4 Psyops Not to Fall For

What I learned from Annalee Newitz’s ‘Stories Are Weapons’

Detail from the book cover

Last week, Annalee Newitz published Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. I learned a lot from it. It’s about psyops (psychological warfare) relevant to our moment.

Here are a few of my takeaways from their book.

1. On Seeing Yet Denying Indigenous People

In 19th-century America, there was a lot of racist mythmaking, and some of these narratives were like psyops. For example, some white people organized narratives to tell other white settlers that they should replace, and in fact already were replacing, the Indigenous population. They would often say there weren’t any Indigenous people anymore, while knowing that they had Indigenous neighbors and continuing to send Indigenous children to residential schools to force them to assimilate.

Newitz explains:

“Indigenous kids needed exposure to new ideas to help them progress, the government claimed. Parents had no right to set the curricula in these schools, nor even to visit their children on campus.”

Today, there is a legislative push from the opposite principle: suppress “progressive” discussion of LGBTQ people in schools and return educational…