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[sources at bottom of article]
Somewhere between Yuri Bezmenov YouTube clips, MAGA Twitter clones, Russian troll farms, and AI-slop Reddit posts, it stopped feeling like “a bunch of separate problems” and started feeling like one organism.
Like a long-evolving field of narratives whose job is to:
- Turn every serious left or egalitarian idea into “foreign subversion,” and
- Keep everyone else so overwhelmed and suspicious that they give up on truth altogether.
This is an attempt to map that field—and then talk about how to live inside it, and to consume without becoming the consumed.
1. The Cold War Ghost: Yuri Bezmenov’s One-Way Frame
Yuri Bezmenov was a Soviet journalist working for the Novosti press agency—basically a propaganda and influence arm tied to the KGB.
In 1970 he defected via India and was resettled in Canada by Western intelligence services under the alias “Tomas Schuman.”
In the ’80s, he became a minor cult figure in anti-communist circles, giving lectures and interviews about “ideological subversion.” His core model, repeated in lectures and in Love Letter to America, was a four-stage process: demoralization (15–20 years), destabilization, crisis, normalization.
The model is simple and sticky:
All your social turmoil—student protests, civil rights movements, anti-war activism, ideological confusion—is not about real grievances. It’s a long-term Soviet psyop breaking down the West from within.
He does not seriously engage Marx as an economist, or the idea that people might have legitimate reasons to criticize capitalism, racism, or US foreign policy. All of that is just “active measures.”
And that’s the important part:
- It’s less a description of reality and more a filter.
- Once you install it, anything that looks like left critique gets filed under “enemy operation,” not “maybe they have a point.”
Decades later, the same clips get recirculated on YouTube, TikTok, and right-wing substack posts as proof that all progressive politics = KGB brainwashing.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War even used his 1984 interview in its teaser trailer, turning his rhetoric into AAA marketing aesthetic.
The content is Cold War; the frame is timeless:
“If it’s egalitarian, structural, or redistributive, it’s probably subversion.”
That frame survives long after the USSR.
2. The Botnet Era: From KGB Fables to Russian Troll Farms
Fast forward.
Whatever you think about how effective it was, multiple institutions converged on the same basic conclusion:
- The US intelligence community’s 2017 assessment, later reviewed by both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA again in 2025, found that Russia ran an influence campaign in 2016 to undermine faith in US democracy, damage Hillary Clinton, and help Donald Trump.
- The Mueller investigation and later congressional work detailed how the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and other Russian-linked actors operated troll farms and fake accounts, staging rallies and flooding Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with divisive content.
- Academic studies found tens of millions of US users were potentially exposed to IRA content, with exposure concentrated among heavy partisans.
So we do, in fact, have:
- A state actor that runs industrial-scale trolling,
- A domestic movement (MAGA) already primed to see itself as the only “real America,”
- And a decades-old Bezmenov filter that teaches people: “If anyone criticizes this arrangement, they’re probably a foreign agent.”
Forget the conspiratorial glue between those pieces. They are systemically and structurally aligned:
- The old narrative says: the left is foreign subversion.
- The new campaigns pump out content that makes left or even centrist elites look corrupt, deranged, or treasonous.
- Platform algorithms boost emotionally charged, identity-loaded content regardless of origin.
It feels like one creature because, in effect, it is—a memetic ecosystem whose reward function is: keep egalitarian thought permanently discredited and keep everyone else confused and angry.
Cui bono?
A particular nation-state?
No.
The wealthy and their black-boxed internal systems of dynastic privelege which are becoming more and more publicly exposed as the moments crawl forward.
3. AI Slop and the Collapse of Trust
Then we add AI to the mix.
On Reddit, mods in big subs like r/AmITheAsshole say that a large share of posts are now AI-generated or AI-polished “slop”: ragebait conflicts designed to juice karma and engagement. Some moderators estimate up to half of posts are touched by AI in some way.
The details matter:
- The content often targets minorities—trans people, queer folks, Black people, women—with exaggerated scenarios built to make them look unreasonable or monstrous.
- Even when a post isn’t AI, the suspicion that it might be AI already corrodes trust. People no longer know if they’re interacting with actual humans.
