On Sept. 24, 1950, journalist Edward Hunter published a sensational report in the Miami News about the indoctrination techniques used by Soviet and Chinese communists. In it, he coined the term “brainwashing,” a loose translation of phrasing he claimed to have heard used by Chinese prisoners of war captured in Korea. He followed the article with a 1951 book, Brain-Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds. Hunter’s revelations had massive reverberations in Cold War-era popular culture, in which foreign subversion by way of thought control became a standard trope. At the same time, his reporting gave further impetus to the U.S. military and intelligence agencies to up the ante in the escalating psychological arms race, spurring on the CIA’s notorious MKUltra mind-control experiments.
The effect of Hunter’s exposé about the supposed potency of communist propaganda, in other words, was to bring about a further intensification of propaganda efforts on the American side. His other achievement, in this regard, was to make fomenting fear about propaganda a key element of Cold War propaganda.
The science journalist Annalee Newitz’s new book Stories Are Weapons is a 21st-century update of the genre pioneered by Hunter. Once again, we are warned of terrifying new methods of illicit persuasion deployed by enemies, with the implication that we must ratchet up our efforts to counteract these nefarious schemes. But in Newitz’s account, the arena of conflict is, for the most part, domestic. And beyond a few mentions of Russia, renowned now as during the Cold War for its supposed propagandistic prowess, the enemies are no longer foreign governments but fellow American citizens.
Like many Cold War-era propagandists, Newitz voices deep concerns about the implications of propaganda for democracy. “Increasingly,” she writes, “Americans are not engaging in democratic debate with one another; they are launching weaponized stories directly into each other’s brains.” The reference here is to our endless “culture wars,” now carried out mostly online. These have become “virtually indistinguishable,” Newitz writes, from what military strategists called “psywar,” in part because the internet makes accessible to every citizen propaganda tools of a potency and reach once only available to governments.
But Newitz isn’t apportioning blame all around for these developments. While reading Stories Are Weapons, it becomes clear that the phrase “culture warriors” always refers to right-wing “culture warriors” who “[single] out specific groups of Americans, like Black people or trans teens, and [bombard] them with psyops.” Their antagonists, meanwhile, in fact aren’t warriors at all, merely civilians trapped in the rubble of a crumbling democracy. In the face of these unprovoked atrocities, presumably, the pursuit of the enemy’s unilateral disarmament is entirely justifiable. Hence, toward the end of the book, Newitz approvingly cites the disinformation researcher Ruth Emrys Gordon asserting that “some ideas should be ‘disallowed’ in the public sphere,” giving as an example of such an idea the question: “Is climate change something we should solve?”
The most memorable character in Stories Are Weapons is Hunter’s Cold War contemporary Paul Linebarger, a military intelligence officer and academic who wrote science fiction under the alter ego Cordwainer Smith. One might not expect a progressive science journalist to portray Linebarger, a white military man and fervent anti-communist who penned the first treatise on psychological warfare, as a hero, but that is largely the role he plays in the book. In particular, Newitz credits Linebarger with grasping the link between the dark arts of mind control and the more benign project of storytelling, which he saw as having the potential to forestall war in an era threatened by the atomic bomb.
Newitz’s positive spin on Linebarger and several other military-intelligence officials may be taken as an insider’s acknowledgment that progressive journalism and the military-industrial complex have been on the same team, at least since Donald Trump’s election — the anti-disinformation team, to be precise. Indeed, Linebarger figures in the book as a prototype of the heroes of the current war against disinformation: researchers armed not only with facts but with imagination, capable of debunking enemy narratives but also countering them with compelling counternarratives.
