A short series on HBO called Agents of Chaos details how no more than 100 people were able to overthrow the 2016 United States election in favor of President Donald Trump in an intricate Russian troll farm psyop operation.
A similar pattern appears to create a “doom loop” narrative in Bay Area elections and across the country using local networks of Tech Billionaires, Real Estate and Landlord Lobbyists, and Coal industry investment.
Using “Agents of Chaos,” social media influencers, and news media, one could call it the Doom Factory.
If Russians could perfect election interference with profoundly influential United States citizens, why would we not think that United States citizens or the ruling class—that is, the CEOs and billionaire class who influence politics with lobbying—wouldn’t start applying the tactics locally using paid consultants?
According to the series, all that was needed to start the psyops campaign initially meant to control the minds of the Russian people was an office building, some amateur writers, and the internet. Then you would need “Agents of Chaos.” In this case, former President Donald Trump was the perfect master of chaos, dividing the country with rhetoric that expelled all common courtesy and norms.
A great example of Agents of Chaos is the “recall activists,” who are paid by billionaires to create press rallies that do not include Q&A with the press. On October 29, 2024, recall advocates held an “Oakland Business Strike,” in front of city hall, claiming crime is too high and it is the mayor’s fault, despite crime going down more than 30% compared to three years ago.
After two years of “doom loop” divisive narratives that follow up with press “rallies, ” corporate news workers have reported these activists as sources of truth without regard to the retaliatory actions and toxic behavior the activists display online, especially on Twitter “X” leading with Seneca Scott.
Some entertainment sites like “Bay Area State of Mind” show Bay Area pop culture references, which have turned into salacious 24/7 posting campaigns against Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, who faces a recall along with Alameda County DA Pamela Price, a site Scott often references. Scott is the media contact for Philip Dreyfus, Piedmont resident, Hedge fund manager, and Partner at the Farallon Capital hedge fund, who has invested more than $1 million into the Oakland mayor Sheng Thao and Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price’s recall campaign. The campaign has also targeted other progressive Oakland city council members like Nikki Fortunato Bas and Carroll Fife and Congressional candidate Latifaah Simon.
Ironically, Simon’s opponent, Jennifer Tran, running for the same Congressional who will replace Barbara Lee, is also entangled in the same FBI investigation Mayor Thao is, which the recallers claim is enough reason to call her a criminal, with Scott claiming on Twitter “X” she only one the Mayor position by receiving sex trafficking funds and that makes her racist against her opponent Loren Taylor who lost, because he is Black. Mayor Thao is Hmong and has received an intense racist, body shaming campaign from Scott and recall campaign landlord Chris Moore.
On June 26, 2024, Dan Noyes asked Tran about her father, Phuc Tran, being investigated by the FBI. He’s accused of helping Andy Duong launder money for politicians, including Mayor Thao, by using straw donors.
Noyes also asked about her holding her position as President of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce and candidate for Congressional District 12. while running for Congress. She has refused to step down. Tran is a Professor of Ethnic Studies at Cal State East Bay.Farallon Capital Management invests heavily in coal. Oakland has been fighting lawsuits to prevent coal investors outside of Oakland from shipping coal through a terminal, which would create air pollution in many flatland neighborhoods. The lead recaller for Mayor Sheng Thao, Brenda Harbin-Forte, is not running for Oakland City Attorney and refuses to say if she will allow coal in Oakland.
The next phase would be to get reactionary videos of divided communities fighting and committing horrible acts. A certain level of intelligence gathering is needed to understand these groups, create online personas based on their identities, and then set up events to have them meet up, argue, and fight.
Analytics provide specific keywords and phrases to use. Technical assignments would post these keywords and phrases in the comments section of social media and blogs to shape public opinion.
However, there are key differences in the current context of the local dynamic of the psyop doom loop machine operation.
The videos are “concerned citizens” sick and tired of seeing cities like San Francisco and Oakland falling into disrepair. The content would circulate social media, particularly Twitter “X” and YouTube, and it would feature people in their darkest moments—shooting up fentanyl, overdosing, sleeping in the streets, homeless, and, of course, crime—lots and lots of crime.
The Agents of Chaos would be “influencers” hand-picked by influential shadowy figures and Public Relations experts. In some cases, they are the PR specialists and landlord lobbyists themselves. These “Agents” circulate the videos and narrate the story to ensure that a particular social problem is the fault of progressive policy and progressive politicians, even if they were just elected and handed the issues after a long pandemic.
There is a need to boost these Agents of Chaos who can appear in public, on the news, and at press conferences. Persona accounts typically have avatars instead of pictures of real people and names that target specific neighborhoods or local pop culture references. They adapt and infuse the Agents’ damaging political commentary to complete an echo chamber of confirmation bias. Some are people with large followings, while others are more like bot accounts, creating an army of persona trolls sharing, liking, and inflating content engagement.
