The Atlantic’s Propaganda Machine

The Anatomy of a Psyops Campaign: How Fear Replaces Thought and Reason.

This essay is a surgical takedown of The Atlantic’s latest propaganda piece—an emotional psyop designed to smear Trump, rewrite reality, and manufacture public obedience. It exposes how fear, identity, archetypes, and narrative inversion are weaponized to control perception and suppress dissent. This is not argument—it is identity coercion, a classic cognitive dissonance weapon.

This Isn’t Journalism—It’s a Psyop

What The Atlantic has produced is not journalism. It’s narrative warfare cloaked in moral theater—an emotional hit job engineered by a magazine owned and operated by billionaire activist Laurene Powell Jobs. Her publication is not a passive observer of the political landscape. It is an active narrative enforcer, deployed to delegitimize Trump and condition the public to accept Democratic rule as a moral imperative.

The timing of the piece is not incidental. It coincides with anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles and uses them not as events to analyze, but as raw material for emotional engineering. The article functions as a psychological operation—using archetypes, tribal identity, emotional scripting, and fear conditioning to override critical thinking. It follows the FATE model of psyops: Focus, Authority, Tribe, Emotion—each one carefully manipulated to push the reader toward emotional compliance and social obedience.

The “Tyrant Test”: Inventing a Moral Frame to Destroy Legitimacy

The Atlantic introduces the so-called “tyrant test”—a fabricated moral standard designed to delegitimize Trump by reframing law enforcement as authoritarian oppression. According to this new doctrine, any use of force against violent protest is a disqualifying act of tyranny. This isn’t journalism. It’s regime propaganda posing as moral reasoning.

This rhetorical setup is historical revisionism wrapped in borrowed gravitas. From Eisenhower in Little Rock to Obama in Ferguson, presidents have deployed federal power to maintain order. The difference? They did it under narratives approved by the Left. The Atlantic’s tyrant test isn’t applied to Democrats. It’s engineered specifically so only Trump fails it.

By front-loading references to Qaddafi, Saddam, and Tiananmen Square, the piece primes the reader emotionally before facts even enter the conversation. It doesn’t prove Trump is a dictator—it conditions the reader to believe he already is. Military enforcement under Trump becomes dictatorship. Under Democrats? It becomes justice.

This is textbook propaganda: frame the criteria of legitimacy so that only your enemy fails the test. The reader isn’t being informed—they’re being manipulated into obedience.

The Real Function of Narrative Inversion: Psychological Capture

The Atlantic doesn’t just invert facts—it inverts morality itself. It transforms border enforcement into fascism, and turns rioters into freedom fighters. This tactic doesn’t persuade—it captures. It exploits emotional reflexes to short-circuit critical thought and forge a psychological bond with the narrative.

This is why the article avoids presenting data, sourcing opposition voices, or detailing the crimes committed during the LA riots. Information breaks the spell. Instead, the reader is flooded with emotional imagery and moral accusations until only one conclusion seems acceptable: Trump is a fascist monster, and resisting him is an act of virtue.

The most insidious technique is narrative inversion. The true instigators of violence are reframed as victims. Those restoring order are cast as aggressors. The piece repeatedly references gulags, secret police, and martial law—triggering deep-seated emotional scripts linked to authoritarian fear. The intent is not to describe reality, but to rewrite it.

But what’s missing? Context. Charges. Facts. Who lit the fires? What crimes were committed? None of it matters. Who funds the protests? Arabella Advisors. ActBlue. Open-borders NGOs. Who benefits? Politicians who convert outrage into votes. Media conglomerates that monetize rage. Billionaires and Big Tech oligarchs terrified of Trump returning power to the people.

That’s not journalism. That’s moral programming. And it works—because the real target isn’t your reason. It’s your identity.

The Blueprint for Control: How Manufactured Outrage Becomes Power

This article isn’t journalism—it’s a tactical document. It incites the emotional response, scripts the enemy, activates tribal loyalty, and lays the foundation for escalation. Manufactured outrage becomes coordinated protest. Coordinated protest becomes sanctioned violence. And that violence becomes a justification for increased censorship, lawfare, and political consolidation.

