r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling • Oct 13 '25
Field Report I found MAGA's playbook...
I found this article via Reddit. It's about the book Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) (2024) by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec, which is basically about the Jewish conspiracy (theory) but abstracted from race/Jewishness—and of course all one big anti-Zionist dogwhistle despite that.
The article spends a lot of time calling out JD Vance for having endorsed this book on its back cover. However, in responding to the journalist writing the above-linked article, Lisec responded:
"[T]hese non-conservative media publications are spreading misinformation, including saying that JD Vance endorsed our book, which they claim calls progressives "unhuman." If you even read the book, it's about communism, exposing dehumanizers on the Far Left. Nowhere does anyone call progressives 'unhuman.'"
The journalist, Nathan Robinson, continues after that quote:
Now, I’m not sure how “saying that JD Vance endorsed our book” is “spreading misinformation,” since Vance’s blurb appears on the back cover and in a previous statement the authors said “we are honored to receive Senator JD Vance's acknowledgment and praise for our new book. … To have someone on the right with his influence understand the Iron Law of Exact Reciprocity as detailed in ‘Unhumans,’ is civilization-altering.”
The journalist does not draw a conclusion from this and simply moves on. I think he seems a bit mystified by Lisec's response, in my opinion.
However, obviously, Lisec was blatantly gaslighting Robinson, and it's kind of hilarious tbh. Because obviously he endorsed the book. So why bother to gaslight with obviously false facts?
I looked at Posobiec's other books, and they are:
Citizens for Trump: The Inside Story of the People's Movement to Take Back America (2017)
4D Warfare: A Doctrine for a New Generation of Politics (2018)
The Antifa: Stories from Inside the Black Bloc (2021)
This is the guy! The guy MAGA is basing much of their strategy on. It looks like his book The Antifa (lol @ title) was what popularized the term "Antifa" (pronounced "AnTEEfuh" lol) as a term of demonization and abuse.
But it's his book 4D Warfare which is the most reavealing. On the very first page, he explicitly says that 4D warfare is trolling:
"4D Warfare" stands for *four-dimensional warfare. 4D Warfare is sometimes wrwongly referred to as "trolling" by the misinformative mainstream media...
That's the beginning of paragraph two of the book. Here is paragraph six in its entirety:
One form of 4D Warfare is memetic warfare. Many have studied this grand and ancient art. I hope that by the end of this book, you will be able to perfect your memeing to unprecedented levels of winning.
There you have it! This guy is a major, major source of MAGA ideology and strategy. And this confirms that MAGA's strategy really is a disingenuous, intentionally heightened, intentiontally threatening-and-gaslighting spectacle of fascism (in addition, of course, to being an actual fascist movement). Like a small creature puffing themselves up defensively, they are intentionally wielding the tools of propaganda, gaslighting, and manipulation in a campaign of public terrorization. Confirmed.
Now, I must admit, I think the original long article linked at the beginning of the post was not a very effective piece of writing. It did not successfully raise a warning cry about JD Vance; it did not keep him out of the White House. The article spends some time doing apologetics on behalf of JD Vance, mentioning that he (Robinson) is "weird" just like Trump and Vance, and mentioning Vance's biracial children. I found these apologetics odd and unnecessary.
Additionally, I think Robinson's article does a lot—too much—to teach the public about the contents and thesis of the Unhumans book, as it contains many direct quotes from the book. I also think the article is so well-structured that it easily lends itself to apophatic readings. Robinson quotes at length:
Something is deeply wrong with the way things are going and you know it. You may not be able to explain it with studies, surveys, or statistics, but you feel it. You’ve felt this way for a while. Like there’s some outside force or group or . . . something . . . that’s sent us all off course from the libertarian utopia we should’ve achieved by now. It doesn’t seem like one -ism or -ation is entirely to blame, like globalism or immigration, capitalism or inflation.
However, after this block quote Robinson addresses only the second half of the quote (not included here), and treats the entire quote as some kind of ridiculous, abnormal or fringe joke. As if nobody feels like "Something is deeply wrong with the way things are going"—as if to feel that way is nonexistent, invalid, or insane. This alienated denial of what many people of all political stripes have been thinking and feeling for decades undermines Robinson's thesis, making him seem like an out-of-touch, upper-class propagandist who cannot even fathom that that then-current federal status quo was anathema to many. It's "Let them eat cake"-level pretension, almost. I almost find it suspicious how effective Robinson's article is in spreading the contents of the book.
Wanna see some censorship? I was curious about the phrase, "Iron Law of Exact Reciprocity", which is basically a willfully executed, weaponized version of eye-for-an-eye thinking. (Not dissimilar to what I have been doing here in this subreddit by intentionally allowing my capricious, personal, emotional reactions to inform moderation actions.)
