Resisting the 'Put Them in Trauma' Playbook: 3 keys to dealing with psychological warfare

As someone whose job includes tracking misleading content, rumors, and myths, people often ask me "what do you recommend to deal with dis/misinformation?"

It's not an easy question, but I always start with this:

The majority of Americans, regardless of our ideology or political belief, are feeling the daily impacts of psychological warfare.

Russ Vought, who is key figure in the Trump regime, author of the extreme Project 2025 agenda, and a self-described Christian nationalist, defines it like this:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.

We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

But Trump's lead people – the richest White House cabinet ever with 8 billionaires and 12+ millionaires – aren't reserving that trauma just for the EPA, over the last several weeks Trump/Musk & Co. have fired, threatened, and de-funded:

- Employees running the VA Crisis Hotline, a key lifeline for former service members struggling with PTSD, many who are veterans themselves

- Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) staff responsible for monitoring airplane safety and planning/mapping routes

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The importance of "you first"

Something I don't talk a lot about is that until early high school my family survived on section 8 housing and commodity food. Some people may recognize this can, but if you don't the tl;dr is it's the least appealing part of any commodity food box, whether you eat pork or not.

There was also a "Beef With Natural Juices" with a similar level of visual appeal. But, when you live below the poverty level...what you get is what you work with.

Since my parents were first and second generation immigrants that started over, we didn't have any wealth to speak of.

That meant that when things went badly (and when you're poor nearly anything unexpected goes badly) we were at a high risk for being on the street. My parents hid this from us, but it was present in all sorts of ways.

For example, when I was 11 or 12 a neighbor's dog chased me and I broke my arm hopping a fence.

We had no health insurance and my accident nearly destroyed our family, although I didn't know it at the time. I just thought getting a Raiders cast was cool, which, fortunately the doctor said no to because he knew that wouldn't be safe in the neighborhood we lived in.

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The difference between a marketplace and a community

It’s hard to overstate how much power online platforms now have across the globe.

They enable us to easily book a room in São Paulo, scan the news headlines in Nairobi, search for a job in Wellington, and connect us to the people, products, and services around us.

The dominant model for all of this activity is the modern marketplace.

Amazon, Airbnb, Didi Chuxing, Uber, Stripe, WeWork, these are all marketplaces, designed for people to buy and sell products and/or services. The model also extends to social media, where platforms like Facebook have marketplace features and are also viewed as a marketplace for information, ideas exchanged, views shared, beliefs tested etc.

But a marketplace isn’t a community, and as it turns out the difference matters quite a bit.

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