It’s not just about Trump. It’s about narrative dominance. Whoever controls the frame controls the future. That’s why they lie with such precision—Because the lie is the mechanism by which power is seized and truth erased.

This Is How Scops Work: Timing, Fallacies, and Framing

This article dropped to distract from the riots themselves—and to provide cover for Democratic failures by projecting them onto Trump.

The rhetorical toolkit is a greatest hits list of fallacies:

• Appeal to emotion: Children, fear, outrage

• Straw man: Trump wants to militarize the streets for fun

• False dilemma: Either you oppose Trump or you're a fascist

• Ad hominem: Everyone associated with Trump is a racist far-right radical

• Red herring: Shift from immigration policy to white nationalism

• False equivalence: Democrat rioters and ICE are equally extreme

And of course, frame manipulation: the LA violence becomes mere protest; National Guard deployment becomes dictatorship; criminal enforcement becomes genocide.

The Final Mechanism: Dehumanization as a Tool of Control

The most dangerous propaganda technique of all is dehumanization. The Atlantic doesn’t just disagree with Trump or his supporters—it portrays them as internal enemies, unworthy of rights, legitimacy, or voice. This is not casual rhetoric. It’s the slow erosion of citizenship itself.

Trump is not merely wrong—he’s cast as subhuman, a dictator. ICE agents are no longer officers—they’re “secret police.” Protestors who torch federal property are elevated to moral heroes, while anyone enforcing the law becomes an enemy of the people.

This is how authoritarian regimes condition the masses. Not through facts, but through narrative-based dehumanization. It lays the groundwork for censorship, prosecution, political purges—and worse. Because once someone is framed as a fascist threat, any action against them becomes justified.

The Stakes Are Psychological, Not Just Political

This isn’t a debate over policy—it’s a battle over perception, identity, and control. What The Atlantic executed was not a critique, but a behavioral intervention. It didn’t aim to inform. It aimed to recalibrate your moral compass—away from truth and toward obedience. Trump is a tyrant, and anyone who defends border enforcement, military order, or national sovereignty is part of an emerging fascist regime. This is not analysis. It is emotional priming. The objective is simple: return control to the Democrats in the 2026 midterm elections—by fueling coordinated, nationwide protests they can ride like a manufactured “movement” back into power.

The goal is simple: establish the narrative, suppress dissent, and delegitimize any force—political or cultural—that threatens the failed regime’s return to power. It’s not just Trump they’re after. It’s anyone who refuses to submit to the script.

The following is the full article from The Atlantic—a narrative control piece masquerading as journalism.

California Highway Patrol officers arrest a demonstrator in the overpass of the 101 freeway as protests continue in response to federal immigration operations in Los Angeles on June 10, 2025. (Apu Gomes / AFP / Getty)

The Tyrant Test

A leader who uses military force to suppress his political opposition ought to lose the right to govern.

By Adam Serwer

For as long as I’ve been alive, American presidents have defined tyrants by their willingness to use military force against their own people in reprisal for political opposition. This was a staple of Cold War presidential rhetoric, and it survived long into the War on Terror era.

Ronald Reagan declared in 1981 that “it is dictatorships, not democracies, that need militarism to control their own people and impose their system on others.” His successor, George H. W. Bush, did the same in 1992, talking about American presidents confronting the Warsaw Pact, which had been “lashed together by occupation troops and quisling governments and, when all else failed, the use of tanks against its own people.” Bill Clinton, when justifying strikes against the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 1998, emphasized that Hussein had used his arsenal “against civilians, against a foreign adversary, and even against his own people.” George W. Bush repeated that justification when invading Iraq in 2003, saying that Hussein’s government “practices terror against its own people.” Barack Obama, when intervening in Libya on behalf of rebels fighting Muammar Qaddafi, warned that Qaddafi had said “he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people.”

