The U.S. Government Is Waging Psychological War on Its Citizens
August 22, 2025
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
From viral memes to military-grade influence operations, the government is waging a full-spectrum psychological war—not against foreign enemies but against its own citizens.
The goal? Compliance. Control. Conformity.
The battlefield is no longer physical—it is psychological—and the American people are the targets.
From AI-manipulated narratives and National Guard psyops to loyalty scorecards for businesses, the Deep State’s war on truth and independent thought is no longer covert. It is coordinated, calculated, and by design.
Yet while both major parties—long in service to the Deep State—have weaponized mass communication to shape public opinion, the Trump administration is elevating it into a new art form that combines meme warfare, influencer psyops, and viral digital content to control narratives and manufacture consensus.
In doing so, President Trump and his influencers are capitalizing on a propaganda system long cultivated by the security-industrial complex.
What we’re witnessing is not just propaganda. It is psychological warfare.
Psychological warfare, as defined by the Rand Corporation, “involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of opposition groups.”
Today, those “opposition groups” include the American public.
For years, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda and psychological operations aimed at conditioning us to be compliant, easily manipulated and supportive of the police state’s growing domestic and global power.
The government is so confident in its Orwellian powers of manipulation that it’s taken to bragging about them. For example, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.
This is the danger that lurks in plain sight: a government so immersed in the art of mind manipulation that it no longer sees its citizens as individuals, but as targets.
Of all the weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most insidious.
As the military journal Task and Purpose explains, “Psychological warfare is all about influencing governments, people of power, and everyday citizens.” PSYOP soldiers aim to influence “emotions, notices, reasoning, and behavior of foreign governments and citizens,” and “deliberately deceive” enemy forces.
Yet increasingly, these operations are being used not just abroad—but at home.
The government has made clear in word and deed that “we the people” are domestic enemies to be targeted, tracked, manipulated, micromanaged, surveilled, viewed as suspects, and treated as if our fundamental rights are mere privileges that can be easily discarded.
Aided by technological advances and behavioral science, the U.S. government has become a master manipulator of minds, perception, and belief—an agitator of the masses.
As J. Edgar Hoover once observed: “It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.”
Here are just a few ways psychological warfare is being waged against the American people:
+ Weaponizing violence.
+ Weaponizing surveillance and pre-crime.
+ Weaponizing digital tools and censorship.
+ Weaponizing compliance.
+ Weaponizing entertainment.
+ Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging.
+ Weaponizing desensitization.
+ Weaponizing fear.
+ Weaponizing genetics.
+ Weaponizing the future.
None of this is speculative. It’s well-documented.
In 2022, the Pentagon was forced to investigate reports that the military was creating fake social media profiles with AI-generated photos and fictitious news sites to manipulate users.
These are the modern tools of psychological warfare. But the blueprint goes back decades to the CIA’s MKUltra program.
The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.
Today’s psyops rely on mass media, AI, algorithmic censorship, and behavioral economics, but the goal remains the same: shape thought, induce obedience, silence dissent.
In 2014, for example, a Fusion Center in Washington State mistakenly released records detailing government interest in “psycho-electronic” weapons—remote mind control tactics allegedly capable of controlling people or subjecting them to varying degrees of pain from a distance.
More recently, COVID-19 gave the government a global platform to deploy fear-based compliance strategies. Science writer David Robson explains: “Fears of contagion lead us to become more conformist and tribalistic… [we] value conformity and obedience over eccentricity or rebellion.”
That is precisely the point.
By constantly invoking crisis, the government keeps us reactive, not rational. Fear shuts down the brain’s prefrontal cortex—our center for reasoning and critical thought. A population that stops thinking for itself is one easily led.
This is how the government persuades people to surveil themselves, police their neighbors, and conform to shifting norms: through fear, repetition, and psychological fatigue.
It’s classic Orwell: through censorship, disinformation crackdowns, and hate crime laws, speech becomes thoughtcrime and conformity becomes patriotism.
