Every day, millions of people log onto social media absolutely certain they have identified the enemy. Not a political opponent, not someone who sees the world differently, but an irredeemable monster. A Zionist. A terrorist sympathizer. A fascist. A traitor. The conviction feels righteous, urgent, even morally necessary. What most of these people do not realize is that the very certainty they feel, that intoxicating clarity that their side is perfectly good and the other side is purely evil, is not an accident. It was manufactured for them. And the people who manufactured it do not care about any of the causes being fought over. They care about one thing only: keeping us at each other’s throats while they pursue their own interests, unimpeded, in the background.
I was reminded of this watching the 2025 film The Wizard of the Kremlin, a political drama starring Jude Law as Putin and Paul Dano as his fictional spin doctor Vadim Baranov. Baranov, a former avant-garde theater director turned Kremlin propagandist, explains that you do not control a population by telling them what to believe. You flood them with so many conflicting stories, so many fake outrage cycles and manufactured crises, that they eventually stop believing anything at all. Everything is “Fake News,” all Scientists have hidden agendas, all politicians are corrupt. An exhausted, cynical public is a malleable and manageable public.
Baranov is fictional, but the man who inspired his character, Vladislav Surkov, is very much real. For two decades, Surkov served as Putin’s chief ideologue and the architect of what he called “sovereign democracy,” a system that maintained the theatrical trappings of democratic governance while ensuring the Kremlin held every string. As documented by the BBC, he simultaneously funded pro-Putin youth movements, liberal civil society groups, nationalist organizations, and left-wing coalitions, not because he believed in any of them, but because controlling all sides of a debate makes the debate itself meaningless. His background in theater was not incidental. He treated the entire Russian political landscape as a stage production, with himself as the invisible director.
The tactic he pioneered has a name now. In 2016, the RAND Corporation published a landmark analysis calling it the Firehose of Falsehood: a propaganda model that works not by convincing you of any specific lie, but by flooding the information environment with such a volume of contradictory, rapid-fire content that the very concept of objective truth collapses. The goal, as journalist Peter Pomerantsev put it in his essential book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, is a world where citizens can no longer distinguish fact from fiction. A population that has abandoned the idea of truth cannot organize around it.
What tends to get lost is how old this playbook actually is. In the early 1900s, the Tsarist secret police known as the Okhrana were managing a regime in genuine crisis: poverty, corruption, and revolutionary unrest threatening the throne. Their response was not to address any of those problems. Instead, as both the ADL and Britannica have documented thoroughly, they fabricated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged document purporting to reveal a secret Jewish plan for world domination. It was pure invention, plagiarized from a French political satire that had nothing whatsoever to do with Jews. But it served a precise political function: give an angry, frustrated population a monster to blame so they stop looking at the actual source of their misery. Scapegoating as governance. Russia invented this particular wheel over a century ago and has never stopped using it.
In the 1980s, KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov gave a series of widely documented interviews explaining the doctrine he called “Active Measures”: a systematic long-term campaign to collapse a target democracy from within through four stages. Demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization. Demoralization alone takes fifteen to twenty years, the time needed to convince an entire generation that their own institutions, values, and press cannot be trusted. A thoroughly demoralized person, Bezmenov warned, becomes “unable to assess true information. Even if you shower him with authentic proof, he will refuse to believe it.” The description should feel uncomfortably current. And yes, Baranov and Bezmenov: think about that for a minute.
What Surkov did was take Bezmenov’s analog KGB playbook and supercharge it for the internet age. The RAND analysis noted that the firehose model does not even require people to believe specific Russian talking points. It only requires them to stop believing anything at all. But even Surkov’s digital upgrade has itself been supercharged by generative AI. What Bezmenov said took fifteen to twenty years can now happen in hours. Consider what unfolded in the immediate aftermath of the December 2025 terrorist attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, in which sixteen people were murdered. Within hours of the massacre, conspiracy theories claiming it was a Mossad false flag operation were already circulating across X and Reddit, amplified by accounts with millions of followers. A snapshot analysis by the Antisemitism Research Center found that 50% of posts returning a search for “Mossad” on X that day were pushing the false flag claim. Iranian state media called it an Israeli operation. A known Russian disinformation site published an AI-generated image designed to make a wounded Jewish survivor appear to be a crisis actor. According to researchers at the Vision of Humanity Institute, the false flag narrative alone generated more than 17 million media impressions before any official investigation had even begun. Sixteen people had just been murdered at a Hanukkah party. Their bodies were not yet cold. The machine did not pause for a moment.
