Before we begin, I want to make two things clear.
First, I am 100% opposed to physical violence against innocent people, regardless of their race, nationality or ideology.
Furthermore, I am totally in favor of benevolent dialogue as opposed to conflictual communication as the main tool for seeking the truth.
Everything I’m going to share here is verifiable, and I’ll put references and research leads in the video description so you can dig deeper yourself.
Now, I’d like to ask you a simple question.
If, at this moment, you were to discover that some of your most “moral,” most “obvious” opinions had been instilled in you, without your knowledge, through propaganda strategies…
Would you like to know, or would you prefer to remain comfortable?
If you’re watching this video, I assume you’re one of those who want to know.
And if you happen to be an artist, a therapist, a coach, a breathwork facilitator, a massage therapist, or simply someone passionate about natural health and personal growth, you’ve probably already reflected on compassionate communication, attachment wounds, and defense mechanisms.
And like all of us, you carry your share of traumas, big or small, which also means you can be comforted, triggered… and, up to a point, influenced and controlled if someone knows how to push the right psychological buttons.
And that’s precisely where it gets interesting… and disturbing.
Because the same psychological mechanisms that are observed in therapy, the same cognitive distortions discussed in psychology books, are used every day by the media, politicians, institutions,
to create our vision of the world, to create our fears, to create our enemies…
and, ultimately, manufacture our consent.
In this video, I’m not going to tell you what to think.
I’m going to show you how we create the stories, how our own psyche becomes the tool of deceptive propaganda, and above all what concrete signs you can observe in yourself and your surroundings so that you no longer allow yourself to be used against other human beings.
And if you’ve ever felt like you were walking on eggshells with your family during the pandemic,
if you’ve ever felt labeled (“conspiracy theorist”, “pro-Hamas”, “anti-science”, “woke”, “reactionary”, “homophobic”) just for asking questions, if you’re tired of being forced to choose a side without nuance, stay with me.
We will delve together into the mechanics of propaganda… but with an insightful, honest, and deeply human perspective.
Section 2 – The psychological basis: how our mind is manipulated
We’ll start with something you already know very well if you work with humans:
the defense mechanisms and the cognitive distortions.
In therapy, they are seen as protective mechanisms:
ways, sometimes clumsy, that the psyche uses to avoid being overwhelmed.
Denial, projection, minimization, black and white thinking…
It’s not “bad”, it’s human.
But once we know how they work, we can also exploit them.
And that’s exactly what propaganda does.
2.1 Defense mechanisms: what propaganda uses first
Let’s take a few very simple examples.
The denial.
It’s that reflex of saying: “No… that can’t be, it’s too big, it’s exaggerated.”
This is observed in people who receive a diagnosis, or bad news.
In propaganda, denial is used in the opposite way:
If information challenges the official narrative too much, it is immediately categorized as “conspiracy”, “delusion”, “fake news”, without serious examination.
This helps to avoid damaging the reassuring image we have of “our institutions”.
The projection.
In psychology, it’s attributing to others what I don’t want to see in myself.
In public spaces, this looks like:
to call the other person dangerous, hateful, intolerant, while giving oneself permission to be aggressive, contemptuous and exclusionary towards them.
“We defend science and tolerance… but these people, we must not tolerate them.”
Do you recognize the logic?
The minimisation.
On an individual level, it’s “yes, I’ve experienced that, but it’s not so bad”.
In propaganda, it is the art of minimizing certain facts that disrupt the narrative:
side effects, victims “of the wrong side”, scandals, inconvenience.
We talk about it for a bit, then quickly move on to something else.
The black and white thought.
You know it: it’s “all or nothing”, with no nuance.
You’re either for it or against it.
You are either on the side of good, or you are on the side of evil.
This structure is ideal for propaganda because it eliminates grey areas.
You can no longer say:
“I am against this war, but that doesn’t mean I support any particular armed group.”
or “I criticize this health policy, but I am not anti-science.”
If you refuse polarization, you become suspect.
We could continue with rationalization, intellectualization, dissociation…
What’s important here is that everything we observe in therapy, all these individual protective measures, are activated on a large scale by the way we are spoken to.
And the more injured, exhausted, and stressed we are, the easier it becomes.
2.2 Cognitive distortions: when our brain becomes predictable
Besides that, there are what are called cognitive distortions or biases.
This is how our brain simplifies reality to go faster.
Here too, it’s not “bad”. It’s a normal operation, but it’s very, very exploitable.
The confirmation bias.
We tend to seek out and notice primarily what confirms what we already believe, and to ignore or denigrate what contradicts our vision.
The media and algorithms love it:
They show us more content that reinforces our beliefs, because it keeps us engaged, shocked, satisfied to be “right”.
As a result, we become convinced that “everyone” in our camp thinks like us, and that “the other side” is completely crazy or malicious.
The authority bias.
If a person perceived as an expert, wearing a white coat or holding a prestigious title, makes a statement, we are much more likely to believe it, even if it is not thoroughly proven.
Simply adding “experts say” or “studies show” is enough to make many people stop asking questions.
We are not necessarily given the details. We are not told about those who contradict it. But the formula is enough to calm the anxiety.
The availability bias.
The more media coverage an event receives, the more frequent and important it seems to us.
If you are shown images of attacks committed by Muslims on a loop, your brain arrives at the intuitive conclusion that “Muslims are dangerous”, even though, statistically, most live peacefully and the majority of violence comes from other actors.
What you see most often becomes, in your mind, what matters most.
The illusory truth effect.
Repeat a lie or half-truth often enough, and your brain will eventually register it as plausible, or even as true, simply because it has heard it several times.
“We’ve heard it so many times that it must be true.”
Propaganda loves repetition.
The group bias.
We want to be on the right side of our “tribe”.
We are afraid of being rejected, ridiculed, excluded.
As a result, we often prefer to follow the dominant opinion of our social group, rather than risk expressing doubt.
