The White House published its official summary of the 2026 State of the Union address on February 25th.

…[Texas Rep. Al] Green quietly unfurled a sign declaring that “Black People Aren’t Apes,” an apparent reference to a video that was briefly posted on Trump’s Truth Social account earlier this month that depicted President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama as apes. Republican lawmakers were incensed, with Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma at one point trying to tear the sign out of Green’s hand.

What was Mullin so angry about?

To no one’s surprise the White House recount reads like a dispatch from North Korea, a silly propaganda operation. To me it looks like a military-grade influence technique buffet.

As a historian of disinformation I assure you that every line from the White House maps to a known information warfare tactic. Most of them are catalogued in military doctrine manuals from RAND, NATO StratCom, and the old Soviet active measures playbook.

None of this is subtle.

None of it is new.

The only thing novel is that the .gov domain has been captured by people who type like they only have thumbs.

Here is the secret decoder ring you should be able to find in any box of Cheerios.

Loyalty Enumeration

What They Published	How It Works	Who Did It Before
1. The entire “Democrats refused to applaud” list structure	Documenting who failed to perform sufficient enthusiasm for the leader transforms a press release into a denunciation register. The content of the speech becomes secondary to cataloguing the reactions of potential enemies.	Stalin’s Pravda tracked applause levels at Party Congresses. Mao’s Hundred Flowers campaign invited criticism, then used responses as a purge list. Ceausescu’s final speech was structured identically.

Dehumanization Lexicon

What They Published	How It Works	Who Did It Before
2. “Savage criminal illegal aliens — killers, rapists, gang members, and traffickers,” “illegal alien monster,” “invasion”	Categorical dehumanization collapses an entire population into threat archetypes. Once a group is linguistically recategorized as subhuman, any action against them reads as self-defense rather than aggression.	Nazi Ungeziefer (vermin) and Untermenschen. Rwandan Hutu Power radio used inyenzi (cockroaches). Ottoman authorities framed Armenians as existential threats. Khmer Rouge called targets “parasites.”

Firehose of Falsehood

What They Published	How It Works	Who Did It Before
3. Over 47 claims in a single document: “ending eight wars,” “total victory over terrorists,” “single largest drop in the murder rate in 125 years,” soaring 401(k)s, secure border, falling crime	Volume overwhelms verification. Each claim would require independent fact-checking, but the sheer density ensures no single lie gets adequate scrutiny. Documented by RAND as a core Russian information warfare technique. The goal is not persuasion but exhaustion.	Russian IRA operations 2014-2020. Goebbels’ principle of the Big Lie scaled through repetition. Iraqi Information Minister “Baghdad Bob” during the 2003 invasion. Erdogan’s post-coup media blitz in 2016.

Atrocity Propaganda

What They Published	How It Works	Who Did It Before
4. “The grieving families of innocent American women and children murdered by criminal illegal aliens — including the mother of Iryna Zarutska”	Showcase individual victims of the target group to generalize criminality across an entire population. The named victim creates emotional specificity; the category does the political work. Individual tragedy becomes collective indictment.	The Nazis published Der Stürmer with a regular feature on crimes allegedly committed by Jews. The British WWI Bryce Report fabricated Belgian atrocity stories. Willie Horton was the American domestic version.

Blood Libel / Ethnic Financial Crime

What They Published	How It Works	Who Did It Before
5. “Ending widespread fraud schemes — like the $19 billion Somali fraud scandal that burdened Minnesota taxpayers”	Attach an outrageous financial crime to a specific ethnic community as a collective. Position the native population as victims. The dollar figure gives false precision. Whether a kernel of fraud exists is irrelevant — the function is to weld an ethnic identity to criminality in public memory.	Medieval blood libel against Jews. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Chinese Exclusion Act propaganda about wage theft. Japanese internment justified partly through claims of economic sabotage.

