If you have read my novel, “White King Rising,” you may remember that the propaganda chief for Al Qaeda–a man named Samir– was tasked with bringing America down from within, using our core values and our Constitution to undermine the institutions of education, family, religion, justice, military, and the long-revered Free Press.

The character “Samir” created a diabolical and brilliant strategy to get us to destroy ourselves. That strategy involved attempting to perform remote mind control upon the American people. To the readers, it was a daring and shocking supposition.

However, today we are living through the hell of what is now nothing short of prophetic insight into how you can get normally sane, rational, thinking people to turn into a mob, at your command. It was accomplished in my fiction, and it is being accomplished now in your world, your state, your city, your living room.

To discover how, one has to be willing to look creatively at the the work of Ivan Pavlov, the Russian scientist. Most of you know something about Pavlov and his experiments with conditioned responses in dogs. He was studying the relationship between a stimulus and its conditioned response physiologically. Whether he liked Lenin, or Stalin, is a moot point. The work he did laid a foundation for some really insidious mind control technologies.

Make no mistake. Pavlov was not experimenting with dogs because he was running a dog training academy. He was not running an obedience program for wayward pups. Not having the permission to work on human subjects yet, he began where most scientists do–working in a laboratory on animals. In this case it was dogs. And the results were conclusive.

Conclusive enough that authoritarian regimes have been using the technology against theirs and others’ citizens for all of the 20th century, and now massively and surreptitiously in the 21st Century.

The only way a bad guy could in fact control billions of people on planet earth would be to find a way to get the men and women to control and restrain themselves. Thus the stimulus-response technologies of propaganda and public relations today.

In Black Propaganda, the technology is simple. Just link an emotional response–one that is violent and visceral–to a person, a word, a symbol. If the message which produces the negative emotion is repeated often enough, all it takes eventually is for the targeted person to show up, or a word to be spoken, or a symbol to be presented, and the response of people is knee-jerk and unthinking.

Over time, the constant repetition of the message, coinciding with a situation which produces a response–usually of fear, anger, hatred–creates a short circuit that now renders emotional stability, critical thinking, or logic, unable to enter. One simply reacts to the “button” when it has been punched.

And men and women are reduced to salivating dogs just as Pavlov’s were when they heard the buzzer in the presence of food. Later, the food was taken away but the buzzer remained. If the buzzer was pressed, even though there was no food, the dogs would salivate. Today, if the “crisis” buzzer is pressed, even though there is no real crisis at the moment, the emotional response occurs anyway.

I would like to suggest to you that this explains a great deal of the mystery you are experiencing when you see people going off halfcocked, like lynch mobs being directed by some shadowy hidden figure. When you see normally rational people turn into seething, close-minded hatred of another person or group–without any apparent current provocation–just know that someone has planted a propaganda button about a person, group, or idea. Then, in the future, when you expect to rationally discuss or debate some issue or person, you are greeted by the rabid barking of a human being whose logic has been short-circuited. And who no longer retains a control over his emotions, and his subsequent actions. An example of such a button is: “America is systemically racist.”

Quite a conundrum, isn’t it? To solve problems in present time, you have to talk about them, discuss them, create solutions for them, persuade others to embrace your ideas and solutions. But, if the person you are talking to is “conditioned” to hate you because of the color of your hat, or the color of your skin, or whether or not you wear a mask at all times, you are in the world of stimulus-response, and someone is punching the “buttons” of you and those you are trying to talk to.

If you are not in control of your own mind, and you allow yourself to be controlled by words and symbols other people have planted in your mind to produce an immediate emotional response, then just recognize this: My character “Samir” is real. He and others like him have an agenda. And your well-being is not part of it. “Samir” wants you to do his bidding without you even knowing he gave the command. He sees you like a “salivating dog.” It would be a tragedy if you fulfilled his demented vision and became one.