From the CIA’s MKUltra to Britain’s COVID fear tactics, governments have spent decades perfecting psychological operations against their own people.
Surveying the battlefield
For thousands of years, military strategists have understood that an army’s success often depends not on its size or even on its armaments but on its knowledge of the opponent.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
It follows, then, that the success of the globalists in their fifth-generation war on us all depends on their knowledge of humanity itself.
What makes people tick? What motivates and demotivates them? What stimuli do they respond to, and in what way do they respond?
From the viewpoint of those wishing to manipulate, control and subdue humanity, the knowledge of the human mind that can be gleaned from the answers to these questions is the most prized knowledge of all.
So, it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that not only scientific researchers but military planners and government officials have spent centuries trying to better understand humans and their behaviors – and, more importantly, how to mold, influence, shape, or outright control those behaviors.
Everyone knows about Ivan Pavlov’s experiments in conditioning. Any high schooler could tell you how Pavlov was able to condition dogs to salivate upon hearing the ringing of a dinner bell.
But how many know that Pavlov’s research didn’t end with his observation of canines? That he next began duplicating his experiments on human subjects? That those human experiments saw Pavlov and his protégé, Nikoli Krasnogorsky, scooping orphans off the streets, drugging them, surgically fitting them with salivation monitors and force-feeding them food so that these children, like Pavlov’s dogs, could be trained to salivate on command?
How many are familiar with the experimenters who followed in Pavlov’s footsteps? How many have seen the footage of John B. Watson’s “Little Albert” experiments, where the psychologist deliberately traumatized an 11-month-old baby in an attempt to refine the techniques of conditioning humans?
How many have read Watson himself bragging that “[a]fter conditioning, even the sight of the long whiskers of a Santa Claus mask sends the youngster scuttling away, crying and shaking his head from side to side”?
Source: Psychological care of infant and child by John B. Watson
How many have read Skinner’s Walden Two, in which he proposes a scheme for creating a utopian society by conditioning children from birth to assume specific roles in society?
By this point, it’s fairly common knowledge that the CIA conducted mind control experiments like Project MKUltra, using operatives like Sidney Gottlieb and Dr. Ewan Cameron to administer LSD to unwitting subjects and conduct other ghoulish experiments in mental manipulation. But how many have heard of MKSearch or MKChickwit or MKOften or any of the other spin-offs of this nightmarish research?
How many know these experiments “were designed to destabilize human personality by creating behavior disturbances, altered sex patterns, aberrant behavior using sensory deprivation and various powerful stress-producing chemicals, and mind-altering substances” and were carried out on so-called “expendables” – i.e., “people whose death or disappearance would arouse no suspicion”?
And how many are aware that Chisholm’s call to action was heeded by men like British military psychiatrist Colonel John Rawlings Rees, the first president of Chisholm’s World Federation of Mental Health and chair of the infamous Tavistock Institute from 1933 to 1947?
How many know the story of how Dr. Jim Mitchell – a military retiree and psychologist who had contracted to provide training services to the CIA – took the findings of Dr. Martin Seligman on the psychological phenomenon of “learned helplessness” and weaponized them for the CIA in the service of the agency’s post-9/11 illegal torture program?
Whether the general public is aware of this documented history or not, the record shows that the last 125 years of research into the human psyche has been conducted – or at least weaponized – by Machiavellian manipulators and secret schemers whose intent is to socially engineer the masses.
And, as the science of the mind progresses in the 21st century, these social engineering schemes are only getting more effective.
The information war
The alternative media has certainly had cause to note that we here in the 21st century are the (largely unwitting) targets of a large-scale information war. This war is being waged upon us largely (though not exclusively) by our own governments.
Occasionally, stories of some of the campaigns in this war break through the information blockade, and the public catches a glimpse of the battle that is being waged against them on all fronts.
Bemused Canadians, for example, were able to read about the Canadian military’s bizarre “wolf letter” psyop in the pages of The Ottawa Citizen back in 2021. But any concerns that might have been raised by this psyop and its wild story of forged government letters and recorded wolf noises were soon quelled by the usual establishment lapdog journalists.
