Network TV shows were filled with sex, violence, and other fare that made fundamentalists and conservatives shake their fists at the TV screen.
So on one front, Murdoch was hitting American audiences with subversive, and, sometimes, left-wing TV fare, while relentlessly hitting them from the other side with right-wing news.
At about the same time, groups like The Moral Majority began yelling about sex and violence on TV. See what’s happening here?
Sowing confusion is a classic psyops tactic. In this case, Murdoch was seducing Americans with a subversive, sexual, and violent television culture, then using his newscasts to tell them they’re bad people for enjoying his entertainment offerings.
The devil does this, also, in Christian theology. He tempts you into doing things, then tortures you with shame for doing them. “Grab that pussy,” he says, then comes the shame.
Oh, oops. Well, in most cases, it brings shame. There are people with no souls walking among us that give the lie to that statement.
Anyhoo, Fox News has grown more right-wing over the years, as one news host after another leaves or gets kicked out for one reason or another, then gets replaced with an angrier, meaner version.
You know, reasons like sexual harassment in the workplace.
Even Roger Ailes, the original head honcho of the news network and the “genius” behind it, left the network in disgrace when a slew of female employees, including host Gretchen Carlson and superstar anchor Megyn Kelly, accused him of sexual harassment.
Pro tip: To get a handle on how psyops works, take a look at how conservatives place a few women in key roles to help embellish right-wing talking points.
Another conservative female host, Andrea Tantaros, filed a lawsuit against Fox News accusing the network of demoting her when she reported that she, too, was sexually harassed by Ailes.
Tantaros helped bring down another superstar host at Fox News, Bill O’Reilly.
O’Reilly at the time was considered pretty outrageous, but he was a socialist teddy bear compared to hate-filled goons like Tucker Carlson (who left Fox after a massive defamation lawsuit), Dana Perino, and Laura Ingraham.
Ailes, fittingly, went on to become a media adviser to the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.
Fox News, of course, is a bastion of misogyny, so it should be no surprise that it has a history of being a safe harbor for male predators.
But here’s the thing.
The network is also a mouthpiece for fundamentalist “family values.”
Sowing confusion includes this kind of hypocrisy. In fact, it’s fundamental to the entire game plan.
Right-wing congressional mouthpieces like Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert blow up the internet with phony chants about family values while simultaneously blowing up the news headlines with sex scandals.
This kind of hypocrisy surrounds their Christian cleric backers, too. Their hypocrisy is highlighted by heinous crimes against children on the part of Baptist and Roman Catholic priests who tell their raptured audiences to worship at the alter of Trump, whose scandals dwarf those of many of his cohorts.
The meth and opioid epidemics and the role of Fox News
Doublethink isn’t just a media thing.
Consider the war on drugs, one of the central tenets of Republican psyops ever since Nixon declared drugs “public enemy number one”13 in 1971.
Many believe that the crack cocaine epidemic that gripped American inner cities in the 1980s was a creation of Republican attempts to destroy Black culture and neighborhoods.
You don’t need to subscribe to that theory to understand that it was the result of Republican government policy. I’ll quote here from that famous socialist propaganda mouthpiece, Encyclopedia Britannica, for an explanation:14
The initiation of crack cocaine into socially eroded communities took place during President Ronald Reagan’s term in office, when there was a structural shift that caused huge manufacturing industries to move outside the cities. Their relocation created workforce competitions that further widened the gap between social and economic segments in the inner cities of America.
Wait, what?!? I thought the destruction of American manufacturing was the libs’ fault!
Well, you probably got that idea from Fox News, even though you don’t watch it. The talking points of Twitter, Fox News, and conservative talk radio and podcasts seep into our body politic without you even knowing it’s happening.
You probably at least half agree that the soaring murder rates during the pandemic were somehow the fault of Democratic policies, rather than a side effect of the coronavirus.
That’s because conservative talking points become fact, even to those who should disagree with them.
Note: It would have been more accurate for Britannica to say that the shift “caused huge manufacturing industries to move outside the country”.
A brief segue into the Hillary Clinton psyops
You might think you hate Hillary Clinton for some very good reasons.
But here’s a truth that may result in a few vicious comments (which will prove my point about psyops).
Most of your reasons come from 20 years of influence from Republican psyops. I’d wager that the sustained efforts against her became so entrenched and effective that she became a little crazy herself by the time she ran for president.