Child Protection Pretext

What They Published	How It Works	Who Did It Before
6. “Protecting minor children from the horrors of irreversible sex changes”	Position the state as rescuer of children from a demonized minority. “Protect the children” is the single most reliable authoritarian mobilization frame because it makes opposition impossible to articulate without appearing to endorse harm to minors.	Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” (1977). UK Section 28 (1988). Putin’s “gay propaganda” law (2013). QAnon’s child trafficking mythology. Nazi campaign against “degenerate” influences on youth.

War Buried in Consumer Metrics

What They Published	How It Works	Who Did It Before
7. Military invasion of Venezuela listed between gas prices and tax cuts	Normalization through sequencing. Embedding an act of war inside a consumer satisfaction list makes conquest read as just another deliverable. By the time the reader scrolls past “No Tax on Tips,” the overthrow of a sovereign government is just another bullet point.	Mussolini buried the invasion of Ethiopia inside domestic economic messaging. Bush administration embedded Iraq escalation inside State of the Union laundry lists. Israel’s settlement expansion reported alongside economic indicators.

Sovereignty Laundering

What They Published	How It Works	Who Did It Before
8. “The decisive military action that brought indicted narcoterrorist Nicolás Maduro to justice, crippling drug cartels and liberating our hemisphere”	Reframe military invasion of a sovereign nation as law enforcement. “Indicted” provides the legal costume. “Narcoterrorist” merges drug policy with war on terror framing. “Liberating our hemisphere” recycles Monroe Doctrine language to present aggression as regional stewardship.	Panama 1989 (Noriega). Grenada 1983. Iraq 2003 framed as “liberation.” Soviet “fraternal assistance” for Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Afghanistan 1979.

Credit Claiming / Post Hoc Fallacy

What They Published	How It Works	Who Did It Before
9. “Inflation finally subsiding,” gas prices dropping, stock market surging, crime falling	Claim credit for trends that precede your administration or result from factors beyond executive control. Economic indicators move on multi-year cycles; presenting inherited momentum as personal achievement is a universal autocratic move.	Mussolini and the trains. Stalin and industrialization (achieved through mass death). Putin claiming credit for oil-price-driven GDP growth in the 2000s. Xi claiming poverty reduction that was already trending.

Phantom Threat / Voter Fraud Myth

What They Published	How It Works	Who Did It Before
10. “Protecting the integrity of our elections by preventing illegal aliens from undermining our democracy”	Manufacture a nonexistent threat to justify voter suppression infrastructure. Noncitizen voting is statistically negligible, but asserting its existence creates the pretext for purging voter rolls and restricting access. The “protection” is the weapon.	Jim Crow literacy tests framed as “election integrity.” Hungary’s Orbán used “Soros-funded” migration to justify election law changes. Putin frames managed elections as defense against Western interference.

Militarism as Nostalgia

What They Published	How It Works	Who Did It Before
11. “A World War II hero who helped liberate the largest internment camp in the Philippines,” “Warrior Dividends,” law enforcement “respected once again”	Wrap current militarism in the unimpeachable moral authority of WWII. Conflating a genuine hero’s story with contemporary military adventurism transfers legitimacy from a justified war to unjustified ones. “Warrior Dividends” monetizes the mythology.	Reagan’s WWII references to justify Cold War escalation. Putin’s “Great Patriotic War” cult used to legitimize the Ukraine invasion. Mussolini invoking Rome. Every authoritarian regime attaches itself to prior military glory to launder current aggression.

Unfalsifiable Victory Claims

What They Published	How It Works	Who Did It Before
12. “Ending eight wars,” “total victory over terrorists abroad,” “peace through unmatched American strength”	Declare victory in conflicts the audience cannot independently verify. Which eight wars? Total victory where? These claims exist in a verification vacuum — they cannot be checked in real time, and by the time anyone tries, the news cycle has moved on.	Nixon’s “peace with honor” in Vietnam. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished.” Soviet claims of victory in Afghanistan. The forever war’s perpetual “turning the corner.”