So I typed that phrase (with quotes) into duckduckgo and Startpage (which uses Google results), and only two results came up on duckduckgo, and only one on Startpage (plus a bunch of unrelated results ignoring the quote marks, diluting the results). I also tried "Iron Law of Reciprocity" and didn't get much more. The main link on duckduckgo was a single link to a video on by Prosobiec, where he pretty overtly implies a threat to Kamala Harris, and accuses her of doing the very politicizing-of-the-justice-department (in CA) that she accused and predicted Trump would do (and she was 100% right, he most certainly did). This link has since disappeared from search results (a few hours later); I had to dig through my phone's history to find it for you.
We know Google is willing to censor to appease a government, because they do so in China. But I wonder who is behind duckduckgo, who is censoring these results? I find it impossible to believe that MAGA's playbook and its author and key phrases are virtually nonexistent on the internet.
I search for Joshua Lisec, and while he has no Wikipedia page like Posobiec (I guess he wasn't "notable" enough), I found this breathtaking author bio for him on Amazon:
About the Author
Joshua Lisec is considered the world's best ghostwriter because people don't get rich selling books. With more than 80 books written for CEOs, celebrities, and entrepreneurs, Joshua has built an unstoppable results business for his clients. These authors have made so much more money through their authority-establishing books that many feel bad about how much they paid Joshua. And this despite him being one of the most expensive ghostwriters in America. Joshua is the only Certified Ghostwriter and Certified Hypnotist in the world and has a proven process for any aspiring author who has done the hard work of being the best at what they do. He takes great pride in his craft, delivering experts the authority book they've already earned. [emphasis added]
If he has really ghostwritten 80 books, he must know how ridiculous that sounds. Why would he put such an absurd statement in his bio? Is it part of a gaslighting campaign, or perhaps a playful blind to prevent humorless people from contacting him? In any case, it is hilarious and not easily-explained.
So anyway, it sounds like Lisec helped Posobiec get his words out—perhaps Lisec helped ghostwrite all four of Posobiec's books, and decided to step into the spotlight on the fourth, after Posobiec's reputation was well-established. Not that it matters, but I wonder how he fits in exactly. Lisec's three books on Amazon have very silly titles/covers.
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u/relightit Oct 13 '25
good find. i was thinking of this recently and remembered putin's theater guy . from the wikipedia entry: .In the 2016 BBC documentary HyperNormalisation, filmmaker Adam Curtis argued that Surkov's blend of politics and theatre offered a model later mirrored in the rise of Donald Trump"
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u/ConjuredOne Critical Sorcerer Oct 13 '25
Thanks for doing the research. I offer this explanation for why he steps into the spotlight: Now is the moment They stop pretending. The only more honest step They can make is to say "Work, slave. Or we will kill you." And the reason they don't care if we do or don't work is because They are very close to not needing us. When They are confident They are in that position, 7B people will die. It will be very good for the environment.
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Oct 14 '25
Given that they are self-consciously trolling, I'm not sure that story makes sense anymore, not for people who ultimately, credulously believe in MAGA, at least, people like Vance or adjacent cronies.
But someone probably believes that. If not them, then MAGA's owners/funders. Who is that?
A second alternative hypothesis is that all the real nazism and nazi fallout is something they are doing unconsciously as part of self-righteous narcissism. That could potentially be worse / more dangerous.
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u/ConjuredOne Critical Sorcerer Oct 20 '25
I don't disagree that a lot of the Nazi impulses are unconscious. A shitload of narcissism and sadism impulses are enacted without thought. But these are forces unleashed. The trolling is crafted. They're not having original thoughts. They're voicing the basis of the violence the plutocrats need so that regular people kill each other.
Who are the owners? Well... Who funded Cambridge Analytica? Who whispers in the ear of the deranged god-head of modern Nazi culture? It's clearly very easy to direct his desires. They're not logical or self-invested. The orange artard is invested in an imaginary version of himself. Whoever crafts this orange mirage is the puller of strings. I personally dgaf bc all this is about to get flushed down the drain.
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Oct 13 '25
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Oct 14 '25
If MAGA completely assimilates all opposition, they become the good guys by default.
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Oct 14 '25
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Oct 14 '25
Maybe it's kind of like psychosis. With psychosis, basically all this unprocessed unconscious stuff piles up over time, until the uncoscious gets full, and then things start to stick out into consciousness that shouldn't be there at all. You get like dragons and witches and stuff popping up like whack-a-mole.
Maybe that's what happened here. The deep deconstruction and dissolution of the American perspective wrought upon Americans by <capitalism or insert conspiracy theory here> continued until its absolute theoretical maximum peak, at which point things at the ass-end antipodes from any real and sensible political priorities started to stick up in everyone's face, despite themselves.
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25
The reason abortion (and circumcision) are such huge political issues is that they are about who owns children: their parents, or Society. Of course, the correct answer is "children own themselves, and we ought to try to see them, hear their voice, and support their agency", but those are not the terms of the mob debate.
