By Jasun Horsley — 17 Jul 2026

The Unreality-Based Community

Cognitive Warfare and the Candace Owens Soap Op, Pt 1

Intro

A few months back, I asked Mrs. Horsley to work on a piece for substack about what she was observing around 2^nd matrix, controlled opposition psyop, in relation to super-suss characters like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, with a specific focus on the “JQ noticing psyop.”1

In the interim, with no article in sight, Mrs. Horsley became engaged in researching many things which not only don’t interest me, but to which I have a fairly strong allergic reaction to even hearing about.2

Here’s the basic difference between us: Mrs. Horsley is interested in cracking both the mainstream and the alt-media narratives, to get to the actual (para-political) truth. I am interested in exposing all of that as the light and shadow, smoke and mirrors of Empire, to distract us from the only truth that matters, the truth that will set us free. Her POV is sociopolitical and parapolitical, mine is spiritual and metaphysical.

There is an overlap, and it’s called hell-mapping; but we seem to have been heading further away from that island of overlap, going in our opposite directions. I am less and less interested in mapping hell, except metaphysically, while she has become more and more interested in understanding the current political landscape. This widening gulf has troubled me quite a bit of late.

But now a new development has taken us into a whole new domain. Mrs. Horsley got embroiled in an email discussion with her brother Guy Duperreault about Candace Owens and her view of the Charlie Kirk assassination (a subject on which Guy claims to have spent the last nine months).3

The areas of disagreement between the siblings are as follows:

Candace Owens

For Guy, a heroic exposer of global evils who is being persecuted for her great work.
For Mrs. Horsley, a very obvious disinformation agent who is part of a 2^nd matrix controlled opposition psyop.

(Ditto, more or less, on Tucker Carlson)4

Israel

For Guy (following CO), the public face of a cabal of evil Jewish Kabbalist sorcerers secretly attempting to rule the world, and currently controlling the US (Guy uses the term “necromongers” quite a bit, though not, AFAIK, exclusively to signify the Jew-cabal).
For Mrs. Horsley, Western powers installed and now support Israel as their outpost in the Middle East because of the oil. Currently it is being used to draw fire as part of the JQ “noticing” psyop.5

Mr. Trump

For Guy, a puppet in the hands of Israel who has betrayed his supporters.
For Mrs. Horsley, a mobbed-up outsider, now hostile to the DC establishment, trying to save the petrodollar and foil BRICS.6

The Charlie Kirk Assassination

For Guy, following CO, a plot by Israel, Mossad, the Jewish sorcerers, and Erika Kirk (Charlie’s wife) to take him out for being anti-Israel and replace him with Erika. The accused shooter, Tyler Robinson, currently on trial, is an obvious patsy.
Mrs. Horsley claims to “more or less accept the official account,” though concedes that “we’ll have a better idea when the trial starts” and grants “the possibility of a larger conspiracy. That other shooters were involved. That a team worked with Robinson to muddy up the evidence trail and that he’s a patsy.”7

The primary area of disagreement—very broad and general—seems to be that they both think the other has fallen for “5^th gen warfare” media manipulations into believing a false narrative. Here, ironically, I can say I agree with both of them! I don’t believe either one’s version, overall.

Fortunately, I am married to the one with the most experience in finding the ground of objectivity. Mrs. Horsley (as those who have followed me long enough know) has developed a formidable skill-set when it comes to online research, much of the evidence for which is in my books and articles. She is self-trained in going to original sources when possible, spending as much time checking the sources as finding and citing them, and generally not following parasocial bellwethers like Owens.8 In short, she is largely immune to the sort of 2^nd matrix conspiratainment swill that CO is serving up to newbs and rubes like my brother-in-law.

It is here that my interest lies, in common with the Mrs, and why this piece is appearing at Children of Job, despite the risk of amplifying signals that I tend to think might be better ignored (such as who killed C. Kirk and why).

