By Colby Malsbury

So your fifth cousin twelve times removed finally jumped off the Good Ship Complacency Narrative and started to clue in that there was more to 9/11 than met the eye, and that the medical Maoists heralding Covid orthodoxy nonstop might not have his best interests at heart? In all sincerity, wonderful news! From such small seeds do Godly worldviews blossom, if the Gardener prunes the spreading foliage to produce maximum fruit.

But….if he’s still a wet-behind-the-ears waif, he might not quite grasp yet just what a minefield this internet of “ours” is. And if he desires to glorify God through sounding the warning bell to those who are as at sea as he once was, it is incumbent upon him to accrue some cyber-street smarts rather quickly, lest he finds himself cast adrift into the seemingly endless void of NPC’s and finds himself a walking, talking, mocking meme. At any rate, here are a dozen rookie mistakes he ought to be cognizant of.

1. Not Recognizing the Delphi Method of Group Control in Action

In the Dayes of Elde – aka pre-2020 – I penned a piece on the Delphic structure of Twitter, whereby a central controlling moderator – in 2019, that was still Trump and his triggercentric tweetocracy – divided the entire discourse of the site into two exclusive teams, and was able to concoct an overriding narrative stream out of the endless and mindless chatter disguised as profundity. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of the Method, the piece provides some backstory on its origins and influence, so feel free to click on the link and give it a read.

In the Scarybug Era, Twitter’s manipulative nature has only skyrocketed into the stratosphere, like Elon Musk heading to Mars. And it didn’t end with one site. Seemingly the entire internet is now one gigantic scripted WCW bout, where you get to decide which wrestler is the good guy and which one the bad, and you’re never supposed to clue in that they’ve been operating as a tag team all along.

Fresh recruits to the Cause: avoid getting sucked into this false dynamic at all costs. You’ll spend all your precious time yelling at memes and will become exceptionally depressed – if not suicidal – that you’re not ‘influencing the debate’. The “debate” exists to grind you into powder. If a Christian is to stand as a Godly witness online, it is incumbent upon him or her to recognize Delphic techniques in action when they are utilized, and to do whatever he or she can to throw a monkey wrench into the proceedings. Which brings me to our next mistake…..

2. Arguing With Bots

Deep fake sophistication has come a long way from the days when bots had no avatars, user names along the lines of ‘Hank12345’, and offered comments like ‘Your stupid’ or ‘Hey, have you guys heard about this amazing deal on sunglasses???’. On a format like Twitter where pithy character-limited responses are mandatory, it’s not too difficult to string a sequence of words together that sounds something like an actual human person would type. More and more of these fake accounts also carry a blue checkmark. Hey, who says the algorithm itself cannot be verified?

Of course, there are plenty of flesh-and-blood bots out there stinking up servers, as well. No matter what time of the day you happen to be online, there they’ll be, swarming you like fire ants and doing their utmost to keep you in a state of frenzy, goading you into staying up till the wee hours of the morning doing your damnedest to trigger them, and ensuring that your future employment prospects won’t look too rosy. And unlike them, I don’t think Soros Inc will be offering you a freelance contract any time soon.

So what to do with them? Block them. En masse. The algorithm will perceive that you aren’t doing anything to improve their visibility for fresh catches and move on to more promising waters. If you feel compelled to interact with them at all, call them out on their Delphic tactics. This becomes very easy to do when you know the patterns. Not only is it very gratifying to throw what they’re going to say in their faces before they say it, but they’ll do you a favor by revealing their true feral colors very, very quickly or blocking you before you can block them, or both. Either way, God is therein glorified. Paul refused to play the game the way his Jewish archenemies demanded that it should be played, and neither should we.

3. Falling For Clickbait

Why is it that conservatives never seem able to change anything? Short answer: why would they want to? After all, being a pundit with Fox News or an analyst with the Cato Institute is a sweetheart gig – but a gig that could disappear in an instant if pols start implementing the policies you have been advocating for many fruitless years. Paying mucho dinero to keep yes-men around in perpetuity has always been the prerogative of the Left, not the Right. So conservative talking heads have every incentive in the world to keep the status quo alive and vigorous, that their assigned role as Greek chorus may continue unabated.

It works exactly the same online, except that cyber-cons have an extra motivation – to make their brand of “journalism” as yellow as possible. Why work when you can set up a couple of monetized websites pushing unsubstantiated and sensationalistic fear porn – which will be seen as credulous by people desensitized by a relentless global Psy-Op to believe anything placed before their crossed eyes, so long as it does not come from a mainstream source? Make your headline outrageous enough, and it’s guaranteed to go viral within minutes of its initial posting.

Therefore, newbies: diligently check the source of whatever story you’re posting. If you’re not sure of its credibility, ask around about it. Praise God, rightist skeptics are calling out unreliable websites more and more, and a list of publications to shun is gaining in circulation. Old hands know very well which sites to avoid, and will willingly let you know about them. God is not glorified by gullibility.

And if you avoid sketchy sites, you also have a far better chance of avoiding….