The whole thing, we were told, was caused by “a handful of military reservists testing psychological tactics at a weekend exercise” and “new control measures are now in place to ensure psychological operation exercises and influence activities do not reach unintended audiences” – so, obviously there’s nothing more to worry about!
Residents of the U.K., meanwhile, got their own glimpse of the infowar in 2021 when members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) – a group providing “independent, expert, social and behavioural science advice” to the U.K. government – admitted they were guilty of “using fear as a means of control.”
Tasked with providing insight on how to make Britons compliant with their government’s lockdown, social distancing, masking, and other restrictions at the beginning of the scamdemic, the SPI-B experts urged the government to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” from COVID-19. Multiple members of the SPI-B team later expressed regret about the scheme, calling it “totalitarian” and unethical.
One SPI-B member confessed: “You could call psychology ‘mind control.’ That’s what we do.”
Another put it even more bluntly: “Without a vaccine, psychology is your main weapon … Psychology has had a really good epidemic, actually.”
But to the extent that these operations ever come to public light, it is almost always in disconnected and decontextualized stories like these. Those Canadians who learned about the “wolf letter” psyop, for example, likely never read about the SPI-B scamdemic psyop, let alone connected the events together as evidence of the all-out infowar.
In recent years, however, the existence of the infowar has not only become undeniable. It is undenied.
The cognitive domain of the information battlespace
After detailing the usual examples of the scourge of “misinformation” – i.e., observations that erode public faith in “democratic institutions, journalism and science” – the article then reports uncritically on new techniques that are being developed to trick the public into once again trusting these demonstrably untrustworthy institutions:
New findings from university researchers and Google, however, reveal that one of the most promising responses to misinformation may also be one of the simplest.
In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, the researchers detail how short online videos that teach basic critical thinking skills can make people better able to resist misinformation.
The researchers created a series of videos similar to a public service announcement that focused on specific misinformation techniques – characteristics seen in many common false claims that include emotionally charged language, personal attacks or false comparisons between two unrelated items.
Researchers then gave people a series of claims and found that those who watched the videos were significantly better at distinguishing false information from accurate information.
Although research like that touted by the AP is ostensibly civilian in nature, the fact that this information campaign is part of a literal military battle that is being waged against us is now starting to be admitted, as well.
In 2023, for example, the Japanese military officially added the “cognitive domain” as the latest new battle domain added to Japan’s National Defense Program Guideline. In addition to the traditional domains of territorial land, water, and airspace, and to newly added domains like space, cyberspace, and the electrogmagnetic domain, Japan’s defense authorities now claim the cognitive space as part of their remit.
The building of such cognitive capability would also be written into the National Security Strategy, one of the three major diplomatic and security documents to be amended before the end of 2022, VOA Chinese reported, citing the theory that the Japanese defense authorities and the Self-Defense Force attach great importance to the “misinformation” released by Russia and China, consider that information spread in the Chinese language is a global trend and that cognitive warfare by the island of Taiwan against the Chinese mainland provides valuable experience for research and study.
[…]
Analysts said that cognitive warfare is a combination of digital information, media and spy technology that leads public opinion to extremes in order to affect the basis of diplomacy between countries and to realize the goals of political manipulation, citing the U.S.’ infamous “peaceful transfer of power” strategy in other countries as an example.
The recognition of the “cognitive domain” as a literal battlefield is not limited to the Japanese defense forces, however.
In 2019, the Chinese State Council Information Office released a white paper on “China’s National Defense in the New Era,” arguing that “[w]ar is evolving in form towards informationized [sic] warfare, and intelligent warfare is on the horizon.”
In 2022, Motohiro Tsuchiya, a professor at Keio University, wrote an article on “Governing Cognitive Warfare” for Governing the Global Commons: Challenges and Opportunities for US-Japan Cooperation (a publication of the German Marshall Fund of the United States!) in which he warned that the threat of “intelligentized warfare” by China and other U.S. State Department bogeymen necessitated U.S. cooperation to “create and promote rules and norms that can effectively govern cyberwarfare.”
