What to Do When Weaponized Stories Come Flying at Us

This post is a review of Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare And The American Mind. By Annalee Newitz. W.W. Norton & Company. 246 pp. $27.99.

During World War I, journalist and science fiction writer Annalee Newitz reveals, the U.S. Army established a Psychologic Subsection (soon to be called the Propaganda Section) of its Intelligence Division. The Section prepared leaflets, which were dropped from airplanes, to undermine the morale of German soldiers, while Intelligence Division operatives censored the news at home.

The War Department gave psychological war personnel a permanent home (and the nickname “psyops”) during World War II. A combination of facts, fiction, and advertising hucksterism, backstopped by violence, psyops aimed to influence the minds, emotions, and prejudices of its human targets.

Distributed to service men and women by 1948, Psychological Warfare, by Paul Linebarger, became “a bible on the topic” during the Cold War. The essence of psyops, “as of all good black propaganda,” Linebarger wrote, “is to confuse the enemy authorities while winning the thankfulness of the enemy people,” by spreading anti-communist stories (via, for example, the Voice of America) told by “the mother, the schoolteacher, the lover, the bully, the policeman, the actor, the ecclesiastic, the buddy, the newspaperman, all of them in turn.” Linebarger may also have been the first person to publicly discuss “brainwashing.”

Source: Hypnosis Pendulum/Pixabay

Following a relatively brief discussion of military psyops, Newitz turns to the principal subject of Stories Are Weapons, psychological warfare in American politics and culture. The author covers a lot of ground, including an in-depth examination of micro-targeted ads by Cambridge Analytica, designed to energize heretofore latent racists and authoritarians to vote in 2016 while suppressing the turnout of Blacks and Latinos; Charles Murray’s controversial book, The Bell Curve; a war over gender identity in a suburban Texas school in 2021; and mental hygiene conflicts over depictions of Wonder Woman in comic books and movies.

Newitz, alas, does not make a compelling case for the usefulness of the term psyops by distinguishing it from myths, propaganda, misinformation and disinformation. Nor does the author indicate whether the intentions of operatives help determine whether they are engaged in a psyop.

Newitz demonstrates, for example, that nineteenth-century New England town narratives about “the last Indian,” newspaper editor John O’Sullivan’s doctrine of “manifest destiny,” Frederick Jackson Turner’s still widely cited “frontier thesis,” and Murray’s claims about the relationship between IQ and race, were factually wrong. But not why each of them, along with U.S. government explanations of Indian removal and Jim Crow laws mandating separate transportation and educational facilities for Blacks and whites, qualify as psychological warfare. Twenty-first-century MAGA culture warriors, according to Newitz, “call for violence against their enemies, just as U.S. military operatives would in a PSYOP product.” But readers will find “psyops” by twenty-first-century liberals and progressives conspicuous by their absence from Stories Are Weapons.

Stories Are Weapons concludes with recommendations for the daunting task of “psychological disarmament.” This process, Newitz emphasizes, requires us to prevent additional misinformation from going viral while opening up spaces in the public sphere for fact-based (but also emotional) “counter-narratives to undermine the legitimacy of weaponized stories.” The Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a group that includes election workers, cybersecurity experts in the federal government, academics, and non-profits like the AARP and National Conference on Citizenship, for example, has developed “an influence operation kill chain” to identify misinformation, notify social media platforms, and post alerts and propaganda “weather reports” on the EIP website.

But, unfortunately, a “political transformation” essential to disarmament is not now on the horizon. The federal government and social media companies, Newitz points out, do not now agree about whether and how to shut down “fake news” and slow down the circulation of content. Citing free speech concerns, the courts have made it more difficult for either or both of them to take corrective action.

“There will always be propaganda,” Newitz acknowledges, and operatives “who want to poison us with paranoia and threaten us with death.” That said, as political and cultural crises intensify, we must do everything in our power to ensure that more and more Americans learn to recognize “weaponized stories when they come flying at us.”