Narrative Warfare: Why Deny The Man Behind The Bros?

We had a curious thing happen recently on Twitter.

The Brosr have all the ideas needed to save tabletop gaming. Not only have they rediscovered the heart and soul of Arneson's Blackmoor, which is the root of the whole TTRPG hobby, they have added to this knowledge with their explorations of session Braunsteins, explained the…

— Rexfelis Catlord (@RexfelisCatlord) December 8, 2024

Nice start, but it goes on to do what Pundit and others anklebiting did by calling the Bros cultists following Jeffro as if he were Lyndon LaRouche or some similar figure.

Which, in turn, had Jeffro wondering:

The responses are illuminating:

• "You are viewed as the personification of brosr. Once you are "defeated" the rest can be deconstructed at a later date. Just like every previous conquest of critical theory."
• "They want the movement without the man behind the movement. Classic subversion tactics."
• "Then they will claim brosr away for them, and after they will perverse it"

In short, this is a play at Containment.

If you need a primer on that, here you go:

This ain't short; get comfy.

Containment is the play here. To succeed at Containment of any form of upstart movement, you need to usurp control of it and that means either subverting the leadership or replacing the leadership. Jeffro Johnson is acknowledged as the man leading the #BROSR. He has proven himself unwilling to sell out, so he must be cut out for Containment to succeed, and the most obvious play for achieving that is to do a move right out of Saul Alinksy's infamous playbook Rules For Radicals: "'Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.' Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions."

The problem is that you're trying to do that to a group of people who study war as a hobby, and that study of war includes psychological operations.

The constant attacks on Jeffro show that those seeking to destroy or usurp the momentum generated by the Bros think that they can just depose Jeffro and insert their own man in, who will steer the Bros back into the Conventional Play Cargo Cult step by step until it is fully neutralized.

That itself is telling; it means that someone, somewhere sees this as a threat to be dealt with- and yes, things do get that serious in what seems so minor a thing, because this hobby and medium is not minor. Nothing that has spawned entire billion-dollar franchises, popular literary genres, flat-out defined what "fantasy" means to the Normies worldwide, and otherwise had an impact far disproportionate to its presence.

Someone, somewhere, feels threatened by Jeffro or this wouldn't be happening. This is classic Narrative Warfare, right out of the CIA Playbook, as Mike Benz is now famous for explaining (the first time as Frame Game Radio), and I take that as a badge of honor. Impotent,unimportant, and irrelevant groups don't get targetted like this. Groups that pose a real threat do.

Take a bow, Jeffro. You got the right kind of hater attention.