Mods describe feeling like “one guy standing in a field against a tidal wave”—because generating junk is cheap but verifying reality is expensive.
Over on X, you have a different but related problem. The platform is flooded with bots and anonymous ideological accounts, while the owner can literally override his in-house LLM’s answer to “what’s the greatest threat to Western civilization” from “misinformation and disinformation” to his preferred talking point about “sub-replacement fertility.”
The meta-problem:
Even the instruments we use to make sense of the mess (feeds, chatbots, “about this account” panels) are under ideological and economic pressure.
Add Cloudflare-style outages—where one company’s misconfiguration can temporarily knock chunks of the web offline—and you get a picture of infrastructure that is both centralized and fragile.
All of this is perfect oxygen for that meme organism:
- Bots and AI slop produce endless noise.
- Old Bezmenov-style narratives provide an easy explanation: “See? Everything they say is psyops.”
- Actual foreign and domestic operators surf that confusion.
4. The Memetic Leviathan, in Plain Language
Let’s give the thing a working name: the Subversion Field.
It’s not one person. It’s a pattern made of:
- Cold War anti-left narratives that treat every critique of capitalism or US power as “enemy action,”
- State-backed disinfo campaigns, especially from Russia, that piggyback on and amplify those narratives,
- Domestic movements (MAGA, etc.) that benefit politically from paranoia about “internal enemies,”
- Platforms and AI systems whose business model is engagement, not truth.
Together, they behave like a living system. Roughly:
- Intellectual immune system
- Any attempt to talk about systemic injustice, class, race, empire gets tagged as “Communist subversion,” “globalist plot,” or “woke brainwashing.”
- The content is never argued with on its merits; it’s dismissed as contaminated.
- Noise and exhaustion
- Troll farms, botnets, and now generative AI flood the zone with plausible nonsense.
- Moderators, journalists, and ordinary people get burned out trying to debunk or verify things.
- Self-sealing confusion
- When institutions do call out real interference (e.g., 2016), their findings get framed as another psyop—“deep state,” “Russia hoax,” etc., despite multiple bipartisan investigations affirming the core facts.
- Profitable polarization
- As long as people are emotionally triggered, constantly scrolling, and convinced that half the country is brainwashed, the ad money flows and nobody has energy left for structural fixes.
From a Gnostic angle, it’s classic Demiurge behavior:
Use confusion and projection to keep souls from noticing the actual structure of the cage.
From an ontological-math angle, it’s a giant, self-updating information gradient that rewards low-effort outrage and punishes high-effort clarity.
5. How Do We Move Forward Personally?
This is the part you actually have control over: how your own monad interacts with the field.
Here’s a practical stack.
5.1. Frame literacy
When you encounter political content, don’t just ask “Is this true?”
First ask: “What frame is this smuggling in?”
Bezmenov-style frame:
“Any left / egalitarian idea is foreign subversion, not a response to real conditions.”
Reverse frame you also want to avoid:
“Any concern about foreign influence is just establishment hysteria.”
Both are self-sealing. Both shut down thinking.
Instead, practice:
- “Some left ideas are good, some are terrible; some foreign ops are real, some are exaggerated; now let’s check what’s what.”
That sounds basic, but our collective pattern recognition has been gas-lit into some kind of cultural neurosis verging on the postmodern and psychotic. Online it’s already a heresy.
5.2. Slow channels > slop channels
You can’t fix Reddit or X, but you can change the ratio:
- More books, long essays, podcasts with transcripts, and weird blogs.
- Less “infinite scroll” where you have zero context for who is speaking and why.
It’s literally a bandwidth choice: do you want your mind tuned by things optimized for understanding, or by things optimized for time-on-site?
5.3. Multi-source by default
Steal a move from the Register’s advice: treat wild claims as hypotheses to test, not as instant beliefs.
Basic pattern:
- What is being claimed?
- Who benefits if I believe this?
- Can I find at least two independent sources that aren’t clearly copying each other?
- Is there a reputable outlet, court record, or primary document that touches this?
And no, do not “trust institutions blindly.”
Triangulate the least degraded signals.