And, perhaps inevitably, it wasn’t long before it was discovered that the real threat in this new “cognitive domain” isn’t the ChiComs or the CRINKs or any other outside force, but… *drumroll, please*… online conspiracy theorists!
And what “conspiracy theories” does Nagasako cite in her piece? That there exists a “deep state” over and above the surface-level government, that the COVID vaccines were harmful, that the U.S. has conducted biological weapons research in Ukraine in recent years… you know, the usual harebrained ideas that only kooky conspiracy realists would even entertain.
Yes, for those who haven’t received the memo yet: there most certainly is a war for your mind. It certainly is taking place right now. It is being waged by militaries around the world. The target of these wars is, more often than not, these very militaries’ fellow countrymen.
To those who are just waking up to this war, you have my deepest sympathy. Realizing that you are a target in a battle you didn’t even know you were fighting in a “cognitive domain” you never even knew existed must be wildly disorienting, to say the least.
But here’s the bad news: new technologies are being developed that will make all of this history – from Pavlov to Skinner to Mitchell to SPI-B – and all of these secret operations – from MKUltra to MKChickwit – and all of these military campaigns – from Chisholm and Rees and the machinations of the Tavistock minions to the ChiComs and the Japanese and the development of cognitive warfare – seem like small potatoes.
As we shall see in a follow-up article, the technology to rewire the brain – quite literally – is already being tested and deployed. And, once these technologies are ready to be unleashed on the public, they may bring the age-old dream of the dictators for total domination of the human population to reality.
Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.
When I came under fire, no one in Canada had my back. It was U.S. groups that stepped up. That says a lot about the state of our institutions
It’s been a busy few weeks in Anglosphere politics. Canada and Australia both held federal elections, while in England, voters went to the polls for local
races and a high-stakes parliamentary byelection.
The campaigns—and their results—couldn’t have been more different. In Canada and Australia, incumbent left-leaning governments shaped their
campaigns around external threats, particularly U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs. They portrayed these as “existential threats” to national
sovereignty, crowding out debate on urgent domestic issues like housing, affordability and migration.
But English voters weren’t interested in fear campaigns. Instead, they used the opportunity to send a clear message of frustration with their own political class, punishing both the stumbling Labour government and the disoriented Conservatives.
Across local councils and mayoral races, the upstart Reform Party, a populist, centre-right movement, swept aside the traditional parties. Reform captured more than 30 per cent of the vote, winning 677 council seats and control of 10 of the 23 contested councils. The Conservatives collapsed, losing 674 seats, Labour dropped 187, and the Lib Dems gained 163. In the first parliamentary byelection since the 2024 national vote, a supposedly safe Labour seat—Runcorn and Helsby—flipped to Reform by just six votes.
These results reveal more than political turbulence. They expose important differences in political culture. British voters, with their long democratic tradition and broader economy, proved more resistant to fear-driven narratives centred on U.S. politics. Canada and Australia, more economically dependent and less institutionally resilient, were more vulnerable to manipulation by politicians exploiting insecurity and simplistic caricatures of American threats.
The cost of this vulnerability is domestic neglect. In Canada, conversations about civil liberties, housing, immigration and cost-of-living pressures, especially on younger Canadians, were largely sidelined.
This failure isn’t abstract. I experienced it firsthand.
In 2022, I was appointed chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission. Soon after, a small but vocal activist group targeted me with allegations of Islamophobia and racism, based on a misrepresentation of a 2009 academic article I wrote on political theology. Canadian institutions that should have stood for due process and free expression remained silent.
Support only arrived once the story caught the attention of American organizations. Groups like the Middle East Forum, the Clarity Coalition, the
National Association of Scholars and Law & Liberty offered platforms for me to speak, publish and respond. Only then did some Canadian outlets take notice.
At the heart of this silence was a deeper issue: Canada lacked the civic infrastructure to defend free speech, academic freedom and open debate,
especially when they challenge prevailing orthodoxies.
That, thankfully, may be starting to change.
