You've heard the saying "you don't have to care about politics, but politics cares about you." That's even more true for political warfare. You may not care about political warfare, but these days, political warfare definitely cares about you. There are psyops everywhere.
Because of mass media, the internet, and social media, at least for the time being, you live on a political warfare battlefield. You have very little choice in this matter, and whether you're a innocent bystander or an active combatant, you are by default a combatant in it.
I want you to take this description very seriously. You are a combatant in a global political warfare firefight whether you want to be or not, outside of some very difficult and narrow exceptions. That's because political warfare isn't like conventional warfare. It's everywhere.
More than its ubiquity, everyone is a combatant in political warfare environments because the nature of political warfare isn't to shoot your enemy's army so much as it is to influence your enemy's population. Therefore, the whole population is an active target and fighting.
If you were a Marine storming the beach in Normandy in WWII, you wouldn't run out there with your gear and rifle, and so you don't have the luxury of living your life unaware of propaganda, political warfare, and influence campaigns. You have to know how to protect yourself.
By far the most important "gear" needed in a political warfare environment is understanding enough about political warfare to know it's happening around you and what some of it looks like, how it works, etc. You're less likely to get taken in by operations you recognize as ops.
This means that your "gear" is spending time learning about how propaganda works and what it looks like, but it also means working to develop discernment, not just cruising through life, not just following crowds, not just trusting everything you see, or what you like.
Many of the influence campaigns we are subjected to are "reflexive" in nature. They're based on highly tuned misleading lies that incorporate some truth and then lead people astray in a way that "goes viral." Everyone's talking about it. Everyone's saying it. It's happening!
Reflexive campaigns work not just by being misleading but through crowd effects. Technically, reflexive campaigns work by getting people to believe other people believe something and getting them to follow in rapidly growing numbers, usually to make some political mistake.
It is very important in a political warfare environment where reflexive weapons are deployed that you don't just blindly follow what everyone is suddenly thinking. You have to slow down and take time and get to the bottom of some things. You cannot just go running along with.
Realize you're in a political warfare environment now all the time you're consuming media, either mass or social media. You have to have your guard up. You need to be skeptical and discerning, especially when everyone starts going a particular direction all at once.
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