Now over to Mrs. Horsley [with occasional commentary from me in italics]

Mrs. Horsley’s Intro

For several weeks now my brother Guy Duperreault and I have been arguing about Candace Owens. From my perspective, he’s imbibed her wackadoodle conspiracy Koolaid [fightin’ words, to be unpacked as the series proceeds ~ J].9 “Koolaid” is a neologism that encapsulates the memeplex of “suicide cult” because of its false, as it turns out, association to the Jonestown cult’s mass suicide in 1978.10

From his perspective, I naively endorse the Satanic PDFile Establishment’s (aka Israel’s) sophisticated cover-up of their assassination of Charlie Kirk. The idea that Tyler Robinson shot Charlie Kirk in the neck and killed him because of Leftist rhetoric and hatred for Kirk is what he calls “F_d S__p” [Fed Slop].11

In our last email exchange, my brother opined that I seem to be obsessed with Candace Owens and that he would be quite happy to never mention her again except that I keep bringing her up! Wait a minute!? He’s the one who is obsessed and won’t shut up about her, ffs!

Right here is the great big elephant in the room. Let me explain.

This scenario where two people argue over a third person is the exact situation that French intellectual heavyweight [and Peter Thiel’s mentor] René Girard has claimed leads inevitably to mimetic violence—with one qualification: In Girard’s model, the driver of the disagreement is mutual desire for the third. A covetous rivalry. That doesn’t quite fit with me and my brother. He may fancy Candace Owens, but I sure don’t (ewww). But I will come back to that. First some deep background.

The OODA Doodle Dandy

In 1937, the Fabian Society in the UK launched an “anthropology at home” project of intimate surveillance of working class Brits called Mass Observation. This is a quote from Visual Culture and Mass Observation (2015), in The Vice of Kings (p. 54):

“In its original guise, Mass Observation (M-O) was an organization dedicated to the documentation of everyday life amongst the British working classes. . . . M-O thus sought out facts and figures, through interviews and covert surveillance, which highlighted the nature of their fellow Britons’ day-to-day existence. The range of the Mass-Observers’ interests—from the ‘behavior of people at war memorials, the aspidistra cult, [and] anthropology of football pools’ to ‘bathroom behavior; beards, armpits and eyebrows; [and the] distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke’—was intended to form a comprehensive topography of workers’ lives, and in so doing, provide a new basis for social democracy.”

Mass Observation emerged after the 1926 General Strike when elites sought better tools to manage working-class militancy. The Observers went where the ordinary people gathered and took copious notes. An obvious venue were the dance halls—from where Jimmy Savile later launched himself into the British establishment. What followed was experiments in the promotion of patriotic songs, particular dances, and the outsider culture musical form of jazz. From VOK (p. 58), quoting A. J. Abra, “On with the Dance” (PDF):

In the case of the Lambeth Walk, “Mass Observation’s Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge justified their inclusion of an entire chapter about the dance in a book about the national reaction to the Munich Crisis by noting, ‘we may learn something about the future of democracy if we take a closer look at the Lambeth Walk.’”

It’s a feedback loop. The popularity of the dance coincided with the introduction of conscription in 1939. Does this look organic to you?:

In the 1960s U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd began to formalize a similar feedback loop for military applications. This is it here:

(source)

John Boyd presented it in an essay in 1976. The paper argues that survival in a competitive environment requires the continuous discarding of outdated mental models and the on-boarding of new ones that better align with “reality.” It gained traction in the 1980s during the development of “maneuver warfare” and was very influential in the planning of the 1991 Gulf War. From there, it spread to sports, business, law enforcement, decision theory and information warfare.

Boyd stresses that orientation is the most critical and vulnerable stage of engagement. Our orientation is shaped by our culture, experiences, biases, values, preferences. And, I would add, social pressures and what information we are exposed to. (See Boyd’s “Destruction and Creation.”)

The idea is to cycle through the loop faster than your opponent, disrupting their ability to respond effectively. Think Karl Rove’s (in-)famous gloat:

People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do (Ron Suskind, NY Times Magazine, Oct. 17, 2004).

The OODA framework is operationalized in social media recommendation engines.

I propose a slight modification:

Observe (gather data); Orient (analyze using mental models and experience); Decide (choose a course of action); Operate (execute and observe the results); Repeat.

O.O.D.O.R.

Coming back to my brother and I, what we are participating in, by squaring off with each other, is what Girard calls doubling.