Within hours of the mass shooting at Bondi Beach during a Hanukkah party, numerous pro-Palestine users on X have accused Israel's Mossad intelligence agency of orchestrating it as a "false flag" operation. How nauseatingly predictable. pic.twitter.com/avs0r5BuOh
— Jewlicious (@jewlicious) December 14, 2025
Here is the part that should give all of us pause, wherever we live and whatever we believe. The foreign bot farms, the Russian Doppelganger networks, the Iranian cognitive warfare units documented by the Institute for National Security Studies, the Chinese Spamouflage operations identified by Graphika, none of these actors actually care about the causes they amplify. They do not care about Palestinian national aspirations. They do not care about the cost of gas in Tulsa. They do not care about the independence of Israel’s Supreme Court or the integrity of the US electoral system. These are not causes to them. They are levers. INSS researchers have documented Iranian troll farms running fake Hebrew-language accounts designed to inflame Israeli society from both the far right and the far left simultaneously, because internal Israeli fracture serves Tehran’s strategic interests regardless of which side wins the argument.
When someone in the United States declares that all Zionists are irredeemably evil, they may feel the full weight of moral conviction behind that position. But the talking points they are using, the framing, the absolutism, the dehumanization, were crafted and amplified by forces that will never lose a night’s sleep over the actual welfare of a single Palestinian. When Israeli politicians brand their domestic critics as traitors, or when those critics respond in kind by calling the government fascist, both sides should pause and ask who actually benefits from a culture war severe enough to fracture reserve units and paralyze national decision-making. The answer is not the Israeli public.
This is also the right moment to be honest about something closer to home. The chaos machine does not only benefit foreign adversaries. Domestic political elites benefit from it too, and few examples are more instructive than Benjamin Netanyahu’s current governing coalition. Netanyahu himself did not create foreign disinformation operations, but he has become a master of operating in the environment they produce. Keep the public angry, tribal, and focused on existential enemies, and nobody notices the governance failures piling up underneath.
Consider what his coalition has actually produced. Under National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who controls Israel’s police, police investigations into settler violence in the West Bank dropped 73 percent between 2023 and 2025. The Times of Israel reported that the commander of the West Bank police division was himself under investigation for ignoring settler violence to curry favor with Ben Gvir. According to the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, only 3% of settler violence cases recorded between 2005 and 2023 resulted in a conviction. The rule of law, one of Israel’s most important strategic assets, is being quietly dismantled to keep coalition partners happy.
On the Haredi draft, the picture is equally stark. According to a 2024 study by the Israel Democracy Institute, only 1.7% of Haredi men of military age actually serve, compared to 87.6% among all other Israeli Jews. Meanwhile, Israel’s 2025 budget allocated over 1.8 billion shekels in coalition funds to Haredi institutions, some of which went specifically to organizations that arrange military exemptions, even while the IDF is stretched across multiple fronts and reservists are serving record numbers of days. The INSS has estimated the combined economic damage of Haredi non-participation in the workforce and military at approximately 240 billion shekels over the next decade. These are not abstract policy disagreements. Soldiers’ families, secular and national religious Israelis alike, are watching their sons serve repeat tours while Netanyahu writes checks to the parties keeping him in office.
None of this is happening by accident. As the Christian Science Monitor reported, citing INSS senior researcher Yohanan Tzoreff: “Most Israelis want to see these attacks end, but the government is not making that happen because they don’t want to lose the coalition.” That sentence describes the mechanism precisely. Netanyahu cannot govern competently without fracturing his coalition. So instead of governing, he manages the noise. And the foreign disinformation machine, which pumps out content designed to make Israelis hate each other and distrust every institution, makes his job considerably easier. The chaos that Russia and Iran manufacture for strategic purposes, he harvests for political survival.
