We need a more coherent counter-terrorism response than Donald Trump's call to "close down" parts of the Internet in response to ISIS recruitment, his labeling of free speech advocates as "foolish," and his calls to ban all Muslims from entering the United States.
As I explain in this new book trailer for Combating Cult Mind Control, kids from nice families are getting deceptively recruited and radicalized. But there are things we can all do to keep our loved ones safe from this type of mental hijacking.
If you break down what ISIS is doing on the Internet, you can see terrorists are creating high impact, almost hypnotic videos that glorify Islamic caliphates and demonize Western countries and all religions other than their twisted version of Islam. So we need to use the Internet, not close it down, in order to fully engage in this memetic warfare that is already being waged.
What is memetic warfare?
This is the battle for minds that calls us to use powerful, positive memes. A meme is a powerful, clear thought, a way of framing a message, that can quickly be transmitted, shared, and repeated again and again over the Internet. That is why I use the meme "freedom of mind" in my work as an author and activist countering mind control groups such as ISIS and other apocalyptic cults.
The freedom of mind meme appeals to kids who are targeted for recruitment by deceptive means. It helps them by underscoring that however you understand God, you can know that God created us with freedom of mind.
All the Abrahamic faiths -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- tell the story of Adam and Eve, which makes the point that God respected Adam and Eve's freedom of mind. He didn't deceive them, he told them the truth and let them make their own choices freely. God gave them the freedom to make a choice. They disobeyed, but they had the freedom to disobey by eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
Other positive memes we can use are justice, love, truth, goodness, creativity, individuality, and religious liberty -- the freedom of everyone to worship or not as they choose, without undue government interference. These are more powerful than our opposition's memes of thought control, murdering, rapes, and controlling human consciousness and freedom of mind.
Deceptive cults like ISIS violate people's religious freedom by doing mind control on them, and by concealing the real agendas of the top leadership. To counter that, we must champion the meme of religious freedom -- by respecting everyone's right to believe and behave according to the dictates of their individual conscience.
Trump plays into the hands of ISIS and in effect serves as their greatest collaborator by preaching that America should deny Muslims their freedom of mind -- their freedom of speech, their freedom of association, and their religious liberty -- all of which are protected under the First Amendment.
I'd like to help develop a program to deradicalize people and counter the efforts and impact of manipulative terrorist groups like ISIS who are recruiting kids online.
We need the funding and organization to empower everyone, not just Muslim communities, but everyone, to understand how mind control works, and the differences between how legitimate religions operate and how mind control cults like ISIS operate.
And we need to empower survivors of extremist groups. I have helped thousands of people escape manipulative cults, and these survivors serve as early warning detectors and powerful witnesses in countering extremist mind control cults and their totalistic ideologies.
Here's how Donald Trump plays into the hands of ISIS online recruiters. Trump trumpets a simplistic approach that would do what ISIS wants us to do, which is marginalize Muslims and deny their freedom of mind by imposing travel bans and by closing down parts of the Internet in response to the online activities of ISIS. Instead, we should use the Internet to promote freedom of mind and other powerful, positive memes, such as justice, love, truth, goodness, creativity, individuality, and, no less important, religious liberty itself.