And that’s where propaganda becomes very effective:
all you need to do is make it clear that “in your group, we think X”, and you’re going to censor yourself to stay in the clan.
2.3 Social pressure: when your entourage becomes a relay for propaganda**
There is another dimension we rarely talk about: direct social pressure.
When you post something that disturbs people, many of them will not try to understand what you are saying, they will try to make you regret having said it.
It can show up as humiliating comments, personal attacks, threats to cut ties, or simply a cold silence that makes you feel guilty for asking questions.
Over time, your nervous system learns the lesson: “If I speak up on these topics, I will lose love, status, my sense of belonging.”
And this is how propaganda moves forward: there is no need for an official thought police when your friends, your family, your social circle become, without realizing it, the guardians of the dominant story.
You start to censor yourself, to walk on eggshells not only out of fear of governments or media, but out of fear of losing your place in the group, and connection with loved ones.
2.4 Concrete examples
During the pandemic, for example,
we were bombarded with figures, graphs, and press conferences, billboards in the subway, red banners on TV.
Cases, deaths, variants, emergencies, special alerts.
It was constant.
Your nervous system, however, doesn’t have time to integrate and reflect.
It remains in a state of hypervigilance.
You sleep less well, you are more emotional, you argue more easily.
Your brain is desperately seeking a simple narrative, a clear authority, a reassuring instruction manual.
That’s what I call a mental state of siege.
We no longer take the time to check, to consider nuances, to ask ourselves:
“Who wins what in this story?”
We just want to be on the side of the “good guys” and feel safe.
For a propagandist or an influence strategist,
it’s an ideal suggestibility window.
This is the perfect time to instill beliefs such as:
“Those who doubt the measures are a public danger”, “Those who criticize such a war are traitors”,
“Those who defend the Palestinians are necessarily pro-terrorists”, “Those who question pharmaceutical companies are anti‑science”.
You will notice that all these phrases play on the following:
– fear (danger, threat),
– morality (good vs villains),
– and belonging to the group (you are one of the ‘good citizens’).
So the real question is: Have we really learned anything from all this?
Have we learned any lessons from the pandemic?
Or are we just waiting for the next crisis to react in exactly the same way, with the same fear, the same divisions, the same reflexes of submission?
I’m not saying this to make you feel guilty.
I say this because I deeply believe that the suffering we have experienced should not be in vain.
All these tensions, these breakups, these nights of anguish can become a capital of lucidity.
They can help us to better discern the truth next time, and to remain true to our physical, psychological and moral integrity, even in the midst of a new media storm.
Section 3 – Language, labels, and emotional triggers: the alphabet of propaganda
Now that we’ve looked at what’s happening in our psyche, we’re going to look at what’s happening in the language itself.
Because modern propaganda is not just spectacular lies.
It is above all a strategic use of words:
the words we choose, those we avoid, the labels we stick on, the definitions we discreetly change along the way.
And there is another aspect that is often forgotten, which advertisers and propagandists know very well:
they don’t only use sophisticated arguments, they also use ridicule, mockery, and personal insults as tools.
The goal is simple: to make you so afraid of being humiliated or treated as “stupid”, “crazy” or “extremist” that you end up censoring yourself.
At that point, language is no longer just descriptive; it becomes a kind of electric fence around public debate.
When you notice this kind of rhetoric, that’s a red flag: you’re not facing an open conversation, you’re facing someone whose thinking has already been shaped by propaganda – in other words, someone who has been indoctrinated.
And beyond words, there is the way our autonomic nervous system reacts to certain words, certain images, certain sounds.
In neurolinguistic programming and hypnosis, we talk about anchors:
Over time, our brain automatically associates a stimulus – a word, an image, a piece of music, a tone of voice – with a specific emotional state.
You hear a certain jingle, and your body is already reacting.
You see certain images of war, disease, chaos, and your sympathetic system is activated: tension, accelerated heart rate, alertness.
The programmers of opinion know this.
They will therefore use trigger words, emotionally loaded adverbs and adjectives, highly charged images, dramatic music, and vibrant colors to provoke automatic reactions in you before you’ve even thought about it: fear, anger, indignation, shame, desire to belong to the ‘right side’.”
Through repetition, these stimuli become like hot buttons on your nervous system.
You think you are “thinking”, but often it is just your body responding to emotional conditioning.
3.1 The power of words: to kill or bless in a single sentence
Look at the difference between these formulations:
“Activists entered a government building.”
or
“Violent extremists have stormed our democratic institutions.”
“Soldiers died on a mission.” or “Civilians were massacred.”
“A security operation.” or “A military occupation.”
“The Israeli government” or “the Iranian regime”
The raw facts may be very close.
But the words already tell you who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, who deserves your compassion, and who deserves your contempt.
During conflicts, we often hear:
“1200 people were atrociously massacred” on one side, and “hundreds of thousands of people tragically died” on the other.
Can you hear the difference?
On one side, there is personalized horror: atrociously, massacred.
On the other hand, a kind of abstract fatalism: tragically dead, as if gravity were falling from the sky.
Propaganda uses these nuances constantly.
We don’t say “we bombed”, we say “we neutralized a threat”.
We don’t say “we censored”, we say “we fought against disinformation” or “against hate”.
Words serve as moral makeup.
3.2 Identities vs. labels: when you’re turned into a slogan.
In psychology, a distinction is often made between identity and behavior.
Here, I propose another distinction: identity vs label.
An identity is something you choose:
“I am Muslim”, “I am Christian”, “I am left-wing”, “I am right-wing”,
“I am a healer”, “I am an artist”.
It says something about your belonging, your values, your path.
A label is something that’s stuck on you from the outside, often to diminish you, caricature you or exclude you.
“Conspiracy theorist.”
“Anti‑science.”
“Pro‑Hamas.”
“Woke.”
“Reactionary.”
“Misogynist.”