4. Engaging in Hyperbole

If you’re a parent and you haven’t read your wee urchins Chicken Little yet, please do so. Never has a classic story of children’s literature had so much relevance to the modern state of things. All hollering about the falling sky is ever going to get you is an increasingly disheartened and disgusted follower base and a series of nervous headaches for yourself. While it is good to keep informed on the cunning devices of the wicked while they are still in embryonic stage, at the same time we can never discount the command of Christ: ‘Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’ (Matt. 6:34). And if the day contains mere globalist conjecture rather than actual globalist atrocities, then rest assured that is a good day indeed.

We see this graphically illustrated in the panicky reaction to the World Health Organization’s Global Pandemic Treaty. Is this a horrific Marxist superstructure that precedes the collapse of Western civilization as we know it? Yes…..but so were the 17,981 other outrages that the Davos Gang have inflicted upon us since the beginning of this month. They have their fiendish agreements in place? Fine. Now let them enforce them even semi-competently. I’ll wait. In the meantime, please resist the temptation to prognosticate on what could possibly happen rather than await what certainly will happen. Hyperbolic “reasoning” ultimately will only breed paralysis, not action.

5. Appealing to Woke Authority To Make a Point

The internet is one great big Mars Hill where divergent worldviews come together and await the Next Big Hashtag to marvel at. Ergo, the slightest jot or tittle of info that blows your way is to be grasped at and made viral, that your pet cause might gain more traction and you can be lauded by all as a prophet, or something.

Christians, and especially nativist Christians, must eschew this opportunistic mentality. I care not in the slightest about anything the likes of MLK, Gandhi, Abe Lincoln, John Lennon, and so forth had to say about the nature of tyranny, government, freedom, happiness, or whatever other vaguely defined and universalist-framed ‘telos’ we’re all supposed to be fighting for. Tis a shabby bit of advocacy indeed when we pluck fruit from a toxic tree and deem it succulent because we’re looking for another brickbat to toss about. Once consigned to the dung pile, these boorish idols deserve no resurrection on account of some out-of-context phrase they ad-libbed to drum up some favorable publicity for themselves one afternoon.

And that’s presuming those are even legitimate quotes. Which brings me to….

6. Relying on Screenshots

Memes, memes everywhere and whither they come from I don’t care! Not the most Solonic attitude, but it’s the online reality nevertheless.

If clickbait websites are about as reliable as a PCA youth pastor operating heavy equipment in a logging camp, screenshots from certified news outlets and random social media posts from no-names are far, far less so. There are a million fake CNN, MSNBC, NPR, New York Times,Washington Post, etc templates out there for the mischievous to concoct for their own uses, and if a social media thread is not already permeated by bots, well, photoshopping is well within the grasp of the rankest online amateur now, and outrageous dialogues can easily be concocted free of charge. ‘Satire’ is so endemic that stand-alone screenshots are now completely worthless mechanisms for sounding the alarm bell.

So please resist the temptation to share around that juicy pic of Klaus Schwab declaring Juneteenth to be the International Day of Organ-Harvesting White Infants. He might be evil incarnate, but Commodore Chrome-Dome is never that much on the nose.

7. Crassness

Senator, I served with George Carlin.

I knew George Carlin.

George Carlin was a friend of mine.

Senator, you’re no George Carlin.

So cool it with the potty-mouth and the unseemly sexually-oriented memes, already. In case you haven’t noticed, that’s the online norm rather than the exception, and if you resort to the exact same gutter mentality that the Left utilizes for shock value to garner attention and reacts you’re not exactly setting forth the shining example. I don’t remember Patrick Henry voicing his displeasure with the latent centralized tyranny of the federal constitution by hollering ‘F*** Ben Franklin’ in the Virginia House of Delegates, and whaddaya know? He still has name recognition among the circles that matter today.

8. Cliches

I can’t think of a more certain way to get me to zone out of a message than for someone to type in all-caps ‘WAKE UP BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!!!’ Dude, it was too late when that line was fresh in 2012, and the years have not been kind to that bit of rhetoric.

I loathe talismanic mantras cloaked in the garb of Calls To Action that pass for online ‘awareness’. Hashtag culture has only exacerbated that problem. As an example: who exactly is ‘do not comply’ supposed to reach? Sharing it around is merely preaching to the choir. In all likelihood, leftists can’t even see it as the thoughtful algorithm filters it from their sensitive and virtuous sight. Then we have senseless aphorisms like ‘you’re not meant to wake up the sheep, but the lions!!!’ Last time I checked, lions were rather notorious for being able to raise themselves from slumber, as is the God-ordained wont of any carnivore bent on survival and propitiation of the species.

Bottom line: originality goes a long way in establishing bonafides. Leave the tired tropes to the posers and the FBI agents.

9. Great White Hope-ism

This was a major problem among the Right long before Covid came into being – long before even the internet came into being, for that matter. But it’s a problem that sure hasn’t diminished as it becomes ever more blatantly apparent there is no earthly cavalry coming to our rescue. Not Donald Trump. Not Ron DeSantis. Not Elon Musk. Not Joe Rogan. Not even Kirk Cameron. Only Christ has that authority, and a petulant and psychotic world still rejects Him in toto. Thus, we have the kingdom of Davos in lieu of the Kingdom of Heaven, and the Swiss Alps are a mighty poor substitute for the New Jerusalem indeed.