It would be absurd to say that American presidents have always been principled defenders of freedom and democracy, but their long-shared, bipartisan definition of tyrant is one who oppresses his own. So it’s striking that these warnings about tyrants in distant lands, who were supposedly the opposite of the kind of legitimate, democratic leaders elected in the United States of America, now apply to the sitting U.S. president, Donald Trump. It is a simple but morally powerful formulation: A leader who uses military force to suppress their political opposition forfeits the right to govern. You could call this the “tyrant test,” and Trump is already failing it.

Trump came into office promising to carry out a “mass deportation” of undocumented immigrants. Because of a degraded information environment riddled with right-wing propaganda, many Trump supporters came to think this meant he would target criminals whom the Biden administration allegedly was allowing to rampage freely throughout America. Instead, driven by Stephen Miller, immigration authorities have targeted workers, families, and asylum seekers—people who show up to their ICE appointments—for deportation. Agents have raided schools, workplaces, and homes—masked and out of uniform—methods more akin to secret police than civilian law enforcement in a democracy. Some deportees have been sent to a Gulag in El Salvador, while others have vanished or been expelled to third-party countries where they face dangerous circumstances. Predictably, these heavy-handed tactics have produced a backlash, most extensively in Los Angeles, where the Trump administration has sent detachments of Marines and the National Guard to discourage American citizens from expressing opposition to these methods.

Adam Serwer: The Trump-Trumpist divide

Although there are circumstances where an intervention by the National Guard might be justified, such a decision typically involves the judgment of local authorities—and what’s happening in Los Angeles now is nothing like Arkansas’s school-segregation crisis in 1957, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Guard to protect Black students facing a racist mob trying to prevent them from attending school.

Targeting California is no accident. Republican propaganda consistently paints blue states such as California as unlivable hellholes. Some of the protests have been violent and have given way to vandalism, but not at a level that requires a military deployment, regardless of right-wing propaganda outlets’ best efforts to depict L.A. as a city on the brink of destruction. American service members have been ordered there not to protect their compatriots but to intimidate them at gunpoint for the sin of opposing the president. On Friday, for the first time, U.S. Marines detained a civilian, in apparent violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. The person in question was an Army veteran headed for the Veterans Affairs building in L.A.

The president and many of his prominent supporters seem eager for escalation. Trump has said that Los Angeles has been “invaded and occupied by illegal aliens and criminals,” and that “violent, insurrectionist mobs” have been “swarming and attacking” immigration-enforcement officers. Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X that “insurrectionists carrying foreign flags are attacking immigration enforcement officers, while one-half of America’s political leadership has decided that border enforcement is evil.”

Miller accused L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, who had pointed out that the city had been more peaceful prior to the administration’s response, of “insurrection.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who has been urging Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to use the military to detain American citizens, vowed at a press conference to “liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city”—just moments before federal officers forcibly removed Senator Alex Padilla of California and pushed him to the ground when he tried to ask questions.

Right-wing media, aware that the administration’s actions and rhetoric resemble those of dictatorships, have been telling their audiences that the protests have all been cooked up by Democrats to trap Trump into acting like a dictator—never mind his obvious fondness for dictatorship. “Democrats are causing mayhem in their cities, so when Trump restores order, they can label him a dictator and stir up even more hatred and violence against him,” the Fox News host Jesse Watters said on Monday. “They’re burning their own cities just to prove to their bloodthirsty base that they’re fighting Trump in the streets, burning their own cities for power.” Someone might be bloodthirsty, but it’s not the Democrats.

David A. Graham: The Trump believability gap

If L.A. had been taken over by insurrectionist mobs, the Trump modus operandi would be to pardon them and give them money—though only insurrectionists who try to overthrow the government on Trump’s behalf, of course. Instead, the protests provoked by the administration’s authoritarian tactics appear to be mere pretext for using force against Trump’s political opposition. The L.A. police chief, Jim McDonnell, said the city’s police force could handle the protests without assistance, but such a move would deny Trump his excuse for using the military against Americans who have the temerity to oppose him. This has long been a fantasy of Trump’s—he praised China’s crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protest movement as having “put it down with strength.” Last week, he warned that anyone who protested his wasteful, self-worshipping military parade would be met “with very big force.”