That crazy cackle?15 That came later, after decades of psyops destroyed her reputation.
Her public image converted from a feminist fighter to an evil bitch even among her supposed allies.
The psyops operation against her was so successful that some of the most prominent left-wing political writers spent five years padding their view stats with screeds against her.
Some criticisms against her were justified. But she was mostly just guilty of being a slightly left-of-center but not quite left enough politician. She changed her accent, for example, from a Chicago suburb lilt to a southern belle back to Chicago suburb:
But hey, Obama had a convenient accent, too, when it served him. Politicians are politicians.
The consensus became this: Hillary is evil. This mantra got picked up by liberal commentators just as much as it did by conservatives. If the argument against her was simple centrism, which is an affliction that most modern Democrats have, it would have all been fair, but that was rarely the focus of attack. Attacks were personal and often highly misogynistic, even among people who should have known better.
That’s psyops in full view.
When you can get your opponents to trash their own leaders, you’ve hit pay dirt.
The same thing happened with Biden. The narrative was that he was a doddering old fool who somehow was no match for a man lost permanently to late-stage dementia. Even now, Democrats trying to purge themselves of blame for their contributions to their 2024 election loss focus most of their attention on Biden’s late exit from the campaign rather than their own stunning inability to defeat a man who can’t speak more than two or three sentences without losing focus and sounding like he belongs in a maximum security psychiatric hospital.
Democrats had one job during the election that should have been easy, and that was to defeat a known criminal and sexual perp who history will regard with pure contempt. They failed, not in small part because most mainstream Democrats helped Republican psyops proliferate and, more famously, by surrendering in advance.
Okay, back to drugs!
Today’s scourge of meth in flyover country and fentanyl more generally was most likely an unexpected development (and gift) even for the master manipulators that have been running Republican politics for the last 40 years or so.
But they found a way to psyops it anyway.
The meth/fentanyl problem, like the drug problem as a whole, was a purely Republican invention created by the war on drugs. Vast sums were spent on criminalizing behavior with absolutely zero effect on the amount of drugs pouring into the country.
Instead of applying much-needed money to rehab, more than a trillion dollars have been spent on the drug war.16 Millions of lives have been lost and/or destroyed, including thousands of good people in law enforcement who have been brainwashed into thinking an endless drug war is the right thing to do.
According to the United States Department of Justice:17
Between 1998 and 2012, the number of drug offenders in federal prisons grew 63% and made up about half (52%) of the federal prison population at yearend 2012. Almost all (99.5%) of these offenders were serving time for drug trafficking.
How’s that war on drugs going?
Meanwhile, rural American families have been getting ripped to shreds by a mass incarceration effort that throws millions of their men into jail on petty drug charges and/or addictive behavior.18
For example, the number of inmates with amphetamine-based substance abuse disorders increased in two North Carolina county jails by more than 700% from 2008 to 2016.
People jailed in this way often end up in an endless cycle until they become psychologically institutionalized into a revolving system of incarceration, hopelessness, and crime.
It’s all a perfect platform for Republican psyops. The conservative talking points are that drug use reflects a lack of morals, and besides, the libs took all your jobs away. Go to church, stop abortion, and you’ll stop doing those darn drugs:
“And for God’s sake, vote for a patriot who understands your fears. After all, we invented them.”
However, the decline of manufacturing gestated under Ronald Reagan, and the only statistical conclusion anybody has ever been able to develop regarding drug use is that the drug war has failed.
But the drug war was never meant to be won.
Part of the psyops involves secretly cheerleading the infection of the population with drugs to keep them pliant.
Not satisfied with the pace of destruction in rural America, the free marketeer wing of the psyops operation oversaw the rapid distribution of opioids via the Sackler family and other pharma giants.
So you can stop wondering how on earth flyover country could have turned to Donald Trump.
He was the perfect psyops messenger, that’s why. His target audience is a mess of drugs, alcoholism, and obesity. A rage machine is a perfect outlet for their frustrations.
I don’t have statistics handy on how many deaths have been caused by the war on drugs, the promotion of alcohol, the new expansion of gambling (now featuring crypto!), and the mass distribution of sugar-based foods into the American diet. I’ll let you check that out for yourself if you’re interested.
You can bet it’s many millions.
