By Peter Pavarini
In the dreary days following January 6, 2021, I focused mainly on the Constitutional crisis facing our Nation and paid little attention to the media’s obsession with the Stop the Steal protestors who had gone to Washington. I knew a handful of people who considered going to the rally but none who actually went. Consequently, I completely missed any news coverage of U.S. Army Captain Emily Rainey until I began researching the federal government’s disturbing use of psychological operations (“psyops”) on its citizens.
Move Over Pearl Harbor Day
On the day Democrats call one that “will live forever in infamy”[i] (along with December 7, 1941), the 30-year-old captain chaperoned the “Moore County Citizens for Freedom” – a group of about 100 mostly elderly women – from her home in North Carolina to the National Mall. She was not in uniform and had used authorized leave to assemble peacefully with hundreds of thousands of other Americans who were exercising their First Amendment rights. Based upon every published report of that day, neither Captain Rainey nor any member of her group ever entered the Capitol, endangered anyone, destroyed property or violated any law.[ii] Following a career-ending reprimand from the Army a few days later, the young officer separated from the military on January 11, 2021.[iii]
What intrigued me about Captain Rainey’s story was the Army Unit she was attached to: the Fourth Psychological Operations Group at Fort Bragg. A college graduate who speaks Arabic, an athlete, and a mother of a pre-school child, Rainey didn’t seem like the kind of person the Army would train and employ for eight years only to cast aside.[iv] Unless, of course, she wasn’t in step ideologically with today’s military.
A Short History of PSYOPs
In 2010, the Joint Chiefs of Staff attempted to put a new face on the military’s use of propaganda. Joint Publication 3-13.2 defined psychological operations as follows:
“Psychological operations, or PSYOPs, are intended to “convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”[v]
DOD explained to a wary public that PSYOP forces would never target U.S. citizens anywhere in the world or under any circumstances. Yet, in apparent contradiction, the 2010 publication also stated that PSYOP forces could be used domestically as part of a public information campaign to assist other federal agencies when responding to disasters and crises. Liberally interpreted, this exception arguably authorizes psychological operations during a pandemic or civil unrest as we experienced in 2020.
The use of domestic propaganda has been under fire since World War II when it was first employed by the FDR Administration to galvanize public support for our country’s entry into that conflict.[vi] Until recently, those rebukes typically have come from the Left. As recently as 2011, the ACLU castigated the Department of Defense for using PSYOPS to manipulate the opinions of congressional delegations visiting Afghanistan.[vii]
How Trump’s 2016 Victory Changed Everything
That all changed with Donald Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016. Blind to the deficiencies of their own candidate, the Democrats attributed Trump’s win to, not only their never-proven claims of Russian collusion, but also his campaign’s use of a data-mining company named Cambridge Analytica to shape public opinion.
Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump was just too much for Democrats to bear. Realizing that both sides could play this game, the DNC together with their operatives in the Deep State and the media used the next four years to master the art of psychological warfare on the American public. To avert another electoral disaster, the DNC took a page from the world’s preeminent expert in PSYOPs – the Chinese Community Party.
For decades, the People’s Republic of China had studied America’s greatest vulnerability – the avarice, ignorance, naiveté, and vanity of its people. Beijing then used it vast economic resources to manipulate American business, government officials, the political class, academia and even U.S. military leaders.[viii] The CCP had no trouble making a clean sweep of U.S. politicians[ix] until Trump came along.
Having done business with the Chinese as an international developer and purveyor of Trump-branded products, the 45th president was wise to the CCP’s ways. He made getting fair trade deals with China a key part of his foreign policy. Trump’s presidency may have slowed China’s influence on the emotions and reasoning of the American people but it didn’t stop it. Then COVID happened.
COVID Provided the Perfect Conditions for PSYOPs
The origin of the COVID-19 virus and the PRC’s role in hindering the global response to the pandemic are beyond the scope of this blog. Suffice to say, China’s lack of candor and the dissemination of misinformation about the disease revealed the destructive power of its PSYOP capabilities. One commentator described 2020 as “one big psychological operation causing a mass number of people across the world to trade all logic and common sense for a completely false narrative and false reality.”[x]
It wasn’t just people on the Right who noticed that Communist-style disinformation campaigns had polluted the flow of reliable, objective information on virtually everything important to Americans. Lefties claimed that rightwing media outlets like Fox News used disinformation about the “mostly peaceful” George Floyd riots last year to coax Trump into declaring martial law.[xi] Ironically, the Left had to wait until Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the incoming Biden Administration turned Washington, D.C. into a militarized Green Zone for that to happen. But the public’s growing distrust of the media, government and corporate America – regardless of political persuasion- made clear how successful the CCP and its U.S. surrogates had become in fomenting the cultural war we’re in.