Since my dismissal, several new organizations have emerged. The Clarity Coalition, an alliance of Muslims, ex-Muslims and allies committed to liberal
democracy, launched a Canadian chapter, which I now co-chair with Yasmine Mohammed. In 2024, it joined others to form the Alliance of Canadians
Combating Antisemitism. And earlier this year, lawyer Lisa Bildy, who represented the late Richard Bilkszto, a Toronto principal targeted in a
cancellation campaign, founded a Canadian chapter of the Free Speech Union.
These developments mark a long-overdue pushback. For the first time in years, Canadian groups are coalescing around foundational values and offering critical support to individuals willing to challenge entrenched activist networks. Still, the fight is uphill. These organizations are new, their resources are limited and the pressure is intense.
In my own case, my legal counsel has led a defamation suit against several of the groups that destroyed my reputation and cost me my position. Legal action is costly, and so far, the only significant financial support I’ve received has come from the Lawfare Project, a New York-based legal defence group founded by a Canadian.
That in itself says a great deal.
There are signs of momentum. Muslims Facing Tomorrow, a Canadian group led by the courageous Raheel Raza, recently issued a public statement supporting my legal action and called on Alberta Justice Minister Mickey Amery to reinstate me as chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission.
If that happens, my first act would be to establish an advisory council on free speech and academic freedom, because no society can remain democratic if it doesn’t defend its core values.
Whether Alberta’s government will act remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: if Canada wants to protect its democratic soul, it must stop relying on
others for courage and start standing up for its principles at home.
Collin May is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a lawyer, and Adjunct Lecturer in Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary, with degrees in law (Dalhousie University), a Masters in Theological Studies (Harvard) and a Diplome d’etudes approfondies (Ecole des hautes etudes, Paris).
Troy Media empowers Canadian community news outlets by providing independent, insightful analysis and commentary. Our mission is to support local media in helping Canadians stay informed and engaged by delivering reliable content that strengthens community connections and deepens understanding across the country.
A pensioner faced a raid not for plotting mayhem, but for posting a sarcastic tweet fewer than 30 people saw
It takes a very special kind of madness to send six baton-wielding, pepper-spray-toting police officers to arrest a 71-year-old man in his slippers. But here we are: welcome to Britain 2025, where tweeting the wrong opinion is treated with the same urgency as a hostage situation in Croydon.
Julian Foulkes, once a proud servant of law and order, now finds himself on the receiving end of what can only be described as a full-scale, Kafkaesque raid. His crime? Not drug-dealing, not fraud, not even refusing to pay the TV license. No, Julian questioned a pro-Palestinian demonstrator on X. Because apparently, free speech is now a limited-time offer.
The Curious Case of the Grocery List
The story began in Gillingham when Kent Police decided to deploy what must be half their annual budget to storm the Foulkes residence. Six officers with batons barged into the home of a pensioner who’s spent a decade in service to the very same force now treating him like the Unabomber.
And what high-level contraband did they uncover in this den of danger? Books. Literature. And not just any literature; “very Brexity things,” according to bodycam footage obtained by The Telegraph. One can only imagine the horror. Perhaps a Nigel Farage biography lying next to a battered copy of The Spectator. It’s practically a manifesto.
But wait, it gets better. A shopping list, penned by Julian’s wife (a hairdresser, no less), featured such ominous items as bleach, aluminum foil, and gloves. For those keeping score at home, that’s also the standard toolkit of anyone doing household chores or dyeing hair. But to Kent’s finest, it must have looked like the recipe for domestic terrorism. You half expect them to have called in MI5 to decipher the coded significance of “toilet paper x2.”
Now, this could all be darkly amusing if it weren’t also painfully cruel. While Kent’s squad of crime-fighting intellects were turning over Julian’s life like a garage sale, they rummaged through deeply personal mementos from his daughter’s funeral. Francesca, tragically killed by a drunk driver in Ibiza 15 years ago, had her memory poked through as if it were a bag of potato chips.
An officer was heard stating: “Ah. That’s sad,” before carrying on like she was flicking through junk mail.
