The Tipping Point: GAZA
Chapter Nine
THE MATH:
If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.
+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.
+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.
+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.
+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.
+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.
+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.
+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.
+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to protect ourselves or others.
+
There may be no more tragic episode of our lifetime than what has happened/is happening in Gaza. I pray there won’t be. It will likely be the defining issue of our era, and the ultimate litmus test of integrity. We are obligated to treat it with the serious attention it requires.
The paradox though, for most, is that our attention had been worn down by the heartbreak and frustration of watching helplessly these last two years, to the point where we could no longer stomach looking. This is of course no irony, but a well-designed execution of strategy achieving its intended result. It is by design that we’ve become too emotionally exhausted to hold up the spotlight. In order to save our spiritual and mental health, we gave up on the news. We could not justify the torture it was to just sit and stare when it seems we have no power to stop anything.
In every office building or fancy apartment complex there is a security guard who has to keep eyes on the security camera footage, watching out for anyone trying to commit crimes on the premises. If someone can get the guard to turn away from the footage, then the criminals can infiltrate the building with ease and commit any crime they want against the inhabitants.
If the people step back from their role as witness, we get more of what we are getting —unchecked madness. And the dark lords will pat themselves on the back. The criminals not only snuck past the security guards, they blinded them so they would never witness or testify to any future crime.
As we have shown with those we’ve put into lookout positions, whether it be the regulator contracted to block any harmful products from Bad Companies or the elected officials we assumed would block any policy which supports a genocide, they have failed at the tasks they were assigned. Because of ineptitude or cowardice or greed or another coercive element of their capture, they are no more useful than a blind security guard. If thinking rationally, we conclude that they cannot and therefore should not be relied upon anymore. What this means, is that we are for now in the lookout position, like it or not. It’s us or no one. It’s our eyes or blindness. So if we are thinking compassionately, and yes courageously, we have to keep watch.
Yet this will not mean merely watching what streams on our phones, like a TikTok or a show, without any connection to its creation. Watching without doing doesn’t make sense here and that’s why many of us could not sustain it.
Our analysis here today is not that. We are not just reading over the timeline of events to confirm the horribleness of it. We are not passively reliving trauma like a masochist. We are learning from it. We are learning how to never be in this position again, for this long. They will keep their same position—but ours can shift. Up until now, our position has been to watch and hope, that next year we won’t be watching an all-to-similar story of cruelty and injustice, perhaps in a different region, with a different evil-doer or CEO calling the shots. But their pattern will be exactly the same. And their tactics will be exactly the same.
When we take the spotlight off of THEM—the psychopathic nature we can barely fathom; when we take the spotlight off of IT—the suffering we eventually turn away from; when we redirect the spotlight onto US, and keep it there through every step of the Playbook examination—we can see where to correct the way we react to their tactics and where we can change our pattern.
In spite of how difficult this might be, summoning the temerity and focus to dig deeper into such a dark period—this is the absolute worst time to turn off the light.
For the first time in history, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis.
For the first time in my lifetime, most everyone I know has heard of AIPAC. The shadowy mechanics of how our leaders can allow crimes against humanity to continue without doing everything in their power to protect the people are being exposed.
This enormously significant shift in public opinion is the result of a majority of the people recognizing the deception of the Israeli PR game and that manipulation no longer working on them. What we’ve seen and what we believe to be the truth has overcome the lies of this campaign.
BUT— this did not happen in late 2023, this happened in late 2025. And it took a genocide to get us here.
We undertake the essential requirement of an “After Action Review”, which is not a shaming exercise. All productive teams perform this AAR to better prepare for the next endeavor. Even successful ventures or winners of races do this to see if there may still be some improvement of efficiency or some tweak to shave seconds off their time.
The seeds of future bad fruits have already been planted, so when the first sprouts of that propaganda appear, we want to nip them in the bud much earlier than after tens of thousands of innocent lives lost. We would have to know precisely what and where to nip.
