"Mass Consciousness Activities"
Who are the world's leading experts in psyops and the gamification of lies?
TLDR: Unsurprisingly, an investigation into Israel's sophisticated influence operations targeting U.S. and Canadian politics has uncovered a well-orchestrated campaign aimed at shaping public discourse. Utilizing fake websites, social media, and the spread of anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim content alongside misinformation about antisemitism on campuses, this operation is government-backed but quietly executed through private entities to maintain plausible deniability. Key players include STOIC, Concert, and Voices of Israel, firms linked to large-scale, aggressive propaganda efforts. These findings highlight a broader strategy that includes paying for positive media coverage and engaging in "mass consciousness activities," with clear implications for the integrity of democratic discourse (and the lives of many innocent people).
I’ve been looking into the suspiciously pseudo-grass roots pro-Zionist activism that seems to be influencing US politicians, and it’s quite disturbing although not exactly surprising. Here’s a report from Israel’s Haaretz:
Here are a few extracts:
The Israeli government is behind a large-scale influence campaign primarily aimed at Black lawmakers and young progressives in the United States and Canada.
The influence campaign made extensive use of fake websites and social media to promote content that is pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim content, as well as disinformation about antisemitism on American campuses, according to an investigation by the Fake Reporter organization, published today.
The operation was run by a private Israeli online political campaigning firm called STOIC that was hired for the project. According to sources and information obtained by Haaretz, the operation was commissioned by Israel's Diaspora Affairs Ministry but carried out by a different party, for fear that its exposure could entangle Israel in a crisis.
In 2018, the company changed its name to Concert and in 2022, the name was changed again to Voices of Israel.
The follow-up report by Fake Reporter now being published shows the full extent of the Israeli influence operation, which pivoted into "a large-scale, well-coordinated effort to attack and smear groups that are typically pro-Palestinian. These groups include citizens of Western countries (mainly the U.S. and Canada) of Islamic origins, using deeply Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content.
A network analysis found four other websites that used the same IP and promoted content designed for certain audiences. One was the United Citizens for Canada site, which had multiple social media accounts and disseminated heavily Islamophobic material, including claims that Muslim immigrants were a threat to Canada and demanding a sharia state.
According to information obtained by Haaretz, the company has several software systems that allow the profiling of target audiences and creation of adapted content for them, as well as an influence platform called Ma'acher that enables the mass creation of fictitious online accounts and their simultaneous activation on several social networks.
I think there is overwhelming evidence now that the Israelis are the global experts in organizing the manipulation of the American mind (okay, it’s a tie with the CIA), or as they put it “mass consciousness activities”:
This 2018 article from the Israeli news organization HaAyin HaShevi'it or Seventh Eye was very revealing:
The Israeli government recently approved the payment of NIS 128 million to a private organization called Kela-Shlomo to carry out "mass consciousness activities" within the framework of what the Ministry of Strategic Affairs calls "extra-governmental discourse." The organization was also said to have received a donation of a similar sum from Jewish philanthropists whose names the Ministry of Strategic Affairs refused to disclose. Kela-Shlomo's starting budget, as a result, exceeds a quarter of a billion shekels. Attorney Ben-Meir is demanding that the High Court of Justice stop these activities, too.
Attorney Ben Meir argues that the relationship with Kela-Shlomo is meant to enable activities that "the Israeli government is prohibited from doing," while obscuring the fact that these activities are being carried out on behalf of the government.
"In the case before us, the ministry [of Strategic Affairs] not only is 'aided' by private organizations in carrying out its activities, but also transfers much of its power - draconian powers to surveil, spy on, and spread propaganda - to private organizations that are not directly accountable to the government," the petition claims. "The ministry itself carries out radical activities that are likely unfitting of a democracy, such as espionage and propaganda, and is even transferring [the ability to carry out] these radical activities to private bodies."
"This is not just a question of information gathering," Ben-Meir adds, "but the direct influencing of public discourse by intervention or the setting of a particular line ('narrative')."
An earlier article by Seventh Eye, published in Israeli +972 Magazine, reveals the depth of what I’m calling ‘Public-Private-Propaganda-Partnership™’—it’s got a certain ring, don’t you think? I’m surprised they haven’t used it themselves, yet—aka fascist propaganda:
The Israeli government paid the Yedioth Group, publisher of Israel’s best-selling daily newspaper, hundreds of thousands of shekels to publish articles and interviews meant to influence readers to support a campaign Israel is waging against its critics. The Strategic Affairs Ministry, headed by Minister Gilad Erdan, purchased positive coverage and the distribution of that content on the Internet.
It will soon be far more difficult to obtain information about the purchase of journalistic content by Ministry of Strategic Affairs. The ministry has in recent months been advancing legislation that would exempt it from Israel’s Freedom of Information Law. According to the draft legislation, “successfully waging this battle requires keeping it as ambiguous as possible.”