“Transphobe.”
“Islamist-leftist.”
The list is endless.
The label serves as a quick disqualification weapon.
Once you’ve been labeled, no one needs to listen to you anymore.
We no longer need to respond to the substance of what you’re saying.
They can reduce you to that word, put you in a contaminated box, and warn others: “Don’t go near it, it’s toxic.”
The media love this mechanism.
Instead of inviting a “dissident” or a “critic”, they invite a “conspiracy theorist”.
Instead of a “defender of Palestinian rights”, a “sympathizer of terrorism”.
Instead of a “critic of identity politics”, a “reactionary” or a “hateful person”.
It’s exactly like in a toxic family system:
A scapegoat is chosen, a role is assigned to him, and everything he says afterwards will be interpreted through that role.
3.2.1 Personal attacks: when the person becomes the target instead of the idea
There is another step that goes even further than labels: the personal attack.
Instead of discussing what you say, we attack who you are.
“You’re ignorant.”
“You’re crazy.”
“You’re a bad person if you think that.”
This mechanism has a very precise function: to create so much shame, fear of rejection, or anger that you no longer dare to express your questions.
It is no longer a dialogue, it is a disciplinary tool.
If every time you express a doubt about a war, a health policy, or a social issue you are called “stupid”, “extremist”, “dangerous”, your nervous system understands the message: “To stay safe, shut up.”
In a dysfunctional relational system, this kind of attack serves to keep everyone “in line” and to avoid real discussion.
In public debate, it becomes a weapon of propaganda.
We no longer need censorship by law when people censor themselves out of fear of being humiliated, insulted, or socially executed.
At that point, the personal attack is not an excess of passion, it is a technique of control.
There is another very effective tactic: speaking on behalf of the other person.
You are not allowed to listen to someone directly; instead, you are first told who they are and what they supposedly ‘think’.
You’re told, for example, that this journalist or that commentator is ‘antisemitic’, ‘dangerous’, ‘far‑right’, a ‘conspiracy theorist’, ‘anti‑Trump’, ‘far‑left’, or ‘woke’, and many people form an opinion without ever spending even an hour actually listening to them.
At that point, it is no longer your own judgment that is being formed, it is someone else’s judgment taking up residence in your mind.
And instead of taking the time to listen for ourselves, we settle for summaries that are already filtered and distorted.
3.3 When words are distorted to create enemies
Another very powerful propaganda tool is to distort the meaning of certain keywords.
Let’s take the word “jihad”.
In mainstream media discourse, many people spontaneously associate it with “holy war”, “terrorism”, “violence”.
But fundamentally, in its spiritual dimension, “jihad” means “effort”, “inner struggle”.
It is the fight against our own harmful tendencies.
My jihad, for me, might be to stop compulsively scrolling on my phone,
or to help someone else quit smoking.
Reducing this word to “terrorism” is already propaganda.
The word “intifada” is another example.
In Arabic, it comes from “to shake”, “to get rid of something”.
Historically, it has referred to uprisings against an occupation, sometimes violent, sometimes non-violent.
The first Palestinian intifada was largely non-violent.
Today, peaceful demonstrations and economic boycotts, can be part of this same dynamic of “shaking up” an unjust system.
But in the media imagination, “intifada” = blind violence.
It’s a diversion.
Same for the Sharia.
It is presented as a monolithic, barbaric, uniform block.
Whereas in reality, it is applied very differently depending on the country, culture, and movement.
We can criticize specific applications, of course.
but the reduction “sharia = barbarism” serves to fuel a general fear of Muslims.
Another very telling example is the expression “Allahu Akbar”.
In many Western media outlets, especially since the 2000s, it is heard almost exclusively in association with attacks, war videos or scenes of panic, as if it were a terrorist slogan.
In reality, “Allahu Akbar” means “God is greater” or “God is the greatest.” It is a formula of praise that is repeated dozens of times a day in the lives of Muslims: in prayer, in the calls to prayer, when receiving good news, when feeling emotional, when seeking courage in the face of adversity.
Saying “Allahu Akbar” is not the same as saying “I am going to commit a violent act”.
It means: “God is greater than this situation, greater than my fears, greater than the powerful of this world.”
To give you an idea, in the Christian world we have expressions of the same kind.
When a Christian says “God is great”, “Glory to God”, “Thy will be done” or “Lord, thy will be done”, he is expressing the same thing: recognizing that there is something greater than us, above events, governments and our worries.
Now imagine that the media only broadcast these Christian phrases alongside images of violence committed by extremists.
and that, every time a believer says “God is great” or “Thy will be done”, your brain is conditioned to associate that with terror.
You would have an automatic fear reaction, whereas at the core these are words of faith, trust, sometimes consolation.
That’s exactly what happened with “Allahu Akbar”:
hijacking by certain violent groups, amplified by the media, has emotionally colonized a spiritual expression which, for more than a billion people, has nothing to do with terrorism.
This is a very clear example of the emotional colonization of a word:
We use an expression of praise, It is frozen in a few images of violence, and we transform it into an automatic trigger of fear.
And then there’s the word “anti-Semite”.
At its core, it describes hatred of Jews as a people, and that’s serious.
But it is increasingly being used as a weapon to attack any criticism of a particular state policy.
in this case the State of Israel.
Being anti-Zionist or criticizing a government does not mean hating Jews.
But as long as we deliberately mix the two,
Human rights defenders can be portrayed as monsters.
That’s what propaganda is:
playing with words to colonize your imagination, so that certain words automatically trigger fear, rejection, guilt, before you even have time to think.
And what is even more revealing is everything we are never shown.
When the media talk about Islam, they almost only show us images of violence, fear, and terrorism, as if the whole religion revolved around that.digitalcommons.unomaha+2
But as soon as you take even a small interest in the daily life and inner worldview of Muslims, you discover concepts you will almost never hear mentioned in the news.