I assume that no reader here needs any more information to convince them of the tragedy in Gaza. As I keep saying, this is not an analysis of the tragedy, but of our reaction to it. However correct we feel about our 2025 position against Israel’s military action or U.S. foreign policy which supports that, are we able to identify where our 2023 position was any different, quieter, less confident or less active? This difference is what we want to home in on. There are of course understandable progressions from the heat of a moment like after October 7th to the more nuanced perspective we may hold now, and we always want our position to be flexible as situations evolve. Yet there is also valuable self-discovery for us in examining what exactly was going on internally during the progression, especially if it was a slow one. As we think through it, we don’t want to skip over the personal evaluation just because we have now caught up to the more rational position. Or because we feel a temporary relief during a ceasefire. Else we risk repeating the cycle at the same belated pace next time.
When we finally escape from a bad relationship or any harmful episode in life, once we catch our breath and feel at peace again, there is often great reluctance to then voluntarily dive back in to thinking over all the unsettling memories of what went so wrong. The “just put it behind you” method is super appealing! Unfortunately, it’s also the #1 obstacle to learning the lesson so it doesn’t happen again. For sure we want to put “them” behind us, but if we don’t have complete awareness of how they were able to manipulate us, another one of them might easily access whatever vulnerabilities allowed the last one in.
Many perceive the catastrophe in Gaza as a tipping point. Or, as addicts put it, a bottom. Not for the criminal agenda of the deceivers, that will press on. But for any remaining blindness in us that obscures that very real criminality and any rationalizations that restrict our ability to guard against it. If this moment is as pivotal as it seems, we may be more motivated and capable than ever to change elements in our behavior in order to capitalize on the numbers we now have on the side of sound judgment and peace. But, it will take great vigilance not squander this momentum.
When you’ve been very diligent with dieting and exercise and have finally lost those 20 pounds you’ve struggled so long to shed, you don’t celebrate that by eating a box of donuts. You keep going. You stay disciplined. You lean in and add even more healthy components to your lifestyle. You take advantage of that wind at your sails, not take for granted that it will just keep blowing this way.
One of the themes we drive home here is that hindsight is 20/20 and always much too late, if you are the victim of that period of doubt and dissonance where not enough people were seeing things clearly. I truly believe we have the capacity to shorten this period and think clearly from the jump, once we address the obstacles of manipulation that impede that process.
As we know, Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage. Israel’s retaliation was expected, justified and supported by the majority of Americans and almost unanimously by leadership in Washington.
At the same time, the PR campaign for military action was launched. It began with this claim: Israel is only defending itself, they are only attacking Hamas and not the Palestinian people.
And these claims were believed, initially, by those who were watching the dominant presented reality, the horrors committed by Hamas. For the majority, it was not difficult to wholeheartedly support Israel’s need to defend itself after this barbarousness.
While not many are vociferously “pro-War” outside of extreme war hawks, the masses can often treat each new campaign as a blank slate when it follows a cataclysmic fear event. We don’t have to be pro-War to be made legitimately afraid of an enemy we feel the need to be protected from, like the Communist North Vietnamese, or Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Islamic Terrorists in Gaza or Iran. Or even, as of this week, narcoterrorists of Venezuela.
Unlike some new product that hasn’t existed previously, like the Wearables example perhaps, with war we have a built-in apprehension because we’ve seen and studied so much of the damage. We’ve likely watched many movies on the ravages of war in our day. So, it does depend on successful appeals to emotional fallacy to get us stirred up by our fears or our sympathy enough to override that wisdom in order to support another new military action.
The events of October 7th were most definitely an incitement of fear and emotions.
A week after the attack, a CNN Poll indicated a high degree of sympathy for Israelis. 50% of Americans viewed Israel’s military response as “fully justified,” with another 20% calling it “partially justified”.1
Despite how many or most felt then, we know where that public sentiment eventually got to—today American’s disapproval of the military action has reached 60%.2
This is the same evolution of all previous wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and now Gaza. Support wanes as the truth of innocent lives lost and destroyed becomes visible. (Key word: visible). Given this perfectly repeating sequence, it should not be difficult, even in the early emotional weeks, to predict where we will end up.