Populist Bribery

What They Published	How It Works	Who Did It Before
13. “No Tax on Tips, No Tax on Overtime, No Tax on Social Security,” “Trump Accounts” for newborns, banning corporations from buying single-family homes	Scatter enough consumer-facing promises to create personal financial stakes in regime loyalty. Each item targets a specific demographic. The policies need not be real or enacted — the announcement itself is the product.	Perón’s aguinaldo (mandatory bonus). Chavez’s Bolivarian missions. Erdogan’s pre-election handouts. Putin’s pension increases timed to elections. Bread and circuses, updated for the 401(k) era.

Sacred Calendar

What They Published	How It Works	Who Did It Before
14. “National Day of Patriotic Devotion, 2026” in the related articles	Sacralizing the regime through mandatory civic ritual. Creating regime-specific holidays displaces existing civic traditions and establishes the leader’s calendar as the national temporal framework.	Mussolini’s Fascist calendar (Year I of the Fascist Era). Franco’s “Day of the Race.” Nazi Nationalfeiertag. North Korea’s Juche calendar. Turkmenistan’s Ruhnama Day.

Enemy Media Designation

What They Published	How It Works	Who Did It Before
15. “Media Offenders” page linked in site navigation	Official government designation of press outlets as enemies of the state, maintained as a permanent institutional feature rather than rhetorical flourish. Converts press criticism from democratic function to act of disloyalty.	Nazi Lügenpresse (lying press). Stalin’s purges of journalists. Erdogan’s mass closure of media outlets post-2016. Orbán’s systematic acquisition of independent Hungarian media. Duterte’s shutdown of ABS-CBN.

The Architecture, Not the Ingredients

Any single tactic on this list normally would be dismissed as deranged political hyperbole, excessive partisan messaging, or rhetorical overreach that causes conflict. That is exactly how military intelligence sets up a disinformation buffet to work. The effect does not depend on any individual dish, because it serves them all simultaneously on official White House china. As Trump loyalists monitor everyone in the house, those who digest what’s served are in trouble, while those who resist are in even more danger.

Military information operations doctrine FM 3-13 distinguishes between content and architecture.

Content is each of the fifteen individual tactics. Architecture is the system that connects all the content, such as the .gov blog post methodology. The White House use of military intelligence doctrine in an attack on the American public does three things at once with a known authoritarian architecture:

1. Establishes a loyalty test (who applauded)
2. Designates enemies both domestic (Democrats, media) and foreign (immigrants, Somalis, Venezuela)
3. Buries an act of war inside a consumer rewards program

That triple function of loyalty enforcement, enemy designation, and normalization of violence does something far beyond an actual press release. It is an operations order, which comes along with news that mass political prisons are being rushed at high cost to begin spraying people with “war power” authorized pesticides.

Use of the .gov domain and a blog post to attack Americans tells you how far and informal a normalization of military dictatorship has already progressed. Every technique was field-tested by a regime that did not survive its own ambitions. The historical record is not ambiguous about where an all-you-can-eat buffet approach to military intelligence leads.

The only question is whether Americans recognize the price of swallowing what Trump is dishing, before the bill is due.

In 1959, Charles Mingus boldly wrote a song that spoke truth to power.

“Fables of Faubus” called out Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus directly. The sitting governor had ordered the National Guard to block nine Black teenagers from entering Little Rock Central High School. Faubus weaponized American protections to attack the most vulnerable.

Mingus didn’t deal in abstraction. He pointed at the man and showed everyone how to laugh.

Columbia Records recorded the song. Then they strategically stripped out the lyrics and released only the instrumental version. The music was deemed fine as culturally prestigious, commercially viable, safely ambiguous. The words were called a problem. Mingus himself said it plainly:

Columbia wouldn’t let them record the lyrics.

The motive was protecting Columbia revenue in Southern markets. A corporation understood exactly what the song meant, wanted to profit from its reputation as protest art, while it surgically removed the part that actually protested.

The vocal version came out a year later on Candid Records, produced by Nat Hentoff, who remembered the lyrics as “natural as sunlight.” The controversy never was in the content. The distribution system manufactured the crisis.

Name Me Someone Ridiculous

The Candid recording is a call-and-response between Mingus and drummer Dannie Richmond. Mingus calls and Richmond responds with names.

