03/08/2025
It Is No Longer a Theory: Joanna Pennyfeather
There’s a saying that when a former defected USSR citizen was asked what the main difference was between the West and USSR, he replied, “In the USSR we knew that the media was lying, but in the West people still believe the media is telling the truth.”
In the current age of misinformation, it’s important to keep this in mind.
The USSR famously had the newspaper Pravda (which means ‘truth’ in Russian), and it’s easy to think that the West is not subject to the same narrative control as the USSR was. However, one only needs to look briefly into Operation Mockingbird to understand that, while the means were different, the goal and desire of narrative control was still the same. Operation Mockingbird was a CIA programme during the Cold War era with the intention to infiltrate media outlets and use journalists as vehicles for state propaganda.
Pravda and Operation Mockingbird belong to a simpler time, when the number of media outlets were considerably fewer and more easy to control.
Of course the USSR eventually fell and Pravda went down along with it, and Operation Mockingbird has, at least officially, been discontinued. But to believe that the governments of the world have given up the idea of having narrative control is naïve.
The purpose of this article is to argue that the only thing that has changed is the tactics; and digital ID, being the newest tactic to regain narrative control, is a reaction to the previous control mechanism, which was to intentionally spread misinformation.
Currently, across the Anglosphere, we are seeing a coordinated rollout of a ‘digital ID’ regime. This is marketed slightly differently depending on the country, but a common refrain we hear from the promoters of digital ID is that it is to “protect the children” from the evils of social media.
To be clear, it has zero to do with protecting the children, and whenever you hear phrases like that, stay alert, because your freedoms are likely about to be stripped away.
In order to explain the reason for the sudden and concerted push for digital ID, we have to go back a bit in time.
Gaining control of, or heavily influencing, the information and narratives used to be much easier. There were far fewer media outlets to control or influence. Back then, the way to assert narrative control was to either outright control the media outlets themselves (like with Pravda) or infiltrate them or pay them off (like Operation Mockingbird).
Control was easy and information flowed in only one direction: from the top down. Gatekeepers controlled the information and thus what you thought. One could argue that this was the central message of Orwell’s 1984. He who controls the information controls what people think and how they feel about things.
As an aside, the book and the excellent documentary, Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky explains this in great detail. Regardless of Chomsky’s current views, Manufacturing Consent remains a very important work and it clearly lays out how it all worked.
However, sometime in the ’90s, something happened: the internet.
The internet was truly a revolution and most importantly it was an informational revolution. It changed everything. It was a challenge to the monopoly on information.
The old problem used to be how to control information, which was largely achieved by influence operations and censorship. But with the internet the battle evolved. No longer did information flow top down, but it flowed between people all over the world, especially with the help of smartphones with access to social media being in everyone’s pockets.
The problem of narrative control was still the same, but the battlefield had changed and so the tactics had to change with it. The new tactic has been one that you have most likely heard a lot about in the recent years: misinformation.
From the governments’ expressed point of view, they want you to believe that there is a lot of misinformation out there and that they are the only truth teller capable of protecting you from going down the rabbit hole. They are the so-called “single source of truth”, as famously expressed by former PM Jacinda Ardern.
The reality of the situation is quite the opposite. The greatest purveyors of misinformation is actually the state itself, by which I mean the government and the shadowy structures that keep it going – primarily its intelligence agencies.
Now, to be clear, when I say that governments are spreaders of misinformation, I mean that in a quite literal sense. Not in the sense that, for instance, the Covid vaccine was erroneously promoted as being “safe and effective”, but rather as a deliberate governmental strategy to push outright falsehoods on people with the clear intention of deceiving them and making truth finding near impossible.
With the internet, information was democratised and governments realised that they couldn’t win the narrative war by censorship alone. There were too many voices – too hard to control. So instead, rather than trying to control information, they set out to destroy all trust in it. They set out to flood the system with so much nonsense – so many contradictions and falsehoods – that the average person would find it damn near impossible to get to the truth and thus would default back to the so called ‘trusted sources’.
Those trusted sources would, of course, be managed, curated and, in many cases, directly influenced by the very same governments and intelligence networks that lost their grip in the first place. In some cases, the influence was quite in the open, as evidenced by the last Labour Government openly paying media outlets taxpayers’ money for pushing certain agendas and talking points.
