How to Memory-Hole a PSYOP

CJ Hopkins

There comes a time near the end of every PSYOP when the PSYOP has achieved its objective, or as much of its objective as it is going to achieve, and is becoming increasingly recognizable as a PSYOP, and so the focus shifts to damage control, and erasing the PSYOP from official history.

This is a crucial stage of the PSYOP, because, at this point, a significant percentage of the public have realized that they’ve been thoroughly mindfucked, and many of them are none too happy about it. Some of them are starting to ask awkward questions, like “why were we deceived and coerced by our governments, global health authorities, and the state and corporate media into submitting to a series of experimental ‘vaccinations’ that appear to be killing and injuring a lot of people?”

Or “why are we occupying and torturing the residents of a Middle-Eastern country that never attacked us, and never had any intention to attack us, and which posed no threat to us whatsoever?”

At this point, it is way too late for those engaged in conducting the PSYOP to continue to deny the facts and gaslight the masses. That won’t work anymore. So, it is time to do some limited hangouts, and some whitewashing, and a little sleight-of-hand, and just generally confuse and distract the public, and send them off on various wild goose chases, while the official history of the PSYOP is written.

For example, say you’re just wrapping up a PSYOP in which you radically restructured society into a pathologized-totalitarian dystopia where the majority of the masses went full-blown fascist, mindlessly following senseless orders, parroting official propaganda, and demonizing and persecuting those who refused to conform to the new official ideology … say you are just winding down a PSYOP like that, and what you need to erase from your official history is the fact that your entire PSYOP was based on nothing but faked statistics, because the pandemic you used as a pretext for your PSYOP was most closely comparable to the medium influenza pandemics of 1936, 1957, and 1968, so it never remotely came close to justifying any of your fake “emergency health measures,” much less the radical restructuring of society into some paranoid, totalitarian “New Normal” … and now you need to erase all that from history, and you need to distract people while you do it.

Well, one thing that almost always works is what stage magicians call “misdirection,” which means, focusing the audience’s attention on something unimportant while you perform the trick, like … wait, what the hell is that over there?! Is that a MUTANT COMMUNIST VIRUS?!

That’s right, folks, the Pfizer Corporation is engineering SECRET MUTANT COMMIE COVID VIRUS BIOWEAPONS that trigger MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS! Break out your AR-15s and your checkbooks!

Or whatever. I think you get the picture.

This type of ham-handed misdirection is extremely effective on a certain demographic, but it doesn’t work on everyone. Those who haven’t awakened to the Sino-Judeo-Commie-Satanist-Occupation-Global-Government plot to depopulate and culturally Marxify the world with the assistance of global corporations like Pfizer, or who have some knowledge of sleight-of-hand techniques, or basic public-relations tactics, tend not to respond as enthusiastically.

So they need to be misdirected more subtly.

And that’s where limited hangouts come in. As I outlined in a recent essay, limited hangouts are an elegant means of preventing people from exposing your PSYOP. You just “hang out” a limited part of the PSYOP, one that you know won’t do you much damage, and let the masses feed on that. They’ll be so grateful to get a little part of the truth that they’ll forget about the other parts of it, the parts that matter, which you are never going to give them.

So how do you go about doing that, exactly? It isn’t as complicated as you might imagine. All you need to do is pick the right journalists, plug them in, and let them do what they do. They don’t need to be instructed or monitored. You know what they are going to report, and what they are going to avoid reporting.

Take the latest “Covid Twitter Files” for example.

Imagine, you’re Lee Fang, a journalist at The Intercept, and you are given access to the Twitter database to research censorship of the facts Twitter censored in order to prop up the official Covid narrative and ensure that as many people as possible were injected with experimental “vaccines” that they did not need but were coerced into taking, and which have killed and injured millions of people, and, instead of researching and reporting that story, what you decide to report on is the censorship of users demanding access to these same “vaccines.”

Seriously, think about that for a minute.

I’m not suggesting that Lee Fang, or any of the other “Covid Twitter Files” journalists, or those helping to promote them, are “controlled opposition” or anything paranoid (and silly) like that. The most effective PSYOPs don’t work that way. Journalists like Fang don’t have to be told what they are allowed and not allowed to report on. They know that instinctively. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be who they are and doing what they’re doing. Lee Fang, for example, is a millionaire, working for Pierre Omidyar.

