Dealing with the Casualties of the Info War

When a Learjet 60 went down in Palm Beach County on Sunday, killing all nine people on board, people predicted the conspiracy theories before they started.

They were right.

Despite having video footage of the actual crash, people claimed the video was AI or the craft was actually a missile. Those who agreed it was a plane claimed that it was shot down by Mar-a-Lago’s air defenses, despite there being no damage to the craft consistent with a missile strike. Once the victims came out, one being a CEO of a tech company, narratives were being pushed that he was killed for a cover-up. It’s taken the same shape as every other conspiracy theory.

So a family can’t even die in a horrific plane crash without a conspiracy theory. And I know people who actually believe it wasn’t just a plane crash. Even my wife told me she knew people who thought the same—regular people falling for nonsense.

The more I learn about the psyops against the West, the more it starts to look like an actual war. The only difference is that nobody comes home in a box, at least in the best cases.

In a real war you lose people to a bullet or a bomb. In this one you lose them to ideas disseminated across every kind of media. The damage extends much further than them, landing on everything around the person instead of on the person’s body.

The casualties from this war are real, and there are a lot of them.

I’ll start with my own, except they weren’t really mine: I was the casualty.

Out of the many friends I made throughout my life, I lost my friend Josh, who I served with in Iraq twice. We’d known each other twenty years. When he saw where my politics had gone in 2015, he told me I was a terrible person and blocked me. He didn’t even allow me to explain myself. I haven’t spoken to him since.

At the time it stung, but I got over it rather quickly by telling myself he was a “normie” who wouldn’t understand. Regardless, it was a serious loss, because we were the kinds of friends who’d never stop laughing uncontrollably together—over anything.

The truth is I was the problem, not him. Josh didn’t cut off a friend for no reason. He cut off a delusional antisemite.

There were many more losses throughout the years, as you could imagine. As my name started going viral across social media, more people actually saw what I was up to. I lost friends from high school; some of them were Jewish. Even though I told them “I’m talking about the elite Jews,” they weren’t going to tolerate someone like me. I never talked to any of them again. Again, I would tell myself, “It is what it is.”

Even the friends I currently have have distanced themselves over the years. This is partially due to us all having families and being busy, plus the fact I moved an hour away from all of them. But sometimes I’ll see them having get-togethers without me. An hour’s drive isn’t a big deal, and they could have been invited. But people talk and things spread. I don’t blame them: how do you invite the infamous Lucas Gage to your kid’s birthday party? What do you say to the other parents about the guy standing in your kitchen?

I’m not trying to be dramatic here. I’m sure many of you reading this have similar stories. I’m also not the worst case, not by any stretch. I know people who lost their marriages for being in the JQ movement.

And I did the same thing to somebody else. I have two sisters, and in 2012 I cut off the middle one over an interracial relationship. It cost me five years with her. I didn’t go to her wedding, and she didn’t come to mine. She spent those years explaining to people why her brother was a racist, and it hurt the whole family. I’d been psyoped into thinking the Jews took my sister away from me over her dating preferences. The truth is, nobody took her away. I left because a fanatic White nationalist can’t have a race-mixing sister.

This Info War isn’t just about spreading antisemitism. Our enemies use every division we already have: race, sex, religion, and politics. Even in the “normie” political spheres, people have lost far more than friendships over it. Fathers have lost custody over their children over gender identity disputes. People have lost jobs over something they said in their youth.

The Info War doesn’t just come from without, but it also comes from within: tribal warfare between political adversaries exists everywhere, and psychological warfare includes defamation, lies, and disinformation about the other. But don’t think for a second foreign actors aren’t exacerbating the already existing tensions between every kind of identity.

Social media has become the new digital town square used by billions of people a day. Most users are anonymous, and now there is a pandemic of bots being run by not only individuals but also foreign governments, manipulating the algorithm.

Never before could one person go viral unless they were on the front page of the New York Times or were on a TV show. But now, any person can say or do something that is either incredible or insane and reach the entire planet within a few hours because of the internet.

And if a person can go viral, a foreign bot farm can make them or their bad ideas and trends go viral, especially ones that are detrimental to our nation’s well-being.

Think of all the harmful challenges our youth have engaged in because they went viral: the Tide Pod Challenge, the Benadryl Challenge, the Blackout Challenge, and the knockout game—real injuries, and in the case of the Blackout Challenge, dead children. These are just a few.

The same is true about bad ideas: flat earth, moon landing denial, Holocaust denial, 9/11 conspiracies, and the most recent one being the Israel-killed Charlie Kirk conspiracy, which we all saw get built right before our eyes by e-celebrities incentivized to spread these lies.

Although I don’t personally know anyone who ate Tide pods, I do know plenty of people who drank the Kool-Aid on the flat earth and moon landing denial narratives. Though I didn’t fall for those two, I did fall for and push the Israel Did 9/11 conspiracy and Holocaust denialism for nearly 20 years.

All of us are susceptible to falling for false narratives once we lose trust in our institutions, especially when we are ignorant to the details of certain topics. The 2020 COVID lockdowns didn’t help, either. Entire countries were locked down, putting people in front of the internet for most of the day, where many literally joined online cults or surfed the web to find out what was really happening. Governments did a terrible job with the COVID narrative; censoring people caused a spike in conspiracy thinking, despite thinking the opposite would occur. This drove people to come up with all kinds of conspiracies about deliberate bioweapon releases and depopulation agendas. Virtually everyone knows someone who believes these.

The hard part is about the Info War: having to accept that people you know will eventually get duped into believing something false, and it may cost you that relationship. Even you may fall for something untrue, say stupid things out loud, and it may cost you your job. These are real losses that I don’t want to downplay.

I expect more people to get sucked into conspiracy theories as time goes on. The only good news is that they are getting so ridiculous that the amount of incoherent narratives that defy everything we know just may eventually snap people out of them due to inherent contradictions. But probably not without the damage being done to their relationships.

That’s why this piece is really for you, dear reader. People you love and care about—friends, family, co-workers—may become a casualty of the Info War, and you’re going to want to know what works and what doesn’t.

Here’s what doesn’t. Josh cut me off in 2015, and he had every reason to. It still didn’t bring me back an inch; it confirmed everything I already believed about people like him. Every person who blocked me, called me a name, or wrote me off did the same thing: they handed me more proof.

And here’s what does work. My sister had every reason to, and did the opposite. She never cut me off, and neither did the rest of my family. They kept the door open for five years while I was the one not speaking, hoping I’d change my ways. When I finally came around, she was still there.

You have every right to create distance from deluded people, especially if they’re toxic. It’s not your job to have to listen to them rant all day or hold their hand while they’re infected with a mind virus. My sister did exactly that—she kept her distance too. The difference between her and Josh is that she never decided who I was. So I’d advise against holding it against them, personally.

Tell them the truth, plant the seed, and let nature take her course. They may one day snap out of it, or they may never.

This is a form of digital Darwinism; some people are not going to make it, and you have to accept that. But if they do come around, you want to be the one still standing there.

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