Narrative Warfare: Kern Talks Narrative Warfare

Collected from Mark Kern's Twitter feed, posted the other day.

What’s coming is like nothing you’ve seen before.

Americans who have never lived overseas, been through revolutions, wars, or coups simply cannot imagine. The world is always on the brink of evil and evil does exist. It can manifest here too.

In the past few years, tactics have been slowly tested and normalized. One is the human moderation of trend lists and the rise of algortyhms and AI to selectively show what people see. 5 years ago I was told this was a myth, that trends were never touched by humans. Now we know.

Then they tested shadowbanning and view suppression. Again, we were told this was a myth and conspiracy. Today it’s openly discussed as part of business. It was normalized.

They tested deplatforming with Alex Jones, an obvious target that nearly everyone could be convinced was banworthy and unpersonable. In the past year, it’s not even questioned by mainstream media when much milder personalities are deplatformed.

Then they tested their new tool with monetization. Payment providers discovered that they could normalize this too. Starting with concepts like “gun vendors” and now targeting people and their families on a personal level (see Gab’s founder).

Then they went after the major independent news and blog sites. First they fact checked them. When that became normal, they moved to complete delisting in search and then outright bans from social media. This too, was normalized.

Then they went after video channels, testing their censorship on the obvious targets people might agree with banning. Now, as of the past couple of days, they are demonetizing huge swaths of the YouTube commenter genre. This is happening today.

Today, no reasons are given for bans or suspensions. There is no appeal, no accountability. It started small, with test cases, and expanded as they discovered people were unable to mount an effective defensive. The reasons are secret. And it’s getting worse.

Every tweet I make I am careful. I’ve never spent so much time finding roundabout ways or euphemisms to critique power. The media isn’t speaking truth to power. They are all the same, with the same talking points. The ones allowed to be promulgated.

Things are happening on an uprecendemted global scale. The frog has been boiling for five years. It was a huge mistake for this administration to ignore the global lockdown on free speech and communication. It will cost them.

This isn’t a left VS right issue. It’s not a culture war issue. The culture war is a pretense, a distraction. This is about power.

He's right about this being about power.

The rest is the context for seizing, holding, and expanding that power. The reason for resorting to Narrative Warfare to do this is that most people don't even perceive this as a form of warfare, so they don't fight back well if at all and thus the enemy wins by default. It is only after the win that the targets even wonder what happened, after it's far too late, and are confused as to why.

But this isn't the normal state of affairs for the enemy. Enough of us do perceive Narrative Warfare to start getting the word out to others, and enough of them have been willing to heed us that there is resistance to this campaign. So far it's not been enough to defeat it, but it has been enough to buy time, and time is needed to show others yet that this is indeed going on. As more people accept that we are telling them the truth, and comprehend the threat they face, it becomes a race against time on both sides. We've got to get enough people aware and resisting to stop them; they have to push through their power grab before a critical mass arises that can and will stop them.

And no blackpills here. This is happening.

Make no mistake, this is a war of competing and mutually-hostile narratives going on. Before they attack the statues, before they cause the riots, before they sabotage the economy, before they attack the government, they assault and defile the mythical narratives that unite us as a nation and a polity. This is the basis for warfare, and all the talk of logistics and strategy and tactics pale in comparison to the narratives that make their use viable because narrative translates to morale first and discipline second.

Remember that a narrative can be true and it can be fact. Narrative is applied Rhetoric, and Rhetoric can be true as well as factual. Narrative persuades by using myth to tell a people about itself to itself about its world and its place in it; this is Rhetoric, not Dialectic, because it deals in emotions (as myth commonly does) to connect a people to its continuity--to sustain its roots--and this is why severing that connection is such a devastating blow.

And this is what Kern's getting at here above. All of the social media censorship, ultimately, is about seizing control over the ability to spin narratives and assault nations accordingly by getting them to believe whatever it is that suits those that want control over them.

That is Narrative Warfare.

So defend your stories and storytellers.