From there, it appears there is a genuine public concern, and these issues are news worth bridging the Agent of Chaos narrative into local news media and, at times, Fox News.
This is how mainstream conversations are shifted, and policies like homeless encampment sweeps and tough-on-crime policies are enacted even when politicians initially said they did not want to impose extreme conservative policies. Without countering support, politicians will waver to whichever policy garners the most public favor while they unknowingly are the targets of these attacks.
Agents of Chaos also use blogs and media sites that act like pop culture hubs, enticing viewers to more controversial content until they garner a large dedicated following. Then, they use the site to relentlessly dump political disinformation about their political opponents.
All of these social media psyops use memetics, symbolism, ideology, and identity, all things people hold dear and expect cultural control over. Yet there is a constant batter over who owns the narrative, as the Agents of Chaos will take control over all cultural narratives using identity reductionism and insults to keep communities divided.
The content is a reflection of how polarized the conversation is. They are holding up a mirror to society, exploiting trauma, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and all the hate within. Online trolls raise questions about issues that are too extensive to answer to strangers while combatively demanding responses immediately. It is irresistible to fall into this trap when everyone’s political issue is at stake.
Representing conflict cloaked in moral justice for victims and social issues, Agents of Chaos are a modern reflection of an independent agent. Rather than the classic agent provocateur attached to one government agency, they can thrive independently through a shadowy, well-funded network with a collective agenda.
Agents of Chaos are provocateurs, social engineers with public relations backgrounds, marketing experts, and people who know data points and demographics.
They study pop culture and appear friendly to mainstream activities, but once they build enough trust and following on social media, they infuse disingenuous propaganda at just the right time.
It is not that propaganda itself is an issue. Many well-intentioned activists typically use propaganda, but many do not understand that it is much like sales. People will not buy into your pitch if you appear to sell something right off the top.
That is why building trust in the community through pop culture is a necessary step. If the propaganda—messaging with a political bias interest—is provided with complete context, it is not necessarily an issue. People can believe in the cause, or they can ignore it.
Propaganda filled with half-truths, followed by malicious, unfounded, questionable rumors, doctored images, and direct character attacks, should be considered disingenuous and harmful.
It works so well because, like any narcissist, they know what people want to hear, and they will pander to whatever they need to be said to make them feel seen and heard. In some twisted way, while many people see Agents of Chaos degenerate, they attract people who relate to their messaging.
Educating the public on the subjects at hand is the only way to interrupt the effects of disingenuous propaganda.
In this case, news workers should report how the government works, what politicians can do, their limitations, and their policy records. Still, modern journalism is filled with corporate media that chases after short attention spans for what they call “eyeballs” to get as many advertising dollars as possible.
This incentivizes clickbait headlines and stories of conflict. At the same time, the news workers are given little time to do the research necessary to tell the whole story because they must continue pumping out content to make a profit.
In the 2024 election cycle, two major news organizations decided not to endorse any presidential candidate because owners interfered with the editorial process. This is a significant concern in journalism since there is supposed to be a firewall between the publisher and the editorials. These examples prove corporate news media is increasingly incapable of delivering balanced, unbiased coverage.
There is an additional layer for all activists and organizers to pay attention to. Speaking from experience, Tur-Ha Ak of Community Ready Corp (CRC) has organized retaliation against himself, his partner, and Oakland city council member Carroll Fife, who led Moms 4 Housing when she was the Director of ACCE.
Both are housing activists in West Oakland, and when they appeared to assist unhoused people experiencing a sweep of their encampment, another housing encampment started to threaten them and claim they were attempting to prevent the unhoused people from seeking shelter. The housing activist, Vincent Williams, was charged at Fife, and as he did, Ak protected her. Williams claimed Ak slammed his head, causing injury, and about a year later filed charges just in time for the recall campaigns to heat up. The charges have since been dropped since police camera footage showed no evidence Williams had been harmed.
Due to this experience, Ak said in a Zoom meeting with other activists that the objective was clear: delegitimize Black leaders by using opposition, using other Black activists to attack Black leaders in the community, and creating doubt. He said the antidote was absolute clarity of what was happening. That’s easier said than done when a million dollars is stacked against you.
Tur-Ha Ak came up with six times of surrogates used to complete objectives, which sparked internal division within organizing leadership in the community.
Six Types of Surrogates
Lawman – The individual assigned to catch those breaking the law (think of all the FBI investigations that have spread even to the Oakland Police Department, but the narrative focus has remained on Mayor Sheng Thao despite no updated interest in her since June 2024.}
Provocateurs – will get you to break the law, they will manipulate emotions, etc.
Sabator – destroyer, break, intentionally destroy property and organizations to impede your work.