How did Republicans go from condemning leaders who threaten their own citizens to becoming sycophants for one? Here, too, we find a holdover of Cold War rhetoric: the use of Third World to describe multicultural communities such as Los Angeles.

In the 1950s, the terms First World, Second World, and Third World emerged as a means to describe Western-aligned nations, Soviet-aligned governments, and emerging nations not allied with either faction, respectively. Third World soon came to be used as a pejorative term for poor, nonwhite countries—full of human beings who could be considered disposable.

And that’s exactly how Trump officials and their allies are referring to communities such as Los Angeles in order to justify using military force. Last night, following the massive “No Kings” protests across the country, Trump posted on his social network Truth Social that he was directing ICE to “expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities,” which he called “the core of the Democrat Power Center”; he further described immigration as turning America into a “Third World dystopia.”

The post echoed similar language from right-wing-media figures who, last week, began repeating the same rote talking points about the need to ban all “Third World” immigration. The conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk, who spoke at Trump rallies during the 2024 election campaign, displayed on his podcast, as part of an argument for Trump using the military to “take back the streets of LA. Do it and do it fast,” a chart from a white-nationalist website showing the white population of Los Angeles declining. Kirk also made explicit that he wasn’t borrowing just the chart from a white-nationalist website but also its ideological conclusions about the threat that nonwhite people pose. “This is the Great Replacement Theory,” Kirk explained. “Remember we talked about how they want to replace white Anglo-Saxon Christian Protestants with Mexican, Nicaraguans, with El Salvadorians.” The term Anglo-Saxon Christian Protestants is wildly archaic, 1930s racism. What’s next in the Republican-aligned podcast world? Rants about swarthy Sicilians and perfidious Jews?

The increased support Trump received in the 2024 election from nonwhite voters hasn’t altered prominent Trump proponents’ view that America is the white man’s birthright and that all others are merely interlopers. “The deeper goal is to reshape America demographically. It is to make America less white, less European by descent,” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh declared. “You’re not gonna destroy Western civilization just by winning the next midterms or whatever. You destroy it by importing non-Western people.”

Adam Serwer: Trump’s followers are living in a dark fantasy

These ideas weren’t coming from just commentators. Attorney General Pam Bondi said L.A. “looked like a Third World country” on Fox News; Miller posted on X that “huge swaths of the city where I was born now resemble failed third world nations. A ruptured, balkanized society of strangers.” If Los Angeles is “balkanized,” that is because it has a long history of being forcibly segregated by race, starting decades before Miller was born. But here, Miller’s objection is not a call for integration but an expression of rage that the city is less white than it used to be. On Thursday night, Trump said “illegal aliens” were turning America into a “Third World Nation” and declared, “I am reversing the invasion. It’s called remigration,” using a European far-right term for ethnic cleansing of nonwhite immigrants from European countries, regardless of status or citizenship.

The math here doesn’t take much effort. In the view of these officials and commentators, California (and, by extension, America) has been ruined by immigration from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, which is what makes mass deportation and the use of American military force against their own people necessary. As it happens, this coincides rather neatly with Miller’s expressed view that the repeal of racist restrictions on immigration in the 1960s destroyed the country. Both inside and outside the administration, the consensus of prominent Trumpists is that if you are not white, you are a threat to Western civilization. This is how they rationalize Trump failing the tyrant test—the threat of military force is being made against people the administration and its propagandists want you to see as not truly American.

This is how a tyrant thinks. Every dictator who has ever cracked down on political opposition has done so by rendering them internal foreigners in rhetoric and deed, invaders of the body politic who can justly be crushed like insects. Those serving in uniform, military or civilian, should ask themselves whether becoming a tyrant’s instrument against their own communities is what they had in mind when they signed up.