For example, the concept of Hassanât (حسنات): good deeds, acts of kindness and justice that accumulate like a spiritual capital and that, according to the tradition, will be weighed on a scale on the Day of Judgment.wiktionary+2
In that vision, every gesture matters: praying, feeding those in need, giving quietly, speaking gently, removing something harmful from the road, visiting a sick person, smiling at someone… all of this is considered Hassanât, good deeds that erase faults and weigh heavily in the balance.facebook+1
God’s mercy is described as so vast that good deeds are multiplied, while bad deeds are not amplified in the same way.quranbookonline+1
In other words, for millions of Muslims, everyday spirituality is not about ‘seeking war’, but about accumulating acts of kindness, compassion, and service, because they believe they will be judged by their capacity to do good around them.alislam+1
If nobody ever tells you about Hassanât, if nobody ever shows you that dimension, and Islam is reduced to a few images of armed fanatics, that is not neutral.
That is already a form of propaganda: an entire universe of values, gentleness, and service is hidden from you, and only what produces fear is kept in view.”
3.4 Fallacies and “false logic” in public debate
Add to that the fallacies, these flawed lines of reasoning that we hear everywhere,
And you have the perfect cocktail.
L’appeal to authority :
“Experts say that…”, “The science is clear…”,
without ever showing you the disagreements between experts, neither the limitations of the studies, nor conflicts of interest.
The personal attack :
We’re not attacking your argument, we’re attacking you.
“You are not a doctor,” “You already shared this video 5 years ago,”
“You have such and such a past, so we don’t have to listen to you.”
The overgeneralization :
“All those who criticize this policy are conspiracy theorists,”
“All pro-X people are fanatics”,
“All anti-Y people are haters.”
The double standard :
An act is considered “terrorist” when it is committed by the enemy.
but it is a “targeted operation” or “collateral damage” when it is committed by our allies.
The strawman :
You say “I have questions about this measure”,
And they respond as if you had said “I deny the existence of the disease” or “I want people to die”.
Your position is being caricatured to make it easier to attack.
In therapy, people are taught to identify these distortions in their inner dialogue.
In public spaces, we need the same level of competence, but applied to media and political discourse.
In the next part, we’re going to go even further:
we’re going to talk about how these narratives are constructed, the interests at stake, and the ways in which the media and algorithms structure information so that certain truths become almost impossible to see.”
Section 4 – Media, Power, and the Manufacture of Consent
So far, we have mostly talked about psychology and language.
But one simple question remains: Who uses these mechanisms, and through what tools?
Today, the main tool is the mass media and digital platforms.
Not only the major newspapers, but also the 24/7 news channels, news sites, talk shows, and of course the “social” networks which decide, through algorithms, what you see and what you will never see.
We could call it, as some authors have done, the manufacture of consent :
a system where information is not simply “reported”,
but structured, filtered, edited, repeated,
so that the majority of the population will eventually accept certain wars, certain health policies, certain economic injustices, as if it were the only reasonable option.
4.1 How the media structure the narrative
This system has several layers.
First, the property and the funding :
The major media outlets belong to economic and financial groups, sometimes very close to political power.
They also depend on advertising from large companies.
That doesn’t mean that every journalist is corrupt,
But that means that certain topics are encouraged.
and others much less so.
Then there are the “legitimate” sources :
governments, armies, major agencies, institutional “experts”.
They are the ones who are mentioned first, who are invited onto the show.
Their press releases serve as the basis for the news.
If you contradict these sources too much, you become “marginal”, “not credible”.
Add to that the invisible sanctions :
careers that are ruined,
invitations that disappear,
the dwindling budgets,
when someone insists on deviating from the accepted narrative.
Very quickly, most of them intuitively understand how far they can go.
Finally, there is the ideological filter :
At one time it was anti-communism, today it’s the “fight against hate”, “against disinformation”, “for security”, “for democracy”.
These are seemingly noble values, but used to justify the marginalization or censorship of certain discourses.
All of this creates a kind of mental corridor:
It seems like there’s a debate, because we see people arguing on set, but in reality, everyone remains within a very restricted framework.
The truly disturbing questions, profound challenges, almost never reach the general public.
4.2 Controversial documents, very concrete strategies
There are also some documents… let’s say, very controversial, whose exact author is unknown, and that’s not the most relevant today.
What interests me is not debating their origin, but to note that the manipulation strategies described therein are indeed at work for decades:
– control of the press and creation of false opposition,
– the creation of economic crises and wars,
– using misery, fear, and hatred to make people easier to govern.
When you read this with a perceptive gaze, one cannot help but see the same logic, than in modern models of influence and propaganda:
exploiting our defense mechanisms, our cognitive biases, and press precisely where our nervous system is most vulnerable.
Whether we look at it through ancient texts or contemporary analyses, or simply by observing the facts.
The same ingredients are always present:
– divide and rule,
– weakened by fear and insecurity,
– saturate with anxiety-inducing information,
– to control words and images,
– and present himself, in the end, as the only possible savior.
4.3 The role of algorithms: custom-made blinders
The mass media are no longer alone, they work hand in hand, consciously or unconsciously, with the algorithm’s major platforms.
These algorithms have a simple objective:
Keep your attention for as long as possible.
And for that, they understood that what works best is content that triggers strong emotions:
fear, anger, indignation, a sense of urgency.
Result :
– you more often see the worst examples from “the other side”,
– Scandals and outrages come first,
– the nuances, the calm analyses, are much less visible.
You find yourself in an echo chamber :
If you identify with the left, you will mostly see reasons to hate the right; if you identify with the right wing, you will mostly see reasons to despise the left wing; if you identify as pro-X or anti-Y, we will mainly feed you content that reinforces this identity.
Algorithms do not “conspire” in the human sense of the word, but they amplify precisely what makes propaganda effective:
polarization, simplification, repetition, and the reduction of the other to a caricature.