Informant – they observe, listen, gather info, and give intel.
Disinformer—Give our disinformation. (David Peters in Oakland is a good example of this. He is like a local QAnon conspiracy guy; he is also the Informant.)
Redirector/co-op: Take energy and cultivate personality. Mimic the work, and it will take you in a different direction.
Stunt dummy – The one willing to do all the things willing to get themselves in trouble to get you in trouble.
By human nature, people are drawn to gossip and conflict far more than policy, its geeky details, and the slow-moving mechanisms of government. Most people do not understand that a government in a democracy is meant to work slowly, so they often expect change to happen immediately once a politician is elected. All outside events that affect a region out of the control of that politician can also become their fault.
The ruling class and Agents of Chaos understand how ignorant the masses are, so they use their short temperaments, economic frustrations, daily stress, and worries to seize on their mindset.
Agents of Chaos will act as if they understand their plight and have their best interests in mind as long as they follow their lead, creating a cult-like following. They also insist their followers should not listen to whomever they deem enemies. Often, the term “evil” is used as the public has been religiously indoctrinated for thousands of years. Describing someone or a group as evil dehumanizes the subject and makes them a threat.
As the narrative will follow, those the Agents of Chaos have deemed enemies should be eliminated, bullied, and treated as outsiders, unbefitting the new utopian society they envision creating. The Agents have the solutions to this “heaven,” a perfect world in which homelessness, crime, blight, and poverty are swept away, never to be seen again. Their following do not care how these social problems disappear. They just want immediate results.
The propaganda dehumanizes entire demographics and neighboring populations to create serious disagreement among communities that can never be resolved through debate. How can you debate with someone who does not see you as human or worthy of being in their society? While these signs are often ignored by those who are not experiencing public attacks on social media or in public due to not being considered a serious issue, they are the predictors of fascism blossoming.
These propagandists are a bit more like “keyboard gangsters” than the original Russian troll farms who spent time attempting to convince naive Americans to adopt their narrative. They automatically call anyone who disagrees with their narrative “progressives,” “nutty,” “cultists,” and liars. In this sense, they are not nearly as sophisticated.
You’ll rarely see them roaming the streets or organizing outside. If you challenge their narrative effectively, they’ll simply block you. That way, you will never appear in their comments challenging many of their blatant lies or stories that purposely miss essential information and context.
Agents of Chaos use the old Roman tactic of divide and conquer. Despite themselves possibly being BIPOC, they will use identity and race as tools to weaponize arguments of victimhood and fallacy.
Using identity reductionism, Agents of Chaos are so arrogant that they believe they can outwit the public by gaslighting with half-truths and narcissism toward their class while playing a good role model to the upper class. They aggressively create hostility and cause conflict and disagreement where none was previously.
Racism is but a tool to chisel away at unity in democracy so wealth, resources, and power can remain in the hands of those who have maintained control. What would otherwise be mutual agreements in policies through communities? Agents of Chaos can wedge apart using identity and trauma, turning rational thought into fears, chaos, and confusion. Most of the politicians being maliciously attacked today are Black and Asian women.
The ruling class specializes in hostile corporate takeovers, so it is absolutely not above them to attempt to take over elections. All they need are aggressive strategies to disrupt the marketplace of ideas and social media data points to understand our deepest inner thoughts.
All our illnesses inside and around us work against us, weakening and dividing us. All forms of communication can be used to manipulate the bodies of our interconnected societies, just as humans can manipulate each other.
We are vulnerable to propaganda because we have been raised on propaganda entrenched in every media aspect. The ruling class has made us easy to manipulate and control.
This one battle that will have no winners when the elections are over. Whoever is left governing will have to take ownership of the current state of politics and the division between neighbors and communities.
The battle may be lost, but the war is not over. A lack of communication can become self-sabotaging and create defeat, as can being a toxic participant in chaos.
Not all is lost. The new year will bring new opportunities, and the most important is maintaining self-respect and walking away from the Agents of Chaos to focus on community building.
What will work against the Agents of Chaos is a well-educated, organized public. With this knowledge, my hope is organizers and community leaders will find creative ways to bring the community together and educate them on how things work and what we can do to independently solve our social issues rather than expect time and time again that electing one politician, donating money to a non-profit or protesting will solve all of our problems.
We can not go back to ignoring current events without contributing anything to our communities between four-year election cycles.
Leaders who have been relentlessly attacked will have a chance to gain wisdom and growth from the hardships of accepting things they could not control. They will learn to choose who they keep close to them wisely instead of building networks based on nepotism and friendly relationships alone.
With charm and empathy, they can negotiate using their intuition and rule with their hearts. They can stand firm by what they have always believed in and cannot be dominated by others.
It is important to manifest intentions and establish clear plans before starting new projects. With hard work, potential and growth are abundant.