5.4. Treat your attention as sacred fuel
Your attention is basically your monadic output.
Don’t feed it to slop if you can help it.
Concrete moves:
- Hard caps on doomscroll time.
- Deliberate “offline” or “off-feed” windows where your brain only consumes things with names and authors.
- Small communities (Discords, forums, game servers, inclusive and supportive fandoms, etc) where you actually know who you’re talking to.
You won’t escape the organism, but you can lower its coupling to your nervous system.
6. How Do We Move Forward Culturally?
You’re one monad. But you’re not alone in this hell arcade. Some larger levers are worth naming.
6.1. Platforms: change the physics, not just add labels
If we ever get serious about this, platform physics has to shift:
- More friction for mass-produced accounts and political ads;
- Better provenance tools (who is funding this? how old is this account? where is it posting from?);
- Support for slower, thread-based discussion instead of pure viral metrics.
We already see small hints:
Twitter’s “about this account” panels,
Reddit’s spam takedowns,
Cloudflare blocking huge waves of AI scraping requests…
But it’s all just a bunch of back-asswards patchwork.
The Leviathan wins when everything is real-time, contextless, and engagement-ranked.
6.2. Education: teach the Bezmenov pattern and its misuse
Honestly, every media-literacy class should show:
- A chunk of Bezmenov’s lecture on “demoralization,”
- A brief on actual KGB/Soviet active measures,
- A walk-through of how his frame is now weaponized by people who want to dismiss all left critique as psyops,
- A parallel walkthrough of modern Russian troll operations and domestic disinfo.
Not to say “never worry about subversion” or “everything is subversion,” but:
“Here are the tools. Here are the ways they get turned into excuses to stop thinking.”
Teach kids how to spot frames, not just “fake news.”
6.3. Support intentional small worlds
The UC piece on gaming culture is the clearest example of what it looks like when we design micro-worlds on purpose:
- The same kind of games that are hellscapes of misogyny and racism online can, in a prison context, become rituals of de-escalation and healing when they’re structured as shared, safe spaces.University of California
Translate that to the net:
- Niche forums, co-ops, carefully moderated communities, personal sites, even resurrected old games with fan-run servers…
- Intentional worlds where you can practice better information hygiene and better culture.
The big feeds aren’t going away now that the digital space is self-perpuating.
But that’s more reason to carve your own space and protect it against the force of relentless replication itself.
7. There is No Grand Finale
There’s no clean ending where we “defeat psyops” and ride into the sunset.
The Subversion Field is what you get when:
- A superpower spends decades doing covert influence operations,
- Its enemy spends decades building anti-communist mythology,
- The internet wires the world together,
- And ad-driven platforms discover that outrage is rocket fuel.
What we can do is:
- Refuse totalizing frames (“all left ideas are psyops” / “all foreign influence is fake news”),
- Guard our attention like it’s actual energy,
- Build and join small, high-quality spaces that aren’t slop-driven,
- And keep mapping the organism honestly, even when that map is uncomfortable for everyone’s favorite tribe.
The point isn’t to become the one person who finally sees through everything.
The point is to become slightly harder to program—and to build cultures where that’s normal.
Sources
- Kat Tenbarge, “AI Slop Is Ruining Reddit for Everyone,” Wired, Dec 5, 2025.
- Anna Brining, “Bots, bias, and bunk: How to tell what’s real on the net,” The Register, Dec 5, 2025.
- Hadlee Simons, “Cloudflare took down large swathes of the internet… again,” Android Authority, Dec 5, 2025.
- UC Irvine / University of California, “From toxicity to healing: Changing the culture of online gaming,” 2024.
- “Yuri Bezmenov,” Wikipedia entry (accessed Dec 2025).
- “Chaos Agent: Yuri Bezmenov,” University of Toronto Libraries exhibit.
- Yuri Bezmenov, “Soviet Ideological Subversion of America in Four Stages,” lecture transcripts and recordings.
- U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, “Russian Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” and related releases.
- CIA review and Senate Intelligence Committee reports on the 2016 Russian interference assessment.
- Chris Bail et al., “Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency’s impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017,” PNAS, 2020.
-BoloSolo
Gnosis Under Fire 
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