Newitz’s book thus serves as an extended apologia for the “disinformation-industrial-complex” that arose after the shock of the 2016 election, the origins and operations of which have been documented by journalists including Joseph Bernstein and Jacob Siegel. “Big Disinfo,” in Bernstein’s shorthand, works “at the juncture of media, academia, and policy research” as an “EPA for content.” “As an environmental cleanup project,” he notes, “it presumes a harm model of content consumption.” Newitz exemplifies this mentality, writing at one point: “As a science journalist, I was frustrated that there were no scientific instruments, no objective measures I could use to prove that people’s lives were being destroyed by words and ideas.” Hence the need for the sorts of projects praised in the book, such as the Stanford Internet Observatory and the Election Integrity Partnership, which claim to track and quantify this harm.
Newitz avoids the absolute truth/falsehood binary presumed by many anti-disinformation crusaders, adopting instead a more postmodern stance. Rather than a contest of truth and falsehood, there are only “stories,” some harmful and others beneficial. (Newitz sometimes even uses the term “psyop” in a nonpejorative sense.) Rather than setting “disinformation” and “misinformation” off against impartial facts — although there is some of that, too — Newitz explores how “weaponized stories” can be deployed to counter enemy propaganda. As one interviewee puts it, “There might be such a thing as good propaganda.” And because the “culture warriors” are unprovoked right-wing aggressors, the deployment of counternarratives of possibly questionable truthfulness is inherently justifiable as self-defense.
Putting the mythmaking ethos it rationalizes into practice, Stories Are Weapons recapitulates one of the most dubious founding narratives of the anti-disinformation industry: the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Seven years on, this episode has been somewhat forgotten, but in the wake of the traumatic 2016 election, the notion that a previously obscure consulting firm had single-handedly sabotaged American democracy became gospel across much of the pundit class. It isn’t hard to see why: It explained something that seemed inexplicable, namely Trump’s victory. Never mind that much of the hype about Cambridge’s alleged impact on the election was derived from the company’s own overselling of its dubious and unproven techniques of social media “microtargeting.” For Newitz, as for many other journalists at the time, it provides a “better story” about why Trump won: not as a result of democracy but of a plot against it.
Where does all of this leave American democracy? Although Newitz refers many times to the need for a “rejuvenated public sphere” and briefly dwells on the public library as an exemplar of this vision, it remains vague. There is none of the nostalgia one finds in other anti-disinformation literature for an earlier era of reasoned public debate, whether embodied in 18th-century London coffee shops or Walter Cronkite’s television studio. Indeed, in Newitz’s account, all of American history is rife with psychological warfare. What is more, the heroes of the book, like its villains, are purveyors not of idealized rational discourse but of “stories” or even “psyops.” It is unclear, then, what a democracy that is not a “theater of psychological war” would look like.
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In Stories Are Weapons, as in Hunter’s Brain-Washing in Red China, we are told that democracy faces an unprecedented threat from an enemy’s capacity to short-circuit deliberation and persuasion with a hostile takeover of the mind. But other than the state-employed troll armies of Russia’s Internet Research Agency — key protagonists, along with Cambridge Analytica, in Big Disinfo’s foundational mythology — those numbered by Newitz among the enemy forces seem to consist largely of fellow citizens with internet access. How can the democratic citizenry also itself be the enemy of democracy? The logic seems to be that because the bigotry of some citizens — their not “agree[ing] about who is a person,” as one of Newitz’s interviewees puts it — threatens to disenfranchise vulnerable minorities, some citizens must be “disarmed” (read: censored) to protect democracy.
During the Cold War, the imperative to fight the totalitarian menace led some branches of the American state to pursue covert operations flagrantly at odds with democratic principles. In recent years, a similar dynamic has played out, sometimes resurrecting the old Russian and Chinese threats but with anxiety heavily focused on the dangers posed by Americans who vote the wrong way. Once again, safeguarding democracy, by undermining it if needed, has become the logic of the ruling regime. Much as Linebarger’s and Hunter’s writings shed invaluable light on the raison d’état of the earlier era, Newitz’s book may prove useful to future historians of our era.
Geoff Shullenberger is a writer and academic. He blogs at outsidertheory.com. Follow him on Twitter @daily_barbarian.