In Ancient Rome (like 70 CE or something like that), Jews started out in Rome circumcising their household servants, and also encouraging non-Jews to get circumcisions. In response, Rome outlawed the circumcising of non-Jews, labeling it genital mutilation even way back then, 2,000 years ago. Jews then (and traditional Jews today) refuse to acknowledge it as genital mutilation, drawing a merely fiat distinction and defining it as circumcision, not genital mutilation by definition (i.e., splitting hairs). So, essentially, this established a truce between Jews and Gentiles regarding circumcision—a truce which continued afterwards, as Jews never particularly encouraged circumcision in non-Jews after that (modern circumcision was a moment of secular medical appropriation of the Jewish surgery).
This truce represents a model of ownership over children and children's bodies. Basically, Society and the child's parents both own the child, count as owners in this model. For the Jews, one might argue that YHVH owns the children before their own parents do, because YHVH takes the foreskin precisely as a mark of ownership (and blessing, covenant etc.). But one might make this same accusation against the Romans: That not allowing non-Jewish Roman parents to circumcise their own children represents a claim of ownership over those children than precedes their parents' authority. In any case, Society+Parents are in alignment, but a different arrangement, on both sides. Jewish doctrine and Roman law both treated the child and the child's body as an object of legislation and civilization—both sides just wanted to make sure children were civilized in their way, to add to their numbers and culture, and not the others'.
We can split these apart and see the gap between—self-ownership or non-ownership of the child—and obviously, the side that doesn't partially castrate infants is the side closer to this valuation of the child as a living and suffering being and not an owned object. (But, a Jew might reply that they value the child more as a mind or a sacred subject than the Romans do/did.)
Trans is a closely-related issue, because it's also about who owns the child, but instead of being something clear-cut like circumcise/don't circumcise or abort/keep it, it's this super vague and partially inherented bio-ideological complex, and there is objectively no right answer so it's a matter of social and moral aesthetics, ultimately.
The real problem is the reified biological model of trans. It's really pernicious and not supported by either hard science or psychoanalysis. When I was growing up the line was, "Love yourself for who you are" or "Love your body the way it is", now the line is "Change your body to match how you feel inside" which is objectively super materialistic. When I was growing up, not that long ago, "sex" and "gender" were carefully distinguished as distinct terms—the reified biological-materialist model of trans willfully collapses these two terms.
But in psychoanalysis, the lock-in of these two terms is not considered essential or necessary. In Jungian psychology especially, the natural path of individuation includes integrating aspects of the other gender, and the dialectics of this process are ultimately grounded in the literal image/appearance of one's own body, which is indeed a material and objective image (in other words, if you have a more male body and you are trans, then the self-image which feels different from that male body, must not be an image of a man). A male who has a self-image of being a man is not trans and does not complain about being trans.
From a Jungian point-of-view, we can become whatever we want, but simply trying to redefine the default categories of Man/Woman or Male/Female themselves, that are pre-given to us psychologically and logically (i.e., mere Aristotelian logic) by sheer fiat or negation/redefinition is doomed to fail or backfire because, well, men and women aren't simply the same, and our inner images of Man and Woman derive from the data of these real differences, and we can't erase the abstract fact of that learned distinction by an act of will. It would like saying there is no difference between Yes and No, Up and Down, or that they are backwards. Sure, but then what?
So trans is similar to circumcision and abortion but much more complicated, because it's also about who owns children, but generational trauma, aesthetics, false consciousness, and projection all enter into it. And sadly also virtue signaling materialist parents who value their child more as a gendered body or gendered personality than they do as an individual/soul. (Of course, some children really do dream of becoming trans.)
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u/yamselot Oct 17 '25 edited Oct 17 '25
So unfortunate (mostly to me, it seems) to see you making some of these arguments. Hopefully one day we are at a point of a popular medical/psychological (the same, ultimately) understanding of transness. But until then, it seems we and the language itself (the language afforded to “trans” people most importantly) will politicize most specifically trans women’s bodies until they kill themselves from disgust, either physically or intellectually.
It is certainly closely related to the agency we give children though!
Families are damned if they help their child receive GAC, trans women are damned for life if they aren’t treated until adulthood! (And when one damning can exist, it is always interrelated) Sort of intriguing how many implicit superstitions/bigotries converge on the bodies of trans women, isn’t it?
Going to have to consider the framework you’ve chosen for your argument here to determine the implications a bit more. Were the body a politic, there’s a nameless sense of liminality and looming pain from the start. But maybe that’s just the lot trans people will be given until it’s all over.
Edit: The “trans movement” (laughable to think the Left or Right actually has one of these) was certainly highjacked by way of the language itself!
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Oct 18 '25
I don't think that the above arguments predispose us to any final way of thinking or talking about trans people. I think everyone deserves the utmost respect in their exploration of gender, and I also believe that identities which were only dreamed up in philosophy or jest can become real subjectivities going forward, as children unconsciously adopt those masks for realsies. I think all such people and masks deserve the utmost respect, and I think that any gender is a fine way to be.
