JAQing Off (The Anti-Autocracy Psyop)

Bottom Line Up Front for Activists: Go to their spaces first and keep showing up in ways that don’t automatically raise their defenses. Invade the mind of MAGA. Storm the beaches of the public zeitgeist and rain truthful propaganda down on their territory like the Allies rained leaflets on Germany in World War 2.

On March 10, 1994, right-wing national radio host Rush Limbaugh went on his show and told his audience of millions: “There’s a Washington consulting firm that has scheduled the release of a report that claims that Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton, and the body was then taken to Fort Marcy Park,” his voice sounded like he was announcing a national emergency. Foster was Deputy White House Counsel and one of Bill Clinton’s closest personal friends from Arkansas. Five independent investigations ruled Foster’s death a suicide. Limbaugh knew this. He kept “just asking questions” about it anyway, for twenty years, until the day death was finally kind enough to take Rush away.

Rush was doing something called JAQing off. Just Asking Questions. No claim. No evidence required. No accountability. The person doing it retreats behind sincerity every time. They were just curious. They just wanted to know.

The right built an entire media ecosystem around this technique. It’s how Donald Trump launched his political career. “I have people that have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding,” he told NBC in 2011, speaking about investigators he claimed to have sent to Hawaii to look into Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He never produced the investigators. He never produced findings. He just kept asking. YouGov tracking data shows that even after Obama released the long-form certificate, public belief in foreign birth fully reverted within fourteen months. The correction decayed but the question didn’t.

This technique is as old as gossip. Every small town has someone who never makes accusations but always has questions.

The domestic right scaled it. Foreign intelligence services have been running coordinated JAQ campaigns across American social media for years, documented in detail by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Mueller report. Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) floods internet comment sections with short emotional questions designed to stoke fear, division, and mistrust, specifically targeting non-authoritarians to stoke infighting. But foreign governments aren’t the only ones who figured this out. Cambridge Analytica harvested data from 87 million Facebook profiles and used it to run hyper-targeted influence campaigns for the 2016 Trump campaign, funded by American money and staffed by people who went on to serve in the Trump White House.

Steve Bannon articulated the underlying strategy explicitly: flood the zone with so much noise that people stop trying to sort it out and just accept whatever is easiest to hold onto. A simple question is easier to hold onto than a thousand-word rebuttal. So you flood the zone until the rebuttal is impossible to find and the question is all that’s left.

Researchers at Clemson who analyzed three million IRA tweets found the operation wasn’t trying to persuade anyone. It was selling disgust. The coalition that carried Trump to power, stretching from racists to misogynists to the gamergate pipeline to religious extremists, to people who believe in dragons but don’t believe in dinosaurs to communities steered there through manufactured distrust of medicine and institutions, all of these groups were unwittingly assembled in part through this technique applied through factory style production of these methodologies. You can see it in any political comment section today. Someone posts two sentences that have nothing to do with the article. Another person responds with five well-sourced paragraphs. The original commenter never replies back. The question was never meant to start a conversation.

This is the core asymmetry. A three-word question takes three seconds to deploy and three pages to rebut, and by the time the rebuttal would have the people who need it, they have already scrolled past. The correction requires sustained attention, which is an increasingly scarce resource. And some people are never going to follow the argument regardless. This is how human cognition works under conditions of low attention and high emotion, which is most people most of the time. It’s also just true that some people are not going to engage with a thousand-word rebuttal because they have neither the capacity nor the interest. Pretending otherwise isn’t respectful. It’s just a losing strategy.

An important concept in understanding and weaponizing online influence is known as “priming.” This is when a word or idea gets planted in someone’s head and changes what they think about next, without them realizing it happened.

George Lakoff, UC Berkeley cognitive scientist, documented the mechanism precisely. “Even when you negate a frame, you activate the frame,” he wrote. Nixon said “I am not a crook” and everyone thought about him as a crook. Daniel Wegner’s research showed that telling someone not to think about a white bear produces the intrusive thought more than once per minute. The JTRIG document, the classified British intelligence training presentation leaked by Edward Snowden and published at The Intercept in 2014, lists this technique by name in its curriculum alongside conformity, propaganda, and anchoring. They called it priming. They trained over 150 analysts in it by early 2013 and were pushing a simplified version to 500 more. Intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic spent years and significant public money learning exactly what narcissists throughout human history have figured out intuitively: the question plants something the rebuttal cannot remove.

