“In hybrid warfare, information is the weapon.” — Maajid Nawaz
As covered in depth in my research piece The Invisible Weapon, the US has been the subject of a long-running Russian hybrid warfare campaign, with Israel being targeted as an important pressure point.
Like an onion, this war consists of layers; with only the outer-most layer being visible to the naked eye.
The long and obscure line that’s been drawn from Gaza to UCLA and many US university campuses becomes clearer when you can recognize the tactics at work.
The Israel-Hamas conflict — one very public layer of a much deeper and more complex war — can be viewed through two lenses. The first lens, which everyone can see, is the physical war, taking place on Israel’s borders and directly impacting the livelihoods of the Israeli and Palestinian people. However, this is not how hybrid warfare actually works.
The second lens is the content that is created based on the physical war: images, narratives, social media campaigns, slogans — and what they evoke out of people. This is what fuels the real war, which is the information war. The kinetic war is being fought with soldiers and artillery and occurs in a limited geographical location. The information war is being fought with propaganda and occurs inside people’s minds. It is global.
Weaponized human minds are more powerful than any artillery a military can wield. Propaganda (the invisible weapon), can be used to manipulate a nuclear superpower into destroying itself without requiring a head-on conventional war. This is hybrid warfare in a nutshell.
Young developing minds are the most prone to being captured and manipulated by propaganda. Exhibit A: TikTok’s 1 billion monthly active users, including 150 million Americans, 25% of which are between ages 10- 19. Exhibit B: US university campuses.
Students of history will notice striking parallels between the environment in the US today and those of China during the Cultural Revolution (1966- 76) and Iran during the Iranian Revolution (1979). Both cases were major upheavals of social order, carried out by young people brainwashed by Marxist philosophy and the crowds that followed along without knowing why, that went so far as to actually overthrow the existing political regimes (oh, and they were both Russia-backed).
This is the outcome Putin is aiming for in the US today. Two refreshers from the evidence presented in The Invisible Weapon: 1) Russian intelligence created the Palestine liberation movement in the ’60s, 2) Russian intelligence has created protest movements and riots in the US. American youth wearing keffiyehs and Hamas headbands, waving Hezbollah flags, and physically attacking people is a triumph for Russian propaganda.
Like the youth of China and Iran before them, the radicalized American youth of today have no idea that what they’re actually fighting for is to replace Western democracy with a new regime of totalitarian control and oppression. They know they want to tear the system down, but if successful, what would replace it?
This is why what’s happening on college campuses today — the taking over of public and private spaces, blatant discrimination and intimidation, physical and verbal attacks, riots, and all-out brawls — is important for everyone in the West, and not just Jews who are the most explicit current targets. Ultimately the target is America. The theater you see is not a side-effect of the war. It IS the war.