To be clear, Netanyahu’s opponents are not absolved by this analysis. The opposition to Bibi’s coalition includes voices who have learned the same lesson the hard way: that outrage travels faster than nuance, that a shocking accusation generates more engagement than a carefully reasoned critique, and that the algorithmic reward for bombast is far greater than the reward for substance. When Israeli and international NGOs stretch the definitions of apartheid, Nazism, and genocide to describe Israel’s conduct, applying to a functioning multiracial democracy with Arab Supreme Court justices, Arab members of Knesset, and Arab officers in the IDF, terms specifically coined to describe systems of institutionalized racial extermination, they do not strengthen the case for Palestinian rights. They hollow out the language needed to make that case. Words that mean everything, end up meaning nothing. And a public that has been told for years that Israel is literally Nazi Germany is a public that has been made immune to legitimate, specific, evidence-based criticism of actual Israeli government failures, the very failures documented above. The chaos machine wins either way: when the government suppresses accountability through tribal rage, and equally when the opposition abandons precision for provocation. Both paths lead to the same destination, a society too exhausted and too polarized to demand or deliver genuine change.
When an America Firster insists that everything wrong with the country traces back to a shadowy foreign lobby running Washington, they probably believe they are speaking uncomfortable truths to power. But the narrative infrastructure supporting that framing was built and boosted by states that would like nothing more than for the United States to retreat from every alliance it has ever maintained. It is worth asking, with genuine seriousness, what an America-first world actually looks like in practice. When the United States steps back from the Middle East, the country that steps in to fill the vacuum is Russia, as it demonstrated very concretely in Syria. When China absorbs Taiwan, it controls the manufacture of the advanced semiconductors that power virtually every American weapons system, financial institution, and communications network on earth. A nuclear Iran does not just threaten Israel. It transforms a region that already moves global oil markets into a permanent hostage situation. Anyone who lived through $120-per-barrel oil understands, viscerally, what that does to an American family’s grocery bill.
And then there is the specific, documented, strategic value of the US-Israel alliance, which tends to get flattened into an abstraction in these debates. After the 1967 Six-Day War, as documented by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Israel handed the United States captured Soviet SA-2 missile batteries, advanced radar systems, and access to a defected MiG-21 fighter, the most secret Soviet combat aircraft of its era, under what the US military called the HAVE DOUGHNUT program at Area 51. American pilots flew and analyzed that aircraft for years. It directly shaped US air combat doctrine and helped pave the way for Israel receiving the F-4 Phantom. Then in 1982, during Operation Mole Cricket 19 in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, the Israeli Air Force destroyed over 80 Soviet-supplied Syrian aircraft without losing a single jet, and became the first Western air force ever to destroy a Soviet SAM battery in combat. The Soviets were shaken enough to dispatch senior military officials to Damascus to investigate what had happened to their hardware. American weapons, operated by Israeli pilots using Israeli intelligence, had just been proven superior to Soviet systems in front of the entire world. As Tablet Magazine noted, it was the finest demonstration of Israel’s strategic value to the United States during the Cold War, and that intelligence-sharing relationship has never stopped. The forces amplifying narratives about sinister lobbies controlling American foreign policy are not interested in any of this history. They are interested in severing an alliance that inconveniences them.
This is the mechanism at the core of all of it. You find the real wounds, the real grievances, the genuine injustices and anxieties that exist in any society, and you pour algorithmic fuel on them until the flames are too high for anyone to see across. The wound becomes the whole world. Everyone on the other side becomes a monster. And while you are busy fighting the monsters your feed has manufactured for you, the actual architects of the chaos are getting exactly what they paid for.
The machine has one fatal weakness. It only works if we let it. Every time a person chooses a specific, honest argument over a dehumanizing slogan, every time a citizen demands a straight answer about a budget or a policy instead of accepting a culture war as a substitute, every time someone extends enough humanity to their opponent to actually hear them, the whole apparatus loses its grip. The playbook is over a century old and while the technology changes, the choice does not. Choose carefully. Choose wisely.
