Storming The Gates
Part 2: Engineered Reality
This is a multipart essay. Previously: Part One.
2. Engineered Reality
We live in an age of information silos and psyops, a reality that grows clearer with each new crisis. Not long ago, I stood in front of students teaching media literacy, unaware that even though I was more media-savvy than most, I was still the victim of so many false narratives fed to me by dishonest sources. “All media has a bias; it’s a lie to say otherwise,” I told my students but it wasn’t until the Biden administration pushed its allies in corporate media so far as to become farcical that I truly began to grapple with just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
The fabled “red pill” (a reference to the choice Morpheus offers Neo in The Matrix to awaken from a false reality) that so many independents and right-wingers talk about today isn’t about adopting conservative views or opinions; rather, it’s about waking up to your own sovereignty. Once you do this, you’ll start to question every mainstream narrative. It’s a maddening enterprise and it spins many into chaos, but for those of us who survive, we develop a grounded distrust of nearly every institution that we once believed told us the truth.
These false narratives are psyops, engineered realities, that have been working on us since the day we were born.
Psyops work in many deep and complex ways, but one of the most common tactics they use is to create confusion around common language so that we lose the ability to speak clearly about a problem at hand.
Here is just one example: it’s now common for medical offices to use phrases like “birthing person,” which is meant to obscure the hard-wired biological fact that only humans of the female sex give birth. This is obvious to rational people but simple questions like “can men give birth” or “what is a woman” have recently stumped both doctors and supreme court justices alike before Congress.
Of course only females give birth, but if we assert this indisputable fact as truth then slogans like “trans women are women” fall apart. Radical ideology, like that of gender ideology, cannot withstand such scrutiny so immune responses like obscuring language are deployed—reinforced by media, colleges, HR departments, nonprofit foundations and think-tanks, and online mobs.
In such a world, any “cis gendered” individual who makes a common sense statement like “only women can give birth” becomes “transphobic” whether they are or not. Few want to be on the wrong side of the next great civil rights movement, and most of us can’t afford to jeopardize our jobs and reputations for issues that seem to not directly impact us, so we go along with the lies. We accept the “re-education” seminars from HR. We comply. Yes, Bob from accounting is now Belinda and she always has been.
This example is not meant to open the trans debate in this essay, but rather to provide a clear example of why language matters. The moment we cede ground to terms like “chest feeding,” we open the flood gates. If swimmer Lia Thomas is actually a woman, then any critique of her competing in women’s sports can be dismissed as transphobic. But if you speak honestly about Will Thomas, an unremarkable male swimmer who ‘transitioned’ and then dominated the female category the next year, then the conversation about Will Thomas and the unfairness of him competing in women’s sports becomes clear.
When you control language you not only control what people say, you control how they think. This is why Freedom of Speech is the first of the inalienable rights articulated in the US Constitution; it is also why I am (nearly) a free speech absolutist.
The same linguistic operation at play in the trans examples above is at play with illegal immigration. Perhaps you grew up hearing the 1984 single Illegal Alien by the band Genesis on the radio. It surely didn’t trigger you, did it? That’s because, until recently, the meaning of “illegal alien” was clear–something like: “a person residing in a country without legal authorization, such as through unauthorized entry or overstaying a visa.” The term “illegal alien” was easy to understand.
But today that phrase is considered outdated and offensive, and the words that have replaced it are unclear. Since “illegal alien” is now a ‘trigger word’, cut from the AP style guide in 2013, it has disappeared from corporate media and is now on the invisible list of words and phrases wielded by those who use censorship as a tool for power. Political correctness asserts that illegal aliens might be referred to as any of the following terms: undocumented immigrant, unauthorized immigrants, undocumented noncitizens, noncitizens, or migrants. These words are not intended to describe but rather to obfuscate meaning. If no human is illegal then the line that differentiates a “migrant” and an “immigrant” is confusing.
In fact, the distinctions between the two very different groups of people in our country disappears completely. “No human is illegal” and “we are a nation of immigrants” spoken in the same sentence erases legal immigrants completely. This combination of phrases, heard routinely in discourse around immigration, omits so much. We are a nation of immigrants, yes, but those immigrants came here through a legal vetting and naturalization process. “Migrants” did not. It’s not clear to that casual listener that a “migrant” is just an illegal alien with no legal right to be in our country, period.
For the first century of our nation’s history immigration was largely unrestricted because we needed bodies on the frontier, but by 1882 restrictions were put in place to discern who had the right to become a US citizen and who would be denied citizenship. The Immigration Act of 1882 excluded convicts, lunatics, and paupers; an 1891 expansion added polygamists and the diseased to this list. By the start of the 20th century a framework for deportation was in place. By 1917 illiteracy tests were imposed, and by 1921 immigration was capped at 3% of each nationality’s 1910 U.S. census count. This was also the decade where Immigration and Border Control was formalized as an office of the federal government.
So in broad strokes the first 100 years of our history allowed unrestricted migration, but for the last century and a half the United States has had a tightly controlled, if imperfect, legal immigration and naturalization process. Never in the lifetime of anyone currently living would rational US citizens advocate for unvetted immigration or open borders, but all of that changed this decade when the Democratic Party under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris turned this ludicrous idea into policy. The turmoil we see in the United States today, in 2026, is a direct consequence of these disastrous policies. The turmoil we have seen in the past year in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, and other “sanctuary cities” is solely the fault of Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris.
In the 1960s, the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education created tension as some Southern states refused to integrate schools. In 1962 Alabama Governor George Wallace famously tried to block two black students from registering at the University of Alabama. As the situation intensified, President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and dispersed them to the University to enforce desegregation. This event showed that the Federal government could lawfully use military force to uphold federal law even when states refused to do so. Today, few would argue that Kennedy’s use of force to bring segregation to an end was wrong. The left celebrated this historic action as a grand victory in the Civil Rights Movement.
Yet today, the same Left, refuses to acknowledge that ICE officers enforcing federal law are simply doing what democracy demands as a result of the 2024 election. Of all the promises Trump made in that election cycle, mass deportations and closing the border were the issues that had the highest approval among both the Republicans and Independents who voted for him. As much as the left might hate, or believe they hate, these policies, that they are lawful is irrefutable. (Note: I say “believe they hate” because few of these same people protested President Obama’s mass deportation of 3 million people, 60% of whom had no criminal record other than entering the country illegally, over the eight years of his presidency). “Sanctuary cities” today are as unlawful as segregationist were in the 1960s, yet the left routinely calls the enforcement of these policies “fascist” and the enforcers of these laws “gestapo” and “Nazis.”
Down is up; up is down.
The left has every right to protest and to work through the political system to change federal law should they gain the political capital to do so, but to impede lawful, active law enforcement operations is illegal. If Kennedy was correct to force desegregation in the 1960s, then Trump is equally justified in enforcing federal immigration law in Minneapolis in 2026. That many don’t like it is beside the point.