Which brings us back to Captain Rainey. Despite the Biden Administration’s claim that January 6th exposed a widespread conspiracy of white supremacists within the U.S. military, the numbers don’t support that. Of the 500 plus people arrested in connection with the events of that day, only 23 were veterans, two were active Army Reserve and one was active National Guard. That’s hardly proof that factions within the military were about to overthrow the government. Indeed, nothing revealed so far justifies DOD’s stand-down order to purge its ranks of any extremists. Why then would a young Army officer who was never arrested or implicated in anything to do with January 6th “riot” be pushed out of the military five days later?
Suppressing Dissent By Manufacturing An Existential National Crisis
Making an example of Captain Rainey’s legal exercise of her First Amendment rights appears to be part of an ongoing PSYOP campaign to intimidate anyone who questions the results of the 2020 election. That’s the only explanation that makes any sense.
Similarly, why would the U.S. Department of Justice demand that Thomas Barrack, a wealthy 74-year-old man with no previous criminal record have his passport seized, be forced to wear an ankle bracelet and put up a $250 million bail bond on a questionable charge of having violated the rarely prosecuted Foreign Agents Registration Act? Answer: for having a close personal relationship with Donald Trump. The message is clear. If Trump were to run again, win or lose, those who work for him will be totally destroyed – not just shunned by High Society, but made to “disappear”, as the Chinese Communists say.
As we’ve seen time and again, the Left makes comparisons to Nazi Germany whenever it attacks someone who disagrees with them. Recently, the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, the military’s top banana, outed himself as fierce anti-Trumper by comparing everyone who participated in the January 6th Stop the Steal rally to Nazi brownshirts. He said the storming of the Capitol was our Nation’s “Reichstag moment”. As others have already noted[xii], General Milley apparently did not study European history at Princeton as he had the facts surrounding the 1933 Reichstag fire all wrong. “The more accurate analogy is not the brownshirts and Trump supporters, but Hitler and Biden.”
Think about that. Hitler manufactured what today is considered an “existential national crisis” – something the DOD would say justifies the use of PSYOPs on American civilians. The Nazis called the Reichstag fire “a prelude to an insurrection” which gave Hitler the right to pass laws by executive fiat and suppress all opposition to his totalitarian power. That should scare the hell out of anyone who still believes in the U.S. Constitution.
[i] Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, January 6, 2021.
[ii] According to an AP report issued January 11, 2021, Captain Rainey’s commanders at Fort Bragg said she acted within military regulations and that no one in her group broke the law. See “Army Investigates PsyOps Officer for Role in Washington on Day of Capitol Riot”, The Guardian, January 11, 2021.
[iii] Captain Rainey had previously made headlines in May 2020 when she posted a video of herself pulling down a yellow caution tape at a playground where she had taken her child to play despite COVID restrictions. Police in Southern Pines, N.C. charged her with “injury to personal property” as a result of the incident.
[iv] In such demand, PSYOP recruits are eligible for a $30,000 signing bonus and up to $65,000 of college loan repayment. They are also eligible for up to $4,000/year in tuition assistance and competitive benefits that include healthcare, housing, meal allowances and a variety of family support programs. To learn more, see https://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/browse-career-and-job-categories/intelligence-and-combat-support/psychological-operations-specialist.html
[v] Steven Aftergood, “DOD ‘Clarifies” Doctrine on Psychological Operations”, Federation of American Scientists, January 19, 2010.
[vi] See Leo W., “The History of U.S. Psychological Operations”, SOFRED, March 21, 2020.
[vii] Robyn Greene, “Military May Be Engaged in Illegal Psychological Operations and Propaganda Against U.S. Citizens’, ACLU Newsletter, March 2, 2011.
[viii] Grant Newsham, “Chinese Psyops vs. US Have Been One Hell of a Success”, Asia Times, December 3, 2019.
[ix] Senator Diane Feinstein had been accommodating the Chinese for decades while her husband was making millions from his Chinese business dealings. In 2019, former VP Joe Biden declared “there’s nothing to worry about from the Chinese” while his son Hunter was funneling huge sums of Chinese money through his investment company. G. Newsham, supra.
[x] Justin Malonson, “2020 – the Brainwashing of America: The Psyop of Total Mind Control”, December 1, 2020.
[xi] Molly McKew, “Current Information Operation Topics: Someone Is Psyoping Americans, and You Should Be Really Pissed Off About It”, https://standuprepublic.com/author/Molly-Mckew/ June 8, 2020/
[xii] See retired Army Colonel F. Charles Parker IV’s excellent blog “As Long as We Are Making World War II Comparisons….”[xii], American Thinker, July 25, 2021.
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