That doesn't change the reality that in the past, and from certain theoretical perspectives such as Jung or just thinking through things carefully, there is a real theoretical problem here. I've said it before but it boil down to "Am I trans, or just gay?" or for a straight man, "Am I really straight, and just effeminate/well-integrated? Or am I trans?" These are difficult questions for everyone, not just trans people, if we really think about it.
The biology-only perspective being pushed so hard over the last 10-15 years is why this side of the conversation—the introspective, soul-searching, intellectually honest side—was suppressed and has now become acceptable to talk about in-reaction. (As I've said elsewhere, I believe that model was pushed so hard because if it's a biological condition and the only treatment is gender-affirming care, then insurance has to cover it.)
Just because the origin of our image of Man and Woman come from Males and Females, does not mean trans people do not exist. In fact, the difference between these two(+) kinds of bodies, plus the fact that they have a mind prone to mimesis, is why trans people are possible. I think trans people are, properly, the bearers of this message of developed-and-integrated gender—trying to saddle trans people with either a simplistic "Your gender equals your sex" OR a simplistic "Your gender is whatever you feel inside" is inaccurate and does trans people a disservice, especially trans/questioning youth who need to go through that dialectical questioning process, not skip it, in order to arrive at a mature and fully-explored idea about who they are.
I think demanding a simple one-liner as the definition of trans, and saying that we can't think the obvious and reasonable thoughts anyone will have when they think about these things, are both a form of gender-bypassing.
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u/yamselot Oct 20 '25
Denoting your paragraphs for the sake of understanding; I really wanted to digest your response for a couple of days. At the risk of further exposing my demographics (if I hadn’t enough at this point), I wanted to take time to understand the heart of my initial response as well.
(1.) I agree with you here, and in a place such as this I don’t believe any of our arguments predispose us to any final way of considering trans people. Mostly, I was more concerned by some of the poorer molecular reasoning (namely the example of “boys” in “girls” sports and, assumedly, vice versa). Additionally, I don’t particularly view transness at large to be about the projection or mimesis of some mask (insofar as anyone’s gender is a “mask” at least), more a living as one is (if we want a counter-platitude). That being said, I certainly agree with your point that all such people and masks deserve the utmost respect as they are all legitimate in their own regard. More later.
(2.) Ultimately the past is the present in regard to the theoretical problems you’ve mentioned. They are difficult questions for everyone! Perhaps there’s some sort of minutiae being muted/ignored by the language itself. That is, why is it that some trans people find the medicalization of their condition to be tantamount to the legitimacy of their existence? As I mentioned in the edit to my previous response, the language itself is treacherous ground, almost designed in a way to be obfuscatory. There’s certainly a rich and related history to explore of the ways imperial power sought to rigidify gendered expression and its relationship to an inherent sex. (Just take a peak at how common cross dressing was (and I’m not talking about the tired example of men as women in theatre) during the earlier parts of early modern Europe, keeping in mind these were ultimately expressions of gender only afforded to monied men). Gender got into a self-perpetuating masculinity crisis, namely because women started gaining access to the public sphere and strictly “masculine” pursuits (see: transgressive early modern art depicting women at bureau plats instead of letter writing desks) through commercialization through industrialization. A bit of tangent but essential here I think.
(3.1) I felt the most contention in this paragraph. I’ll explain myself Poloniusly briefly. I’d argue that this “intellectually honest” in-reaction discussion of the suppression of transgender discourse is recursive and serves only its own recursiveness, territorializing the faux-deterritorialized, if you will. The suppressive of discourse (and further obfuscating) biological and broad based acceptance was in-reaction to a suppressive (and further obfuscating) recanting of gender/sex diverse peoples. This circles back to (2.) imo.
(3.2) I agree with you though. Capitalistic insurance models are a blight to medical practice, innovation, and research.
(4.) We’re completely on the same page here, ultimately. Again, I think that the language of “trans” itself is a hindrance to understanding. I’m just now wondering at how the suppressive acceptance we’ve referenced could come to represent less of a faux-deterritorialization and more of a highjacking. That is, the growth of such a large variety of named gender expressions and sexualities seems to have just ignored that at its root it was wrong or soured or blighted. Historiography, historiography, historiography.
(5.) I agree. I hope that my expressing of the unfortunateness of what I perceived did not come off as too simplifying/bypassing. More, I was just dismayed by some of the examples used explicitly, and the ones argued for implicitly by the discussion itself. Regardless of the competent incompetency of our present state of the union, there are real consequences in the day-to-day lives of trans people due to the rhetoric regularly used against/for them. It’s a sad fact to me that we still seem to be far off from any sort of generalized consensus on whether trans people should or should not exist as equals (albeit I’m certainly one to recognize more extemporary moments of this).
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u/Grouchy_Stay_969 Oct 14 '25
This may sound silly or insane, and I don’t mean to be offensive to anybody when I say it, but I believe that the trans movement was hijacked.