In a world where “awake” pols, CEOs, entertainment figures, and the like turn woke just as soon as they get their first taste of real power and influence, we must never allow ourselves to be lured onto any bandwagon, much as the online ebb-and-flow pressures us to do so. Trump was not the Maverick of Mavericks who somehow managed to slip through the grasp of the globalists to begin the process of regeneration, and neither is the next actor who, professing to be Cromwell, is in actuality Barabbas.

10. Humanist/New Age Tendencies

One common refrain I have seen during the Great Gaslight is ‘despite all that’s happened, I still think people are basically good.’

Anyone who says that is not going to be surviving the next few years. Not with their sanity intact, anyway. Of course, their sanity is already suspect, or they wouldn’t have said that to begin with.

Fuzzy-minded optimistic tweets about how ‘the right’ will eventually prevail when the poster inhabits a post-existentialist wasteland and can’t conceive of anything past being kind to butterflies ‘right’ only yields more long-term despair. Theirs is an Eden I want no part of, as their ancestors’ similar Emersonian/Thoreauvian pantheistic utopianism is a large part of the reason we wound up with the excesses of the twentieth century and well beyond. One cannot replace Moloch worship with Asherah adulation and expect change for the better. So no, I am not about to join in a chain of ‘good Chi’ or ‘positive energy’ or ‘the Force, Luke’ or whatever to overcome systematic evil. And I am not about to make common cause with any bubblehead who does so.

11. Hubris

So, conspiracy newbie. You’ve been posting anti-government stuff for a few months now. And whaddaya know? You’re starting to get a following. The ‘likes’ on your posts are starting to average double digits, you get the occasional ‘I agree!’ response or a laughing emoji, one of your posts even got shared!

Know what all this means?

Absolutely zilch….if you let it go to your head.

This isn’t the internet of even ten years ago. Back then, before Algorithmania had encompassed everything, it was still possible to reach out to folks far removed from your environs and develop genuine camaraderie and friendship with them. You could use that as the basis for the formation of a genuine community of interests and therein glorify God.

No more.

It’s all about quantity over quality now. You don’t have a follower list that exceeds at least one million, and you don’t have a couple of hundred thousand shares per post? Sorry, Champ, you’re sorely lacking in ‘influence’, and down goes your visibility!

But of course, having woke moderators to constantly dodge around, you’re not going to be posting anything too incendiary – particularly when the range of acceptable topics and what constitutes trigger words changes by the week, and every whimsical change carries all the finality of Stalin dictating doctrinal policy to the Comintern. So you want to be an online presence? Best be as insipid as possible, but cloak your lack of a spine in edgy spitposting language, and rely on your ever-diminishing core of followers who have been with you since before the days of overwhelming net censorship to act as cheerleaders on everything you post.

That’s the top echelon of ‘success’ you can hope to attain to these days, young apprentice. It’s nothing to be proud about, and let this realization keep you humble at all times.

A good example of where this mentality can lead a person is a recent Facebook post by one ‘Michael Foster’, wherein this alleged rising star within Reformed circles (who proudly boasts of his ‘highly mixed’ descent and his rearing by a grandmother who survived the Holocaust™, incidentally) saw fit to castigate Kinism by posting a screenshot of a private conversation between himself and one of our own with a commentary along the lines of ‘ha ha, look what this stupid and unsophisticated racist is saying!!’, and letting his sycophantic fanboys compete with each other as to who can demonstrate their loathing for the Godly-ordained hierarchy of the nations with the least hint of shame. I suppose this is his idea of Christian leadership – treating a pivotal Scriptural issue that is personally repugnant to him as a big joke, and encouraging his stable of braying jackasses to kick it into the mire. What is it that differentiates your style of discourse from that of CNN again, Good Reverend? Or from The Communist Manifesto, for that matter? But be that as it may. He has chosen his personal ‘influence’ – a fleeting thing in the increasingly fickle Reformed community – as his personal Baal. May it give him much comfort for a year or two. Though even that won’t happen.

12. Not Walking Away From the E-Device For an Hour, a Day, a Week, a Month

Much as I hate to state the obvious, 24/7/365 net access is bequeathing us a generation of cyborgs whose hands are permanently melding to their phones, a la Videodrome. And not well-adjusted cyborgs, either. A constant barrage of ‘we’re all gonna die slowly and painfully’ by net zombies who have not taken the points laid down in this article to heart is going to bring anyone to a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual collapse in record time. It’s distressing just how common lamentations to be released from the confines of the Matrix are becoming on any given news feed.

God created the world and all therein in six days, man created thuh intrawebz over a span of fifty years and counting. Man did, by far, the poorer job. So disconnect from faux-reality early and often and continue to interact in the real world, as God intended we do all along. Dominion ultimately will not be attained through an operating system, just as our forefathers could not rotary dial their way to victory in the 1950s. The Sabbatic refreshment that will result will quicken body and soul and give you the fortitude to re-enter the fray another day with flashing sword and determined mien.

Always remember: you are the one using the internet. Once it begins to use you, it becomes expendable.