Yedioth conducted a campaign to get people to download an app called Act.il, and encouraged them to involve themselves in military propaganda as in a game - to go on ‘daily missions’ propagating IDF Hasbara propaganda. Yes, that’s right, a war game in which you earn points etc. There’s a good description of it here:
Act.IL sends activists on “missions” to like, comment, and share pro-Israel material on social media, and to flag, report, and respond to Israel’s online critics. Users jump from platform to platform, countering criticism of Israel with talking points and images that reflect a right-wing Zionist understanding of Jewish and Israeli history, culture, and politics. The app encourages Israel supporters—and particularly Jewish Americans—to imagine themselves as soldiers fighting for Israel on the front lines of a vicious cyber war. In doing so, these supporters form a network with Israel’s actual soldiers: The app’s CEO, Yarden Ben Yosef, is a longtime Israeli intelligence officer who told The Forward in 2017 that Act.IL’s developers work closely, if informally, with Israeli military and intelligence officials. The app’s enthusiastic gamifaction of propaganda and its slick startup veneer mask the direct extension of Israeli militarism and surveillance into diaspora Jewish communal life.
Act.IL emerged from the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Israel’s first private university, which is located in the city of Herzliya at the heart of the country’s high-tech “Silicon Wadi” and has deep ties to the Israeli military and state apparatuses. During Israel’s 2012 incursion into Gaza, the IDC established an emergency “public diplomacy center” to address concerns about the country’s image; the center was revived two years later, when the IDF killed thousands of Gazans during another military operation.
The IDC quickly established the situation room as a permanent fixture of the university. With the help of US-based pro-Israel organizations and software developers, it also began exporting this aggressive communications model to Jewish communities in the diaspora. Today, community managers and volunteers meet regularly in media rooms around the United States (or, these days, virtually) and trawl the internet for posts they deem anti-Israel, which they feed into the back end of Act.IL. These messages then become the basis for a sprawling online game.
The article then goes on to explain how the game works, and it really explains a lot of the threads on X that I’ve seen:
Tapping a mission brings the user to a briefing, where they are presented with a short description and screenshot of the target—a social media post—and guidance on how to respond. Depending on the nature of the mission, this might mean writing a hostile comment or flagging a post as inappropriate, or it might mean sharing or upvoting an allied post. (Act.IL provides participants with talking points, but also encourages them to develop their own language lest they be marked as bots by social media platforms.) The user is then brought directly to the platform where the target appears, and carries out the operation. Finally, they can jump back to the Act.IL app to earn their reward. Users receive points for each completed mission, unlock badges for achieving certain objectives, and are ranked on leaderboards that display the top activists in a given month.
Apart from the Israeli government, who is funding this ‘game’?
The IDC commissioned the platform in conjunction with two well-funded, US-based pro-Israel groups, the Israeli-American Council (IAC) and the Maccabee Task Force. The former is a cultural organization devoted to Israeli-American advocacy and has a lobbying arm that pushes anti-BDS legislation and hawkish foreign policy positions. The latter, funded by Sheldon Adelson and directed by Christian Zionist David Brog, is devoted to combating BDS on college campuses.
I’m still trying to figure out if the CIA taught Mossad or Mossad trained the CIA, or if they are essentially the same thing: the wetworking arm of the global fascists who run this world through Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. Anyway, one thing is for sure: these people know about psyops.
In the bigger picture, in terms of the mind games, I guess it all started before the OSS-CIA-Mossad-MI5/6 formation. We should really go back to Freud’s invention of psychology and his nephew Edward Bernays’ manipulation of the Western and then global mass consciousness. Joseph Goebbels, head of the “Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda” famously attributed his tactics and inspiration to Edward Bernays. Bernays used his uncle Sigmund Freud’s work to manipulate the minds of the US population in support of war, before going on to create the industry of Public Relations and the consumer-capitalist society that we all love so much today (distract the masses from challenging elitist control). Fun fact: the now exposed pro-Ukrainain Disinformation Czar, Nina Jankowicz, aka Scary Poppins, was a “Global Fellow” of the Woodrow Wilson Center. Yes, that’s right, the President Woodrow Wilson whose new military propaganda machine hired Edward Bernays to do his mind control tricks on the unsuspecting populations:
The Wilson administration took immediate steps at home to curtail one of the pillars of democracy – press freedom – by implementing a plan to control, manipulate and censor all news coverage, on a scale never seen in U.S. history.
Immediately upon entering the war, the Wilson administration brought the most modern management techniques to bear in the area of government-press relations. Wilson started one of the earliest uses of government propaganda. He waged a campaign of intimidation and outright suppression against those ethnic and socialist papers that continued to oppose the war. Taken together, these wartime measures added up to an unprecedented assault on press freedom.
