This episode explains cognitive warfare and shows how the religious right uses tactics—certainty, fear, polarization, historical revisionism, and dehumanization—to shift people from evidence-based thinking to obedience to authority.
Using examples from foreign troll farms to the America Praise Initiative, the host exposes how narrative control and cognitive dissonance create separate realities and weaken shared institutions, and presents the Treaty of Tripoli as a key secular counterpoint.
Ultimately the episode calls for cognitive resilience: favoring evidence, critical inquiry, and deliberation to resist manipulative influence.