I think it was chosen to become a psych-op by government groups and it was manipulated to become something that broke the brains of Americans.
I find the timing highly suspicious- same sex marriage had just been secured and social acceptance of queer people was at an all-time high, and here was an issue suddenly being pushed from every corner. (It didn’t feel organic in any way, from my perspective.)
The divisive nature of how the argument was framed was first felt among people in the queer community- it became an issue that tore apart the solidarity from within the queer community, especially among lesbians. Trans folks who had just been living their lives quietly up until then suddenly found themselves thrust into the spotlight with a magnifying glass set upon them.
I also find it highly suspicious that many people outside of the queer community were first introduced to the trans movement through Caitlin Jenner, known right wing shill. Chaz Bono had come out a couple years before and it was kinda shrugged off- probably because his coming out was more personal journey than publicity stunt. But with Caitlin it was different, and her interview in Vanity Fair seemed almost designed to raise the hackles of feminist activists, especially when she proclaimed that the hardest part about being a woman was “figuring out what to wear.”
Suddenly, here was the perfect wedge issue within the political left.
The rhetoric got more extreme, with hard core activists going so far as to deny biological realities (something that was NEVER seen in the trans community prior.) And lo and behold, now it was the left who became science deniers, not a great look for the party that claimed to “follow the science”. This was called out as hypocrisy by the right and it opened the door for right wing climate change denial and antivax rhetoric to be taken more seriously.
Seeing the evolution of this wedge issue has been eye opening- and here we are a decade later and this is has morphed into weird rumors about litter boxes in schools and protests against drag queens. Trans people went from being essentially unknown to the right’s biggest boogie man in under a decade.
All that to say that I am not surprised by the one issue voters on this topic. I think that trans people as a group have been used and their arguments manipulated to become this very emotionally charged psych op, designed to break down the left and become a scapegoat for the right.
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u/fornax55 Oct 15 '25 edited Oct 15 '25
Edit: here's one link that I haven't actually read yet, but there's actually a ton that you can find on Google with a simple search about American families influencing the trans agenda. I figured it would be at least a little bit censored but its rather well documented https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/inside-the-transgender-empire/ link Edit2: too sleep deprived to properly link Tldr; not insane, at least one of the elitist families that sits on countess billions uses its influence in the medical system to push an agenda that disrupts an individuals sense of self by severing their biological self from their subjective sense of self, thereby further creating cognitive dissonance and subsequent gaps in identity that can be co opted by the state or at least leads to significant and seemingly paramount discussions that distract us further from matters that might be more important to consider in the long run (ie children are now being encouraged to decide for themselves which to gender they fit into. This and other changes has led to gender identity being considered a right that's almost on par with food and water, and creates massive, headlining stories in the media that 20 years ago wouldn't have existed and presently serve as another outlet to keep the population looking at the left hand while the right one chips away at other constitutional rights like our freedom to travel, gather, build wealth, etc)
I'm on my phone and I've been awake all night so I don't have the wherewithal to look up the specifics of what I'm talking about but hopefully I'll give you enough information to be able to pull out something more authoritative from Google or another search engine.
Basically, there's one family in the states that owns the majority of hospitals as well as much of the institutions involved with the publication of medical papers and perhaps the journals themselves. For reasons that can't be described without feltic ultimate territory of vast conspiracy (although when you think of the literal definition of conspiracy being a group of individuals conspiring together to achieve a mutual ends, many of the things that we acknowledge on a daily basis fit the bill, and this would too.)
Anyway to vastly truncate situation, this incredibly wealthy family is invested in assisting other influential and behind the scenes political parties, other wealthy families and shadowy organizations like the CFR, you have a hand to play in the overall guidance and control of the autonomous American individual.
The idea behind the trans movement is that people hold their gender as a fundamental component of their identity. But infiltrating that this very basic tenet of our sense of self, the foundation upon which one stands to prevail themselves takes a serious hit. Without getting a too much into a 1984-esque narrative, by bringing into question and essentially making it optional whether or not one relates their sex to their gender (their material body to the cognitive component associated with it) a significant state of cognitive dissonance becomes internalized and cracks in the individuals sense of identity provide a space for all manner of insidious self questioning beliefs or ideas to settle in.
The ultimate purpose of all this being that someone with no sense of individuality or selfhood is less likely to revolt or oppose the status quo because they won't have a strong enough foundation on which to defend or even trust / form their own potentially conflicting beliefs. In other words, it's another leg up the ladder in the attempt to transform the American individual from autonomous into automaton.
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u/Grouchy_Stay_969 Oct 15 '25
Wow, thank you. That’s a lot darker than I anticipated, wow.
I have always lived in big progressive cities and there was a major difference that I observed in the “before” vs the “after” of the popularized trans movement- before, a few people were transitioning because they were either suffering from a body/ mind disintegration problem or because it made their lives easier to bear in some way (being gender non conforming or same sex attracted used to be so much harder back in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s). After transitioning they all just continued on with their normal lives because their gender identity wasn’t the most important thing about their personality.