And so a common way of operating is as follows: allow a forbidden truth to come out in some form, but make sure one or a few provable lies are attached to it. Then when the forbidden truth starts taking hold, get one of the reputable, aka paid-off outlets, to attack not the truth, but the easily proved lie. This guilt-by-association tactic is thus used to disprove everything associated with it, including that which was originally true.
An example of this can be found in Stew Peters’ Died Suddenly from 2022. The main story of the documentary is about embalmers and one embalmer in particular who goes on record, finding big and unusual clots in vaccinated bodies: things they have never seen before. The documentary shows video evidence of this but, and here’s the trick, a few of these video clips were dated before the pandemic.
And so the BBC, a ‘trusted media outlet’, published an article where they stated that Stew Peters “included examples of people supposedly ‘dying suddenly’ from Covid vaccines which were easy to disprove – including clips filmed before the pandemic or before the vaccines were available”.
Mission accomplished and on to the next one.
This is generally a successful tactic that works. But it only works to a point.
The side effect is that some people will actually start believing the falsehoods that were promoted and, once you lose those people, they go down the rabbit hole and are lost. They exit the mainstream – some become radicalised – and as a result social cohesion starts to break down.
This is no way to build, or rather to maintain, a nation. If you want to parasitise on society, which is what the political class does, society needs to stay alive and function.
Herein lies the problem: narrative chaos can be effective, but it eventually collapses under its own weight. The centre cannot hold forever.
And so we’ve come full circle, and are now back discussing the digital ID, which can correctly be understood as the system’s new attempt to regain narrative control after their previous attempts have begun to spin out of control.
Digital ID is not just about logging in to your bank. Not just about accessing government services or paying taxes. Not just about verifying your age for social media. It is about attaching your online person, your ideas, your free speech, your identity and indeed your very being to a state-approved framework of control.
Once this is implemented, it is easy to stop dissent. If your social media posts don’t align with the approved narrative, your ID can be flagged. Your access to platforms restricted. Your ability to publish revoked. You might not even be able to buy groceries or travel. You might get charged with crimes. You might get de-banked.
If you think this is too far-fetched, then you haven’t been paying attention.
To get a glimpse of where digital ID ultimately leads, look no further than China. There, the digital ID is a key part of a vast social credit system, including a web of surveillance, biometric data, financial records and behavioural monitoring. If you criticise the Communist Party or if you jaywalk or associate with the ‘wrong’ person, then your score drops. A lower score might mean you cannot use certain public transport, your kids are banned from certain schools, your internet usage is limited or you are prevented from buying things. Western journalists interviewing people in China often marvel at the fact that Chinese citizens express support for this system in articles, but it only takes a few moments of reflection to realise that the reason for their support is tightly linked to the repercussions they would face if they speak critically against it.
‘That’s only China,’ you might say. It would never happen here.
Wrong. This is already happening in the West. The Twitter files already showed us how the US Government worked with Twitter to ban people. Entire platforms are demonetised or delisted. Truckers protesting in Canada got debanked. Indeed, whenever you read articles about world elites wanting to ensure the entire world is ‘banked’, the real motivation is not to include people in the banking system, but to have the ability to punish wrongthink by removing people from the banking system, i.e., to ‘de-bank’ people based on their behaviour and level of obedience to the Ministry of Truth.
Digital ID and social media bans are really about taking back control and of restoring the old one-way communication pipeline.
Of course, only lies require this level of force and insulation. Only falsehoods need protection from scrutiny.
The push for digital ID is not about efficiency. It’s not about safety. It’s not about freedom or convenience. It’s about control. It’s about building a cage around you, where your identity, your speech and your access to society are all controlled via a centralised authority.
Once implemented, there’s no need for gulags, because you will already be in one.
We can still fight back. We are not powerless. But time is running out.
The internet, despite its flaws, is still here. And it still allows us to speak the truth, at least for now, and we must use it. We must resist calls for safety in exchange for submission. We must point out that the emperor is naked and stop participating in the lie.
Because if we don’t, someday soon, we will find ourselves subjects in a digital gulag, constantly monitored and judged and always one little misstep away from being cast out into digital exile.
Someday soon, we will find ourselves subjects in a digital gulag, constantly monitored and judged and always one little misstep away from being cast out into digital exile.
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