[See “Monstrous Doubles: René Girard and the Mimetic Inheritance of Religious Structure” for a comprehensive breakdown of Girard’s theory. The piece begins with:

Watch American politics long enough and a strange pattern emerges. Democrats and Republicans each claim to defend victims against persecutors. Each accuses the other of being “fascists” or “authoritarians.” Each sees the other as an existential threat requiring extraordinary measures. The rhetoric is structurally identical—only the names change. Each side’s tactical innovations provoke reciprocal escalation from the other. Each violation of norms licenses counter-violations. “They did it first” becomes the universal justification.

[This fits with the two siblings accusing each other of being obsessed with the object of discussion (Owens). I can certainly verify Mrs. Horsley’s claim that her main interest in Owens is because of her brother’s interest; yet it seems likely that her challenging him on it so relentlessly has caused him to double down, which is central do the doubling of mimetic rivalry (more on which in a min). ~ J]

As we continue to argue back and forth, becoming more insistent and less willing to consider the other’s position, poor Candace Owens becomes more and more irrelevant. The struggle has us. In our case, it has to do with contradicting/competing versions of reality. We both have keen sense-making faculties. We all do it all the time. Starting from when we are kids. The bully from school says to meet him in the back alley after class and promise to come alone—but we know.

It’s necessary even in our present, cushioned, mediated lives. Mediated. We are both too online, and online is a battlefield of competing interests, wielding bot armies and influence campaigns and fakes of every sort. And, per John Boyd, it moves fast.

The technology is probably working on us too. Our phones, listening?12 The wee camera peering up at us through that tiny lens, recording our expressions and the dilation/ contraction of our pupils as we look and look and look?

Tape is a thing. So is Mylar.

What do I look at? Xwitter for breaking news. Then mostly I look for lectures or discussions that I can load onto my little mp3 player to listen to while I’m in the garden or doing chores. I also listen to James Howard Kunstler’s podcasts. The peak Peak Oiler. I always tuned into talk radio while it was a thing. Always was a news junkie. Lately, it’s the debate scene that has my attention. It’s really something, alright.

My brother has been listening to Candace Owens for months now. I watched her interview with that rabbi a year ago and knew of her from that Netflix-is-Wrong Steven Avery series she hosted.13 The rabbi was so ick he made CO look good, and though the Steven Avery story is compelling, her series was vacuous and unwatchable.

But my brother is all in. Earlier this year, he emailed me about one of her shows that had impressed him. She went over the old Barbara Bush, Jack Parsons, L. Ron Hubbard and Crowley material from 2005. No fight there.

[This mixes up two narrative strands, the “BB as AC’s daughter” is 2nd matrix stuff; the Parsons-Hubbard-Crowley stuff has been around since at least the 90s (it’s in The Lucid View), and IMO only became 2nd matrixed in the last twenty years or so, even forming the basis for a crappy TV show, Strange Angel, based on a Feral House book of the same name. There are two kinds of low-hanging fruit here, then, the probably spiked ground kind of either made-up or highly speculative and titillating (BB/AC), vs. the genuine “occult history” materials that have been steadily incorporated into the “official” 2nd matrix narrative, i.e, the truth that makes the disinfo program that much more effectively pernicious. This will be an unfolding theme of the present series, which I might call “the real (fake) satanic panic.”~ J]

It’s the Charlie Kirk sleuthing that has really got him. Black Widow Erika. TPUSA, League of Baddies. It’s absurd (to me), but he has on-boarded her entire lurid conspiracy tableaux. I’ve told him that it reads like a soap opera. Cliff hangers to close every episode. Bah!

We argue about it but it makes no difference. At this point, the Candace Owens Universe has infiltrated his cognitive and perceptual faculties. He believes, and in my observation, those beliefs now function as a filter for any new information he is exposed to. Challenges are rejected. (Mine, at any rate; probably he never speaks to anyone about Erika Kirk in his regular, day-to-day life.)

And of course, it is the same for me. I don’t listen to Candace Owens and you couldn’t pay me to. (Though I do listen to Andrew Wilson, the relevance of which will become apparent.) And so my brother and I mirror each other. That’s Girardian doubling.

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