Manipulators Understand That Narrative Control Is Everything
Apr 22, 2026
Former Israeli intelligence officer Ella Kenan was seen at a recent pro-Israel conference saying she runs an online influence operation that works with “communities of over sixty thousand people around the world that make our content viral” to manipulate public discourse and “serve the narrative” of Israel.
I’ve been assured that this never happens and that it’s antisemitic to say it does, but okay sure. Let’s move on.
“We also create content for non-Jewish influencers that collaborate with us,” Kenan says in a clip I first saw circulated by Information Liberation’s Chris Menahan. She then boasted of coining the slogan “Hamas is ISIS” and circulating it with such success that Joe Biden eventually parroted it in a speech.
“I offered ‘Hamas is ISIS,’ and I offered why, and I gave a short 101 on how we can garner attention and traction around that narrative, and that worked,” Kenan explained. “So in three to four days it became the most viewed narrative online. It became viral for almost three months around the world, in some places even more, and it even got to Biden’s speech. I also, you know, I can’t show you but I have so many videos, posts of Palestinians or Hamas officials like Abu Obeida responding to that narrative, influencing them.”
Do you notice how often she repeats the word “narrative”? This is because all manipulators understand that narrative control is everything.
It reminds me of a 2024 McCain Institute conversation between then-Senator Mitt Romney and then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken where they discussed the need to ban TikTok in order to control the narrative.
After bemoaning Israel’s lack of success at “PR” regarding its Gaza assault, Romney just came right out and said that this was “why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature” — with “us” meaning himself and his fellow lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
“How this narrative has evolved, yeah, it’s a great question,” Blinken responded, saying that at the beginning of his career in Washington everyone was getting their information from television and physical newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
“Now, of course, we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond,” Blinken continued. “And of course, the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative. And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates. And we can’t — we can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”
There’s that word: narrative, narrative, narrative. That’s how empire managers talk to each other, because that’s how they think about everything.
This is because empire managers are always acutely aware of something that normal human beings are not: that real power comes from manipulating the stories — narratives — that people tell themselves about their reality.
They understand that humans are storytelling animals whose inner lives are typically dominated by mental narratives about what’s happening, so if you can control those narratives, you can control the humans.
They understand that power is controlling what happens, but true power is controlling what people think about what happens.
They understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world.
That’s what’s going on with all the mass media propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, plutocrat-funded think tanks, mainstream culture manufacturing in New York and Hollywood, and online influence operations like the one run by Ella Kenan. A few clever manipulators understand that you can control a society by controlling its dominant narratives.
You may notice the more manipulative people in your own life behaving the same way. They pour an unusual amount of energy into influencing the agreed-upon stories their social circle tells about them, about the people they favor, about the people they dislike, and about what’s been happening. They’ve learned that the key to controlling a group of humans is controlling their collective story about their surroundings.
Manipulators understand that you can get people to trade away real material goods for empty narrative fluff. A womanizer can manipulate a lady into trading real material sex for empty narratives about loving her and wanting a future with her. A cult leader can manipulate their followers into trading all their wealth and possessions for narratives about rewards in the afterlife. An Israel propagandist can manipulate people into supporting real military resources being sent to the middle east in exchange for empty narratives about defending western civilization or fighting terrorism or fulfilling a biblical prophecy. Through manipulation, they can ensure that they get the material goods, while their marks get the empty narrative fluff.
Spiritual maturity means moving out of our hypnotic fixation on mental narrative and bringing our attention from the babbling mind chatter to rest in the wonder of the senses, where material reality can get a word in edgewise. As humanity matures toward becoming a conscious species, we will hopefully find ourselves less transfixed by mental narrative, and therefore less easily roped in by manipulators who rely on the stickiness of human head noise to get us to buy into their stories.
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/manipulators-understand-that-narrative?publication_id=82124&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=b88mv&utm_medium=email
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posted by Satish Sharma at
12:01
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