But somehow, the millions that are left keep voting against their self-interests:
Fake News
An effective psyops operation does something like this:
It creates a figurehead who broadcasts an almost incomprehensible volume of lies19 that are repeated with endless frequency. It lures rabid religious fundamentalists to rally to its cause by promising a Supreme Court that will ban abortion.
The lies take hold in the nation’s body politic to the point where they become true to a dangerously large minority of people.
These people then act as foot soldiers for whatever ridiculous cause the psyops operation desires. It can be anything. Anything at all.
There are no limits to these lies.
Presidents are said to be Kenyan nationals. Secretaries of State are said to be ringleaders of pedophile rings based in obscure pizza parlors. Haitian immigrants are eating your pets, and trans people are hiding in the bathroom preparing to rape your grandmother while she digs for quarters to give to the bathroom attendant, who is probably DEI.
The world becomes a place where The Holocaust is fiction and the world is flat. Blue lives matter, once again, more than Black lives. The 40-year old Critical Race Theory20 is said to have been invented to shame white people. Immigration, the founding principle of the country, is no longer cool.
Elections with rigorous oversights are said to be riddled with fraud. Vaccinations cause autism even though each vax consists of a different chemical composition.
Simultaneously, the psyops operation creates a slogan called Fake News and declares that real news is fake news.
Professionals are disparaged. Scientists are shunned.21 Teachers, already under extreme duress22 thanks first to a pandemic largely the making of the psyops operation and, later, draconian funding cuts, are pressured into teaching false narratives.23
The coronavirus and crocodile tears
You’d think they’d be pretty happy by now, right?
But guess what? The creators of mass hypocrisy and lies got a free gift in 2020 called the coronavirus. We’ve all tried our best to forget this story. We tried so hard that the majority of Americans forgot that the mad king’s response to that pandemic led to more than a million deaths, many of them in rural parts of the country where vaccinations became public enemy number 200 or so.
The race was on to kill more of their own.
For evidence of this, here are the numbers of dead people as it relates to vaccination rates in America as of December 2021:24
If you are a Trumpist, you may have trouble interpreting that graph, but the rest of you can easily determine what the solid blue line represents.
These graphs help convey the following message: Those people who aren’t vaccinated die at a much higher rate than those who are vaxxed.
If you were boosted, you probably ended up sneezing a little.
The graph on the left shows us what we already know: Omicron snuck into some of us who were vaccinated. The graph on the right shows us what we also know: Those of us who were vaccinated survived it, often with nothing more than cold symptoms.
Those who weren’t vaccinated filled up hospitals and ICUs, often at the expense of people who didn’t do things to make themselves sick.
This means that even people in rural areas with poor medical support who bothered to get vaccinated may have died from heart attacks thanks to their peers who fell victim to the ongoing psyops operation.
That’s because rural hospital ICUs filled up with unvaccinated COVID victims. This, in turn, pushed other people out.
Now, the vax deniers have moved on to measles and polio.
Why is this happening? Why are they killing their own?
Culling the population helps lower costs over time. Psyops operators, represented best by a handful of oligarchs, are all about money in a way most of us can’t begin to imagine. It only makes sense that deleting part of the population would be a tech bro’s wet dream. The pysops operation can keep blaming the libs because the strategy works.
Trump won the last election through a well-oiled machine of lies and grievance peddling. The supply chain problem? Libs’ fault. Inflation? Blame the libs. Even though all of that was set up under the bipedal Cheeto.
Admit it. There’s a big part of you blaming Democrats for everything that is pissing you off today.
You can scoff at all this, or even pretend it’s not happening.
And why not? It’s what most of us have been doing for the last 40 years.
If you liked this article, like and restack this shiz! Thanks for reading!
Footnotes
Most polls show that the majority of Americans are in favor of stricter immigration laws.
Dickson, Ej. 2022. “Doctors Demand Spotify Puts an End to Joe Rogan’s Covid Lies.” Rolling Stone. January 12, 2022. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/covid-misinformation-joe-rogan-spotify-petition-1282240/.
Contributors. 2003. “Ordinary People Simultaneously Accepting Two Mutually Contradictory Beliefs as Correct.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. May 12, 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink.
The numbers shown in the preceding paragraph and this one are derived from this study by the Kaiser Family Foundation:
“A Medicaid per Capita Cap: State by State Estimates | KFF.” 2025. KFF. February 26, 2025. https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/a-medicaid-per-capita-cap-state-by-state-estimates/.
Contributors. 2006. “Military Tactic That Primarily Influences the Behaviors of Individuals.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. July 7, 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_(United_States).