Oh Lord, no more swastikas!
Oh Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!

Name me someone ridiculous, Dannie.
Governor Faubus.
Why is he sick and ridiculous?
He won’t permit integrated schools.
Then he’s a fool.

Boo! Nazi fascist supremacists. Boo Ku Klux Klan!

Mingus drew an obvious fascism parallel explicitly.

This was 1959. This was not retrospective analysis, not as rhetorical flourish. This was a man at the top of his game, a world famous musician, calling out real-time pattern recognition. Swastikas and Klan hoods in the same breath, because he understood they are the same operation switching between different uniforms.

Louis Armstrong already broke this ground two years earlier. He had told a reporter that Eisenhower was “two faced” with “no guts,” and described Faubus with an expletive too strong to print. The reporter and Armstrong negotiated a sanitized version of “uneducated plow boy”, which became a phrase the reporter later admitted was more his than Armstrong’s.

Even the act of speaking a truth in America required editorial negotiation about how much truth the weak white nationalist infrastructure could bear.

Mingus took it further. The system pushed back harder.

Arkansas to This Day

The thing about Arkansas is they still haven’t dismantled what Faubus stood for and built. The KKK has continued to be coated and rebranded, the Nazis embraced and extended. The state that deployed National Guard troops to stop kids going to school now deploys its legislature against the same populations with the same confidence that institutions will protect the operation.

Nazis and Klan freely roam without a care. It’s less that they had to seize power of state institutions, and more that they know government institutions reward their predatory incompetence. Arkansas isn’t about an extremism problem, when it runs a governance model for national socialism to be the product.

Faubus stood as a proof of concept. The template he established was the use of existing state infrastructure to enforce exclusion, force the federal government to either intervene or be complicit, and face no personal consequences either way. It remains the operating manual.

The man served six terms as governor. Six. After deploying the military against children. The system didn’t punish him. It promoted him.

If he were alive today he’d be the guy who denies the request for American hero Jesse Jackson to lie in honor in the Capitol.

The Competent Complicity of Curation

Columbia’s editorial operation on “Fables” is a precision instrument worth examining. Rather than silence Mingus, which would generate more protest material, they curated him into erasure. They kept his music to signal cultural seriousness and sold records, offering fans the bones while removing all the meat. The instrumental version let white liberal audiences feel something without the urge to do anything. It was consumption without reality of confrontation.

This editorial selection is competent complicity. The people making final cut decisions understood music, understood politics, understood exactly what they were doing. They weren’t accidental. They were serving a role in protecting, enabling and extending the white nationalist dominated market.

Hentoff’s Candid Records operated differently. It was total creative freedom, no editorial interference. The result was a recording where the lyrics landed with their full weight. Two labels, two systems, two outcomes from the same source material based on which one practiced integrity instead of complicity.

Rotary Perception

Mingus had a concept he called “rotary perception”. He said musical beats exist inside a circle, like target practice using birdshot, rather than on a line, giving musicians freedom to place notes anywhere inside that space without losing the underlying pulse.

Mingus described a centroid with acceptable variance. The beat is the mean, the circle is the confidence interval, and the notes are data points that can land anywhere within the distribution without losing the underlying signal. That’s a scatter plot with a cluster around a central tendency.

He developed it partly in response to critics who claimed younger musicians were more innovative than him. His counter argument was the “avant garde” already was audible in Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington, when you really were paying attention.

The concept applies well beyond music. What gets marketed as unprecedented almost never is. The patterns repeat. The refusal to recognize them is the product, not the problem. Mingus was saying in 1959 what the historical record has been saying for centuries. The thing you’re watching happen also happened before, that someone documented it, and that the failure to learn from it serves specific interests.

He was a historian’s musician.

Arkansas deploying state power against Black schoolchildren in 1957? It was a rotation. Trump loyalists protecting and rewarding that deployment in 2026 aren’t new either. It’s the same beat, played at a different point in the same racist circle.

Mingus saw it. He named it. And then Columbia cut the meat off and sold the bones anyway.

Some things rotate. Some things don’t change at all.