Perhaps this class was a way of hiding in plain sight

Monday, March 2nd, 2020

Lauren Groff’s last class of the day at Prepper Camp was “Psychological Warfare”:

The instructor was a super-fit black man named Hakim Isler, whose movie-star charisma made sense when I learned that he had been on Naked and Afraid and other survivalist television shows; he calls himself the Black MacGyver. He, too, was former military, from the SERE — or Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion — school, a combat veteran, and a fourth-degree black belt in To-Shin Do, which had led him to write a book called Ninja Survival.

Isler took us through the idea behind psychological operations, or psyops, which he learned when he was in MISO, or military information support operations. He spoke of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the five tenets of survival (there’s always an agenda, know what makes you tick, psyops is a two-way street, take notes, be flexible and open to change), and the four strategies of the field (fortify, align, divide, and overcome).

I began to think that perhaps Isler was himself here to engage in psyops — to discover what makes preppers tick, to track their psychology, to understand the needs and weaknesses of this community, with the ultimate aim of somehow using that knowledge. Perhaps this class was a way of hiding in plain sight, being so brazen about his presence that nobody would ever suspect him of having an agenda. I thrilled to the idea; I felt, for the first time since the disillusionment of the day before, that there might be someone in this place who wasn’t a libertarian. Perhaps I wasn’t as lonely in my politics as I had felt. Or perhaps I was losing my mind.

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