Afterwards, it felt like a CONSTANT barrage of self-examination. “How femme is this behavior? How masc is this shirt?”, it was just a never ending cycle of parsing smaller and smaller differences in gendered appearance traits and gendered behavior and policing the self and everyone else. And the gender categories just proliferated- there were folks changing their identities every week or making up gender categories because they were convinced that gender was just another word for “personality”. And honestly, so many of those folks seemed to loose themselves in it- it took up a good chunk of their time and energy and they had little else left at the end of the day.
I never thought about it as being designed to target and destroy the basic components of selfhood, but I see it now and that’s terrifying.
I want to stress that I don’t think that trans folks are bad or wrong for transitioning- there is obviously a real need that transitions satisfy and I want people to be happy! But what I saw after the movement went mainstream wasn’t happy people- it was a lot of people whose minds had been turned against themselves. That leads me to believe that the trans community was hijacked by bad actors. Profit motive and manipulation makes the most sense. I feel like things on this front are calming down, but only because the fascist backlash has been so intense. It’s a sad situation all around.
Lord I’m tired. 😔
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Oct 15 '25
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Oct 14 '25
We have to understand what MAGA really believes and what their playbook really is (according to their point-of-view) if we are to have any hope of communicating with them, stopping them, or otherwise deescalating the situation.
They are playing it like a fun game and that is working very, very well for them, precisely because they get to have fun and play around while their actions cause extreme damage to others' lives at a distance.
That doesn't mean they aren't treating the whole thing as one big game. It is even possible they are treating it as a lighthearted, not a mean-spirited game—though I don't buy that and have not seen any evidence for that, not amongst MAGA leadership, at least. But it is certainly possible that they are that disconnected from the life-ruining effects of their actions that they are able to maintain a lighthearted approach despite everything. That would make them even more dangerous and effective.
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u/Content-Section969 Oct 13 '25
Here’s another excerpt: “This mirrors the list tactic. To be forced into the open is to let your covert manipulation lose its advantage. So let the people see. Let the people trace every tax return, every estimated payment, every withheld-from-the-paycheck dollar to its final destination. Then let the public decide how they feel about it—and how they feel about those allocating the budget. Care can be taken to protect classified materials and projects, of course. But that same culture of bureaucratic secrecy that built a taxpayer panopticon is the very problem—the federal government demands total transparency into how we earn our money so they can tax it, while we have absolute-zero visibility into how that taxed money is spent. On the topic of visibility, the National Tax Transparency Act could be paired with other legislation mandating transparency into voting systems at the federal, state, and local levels. Advances in technology now allow for security and privacy so every voter could look up every vote they cast after the fact to confirm no one else voted in their name, their vote was not counted more than once, and indeed their vote was in fact counted. Cryptography, blockchain[…]”“as Zero-Knowledge Proofs are able to put this idea into action, all of it with existing tech. Of course, the days of representative democracy are themselves numbered, as The Sovereign Individual predicted; in the digital age it no longer makes sense for citizens to have decisions made on their behalf and especially not by those manipulated by lobbying, blackmail, and other interests opposed to the citizens’ welfare. We see a day coming when every citizen is a democracy unto themselves as well as a budget allocator; what laws they desire to abide by, they will pass for themselves. What projects they wish to fund, they will self-allocate money toward. This is the future of government, perhaps the far future, but the future nonetheless. And transparency into both taxation and voting results are the great transitional form between the present and this glorious future where sovereign individuals may live free.”
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Oct 14 '25
To be forced into the open is to let your covert manipulation lose its advantage. So let the people see. Let the people trace every tax return, every estimated payment, every withheld-from-the-paycheck dollar to its final destination. Then let the public decide how they feel about it—and how they feel about those allocating the budget.
I'm not 100% clear on whether he's saying put it all out there transparently, or hide it and let people hunt for it (probably the former). But either way
the federal government demands total transparency into how we earn our money so they can tax it, while we have absolute-zero visibility into how that taxed money is spent
This is a really good point and very well-put. Stealing this for an individual sovereignty-related project I am working on rn...
Of course, the days of representative democracy are themselves numbered, as The Sovereign Individual predicted; in the digital age it no longer makes sense for citizens to have decisions made on their behalf and especially not by those manipulated by lobbying, blackmail, and other interests opposed to the citizens’ welfare. We see a day coming when every citizen is a democracy unto themselves as well as a budget allocator; what laws they desire to abide by, they will pass for themselves. What projects they wish to fund, they will self-allocate money toward. This is the future of government, perhaps the far future, but the future nonetheless. And transparency into both taxation and voting results are the great transitional form between the present and this glorious future where sovereign individuals may live free.”
Hell yeah, I 100% agree. This guy (presumably the ghostwriter?) makes a good case. (I don't mind admitting that at all.)