Within a week of Congress declaring war, on April 13, 1917, Wilson issued an executive order creating a new federal agency that would put the government in the business of actively shaping press coverage.
That agency was the Committee on Public Information, which would take on the task of explaining to millions of young men being drafted into military service – and to the millions of other Americans who had so recently supported neutrality – why they should now support war.
Other ads showed cruel “Huns” with blood dripping from their pointed teeth, hinting that Germans were guilty of bestial attacks on defenseless women and children. “Such a civilization is not fit to live,” one ad concluded.
The whole operation took advantage of a fact of journalistic life. In times of war, readers hunger for news and newspapers attempt to meet that demand. But at the same time, the government was taking other steps to restrict reporters’ access to soldiers, generals, munitions-makers and others involved in the struggle. So, after stimulating the demand for news while artificially restraining the supply, the government stepped into the resulting vacuum and provided a vast number of official stories that looked like news.
Most editors found the supply irresistible. These government-written offerings appeared in at least 20,000 newspaper columns each week, by one estimate, at a cost to taxpayers of only US$76,000.
One of the young recruits was Edward L. Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud and a pioneer in theorizing about human thoughts and emotions. Bernays volunteered for the CPI and threw himself into the work.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,” Bernays wrote a few years after the war. “Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”
The full bundle of techniques pioneered by Wilson during the Great War were updated and used by later presidents when they sent U.S. forces into battle.
Here’s a great little documentary from Adam Curtis that tells the story of Edward Bernays (new subscribers to my Substack might like to subscribe to my “The Random Archivist” channel for other seemingly random uploads):
One of Bernays’ notable involvements with military psyops was during the 1954 coup in Guatemala, orchestrated by the CIA under Operation PBSUCCESS. In the name of ‘bringing democracy to the world’, the US overthrew a democracy and installed a dictatorship, as they tend to do. It’s a beautiful story of fascism at its best - corporate interests combined with military power and dictatorship.
The U.S. government, specifically the CIA, sought to overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, who had enacted policies that negatively affected the interests of the United Fruit Company—a large American corporation with significant agricultural holdings in Guatemala. Bernays was a consultant for the United Fruit Company and played a pivotal role in this context.
Bernays’ strategy involved crafting and disseminating a narrative that presented Árbenz as a communist threat to the Western Hemisphere, leveraging Cold War tensions to garner support for U.S. intervention. He facilitated media tours and produced materials that painted a dire picture of a Soviet foothold in the Americas if Árbenz remained in power. This propaganda campaign was aimed at influencing both American public opinion and lawmakers, shaping the narrative to justify the coup as a defence against communism rather than as a manoeuvre to protect American corporate interests.
You might ask, what made Bernays and the CIA so successful in these sorts of psyops? Well, his techniques, which he often described as "engineering of consent," were grounded in a deep understanding of human psychology, particularly the ideas of his uncle Sigmund. Bernays' approach was based on the premise that people are not always rational actors and can be influenced by their unconscious desires and fears:
Association with Desires and Fears: Bernays believed that by linking a product or idea to the public's deep-seated desires and fears, you could influence their attitudes and behaviours.
Creating Authority Figures: He often used experts or influential figures to endorse products or ideas, knowing that people are more likely to follow the advice or example of someone they view as credible or authoritative.
Group Psychology: Bernays utilized the concept of group dynamics and the idea that people in a group tend to follow a herd mentality. By making it appear that a product or idea was already widely accepted, he could encourage more people to conform to the group.
Emotional Appeal: Rather than relying solely on logical arguments, Bernays frequently employed emotional appeals in his campaigns. He crafted messages that would resonate on an emotional level, which can be more effective in changing attitudes and behaviours than purely factual information.
Creating Events and News: Bernays was adept at creating events that seemed newsworthy, which then generated media coverage. This not only brought attention to his clients' products or messages but also gave them an aura of importance and legitimacy.
Haven’t we all witnessed the leveraging of these psychological tactics over the past few years with COVID propaganda and its related tyranny and now with Ukraine and Israel?
So, who are the world's leading experts in psyops and the gamification of lies? I don’t know how one would measure this, but I do know that the Israelis, backed by the US, have become masters of this dark art. They’re so ‘successful’ that they can literally get away with murder on an industrial scale, killing thousands of children with indiscriminate bombs that you paid for with your tax dollars. The TV news-watching audiences in the Anglo-American empire don’t even blink, such is the power of their programming and mastery of psyops.
Further reading:
And here I thought Israel just bought US politicians through AIPAC!
Gaza is a complicated mess. There are resources at stake. And real estate that could be developed as holiday homes by the sea. And...well...if the war ends, Bibi could well be facing a lengthy prison term. Though I'm sure it's nothing to do with that...
The whole mess is so utterly broken....