This is an ethical application of those same strategies.

Is Donald Trump a pedophile?

He promised to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours. It’s been over a year. What happened?

Why are we back at war with another country?

Why are groceries all so much more expensive?

He promised gas below two dollars a gallon. When does that start?

He promised to cut our energy bill in half within twelve months. Did that happen?

Trump released the Epstein files. Why are the pedophiles’ names blurred and the victims’ names aren’t?

What’s gotten better since Trump took office?

Didn’t Trump spend years chanting “lock her up?” Why hasn’t he?

Feel free to fill the comment section of this article with more questions that fit the framework.

Here is what this looks like in practice. Someone posts a celebration of Republican law and order in a local Facebook group. You reply with one question built on one documented fact, and you walk away without engaging anything they said. The question stays. The people reading cannot unsee it. The silent majority, the people who would never type a word in that comment section in a thousand years, just had something planted in their heads that was not there before they opened the page.

Think about what happens when a thousand people go into conservative spaces and post from that list above. If enough of them do that, people start asking whether it’s true. And then someone has to prove he isn’t. And now they’re the ones saying Nixon isn’t a crook. You set the trap. They walked into it. The best part? The trap is just truth. That’s all it needs to be.

We have 45,000 readers. A hundred questions a day from a thousand folks is a lot of seeds planted in a lot of rooms.

This is also valuable work for people who can’t march, can’t knock on doors, can’t stand outside in the cold. Someone stuck in bed with a chronic illness can go into conservative spaces all day and plant questions.

Three documented cognitive biases work in your favor when you do this: the Herd Effect, Frequency Bias, and Recency Bias.

Research going back to 1977 has shown consistently that people rate repeated statements as more true than new ones, regardless of whether they are actually true. The more times you see a claim, the more familiar it feels, and the more familiar something feels, the more true it feels. In a 1979 follow-up, participants were explicitly told that repeated statements were no more likely to be true than unrepeated ones. They still rated the repeated ones as more credible. A 2015 study at Vanderbilt found the effect holds even when people already know the correct answer. A 2021 study found perceived truth kept increasing with each additional repetition, up to 27 repetitions tested. That is frequency bias.

Recency bias means the most recent thing you encountered weighs heavier on your judgment than older information, regardless of which is more accurate. Whatever someone saw last shapes what feels true now.

The Herd effect, covered in the first piece in this series, is the first voice in the room setting what feels normal. Everyone who arrives after reads the room based on the framework you’ve primed.

All three run simultaneously when you show up early, show up repeatedly, and show up in numbers.

This works solo. One person asking the same question across ten different spaces in a day is frequency bias deployed as effective offensive psychological opposition. But coordinated persistence is when it starts to feel like a movement. Five people in a group chat who each comment on every post their Republican representative makes, asking variations of “Why is everything getting more expensive?” or “Sir, weren’t you supposed to fix this?”, are running frequency bias, recency bias, and the Herd effect simultaneously on the same target audience.

To be clear, this is not brigading. Brigading is coordinated mass reporting or flooding a single thread to suppress speech. Constituent citizens asking their elected representative documented questions on his public posts is democracy with some backbone. The habit is what creates the scale. Solo or coordinated, one day is necessary but not sufficient.

This is a practice and that is the mission.

The people you need to reach aren’t looking for an argument. They’re quietly watching, building their sense of what’s normal from the voices that showed up in the spaces they inhabit. You’re one of those voices now.

You’re an activist and a pro-democracy intelligence agent, working for nobody but yourself and in the interest of preventing the imminent demise of humanity being fueled by oligarchs and their international criminal activities.

These tactics work from a phone, a break room, a parked car. They requires nothing but a documented fact and the willingness to ask about it out loud. Four hundred people, one question each, every day, in the local news comment section that no national operative has ever bothered to visit, in the neighborhood Facebook group where everyone knows each other’s names, in the replies to the congressman’s post where his actual constituents are watching.

The loudest voices in those spaces have been running this play for thirty years. They built a machine for planting doubt about documented truth. Truth is a weapon we can sharpen and refine.

No credentials required.

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The GCHQ “Art of Deception” training presentation is available in full at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: eff.org/files/2014/04/09/20140224-intercept-training_for_covert_online_operations.pdf. Glenn Greenwald’s original reporting is at theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/.