Contributors. 2003. “Ordinary People Simultaneously Accepting Two Mutually Contradictory Beliefs as Correct.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. May 12, 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink.
Moore, Thomas. 2021. “Poll: Americans Consider Fox News, NYT, CNN, MSNBC ‘Mainstream Media.’” The Hill. May 7, 2021. https://thehill.com/homenews/media/552420-poll-americans-fox-news-nyt-cnn-msnbc-as-mainstream-media/.
Lutz, Ashley. 2012. Business Insider. June 14, 2012. https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6
“The Simpsons Archive: ‘America’s First Family.’” 2024. Archive.org. 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/20140811014602/http:/www.snpp.com/other/articles/firstfamily.html.
It’s worth mentioning here that conservatives would love to see the Internet Archives, known to some of us as the Wayback Machine, torn asunder.
Old George probably wanted everyone to think he meant the TV show, but he probably really meant this:
Contributors. 2002. “American Businessman (1918–1992).” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. December 6, 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton.
Belén Fernández. 2021. “As the Drug War Turns 50, the US Is Still Public Enemy Number One.” Al Jazeera. June 17, 2021. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/6/17/as-the-drug-war-turns-50-the-us-is-still-public-enemy-number-one.
Turner, Deonna S. 2016. “Crack Epidemic | US History, Causes & Effects.” Encyclopedia Britannica. July 8, 2016. https://www.britannica.com/topic/crack-epidemic.
Healy, Patrick. 2007. “The Clinton Conundrum: What’s behind the Laugh?” Nytimes.com. The New York Times. September 30, 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/us/politics/30clinton.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1E4.CcOh.MI9U3p7eWarH&smid=url-share.
Lee, Juhohn. 2021. “America Has Spent over a Trillion Dollars Fighting the War on Drugs. 50 Years Later, Drug Use in the U.S. Is Climbing Again.” CNBC. June 17, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/17/the-us-has-spent-over-a-trillion-dollars-fighting-war-on-drugs.html.
Ooops! The original link at https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/dofp12_sum.pdf was available when this essay was started, I swear! But the psyops folks are erasing history even as I write this.
So far, Musk can’t remove this link: “Featured News: Number of Inmates with Meth Addiction Jumps in Rural Jails â Partnership News Service from the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids.” 2018. Partnership to End Addiction. 2018. https://drugfree.org/drug-and-alcohol-news/featured-news-number-inmates-meth-addiction-jumps-rural-jails/.
Kessler, Glenn, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly. 2021. “Trump’s False or Misleading Claims Total 30,573 over 4 Years.” Washington Post. The Washington Post. January 24, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/.
Stolberg, Sheryl Gay. 2022. “Republicans Step up Attacks on Fauci to Woo Trump Voters.” Nytimes.com. The New York Times. February 7, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/us/politics/fauci-republicans-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1E4.f8K2.RMzmBoDgQXC3&smid=url-share.
Grumet, Bridget. 2021. “Grumet: If Teacher Exodus Continues, We All Lose.” Austin American-Statesman. November 29, 2021. https://www.statesman.com/story/news/columns/2021/11/29/grumet-if-teacher-exodus-continues-we-all-lose/8752143002/.
McGee, Kate. 2021. “Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Signs ‘Critical Race Theory’ Bill.” The Texas Tribune. June 15, 2021. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/06/15/abbott-critical-race-theory-law/.
Johnson, Amelia G., Avnika B. Amin, Akilah R. Ali, Brooke Hoots, Betsy L. Cadwell, Shivani Arora, Tigran Avoundjian, et al. 2022. “COVID-19 Incidence and Death Rates among Unvaccinated and Fully Vaccinated Adults with and without Booster Doses during Periods of Delta and Omicron Variant Emergence — 25 U.S. Jurisdictions, April 4–December 25, 2021.” MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 71 (4): 132–38. https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7104e2.
You may be wondering why this CDC link is still alive. It’s harder to kill because it is archived by the DOI Foundation, a non-profit repository of peer-reviewed studies.
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This article is astounding, especially to someone who remembers the very beginning of the long trashing of Sec. Clinton. I like a lot of Ruminato's stuff, but just became a paid subscriber. Wish I had some social media reach for 1st time in my life.
You're welcome, I am happy to understand Psyops in a more dimensional way than before I read your piece.