Edward Bernays, the father of modern propaganda, warned of this nearly a century ago: “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” They are, he concluded, “the true ruling power of our country.”
This “invisible government”—the Deep State—has perfected the art of psychological control.
With the approach of the 2026 midterm elections, this psychological warfare will only escalate: more fear-based narratives, more digital manipulation, more pressure to conform.
But the battlefield is not lost—not yet.
As I stress in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the first step in resisting tyranny is recognizing its tools: fear, deception, division, and control.
We must reject the Deep State’s mind games in order to reclaim sovereignty over our mental space and remind the government that “we the people” are not puppets to be manipulated or threats to be neutralized.
We are the rightful rulers of a free republic, and that starts with the right to think for ourselves.
Psychic Treason
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
I am living in a world that no longer exists.
I once lived in a vital world whose only limit was no-limit, “free frame of reference,” as the Haight Street Diggers thought. It was a world of beatniks, Buddhists, hippies, free-jazz poets, pacifists, wandering guitar soloists, postmodern fabulists, soulful anarchists, and collaborative maunderers. It was also a world of close readers, deconstructors, and afficionados of the beautiful, all performing in the heady atmosphere of refusal, a general strike of the Imagination.
It was the rebirth of the romantics, bohemians, Poets with a capital P, and Oscar Wildean dandies. In the face of the work ethic, bohemians old and new had the “right to be lazy,” as Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue declared, or the right to “do your own thing,” as hippy culture would later agree. Of course, this is not a description of a real world, “how it was back then,” but of a psychic climate, the lovely mists and roiling waters of which still sustain my inner life. As Ted Gioia writes in his book Music: A Subversive History, the era brought “a highly contagious psychic treason to prevailing values.”
This world and its open assumptions about possibility slowly dissipated over a thirty-year period. As the late Sly Stone put it, “The possibility of possibility was leaking out.” It seemed quite dead by the millennium, our collective mind aspirated into glass pipettes by techno-oligarchs and assorted others who bore us no love. We were left with Data World, the Great American Smartphone Society. We have been priced out of cities, so there are no avenues to barricade, no “scenes” where artists and musicians can hang out, and our universities are in ruin, occupied by “indentured students,” in Elizabeth Tandy Shermer’s telling phrase, studying only what the boss wants. And what the boss wants has nothing to do with poets. Even at Canterbury’s Christ Church University, the destination for Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, poetry is “no longer viable in the current climate.”
And yet my heart/mind still resides in that other world, that yesterday world, the world that no longer exists.
Whatever for?
Of course, the feeling of living in a non-existent world is not a new thing. Every human life that goes beyond the thirtieth year will be familiar with it to some degree. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig wrote a book about it titled The World of Yesterday.
For Zweig, that meant late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and its generation of elite artists and intellectuals like Freud, the novelist Romaine Rolland, and the modernist composer Richard Strauss. But in 1939, after the rise of Hitler, Zweig and his wife, Lotte, went into exile not only from Austria but from a world rich with music, words, images, and ideas. His novels had been placed on the Nazi’s list of proscribed books and burned, and it was increasingly clear that, as a Jew, he himself was likely on a different and deadlier list. They went to London first, then to the United States, where they were guests of Yale University, and finally to a small German colony in Petrópolis, Brazil, of all unlikely and far-flung places for a Viennese aesthete. In 1942, he committed suicide with his wife by an overdose of sleeping pills. As he explained in a note, “I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labor meant the purest joy.”
A photograph was taken of the bodies of Zweig and Lotte lying on a small bed. He is shaved, mustache
neatly trimmed, in a shirt and tie. She is in fetal posture, snuggled at his side, as if they were just napping after sex, or as if patiently waiting for whatever life came next. Her left hand covers and comforts his folded hands. The fatal box of sleeping pills sits on the bedside table beside a water glass. There is no book on the table for bedtime reading. No need for that any longer. Zweig had sent the manuscript of his last book, The World of Yesterday, to his publisher the previous day. Everything is tidy, nothing left undone, except all the things he might have done had he chosen to live on. Suicide was Zweig’s way of checking out of the grand fantasy of cosmopolitan Europe, soon to become a mass grave.