4.4 How interviews are used to block real dialogue
You can also see this in the way many TV interviews and debates are conducted.
Questions are often closed, loaded, designed as ‘gotcha questions’ that force you into an impossible yes‑or‑no, rather than to actually understand your thinking.
The moment someone tries to bring nuance or step outside the frame, they are cut off, interrupted again, their words are reformulated in a caricatural way, or a label is slapped on them live.
On top of that, you can clearly see the double standard: some guests are treated with respect and patience, while others are constantly rushed, cornered, or mocked for saying almost the same type of thing.
This is not an accident, it is a technique: if you never let your guest finish a sentence, the audience will never hear a complete line of reasoning, only defensive fragments.
At that point, it is no longer a conversation; it is a media trial where the host plays prosecutor, and any serious dissent is discouraged through ridicule, gotcha questions, and aggressive interruptions.”
4.5 Censorship, shadow‑banning, and self‑censorship
When we talk about propaganda, it’s not only about what you are shown, but also about what you are prevented from seeing.
Censorship exists on several layers: accounts being shut down, videos removed, content pushed down in search results, shadow‑banning that makes certain posts almost invisible without ever admitting it, and sometimes even attacks or hacking against websites that are too disturbing for certain political or economic powers.
The result is that for many sensitive topics – wars, foreign policy, corruption, side effects, public‑health scandals – dissenting voices do exist, but you almost need a flashlight to find them.
They are pushed to the bottom of the results, demonetized, flagged as “dangerous” or “misleading”, or simply made practically unreachable for the general public.
But the most efficient form of censorship is the one we end up internalizing.
After a while, you no longer even need a government or a platform to forbid you a piece of content: you forbid yourself from checking certain sources, authors, or viewpoints, because you’ve been told over and over that they are “conspiracy theorists”, “extremists”, “pro‑terrorist”, or “enemy propaganda”.
That’s when propaganda has really won: when the little voice in your head says, “I shouldn’t even read this, otherwise people will think I’m crazy, extreme, or a traitor.”
If you want to regain your inner freedom, it’s not enough to criticize external censorship; you also have to go beyond your own self‑censorship: go and read, listen to, and watch precisely what you are most strongly discouraged from exploring, keeping your critical mind on, without idolizing, but without running away out of fear of the label.
You don’t have to agree with everything you explore. Simply allowing yourself to hear different versions of the story is already an act of resistance against the manufacture of your consent.
4.6 Saturation, distraction, consent
Add two more ingredients to that:
the saturation and the distraction.
Saturation first:
We saw it with the pandemic, but it’s also true in times of war.
Continuous news updates, red banners, breaking news, statistics, shocking images, hysterical debates.
Your nervous system eventually becomes exhausted.
In this state, you are much more inclined to say:
“OK, just tell me what to do, what to think, who to support.”
Next, distraction:
sports, celebrity scandals, minor cultural controversies, wars of words over secondary subjects.
While your attention is occupied with judging, commenting, “liking” and “disliking”, the big decisions are being made elsewhere, quietly.
Little by little, without even realizing it, you start to accept as normal things that, ten years ago, would have shocked you:
– mass surveillance laws, – unimaginable levels of censorship, – preemptive wars,
– inhumane treatment of certain peoples.
And we call this “defending our values”, when in fact we are sacrificing them.
In the next section, we’re going down to the level of the concrete examples :
The pandemic, recent wars, media coverage of Palestine—not to list everything that’s wrong, but to give you clear images in your mind.
“When you want to recognize propaganda in the future.”
Section 5 – Some stories that are not told (or are told very badly)
5.1 Wars and “necessary” big lies
“Before the Vietnam War, you may have heard about the ‘Gulf of Tonkin incident.’ Officially, American ships were attacked, which supposedly justified a massive military escalation. Later, declassified documents showed that this ‘incident’ was at best grossly distorted, at worst fabricated, but in the meantime, hundreds of thousands of people had died.”
Before the first Iraq War in 1990, stories circulated about Kuwaiti babies being snatched from their incubators by Iraqi soldiers. These tearful testimonies, widely broadcast, played a significant role in swaying public opinion. It was later discovered that the testimony had been staged, written by a public relations agency, and that the young girl in question was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador.
Before the second Iraq War in 2003, it was “weapons of mass destruction.” Benjamin Netanyahu was among those disseminating this narrative. Images, vials brandished at the UN, “evidence” that all crumbled afterward. But the war had already taken place. Hundreds of thousands dead, a ravaged country, a region destabilized for decades, all based on a state lie meekly relayed by almost all major Western media outlets.
These are classic examples of war propaganda:
– we exaggerate or invent a threat;
– a shocking, highly emotional narrative is used;
– the same version is repeated everywhere;
– those who doubt are marginalized or ridiculed;
– and years later, it is admitted that this was not entirely true… without the victims coming back to life.
Today, we are reliving exactly the same pattern with the recent war against Iran. In just a few days, we have seen the emergence of a narrative presented as a “preventive attack” to “remove the threat” that Iran supposedly represents: a nuclear threat, a threat against Israel, a threat against American bases, a threat against “the West”.
We are told about Iran’s ability to produce weapons-grade uranium in “less than a week,” as if the bomb were ready to be launched tomorrow morning, even though public analyses indicate that manufacturing an operational weapon would take much longer, and the only nuclear bombs already ready in the region are… on the Israeli side and NATO allies.
Meanwhile, the official justifications change from one press conference to the next:
– to prevent a future genocide;
– to defend American bases;
– to prevent Iran from attacking after an Israeli offensive;
– to bring down the regime in the name of democracy and human rights;
depending on who is speaking and what audience is being addressed. The words change, but the concrete result remains the same: bombs fall on cities, civilian infrastructure, families.