Regardless of the specifics which might make any fear-inducing event feel unique or unprecedented, and regardless of how those singularities make us personally feel a unique or unprecedented amount of real fear, we don’t ever need to treat a public relations campaign for war as anything novel or distinct. The Pattern & Playbook utilized by the War Machine will not be distinguishable from the previous one.
I will repeat the Pattern in the context of a war campaign:
War Machine presents a war they need us to buy into. We don’t yet want it or need it and it may not be good for us.
War Machine uses their powerful Public Relations departments to convince us to buy into their war.
Once War Machine gets initial market share they must continue to sell more war, must expand their war territory, their profit line must go up.
The war contains a hidden harm. War Machine does not disclose this to the public, instead attempts to cover it up.
The citizenry have questions and concerns about the war. Relying on watchdog tools like government officials, whistleblowers, litigation, quality journalism, and the public’s activism, there is exposure of the deception and harm.
War Machine then utilizes a Playbook of tactics to deny the harm, avoid accountability, protect their war business, and keep war going where harm is extended and compounded.
Most all reading this can now easily concede the actual reality—that Israel presented false claims, the captured in our media and government parroted and propped up those claims, and this resulted in tragedy.
Consistent with the Pattern, it would be the Watchdogs who exposed what the deceivers were trying to bury in order for their version of reality to reign supreme.
These mere mortals, the Watchdogs, shepherd the evidence through endless assaults for the sake of truth. For the sake of the people’s right to know. Right to know is a human right enshrined in law defined as the right for people to “participate in an informed way in decisions that affect them, while also holding governments and others accountable.”3 This access to information is an essential foundation to generate, share, and make available to all members of society knowledge that may be used to improve the human condition. Knowledge is light and ignorance is darkness.
The deceptive campaigns of Bad Companies or the War Machine hide the crucial knowledge we need to make decisions behind their fraudulent versions of reality. Watchdogs are the ones who visibly fight the false narrative. And because of their visibility, this is the group which the campaigners will need to target and crush.
Despite the self-defense narrative delivered by Israel, our government officials and mainstream media, the Watchdogs worked to report out the stories and pictures of the actual reality—the IDF’s offensive strategies against the Palestinian people:
After October 7th, Israel immediately ordered over 1 million residents of Gaza City to evacuate and move south, launched a large-scale ground invasion of Gaza, as well as airstrikes on a refugee camp, killing dozens of civilians. About 90% of Gaza’s some 2.1 million residents were displaced, with most facing unsanitary, overcrowded conditions and a lack of basic services.
The Israeli government imposed a widespread blockade on aid, commercial imports, and basic service provision. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant characterized it on October 9 as a “complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” These initial months of deprivation laid the groundwork for the crisis of organized famine that followed.
In that first month of October 2023, the World Food Program warned of Gaza’s dwindling food supply. In December, it reported that more than half of Gaza’s population was “starving”, fewer than one in ten were eating every day, and 48% were suffering “extreme hunger”.
In December 2023, the organization Human Rights Watch found that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war by deliberately denying access to food and water.
In January 2024, UN experts accused Israel of “destroying Gaza’s food system and using food as a weapon against the Palestinian people”.
By only the second week of Israel’s “defense”, more than 800 scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies, and genocide studies signed a public statement “to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
And, in early 2024, a case was brought before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) by South Africa who accused Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip.
In this competition for the public’s attention and opinion, the polling numbers after these initial months show the American people somewhere in between the two presented versions of reality.
Americans were still sympathizing more with Israel (37%) than with the Palestinians (14%). And, 60% still said the United States should support Israel’s militarily until the remaining hostages taken by Hamas were returned (43% of Democrats).
But, by March of 2024, overall approval of Israeli action in Gaza dropped to 36%. And on the question of whether the military action is justified or not justified, both those numbers dropped (27% and 29%, respectively). But—the biggest growth in 2024 was in the group of Americans who said they did not know enough to give an answer. (42%).
What this shows us is that the Playbook is working. Israel and our congresspersons and much of our media say one thing, the Palestinians and the Watchdog groups say something else. The news of the violence and destruction is seeping through despite the gatekeeping by the captured, and so approval for the campaign is waning, yet the majority still feel the need to keep funding the source of the violence and destruction.