Also in 1939, the first year of Zweig’s exile, Jean Renoir’s movie The Rules of the Game was released. It tells the story of that historical moment, Germany and France once again on the threshold of war, but in a very different way. Rather than mourning the death of Europe’s rich culture, Renoir suggests that Zweig’s privileged class was to a degree responsible for the nearing catastrophe.
The film takes place at a country estate called La Colinière among members of the haute-bourgeoisie. This is the stage for Renoir’s display of the upper-crust’s moral indifference to everyone and everything (especially rabbits) outside of their own class. For them, life is simply the “rules of the game” that apply inside of their caste. As the character Octave explains, “You see, in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons.” In other words, everyone knows the rules/reasons of the social class game, even if it is inhuman to follow them. As Renoir explained:
[W]hat is interesting about this film, perhaps, is the moment when it was made. It was shot between Munich and the war, and I shot it absolutely impressed, absolutely disturbed by the state of mind of a part of French society, a part of English society, a part of world society.
The Rules of the Game is not a tragedy but a terminal comedy. It is a farewell party. It is “laughter out of dead bellies,” in Ezra Pound’s phrase.
Zweig was part of the “state of mind” that Renoir describes. Zweig confesses that the intellectual elite of Vienna were not awake to the rough beast slouching toward them. Zweig writes, “[We] noticed little of these dangerous changes in our native land; our eyes were bent entirely on books and pictures.” In Nietzsche’s words, Zweig lived “in a happy blindness between the past and the future.”
The World of Yesterday is an acknowledgment that this abundance of kultur, all these erudite manners, the strict enforcement of elite conduct, all this endless cultural elaboration and haughty indifference, would soon be, literally, ash in the wind. Like so many at the time, Zweig was in exile not only from his home, but from everything he had taken to be reality, and he was incapable of imagining a new reality. For Zweig, suicide was nothing because his world was already dead. He was a victim of history twice over: as a refugee and as someone who could not live beyond the memory of a world that no longer existed. As Nietzsche wrote in The Use and Abuse of History, an obsession with the past destroys the possibility of a living present:
One who cannot…forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do anything to make others happy.
On the other hand, Renoir was one who could see the history that Zweig was ruined by but then proceed to the next “joyful deed,” the making of a work of art. Renoir was Zweig’s health-giving opposite, a rule-breaker and a world-maker. As the British Socialist Worker described his work in 2006:
[The] great quality in Renoir’s movies is that he is always a rebel. In Renoir’s movie world, rules are for breaking, conventions are for disregarding, and authority is for mocking.
In our own very much more dangerous world—threatened not only by fascism but also by nuclear annihilation, climate disruption, spreading food deserts, and ever-larger and more desperate masses of migrants—we too fail to see the writing on the wall even though, once again, it is right before us in
“letters of fire,” as Zweig wrote. Worse, it is not at all clear that we can do what Nietzsche thought was crucial: “to assimilate and digest the past and turn it to sap.”
Happily, it will always be possible to create stories that liberate us from the stories of our masters. This is what William Blake called for when he wrote in Jerusalem (1815), “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” Or, even more assertively, William Carlos Williams in Kora In Hell (1920):
There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.
That, for me, has always been gospel.
Blake’s quote is “heavy,” as hippies used to say, because it asks, as Tolstoy put it, “What is to be done?” The answer to that question might simply be “tell better stories.” Live through better stories. Live through stories that will be understood in an as yet unimagined world, just past the next bend in the river, where the Imagination lives in all its inherited riches. So, let us be Nietzschean, all too Nietzschean, without fear or giddiness, and seek liberation for ourselves and others.
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