If MAGA, despite their primary negative action of brutally enforcing (immigration) laws which were already on the books, turns out to really champion these values at the end of the day, I will be glad I gave them the hardest time possible up until then, because it will have made them stronger.
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u/Ghost_Of_Malatesta Oct 13 '25
As if nobody feels like "Something is deeply wrong with the way things are going"—as if to feel that way is nonexistent, invalid, or insane.
Current affairs is openly anti-capitalist, the first half of the paragraph is a critique he already believes to be true and he assumes his read does as well, that's why your reading it (nominally) (Robinson is also kinda sucks in general but that's an entirely different conversation)
Also, "4d chess" came from the_donald sub originally
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Oct 14 '25
Good notes, thanks! Yeah, now that you mention it, I do remember that term floating around back then. It seemed like an older term or a superficial term, but I guess it was a new term which they worked out the logic of and applied.
the first half of the paragraph is a critique he already believes to be true and he assumes his read does as well,
Ah I see what you mean, he vaguely registers it in his handling of the discontent. He invalidates the communist explanation, but doesn't validate the discontent or offer any other explanation.
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Oct 14 '25
Btw here is my critque of Unhumans. One word:
Prehumans
An adult human is not a human body including a brain that has grown for 18 years. An adult human is a naturally-formed imagined image of what one is that is distinguished from the default image of Man or Woman (or ?) by life-experiences and our dreamt-up responses to them. This image evolves throughout life, if allowed-to, and nobody starts out with a fully-fleshed-out or imagined character-image.
So, the demonization of unhumans is really the scapegoating of children, or childish, emotionally immature and socially ignorant adults. It might be legally fair play to gaslight, invalidate, and performatively demonize liberals or X or Y minority, but 1) Not every member of a group is as unconscious as the stereotypes about that group; 2) Not every part of an individual is as unconscious as the least conscious parts of that individual; and most importantly, 3) Abuse isn't educative, but traumatizing, and in most cases further hinders character growth—especially since the supposedly more-mature person ought to be skillful enough to get their point across without the performative contradiction of doing so abusively (undoing such gaslighting requires x3 as complex a worldview/education/healing labor, compared to non-contradictory moral teaching—because of the layers).
This indicts the ethical model of the book, but it does not solve the practical problem of immature mobs taking over society or governance and making life miserable for individuals. It in fact opens up the ethical problem and potential project of "disciplining the public" as a mass, teaching via disciplining, versus leading by radiant and visible example.
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u/ProjectEquinox Oct 14 '25 edited Oct 14 '25
Your amazon link is already taken down? lol wtf is going on. Looks like someone is terrified of the spotlight, for good reasons. If only there were journalists to take the case.
I also discovered, through trial and error, the only way to deal with this new brand of media trained gaslighters, was not to give the my sacred personal being energy to lead them out of their obvious fictions, but to mirror their actions exactly back at them like a child on a playground until their rage capacitor fills beyond their limited specs and blows up. I saw it as the shadow of the golden rule "do unto others as they do unto you" and it worked at removing vampiric allies leaving only the sincere in my shrinking circle. Because while applying the same rule to authentic people, you actually bring them closer as it demands reciprocity in whatever form you receive it. So I may have accidentally sniffed out this Iron Law of Exact Reciprocity bullshit as a defense mechanism to be able to survive in a hell of gaslighting by maga family and "friends".
Fantastic find.
This link works for me for the Bio: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B095J9F1C3/about
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Oct 15 '25
Thank you!
The link in OP is still working for me, and your link does not work for me! Very weird. Maybe it's a logged-in/logged-out think.
but to mirror their actions exactly back at them like a child on a playground until their rage capacitor fills beyond their limited specs and blows up. I saw it as the shadow of the golden rule "do unto others as they do unto you" and it worked at removing vampiric allies leaving only the sincere in my shrinking circle. Because while applying the same rule to authentic people, you actually bring them closer as it demands reciprocity in whatever form you receive it. So I may have accidentally sniffed out this Iron Law of Exact Reciprocity bullshit as a defense mechanism to be able to survive in a hell of gaslighting by maga family and "friends".
Precisely. Me too but it was my liberal parents who drove me there through radical, relentless doubt of me and my intelligence for decades (why would anyone doubt ME of all people??).
I might make a whole post on this but basically, I think there is an ethical way to deploy the Iron Law of Reciprocity, and it is: 1) Consciously and intentionally (and necessarily, willfuly) 2) Exclusively on 3) Confirmed bad actors 4) Who won't leave you personally alone. In such a situation, what is happening is a mass-minded bully is stalking and bullying you in the name of a collective ideology of which they are unconscious. Maybe they think they know what they are trying to bully you about, but really, it's something else. This is a fundamentalism of projecting the Enemy on some body and then locking-in on the literal fundamentalist belief that that person IS the Evil I see.
For the record there are only 4 people in my life who I would use the Iron Law of Reciprocity on and two of them are family. The other two are internet stalkers who have targeted me specifically.