This is the confused result when the crucial knowledge needed to make decisions is manipulated and/or hidden from the people. The continuing argument over who deserves our sympathy, what is the correct strategy, all in a post-truth world where we trust less and less, means an adequate amount of doubt is sewn. A little doubt can go a long way. It only has to ensure the public feels a bit tentative on an issue instead of forcefully activated.
In order to further their agenda and subdue the resistance, the Playbook tactics the campaigners used worked as they always do to stifle dissent. Those who opposed Israel’s strategies of retaliation were hit with a massively powerful smear campaign. When the captured arms of our government used coercion to further weaponize the suppression of any criticism, the dissenters faced very serious consequences. All this was extremely apparent to the rest of the nation and made it unappealing, or even unsafe, for others to show any publicly-observable disapproval.
All this is exactly how it goes, how it’s been going, for the campaigns launched by the Bad Companies we’ve focused on. In the cases of Big Tobacco, Big Chemical, Big Agriculture and Big Pharma, currently, the Watchdogs are doing their utmost to sound the alarm and deliver the truth from the shadows into the light. In these situations, currently, the Playbook tactics are still overwhelming the Watchdogs and succeeding. The actual realities of most of the bad products we are contending with in our world, which cause so much harm and death, still have not come to the level of transparency necessary for any kind of tipping point.
FYI and FWIW, here are some of the Watchdog groups fighting the false narratives of Bad Companies at present:
https://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/
https://www.gmfreecymru.org.uk/ (this is of course a global fight)
These groups work tirelessly to report the evidence of harm out to us, yet in these cases not enough of the public is receiving. The truth of what is happening behind the captured curtain is still being sufficiently buried so it remains out of visibility. Unfortunately for us here, it seems we would need the crystal-clear visuals the caliber of what we see in Gaza to rally the kind of outcry necessary for change.
With the product of war, the direct causation of harm is (can be) much more obvious and unequivocal. However, that all depends on the coverage and how much debate is allowed or heard. Biased coverage and limited or quashed debate = less exposure of harm = more harm.
The Vietnam War, for instance, unlike in previous wars, was the first “television war.” Uncensored reporting brought the conflict’s unfiltered and brutal reality into every American living room. This visibility created a “credibility gap” between optimistic government reports and the grim scenes broadcast on the nightly news, which directly correlated to the anti-war sentiment that would eventually force America to pull out.
In contrast, there is a widely supported argument that a lack of critical coverage of the Iraq War and its immense human cost undermined potential opposition. Instead of challenging official narratives, much of the U.S. mainstream media acted as a conduit for the Bush administration’s pro-war stance, contributing to public misconceptions that took years to correct. In this war, the captured media downplayed or underreported Iraqi civilian casualties, (some estimates place between 100,000 and 650,000 under)4 and the PTSD of our veterans was notoriously ignored and neglected.
We will call the war in Gaza the first “TikTok” war as the abuses there did achieve that crucial level of visibility, due to the images being displayed on over a billion phones every day.
Despite what the war campaign, the mainstream media and government representatives were saying, the “watchers” grew into a consolidated global majority of truth-telling and utilized all the tools available to Watchdogs. They took their claims to the International Court of Justice, as the courts are often the only path to judgment on these opposing versions of truth. The independent journalists risked and lost their lives to get this truth out to us. As continuous as Israel and its accomplices affirmed “We are not targeting civilians, there is no famine, this is all self-defense, etc”, the evidence of the actual reality was smuggled out and disseminated to the people to confront the deception.
As we’ve shown in the Pattern, the exposure of the harm doesn’t immediately lead to an end to the harm, it immediately leads to the activation of the Playbook which serves to allow continuation of the harm. In all the other Bad Company examples we’ve referenced, the actual reality has been repeatedly beaten back down and shrouded in enough doubt, dissonance or distaste to be effectively marginalized.
The crucial difference in this current state of the game we are in, is that the smear tactics used on the Watchdogs and any of us who agreed with their criticism, which had worked for decades whenever they were needed, stopped working like they used to. Either from overuse and overreach or from buckling under the weight of the unfiltered honesty of the raw footage, or the combination of both, the negative accusations of the smear were no longer discrediting the truth as it poured in.
