How everything became a ‘psyop’ for conservative media
Lately, it’s become popular in conservative media circles to brand certain things as a psychological operation, or “#psyop.”
Climate change, for example. Or covid. Or the media coverage of Donald Trump. Or even the prosecution of Hunter Biden.
Technically, “psyop” is a U.S. military term, referring to various kinds of campaigns to get inside the heads of adversaries.
In a classic psychological operation during the Vietnam War, the U.S. government blasted messages over loudspeakers that were meant to urge Viet Cong soldiers to defect.
Ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it was millions of leaflets dropped on cities to undermine support for then-President Saddam Hussein.
“Who needs you more? Your family or the regime?” one flier asked.
But conservative media personalities have begun using the term in vaguer and wilder ways, seemingly to allege government conspiracies targeted at American citizens — something that would be illegal, even if any of these theories were remotely plausible.
Actual experts in real-life psyops are unconvinced by this latest wave of claims.
“Most people realize it’s just baloney,” said Herbert A. Friedman, a retired sergeant major who worked in psychological operations for the Army.
Fox News host Jesse #Watters is perhaps the most influential superspreader of the term.
In January, Watters used a just-asking-questions formula to suggest that Taylor Swift is a psyop asset of the Defense Department.
How so? He didn’t exactly connect the dots for viewers, but he did note that Swift, who endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, had urged her fans to vote.
The Pentagon shot it down with a punny statement: “As for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off.”
Watters acknowledged that his show “obviously has no evidence” for the claim, but he tied it tangentially to a comment made at a 2019 NATO cybersecurity conference, where a speaker mentioned Swift’s social media influence.
However, the speaker never claimed that the pop star was a government asset, and the event was not held by the U.S. government.
On other occasions, Watters has seemed to repurpose the word into a fancy way to call something a myth or a falsehood or simply a sinister PR campaign he happens to disagree with.
Last summer, he claimed that climate change is “a psyop against the American people by big business and the Democratic Party to worry you into giving you more of their money,” and separately referred to a “decades-long liberal media social psyop that marriage is a broken and dated institution.”
In November, though, it was an even murkier argument about how “control freaks” in the FBI and liberal-leaning Twitter employees constituted an anti-Trump psyop of some kind
— though he not only presented no evidence, but he also failed to explain what any of that meant.
Watters’s Fox News colleague Greg #Gutfeld has also expressed concern about psyops.
In November, he asked panelists on his nightly show whether media coverage of Trump’s potential second term is a “psyop,” though he acknowledged, “I hate using that word, because it puts you in a conspiracy realm.”
Nonetheless, a month later, he declared on the panel show “The Five” that social media is a “psyop.”
The fact that none of these personalities seems particularly committed to any firm definition of the word may be the point.
“It has connotations of malign influence, and so it’s a scary word they can use to negatively brand the things they want to negatively brand,” said Todd C. Helmus, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND.
The cynical genius of calling something a “psyop” is that such accusations “don’t really need to have any evidence, because there’s not going to be any evidence: It’s a secret operation.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/02/22/psyop-conspiracy-theory-conservative-media/
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