And what almost completely disappears from the dominant narrative is the simplest question: who struck first, on whom, in what territory, and by what right? The Western attack is called “preventive,” “defensive,” “proportionate,” when in fact it consists of hundreds of coordinated strikes against Iranian sites, the assassination of leaders, and an enormous risk of setting the entire region ablaze. Iranian deaths become “collateral damage,” while NATO bases remain “legitimate targets.”
Once again, we find the same recipe:
– a threat presented as imminent and almost apocalyptic;
– a very loaded vocabulary to justify the attack (“preemptive”, “necessary”, “responsible”, “for peace”);
– pretexts that slip and contradict each other as the days go by;
– mainstream media outlets that rarely ask the simplest question: “What if we are the aggressors again this time?”;
– and very little room for voices that question the legality, proportionality or human consequences of this war.
If we do not remember Tonkin, the incubators, the weapons of mass destruction and all the previous “mistakes”, we will once again be caught by the same magic: we disguise a war of aggression as an operation for good, and then we ask people like you to applaud or to be silent.
5.2 Pandemic: figures, images and words
During the pandemic, the logic was different, but the mechanisms of fear and saturation were similar.
We’ve seen images of people collapsing in the streets in China.
apocalyptic scenes used on a loop, which have never been properly explained or reproduced elsewhere, but which have left their mark on the collective unconscious.
We started talking about “cases” as if they automatically meant sick people, whereas, historically, a “case” was a person with symptoms.
There, a single positive test was enough to inflate the numbers.
We created categories such as “adequately vaccinated”, by changing along the way the definition of what “vaccinated” meant
or even “effective”.
In parallel, serious side effects have been minimized or made invisible and the dissenting voices of doctors, researchers, by presenting them as “marginal”, “dangerous”, “anti-science”, rather than actually debating the data.
I’m not saying here that nothing was serious or that there was no health risk.
I say that the way which we were told about it bore all the hallmarks of propaganda:
– information overload causing anxiety,
– vague or changing language,
– disqualification of legitimate questions,
– implicit hierarchy of lives to be protected.
5.3 Palestine, Islam and the ideal enemy
Another, even more sensitive example:
the way we’ve been spoken to for decades Palestinians, Muslims, and people from the Middle East.
Images of violent acts are regularly shown, committed by groups claiming to be Islamic, and much more rarely structural, everyday violence, suffered by entire populations:
occupation, blockade, bombings, expulsions.
They lump together “Muslims”, “Islamists”, “terrorists” in the same semantic fog.
It is repeatedly stated that “their religion” is the problem, whereas, in reality, Muslims, Jews, and Christians have already coexisted.
This region existed for a long time before recent colonial projects.
When people march to demand an end to apartheid, an end to the bombings, respect for international law, They are accused of being “pro-terrorist”, or even “anti-Semitic”.
When they utter the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, they are accused of wanting to exterminate all Jews.
while the phrase, for many, simply means a territory without apartheid where no one has fewer rights because of their race or religion.
Here again, we find the same ingredients:
– misappropriation of words (jihad, intifada, sharia, anti-Semitism),
– mass labeling (terrorist, extremist, pro-Hamas),
– rendering certain forms of suffering invisible,
– implicit hierarchy among the lives that “matter”
and those that are reduced to collateral damage.
We could multiply the examples –
Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and many others –
but the idea is not to make a complete inventory.
The idea is that you see a pattern :
Every time it is necessary to make a population accept it, a war, an occupation, a suspension of freedoms, a health experiment or a massive economic sacrifice, we find:
– a simple, very emotional story, repeated everywhere;
– shocking images;
– experts who speak with one voice;
– opponents labeled and ridiculed;
– keywords laden with fear or shame.
And the more you recognize this pattern, the less easily manipulated you are, even when you don’t know all the details of the case.
In the next part, we’re going to talk about that:
How, specifically, can I protect myself?,
Keep your wits about you and not become, against your will, a propaganda relay against other human beings.
Section 6 – How to protect yourself… without losing your heart (harmonized version)
“We’ve talked a lot about manipulation, lies, wars, and fear. If we stopped there, it would just be depressing. And that’s not my intention.”
I am not making this video to make you even more afraid, but to empower you: the power to doubt intelligently, the power to observe, the power to say no to narratives of war and hatred, without losing your humanity or your hope.
6.1 Cultivating healthy skepticism
The first thing is to learn to be skeptical without becoming cynical. Being skeptical isn’t about rejecting everything. It’s about refusing to swallow information just because it’s repeated endlessly, just because it comes from “experts,” just because it’s presented with a fancy government logo or a serious tone on television. It’s about accepting that governments, pharmaceutical companies, NATO, the military, and mainstream media all have interests and blind spots, and that they can lie, manipulate, or hide things, even “for our own good.”
In practical terms, you can ask yourself a few simple questions:
– Who is speaking, and what does this person or media outlet have to lose or gain if I believe their story: contracts, elections, military budgets, credibility, clicks?
– What is shown, and above all what is not shown: which victims, which figures, which experts disappear from the frame?
– Am I judging an entire group based on a few extreme examples chosen to shock me?
– Are we really responding to the arguments, or are we just sticking on labels (“conspiracy theorist”, “pro-terrorist”, “anti-science”) to silence people?
You don’t need to become an expert on every geopolitical or health issue. You can simply give yourself permission to say: “For now, I don’t know, I’m keeping it open. I want more information than three clips from Radio-Canada or BFM.” That’s already an act of freedom in a system that prefers fearful and obedient citizens to thinking adults.
6.2 Develop insight: observe your own reactions
Insight isn’t just about seeing what “others” don’t see. It’s primarily about seeing what’s happening within yourself.
From now on, every time you hear a shocking news item, a slogan, a war image, an alarming figure, you can ask yourself:
– How does this feel in my body? (tension, knot in the stomach, racing heart)
– Does this make me hate someone, an entire people, without nuance?
– Does it give me the impression of absolute urgency, of “all or nothing”?
– Does it make me want to feel morally superior to others?