Although the campaign accused the dissenters of being antisemitic and putting our Jewish countrymen in danger by their criticism of the war, the Watchdogs remained steadfast. It began to come down to scrupulous principals and tough choices—is it worse to be considered anti-semitic or to be silent on a genocide? When the former used to have extreme power of persuasion, the greater need to protect innocent lives from being lost and destroyed began to take precedence.
Once the premise of the smear—that if you opposed this military action you were directing hatred or prejudice toward all Jews—was rejected, the accusations started to lose their sting. And the more and more desperate the smears were that came after this, the more strong-arming the coercive enforcement became, the more the manipulative tactics were illuminated to more and more of the population. It was finally becoming clear enough to see that the vitriol directed at the dissenters was merely another weapon of their corrupt campaign and less an actual attempt to protect society from a degenerate group we should all fear and vilify.
And this is a major paradigm shift.
The breakthrough here was not the sudden revelation of the existence of tactics like capture and the smear campaign and coercion. We haven’t been completely ignorant of those, but we also haven’t had any major victories over them. The development was that it became very evident that their existence was directly enabling the continuation of injury and death. These components within our own system of democracy were part of the weaponry of this war. And more people began to name and define these tactics as components of the assault which they must oppose.
Once these lynchpins of the Playbook were weakened, the entire campaign began to falter and the Watchdogs could more effectively rally in opposition. Whether the opposition will vanquish the enemy remains to be seen, but this is not our focus, not yet. It can’t be. We don’t get to contemplate our offensive strategies until we’ve improved our defensive ones. Any sports fan will tell you that it is good defense which creates good offense.
This shift, however temporal, has taken the form of a new bandwagon rolling through Washington. In addition to the new RejectAIPAC coalition, a US congressman, a centrist Democrat and strong supporter of Israel, has returned his AIPAC donations. More and more congresspersons are pledging not to take AIPAC money during the 2026 midterms, which means they are all considering what is now being called a litmus test for many voters. These are irrefutable signs that what was once the predominant, if not only way to win an election, is now a political liability.
All this does move the needle, and the sights of our aim, closer to the kill shot we’ve been discussing. When previously hardly anyone in government or media bothered with the topic of campaign finance reform, now at least the subject of those campaign finances is front and center, and some politicians are voluntarily reforming. For the vast majority, this is not because they are questioning their morals. But because they are hearing audibly and seeing visibly our questioning of them. When we the people did not have our eyes on the disturbing outcomes of capture, in this case what taking AIPAC money meant, they could hide all that corruption behind closed doors. Now that we see, and have said that we see, they now feel the pressure.
I’m not suggesting anyone be foolish enough to pin all hopes onto this first break in our pattern. On the contrary, I believe this is the time to double-down on the examination of the rest of the P&P, to make double-sure we know how the tricks did work on us until they didn’t (if they didn’t), to see where they still work on us in other issues, and keep investigating how we can seal up the breaches and/or create the new and improved defensive armor we need to get past them.
The rising cancers, heart conditions, chronic disease and addictions in our country that continue to compromise our quality of life and lower our life expectancy year after year, in numbers greater than the death count in Gaza—have a cause. There is specific weaponry behind these fatalities. The shadowy mechanics of the Bad Companies are in play, same as always, and they are still working well.
It’s wise to take advantage of this current high resolution illustration of all the tricks, traps and snares used in the Gaza campaign and burn these into our memory while it’s very fresh and clear. Because we can deduce from our history that these perceptions can naturally, and by design, fade away like chalk on a sidewalk.
The most solid and unchanging part of the Pattern we’ve been locked into for decades, or millennia even, is that our opponents do not rest. And wherever we do, is where they race ahead of us. We see how much damage they can do with their lead time, in the period when we are still wrestling with our dissonance and battling each part of the Playbook. We need to catch up, and then keep pace. We need to recognize and oppose the tactics when they are launched at us next, regardless of the circumstances. And, we need to accomplish this IN. REAL. TIME.
+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see =
We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….