Journalists like Lee Fang, Alex Berenson, and even Glenn Greenwald — whom I like and respect — are the perfect vehicles for limited hangouts. They have the requisite “outsider” credentials while still being members of George Carlin’s “big club” (or maybe just “associate members” … a few million dollars isn’t what it used to be).

The point is, such journalists sincerely believe that they are “independent,” and “adversarial,” and in many instances they actually are … just not when it comes to reporting a story like the most elaborate mass-PSYOP in human history, which is what we’ve been experiencing for the last three years.

Crossing that line would mean the end of everything for them, their money, their status, their social and professional networks, basically, their entire lives. No one has to explain this to them. They got where they are by knowing exactly where that line is, and how close they can get to it, without ever actually stepping over it.

If you ask them, they will tell you “there is no such line,” not for “adversarial” journalists like them, not because they are lying, but because they cannot see it. They have been trained, and have trained themselves, to not see it. As Noam Chomsky explained in a classic interview with Andrew Marr of the BBC, “I’m sure you believe everything you are saying. What I am saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

OK, one more quick Lee Fang example, which has nothing to do with the Covid story. It has to do with Matt Taibbi’s latest Twitter Files report. Note that Matt, unlike Fang and Berenson, has the sense to steer clear of the “Covid Twitter Files,” mostly, which is a lose/lose equation for famous adversarial journalists. But that’s aside from the point. Here’s the Fang tweet …

The “Hamilton 68” dashboard was a high level scam to falsely accuse Russian influence behind everything. Their entire opaque system was a fraud, and virtually every media outlet fell for it. Everyone from NYT to Mother Jones should post a correction: https://t.co/sKyNyvyTlW

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 28, 2023

Hamilton 68 was not “a scam” and the media didn’t “fall for it.” It was a PSYOP, and the media participated in it. If you think I’m nitpicking, you don’t understand how official narratives are created and maintained. They are not created and maintained with magic or top-secret mind-control technologies. They are created and maintained with words … words that frame events in a certain way, and are repeated and reprinted, over and over, by persons and organizations of influence, until they become officially “what happened.”

You are witnessing the beginning of that process right now. Fang’s tweet is just one of many examples. By portraying the media as the victims of a “scam,” the actual PSYOP in which the media participated is erased, and their complicity is portrayed as mere “incompetence.” This should be familiar to anyone who was paying attention during the “War on Terror.” Compare Fang’s framing (i.e., the media tricked by “a scam”) to the framing of the Iraqi-WMDs-PSYOP, which concluded with the same type of limited hangouts and “corrections” by the corporate press (after the PSYOP had achieved its objective, of course).

As The New York Times put it in its 2004 “correction”…

And so on. In other words, “mistakes were made.”

Again, Fang’s tweet has nothing to do with the Covid-PSYOP or the “Covid Twitter Files.” It’s just an example of how the system works. Even in the “Hamilton 68” story, there are certain lines that cannot be crossed.

The corporate and state media and so-called “papers of record” can be portrayed as “dumb,” “sloppy,” “incompetent,” and even “unethical” and “driven by greed,” but they cannot be portrayed as the propaganda apparatus of a supranational global capitalist system, an apparatus that is functioning perfectly, because that would sound like a “conspiracy theory.”

Which it isn’t, as I believe I have just demonstrated again, and as Chomsky explained in that Andrew Marr interview. There is no “cabal” of evil “elites” running the “PSYOP” that I keep referring to, not in any kind of James-Bond fashion. There never is. There doesn’t have to be.

Yes, there are powerful people in the world, and yes, of course they conspire to further their interests, and to amass more power and enrich themselves, but that is not how the globally-hegemonic ideological system we all live in works.

It works by conditioning us from a very early age to sense where “the-lines-that-cannot-be-crossed” are, and by weeding out and quarantining those of us who cross them anyway. But that’s a topic for another lengthy column.

The point is, the PSYOP that we have all been subjected to for going on the last three years is not going to be exposed, ever. The damage control and memory-holing will continue, and the misdirections and limited hangouts will continue, and the whitewashing of corporations like Twitter and the corporate media and “papers of record” will continue, and the Covid-PSYOP will be erased from history, like the WMDs-PSYOP was erased from history … and people will get used to their “vaccinations,” like they got used to taking off their shoes at the airport.

Eventually, even obsessive “conspiracy theorists” like me will tire of writing about it, and we will turn our attention to less depressing topics. That will be kind of a relief, I guess. Maybe I can finally be funny again … if I can forget about all those dead and severely injured people!

CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.