If the answer is yes, that’s a small red flag: you may be getting a taste of war propaganda or health propaganda, especially when you notice who benefits from this story.
You can then slow down. Breathe. Remember that thinking takes time, and that no one has the right to demand that you choose a side in a minute, especially when it comes to approving bombings, sanctions that starve populations, or measures that crush the most vulnerable.
6.3 Change what you let in
Most people still listen to the news on the radio, on CBC or other mainstream stations. I understand: we need to know what’s happening while we’re making coffee or lunch. But we have to be realistic: these media outlets are integrated into a political and economic system; they are not neutral observers above the fray. Their role, especially in times of crisis, is too often to promote the narrative of NATO, Washington, Ottawa, and Paris, while marginalizing dissenting voices.
The good news is that we’re no longer forced to constantly absorb the same version of events. Without being glued to our screens, we can listen to podcasts and alternative channels, less aligned with the dominant narrative, that dare to criticize “preventive” wars, “humanitarian” sanctions, and “counter-terrorism” operations that raze entire neighborhoods. Simply switching sources to hear about, for example, the war against Iran without the Islamophobic and pro-imperialist bias that the mainstream media has been feeding us for the last quarter century already changes the way our nervous system reacts.
You have a choice: listen to music instead of the news, or listen to the news, but through your phone, computer, or tablet, using a speaker if necessary, by choosing amazingly high-quality podcasts. In French, there’s odil.org, a platform for initiatives fighting disinformation, with its podcast that analyzes media and dominant narratives, and tools like the Akili Check app that use artificial intelligence to help verify information before sharing, instead of swallowing everything because “Radio-Canada said so.”
For alternative video content, less vulnerable to censorship by major platforms, you can explore hosting sites like crowdbunker.com, where you’ll find a lot of content deemed “too sensitive” for YouTube.
If you want to delve deeper, there are also tools that allow you to view the same news story from multiple perspectives: media outlets categorized as conservative, liberal, centrist, non-aligned, etc. In English, a platform like Ground News allows you to compare at a glance the perspectives and biases of different sources on the same event, and to see how Western media often march in lockstep when it comes to justifying a war “in other countries.”
Finally, for those seeking more in-depth and clearly anti-imperialist geopolitical analyses, there are French-language media outlets like Acrimed (Action-Critique Médias), which dissects the biases of mainstream media, and analysts like Alain Gresh, Pascal Boniface, Rony Brauman, Dominique Vidal, and François Burgat, who dare to name the responsibilities of NATO, Israel, and Western powers. For those comfortable with English, channels like George Galloway, Chris Hedges, Pepe Escobar, Tucker Carlson, Max Blumenthal in The Grayzone, James Corbett in The Corbett Report, Owen Jones, and Clayton and Natali Morris in Redacted on YouTube, as well as intellectuals like Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer, advocate an anti-war stance and reveal the other side of the coin that mainstream media omit or demonize.
These are not oracles, but tools to get out of your information bubble, see how propaganda works on both sides, and refuse to be automatically enrolled in the camp that best suits your current government.
6.4 Protecting one’s integrity… and one’s heart
Protecting oneself from propaganda is not just a matter of intellect, it is a matter of integrity.
Physical integrity: refusing to let anyone play with your health by bombarding you with fear or guilt, refusing to accept any measure “for your own good” without having the right to debate it, to look at the figures, the side effects, the alternatives.
Psychological integrity: refusing to participate in the witch hunt, refusing to cut human ties just because the media or the government have decided that such a label (“conspiracy theorist”, “pro-Hamas”, “pro-Iran”) is radioactive.
Moral integrity: refusing to rank the value and dignity of human lives according to passport, skin color, religion, or clothing. Refusing to suspend your empathy in the name of a flag, even when your entire media environment pushes you to see certain peoples as “expendable.”
And at the same time, remain open. Continue to love, to laugh, to create, to take care of your body, your relationships, to connect with beauty, with nature, with that which transcends you. This is what prevents the rejection of propaganda from turning into bitterness or widespread hatred.
6.5 Keeping Hope Alive: A Painful, But Real Awakening
I know that looking at all this, it’s easy to become discouraged. But I also see something else.
I see more and more people who are no longer satisfied with ready-made narratives. I see families who, after being torn apart during the pandemic or over the war in Palestine, are starting to talk to each other again, to apologize, to ask themselves: “What have we learned from all this?” I see people who dare to ask questions they would never have asked before.
I see bridges being built between people of the left, the right, believers, atheists, who understand that their real enemy is not the other people, but the forces that profit from their division, their fears, their anger.
The awakening is painful, yes. It involves grief, disillusionment, and the realization that some stories we believed for years were, at best, incomplete, and at worst, outright lies. But this awakening is real. And you are part of it, simply by listening to this kind of content, by accepting to confront uncomfortable truths without relinquishing your humanity.
6.6 A little pact between you and yourself
I’d like to propose a small pact to you, which you can take or leave:
Promise yourself that you will no longer give your consent too quickly. By consenting to a “clean” war, to “targeted” sanctions, to a massive fear campaign, until you have heard at least one voice saying no with solid arguments.
Promise yourself to be wary of stories that incite you to hatred or moral superiority, especially when they always target the same peoples, the same religions, the same “official enemies”.
Promise yourself to keep a corner of your heart open for those whom the media and governments designate as enemies: Iranians, Russians, Muslims, the “unvaccinated”, dissidents, regardless of the current setting.
And promise yourself to keep searching, learning, and informing yourself, even if it’s sometimes uncomfortable, even if it puts you at odds with your group. You don’t need to be perfect, you don’t need to understand everything. You just need to stay alive, clear-headed, and human, in a world that too often tries to buy you off with fear and slogans.
If you found this video helpful, if it put words to what you were feeling in a confused way, I invite you to share it, to comment on it, to talk about it with those around you – not to convince everyone, but to open up spaces for genuine dialogue.