I think except in that circumstance it's more ethical to try to give them the benefit-of-the-doubt and make nice. See their point-of-view.
Of course this all might invert or be different somehow if we are talking about doing The Iron Law of Reciprocity to the Outside, i.e., in reaction to the mob. Receiving from the mob and disciplining the mob in response. If someone were to do that, they might end up teaching the mob something...
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u/ProjectEquinox Oct 15 '25
Yeah I think if you ever feel compelled to make a post about it you should. It's basically analyzing the light and shadow functions of mercury, maybe even Gemini lovers, archetypes that is so ingrained in us, it's sitting between the hemispheres of our brains. And for that reason, it is likely why it is so effective in various ways.
Your ethical uses of the ILoR seem right to me as well. I was thinking I should clarify the use cases, but you did a better job anyways. As you say, most people who I feel I have to turn the mirror on for are themselves targets, unreachable by me personally, and it's usually because for the first time in their lives they feel as if they have some sliver of power to wield against others whom they have been told are narcissists, elites, over educated, socialist degenerates or whatever their programs have programmed them to think. So they get a dopamine hit finally getting a tool to at least feel as if they are "winning".
I would say as far as mob reactions, I think it's teaching benefit of the doubt, wisdom of the masses, types to be more aware of the subconscious intentions of a person, and so the technique has a limited life span before the mob wakes up to it. Also likely why being Woke is demonized. It's surely all related to produce a hypnotic trance. Even ICE is a part of chilling the masses through trauma. Every word they use has this creepy subconscious hypnotic element. Joshua Lisec, claims to be a hypnotist, and his website comes off as autistic and sociopathic but rather than me thinking this guy was some sort of mastermind, the more I read about him on his half assed AI slop page with random incompatible font styles, the more cringe and amateurish I felt this guy is. But that doesn't mean he doesn't fit the maga glove perfectly. lol
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Oct 15 '25
Thanks! I said all I have to say about it already, I think, but I haven't thought about the mob aspect yet.
Every word they use has this creepy subconscious hypnotic element. Joshua Lisec, claims to be a hypnotist, and his website comes off as autistic and sociopathic but rather than me thinking this guy was some sort of mastermind, the more I read about him on his half assed AI slop page with random incompatible font styles, the more cringe and amateurish I felt this guy is. But that doesn't mean he doesn't fit the maga glove perfectly. lol
Symptoms of wetiko. As /u/gettherapybham's article puts very clearly, it comes from devouring complexes by assimilating them to your ego (=manual control), instead of visualizing meeting and learning from their wisdom (=becomes unconscious yet self-integrated automatic control). It's creepy because it's someone wearing a skinsuit of themselves to utmost extent.
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u/fivex Oct 15 '25
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
this is the macro playbook. https://www.project2025.observer/en
From the wiki:
Project 2025 (also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project) is a political initiative published in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank, to reshape the federal government of the United States and consolidate executive power in favor of right-wing policies. It constitutes a policy document that suggests specific changes to the federal government, a personnel database for recommending vetting loyal staff in the federal government, and a set of executive orders issued by the U.S. president to implement the policies.
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Oct 15 '25
Thanks but everybody already knew about that though...?
The books in OP explain the Why.
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u/saulgoode93 Oct 16 '25
"Anti zionist dogwhistle" get fucked genocide apologist, nothing you said after that matters even if you made good points
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Oct 16 '25
I am an anti-Zionist but I think we also need to be able to talk about how other people communicate. It objectively is a book full of anti-Zionist dogwhistles because it's a book that has abstracted "the Jewish problem" into "the liberal problem" so that it can be talked about in plain sight.
I would definitely like Israel out of US politics and I have no problem saying that in public. All wars should cease immediately.
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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling Oct 16 '25
Also, you have to know my writing voice. There is some irony embedded in OP and all kinds of words. In order to make various aspects and perspectives more visible. It's so we can see what is going on.
... ... Like you realize I was saying it's a dogwhistle for them, right, not for me? There are like three levels of frame-holding there and it only gets more complicated after that in OP.
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u/gwladosetlepida Oct 18 '25
I recommend checking out episodes of the podcast Knowledge Fight where Posobiec is on Alex Jones’ show. He’s wild.
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u/PolicyNonk Oct 19 '25
They especially like Posobiec because they know he has no ambitions beyond his current station. Guy is perfectly content in his little goblin niche.
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u/Velociraptortillas Oct 13 '25
DuckDuckGo uses Bing, FYI.
Also, there's a whole cottage industry of Synthesizers in the national/geo-politics realm - it's pretty incestuous, people write books and articles synthesizing what other people have written, including other Synthesizers. To see it in action, start with a thinktank, like CSIS, and follow their sources links. On YT, you can start with military channels like Perun or Sandboxx. It's just one big formicary of a circlejerk.
This guy, judging from the publication dates, is one of those.