After the shakedown came the cell. Eight hours locked up like a mob boss, while the state decided whether tweeting concern about a reported rise in antisemitism qualified as incitement or merely the audacity of having an opinion. It’s hard to say what’s more insulting; the arrest or the mind-numbing absurdity of it all.
A Nation Eating Its Own
Now, let’s not kid ourselves. This isn’t just a Kent problem. This is a snapshot of a country in full bureaucratic freefall. We’ve reached a point where police forces, rather than chasing burglars or catching knife-wielding lunatics, are now busy raiding the homes of retirees over innocuous social media posts.
Julian Foulkes is not a revolutionary. He’s not leading rallies, he’s not printing manifestos in his shed, and he’s certainly not strapping himself to the gates of Parliament. He’s a retired cop who owns a few books, uses X to vent the occasional opinion, and wants to visit his daughter in Australia without being flagged at passport control like he’s smuggling plutonium.
But after hours of interrogation for what the police grandly labeled malicious communication, Foulkes accepted a caution. Not because he believed he’d done anything wrong, he hadn’t, but because the alternative might have been even more grotesque. A criminal conviction. Which, for a man with family overseas, could turn his trips to Heathrow into a permanent no-fly zone.
“My life wouldn’t be worth living if I couldn’t see her. At the time, I believed a caution wouldn’t affect travel, but a conviction definitely would,” he said about being able to visit his daughter.
“That’s about the level of extremist I am… a few Douglas Murray books and some on Brexit.”
He reads. Possibly even thinks. The horror.
The Apology That Barely Was
Kent Police did what all institutions do when caught with their pants around their ankles. They mumbled something vaguely resembling an apology. They admitted the caution had been a mistake and removed it from his record.
And while that’s nice, it rather misses the point. Because they’d already sent a message, loud and clear: Think the wrong thing, tweet the wrong joke, and we might just pay you a visit. It’s the sort of behavior you’d expect in some authoritarian state where elections are won with 98 percent of the vote and the only available television channel is state news. Not the Home Counties.
Foulkes, for his part, hasn’t gone quietly.
“I saw Starmer in the White House telling Trump we’ve had [free speech] in the UK for a very long time, and I thought, ‘Yeah, right.’ We can see what’s really going on.”
He’s not wrong. For a nation so smug about its democratic values, Britain seems increasingly allergic to people expressing them.
He goes further, pulling no punches about the direction his former profession has taken.
“I’d never experienced anything like this” during his time on the force, he said, before diagnosing the whole debacle as a symptom of the “woke mind virus” infecting everything, including the police.
The Tweet That Triggered the Avalanche
The whole affair kicked off in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, a day of bloodshed that left 1,200 dead and more than 250 taken hostage. The shockwaves weren’t limited to the Middle East. They rattled through Europe, igniting a fresh wave of pro-Palestinian marches across the continent.
Foulkes, like many watching the news, saw a video of a mob in Dagestan storming an airport reportedly to find Jewish arrivals.
So, when he saw a post from an account called Mr Ethical; who, with all the irony the internet can muster, threatened legal action if branded an antisemite, Foulkes couldn’t help himself. He replied:
“One step away from storming Heathrow looking for Jewish arrivals….”
That was it. One tweet. One line. No threats. No calls to violence.
Foulkes maintains he’d never interacted with the account before. There was no feud, no history. His post had fewer than 30 views.
And yet, within days, he had six police officers treating his home like a crime scene.
What does this tell us? That we’ve entered an era where satire is indistinguishable from evidence. Where sarcasm is treated like sedition. And where a retired constable who’s paid his dues can still find himself pulled into the maw of state-sanctioned nonsense for a tweet.
So yes, the caution’s gone, wiped clean like it never happened. But the message is still smoldering in the ashtray: think twice before you speak, and maybe don’t speak at all if your bookshelf includes anything more provocative than a Gordon Ramsay cookbook. Because in modern Britain, it’s not always the rapists and murderers who get doorstepped, it’s pensioners with opinions. And if that’s where we’ve landed, then the only thing truly extreme is how far the country’s gone off the rails.