The media system cannot be changed overnight.
But we can, each of us, refusing to surrender to him our discernment, our dignity, and our capacity to love.
And that, in itself, is already huge.
Here is a complete, ready-to-read ending suggestion that you can slightly adapt to your style:
I hope this content has broadened your perspective, that it gave you some pointers to better discern what is presented to you as “obvious” or “undeniable”.
If you want this type of message to circulate more widely than stories of fear, I invite you to like this video and share it with others and to subscribe to the channel.
It may seem trivial, but every like, every share, every comment sends a signal to the algorithms:
There are people who want something other than propaganda and division.
Your reactions, your questions, your opinions and even your disagreements are welcome in the comments.
That’s how we begin to recreate real spaces for dialogue, that we gradually awaken from collective hypnosis and that we contribute to curbing this epidemic of fear.
Thank you for taking the time.
Take care of yourself, and we’ll see you in the next video.
Teaser 60–90 seconds
“If, at this moment, you were to discover that some of your most “moral,” most “obvious” opinions have been instilled in you, without your knowledge, through propaganda strategies…”
Would you like to know?
Or would you prefer to stay comfortable?
We were sold wars based on lies.
babies snatched from incubators,
weapons of mass destruction that did not exist,
and even today, a “preventive attack” against Iran
presented as a responsible gesture,
with justifications that change every week,
and whose consequences will be felt on the global economy
and even into our personal and family budgets.
We experienced a pandemic with a saturation of images and figures,
definitions that changed along the way,
and sincere but dissenting voices labeled as anti-science,
when all they were asking for was a real debate.
This is not an accident.
It’s a combination of three things:
– our psychological defense mechanisms,
– words and images chosen to trigger fear, shame, anger,
– and a media system that creates the corridor in which we are allowed to think.
In the full video, I’m going to show you how to recognize these mechanisms.
how to observe what happens in your own nervous system when you hear a “news item”,
and how to remain both skeptical and insightful…
and full of hope,
Because despite the pain, the population is waking up.
If you’re tired of being forced to choose a side without nuance,
if you want to preserve your physical, psychological and moral integrity
for the next crisis,
I invite you to listen to the rest.
Script summary 3–5 minutes
“If, at this moment, you were to discover that some of your most “moral,” most “obvious” opinions have been instilled in you, without your knowledge, through propaganda strategies…”
Would you like to know, or would you prefer to remain comfortable?
In this video, I’m not going to tell you what to think.
I’m going to show youcommentWe create the stories,
how our own psyche becomes a tool of propaganda,
and how to maintain your mental and moral integrity
in future crises.
Let’s start with the basics:
us defense mechanismsand wecognitive biases.
In therapy, we talk about denial, projection, minimization, black and white thinking.
In propaganda, these mechanisms are amplified:
Any doubt becomes “conspiracy theory”.
All criticism becomes “hate”.
And if you refuse to choose a side, you become suspect.
Our brain, however, simplifies reality with biases:
confirmation bias (I only see what confirms what I already believe),
authority bias (if an expert says it, it must be true),
availability bias (what I am shown the most seems the most important),
illusory truth effect (repeats a lie often enough, it ends up seeming true).
Add to that group membership:
We are afraid of being rejected by our “tribe”,
So we keep quiet to stay on the right side.
Then there is the language and the trigger words.
We don’t say “occupation”, we say “security operation”.
We don’t say “bombardment”, we say “neutralization of a threat”.
We talk about “terrorists” on one side and “collateral damage” on the other.
Certain words like “jihad”, “intifada”, “sharia”, “anti-Semite”
are hijacked to automatically trigger fear, hatred, guilt
before you even had time to think.
And these aren’t just stories from the past.
We were sold the Vietnam War with the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
The first Iraq War with babies torn from their incubators.
The second one involved weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.
Even today, there is talk of a “preventive attack” against Iran.
of imminent nuclear threat,
with justifications that change every week,
and consequences that will be felt
on the global economy and even in our family budgets.
During the pandemic,
We experienced a saturation of images and figures,
definitions that changed along the way,
and sincere but dissenting voices labeled as anti-science
because they were simply asking for a real debate.
Our screens, our newspapers, our social networks
created a mental state of siege :
constant stress, a sense of urgency,
a desire to obey the first “reassuring” authority.
That’s what manufacturing consent is all about:
– our psychological mechanisms,
– words and images chosen to trigger fear, shame, anger,
– and a media and algorithmic system
which draws the corridor in which we have the right to think.
The question now is:how to protect yourself?
First, by cultivating a healthy skepticism.
You don’t have to believe something just because it’s repeated.
or because “everyone” says so.
You might ask yourself:
Who is speaking? What does he have to gain?
What is shown, and what is omitted?
Do we respond to the arguments, or do we attack the person?
And you have the right to say: “For now, I don’t know.”
Next, by developing your insight :
observe what is happening in your body
when you hear shocking news.
Does that put you in emergency mode?
Does that make you hate an entire group?
To feel morally superior?
If so, slow down. Breathe.
You might be getting a taste of propaganda.
Finally, by protecting your integrity :
Refusing to rank the value and dignity of human lives according to passport, skin color, religion, or clothing.
refusing to sever ties simply because a media outlet has labeled someone,
refuse to abandon your capacity for empathy in the name of a flag.
Yes, waking up is painful.
We realize that some things we believed
were at best incomplete, at worst misleading.
But the good news is that this awakening has begun.
More and more people are no longer satisfied with ready-made stories,
dare to ask questions,
and seek to come together beyond labels.
If you want to maintain your judgment,
your dignity and your capacity to love
in the crises to come,
I invite you to cultivate this threefold movement:
Skeptical, insightful… and full of hope.
If you’re tired of being forced to choose a side without nuance,
if you want to preserve your physical, psychological and moral integrity
for the next crisis,
I invite you to listen to the rest.
