“Reclaiming America’s Stories: The Nonlinear War of Soft Power”
- dkclements
- 9 hours ago
- 11 min read
THE WAR BEGAN long before the first tank rolled or the first ballot was stolen. It began with a story. In the garden a serpent asked a question that still echoes in every trailer, every classroom, every thirty-second spot on your phone: “Did God really say?”
That was the opening shot of nonlinear warfare, and the enemy has never changed his weapon.
He fights with stories.
We were made to fight the same way. For two centuries the American story was simple enough that a child could repeat it: a nation under God, liberty purchased by blood, righteousness exalting a people. It was not perfect, but it was coherent.
Coherence is armor.
Incoherence is surrender.
Between 2020 and 2024 the armor finally cracked wide open. Cities burned while the news called it “mostly peaceful.” Children were taught to hate the color of their own skin. Men in dresses read stories to toddlers in libraries while the churches locked their doors and zoomed their sermons.
The story fractured.
A nation that forgets who it is becomes a ghost wandering its own house. I used to blame Beijing alone. The communists. Acquiring our land, culture, movie studios, and theater chains. Even sports stars have toed the line. When then-Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey tweeted “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong” after concerns that protesters would be extradited to mainland China for persecution, LeBron James called Morey misinformed. “He wasn’t educated on…the situation at hand” James said, doing damage control for a country that provided slave labor to make his sneakers. Think on that.
He kneeled for BLM condemning U.S. slavery 150 years in the rearview mirror, then brushed away his own corporate slave master ties to Chinese sweatshops. After Morey’s Hong Kong tweet, China pulled NBA games from state TV (a $1–2 billion annual loss). The league’s response: Adam Silver flew to Shanghai and apologized, players were muzzled, and “Free Hong Kong” shirts were confiscated from arenas in the United States. A private American sports league enforced CCP speech codes on American soil.
Now I ask, can America play its films—or tell its stories—in communist China?
Yes and No.
There is a quota.
Just thirty-four films a year, carefully edited so that Taiwan never appears on a jacket in Top Gun: Maverick, so that the China National Space Administration saves Matt Damon in The Martian, after the Americans botch their mission, then botch his rescue. Since 2016, every foreign film that wants to enter China must first be pre-approved by the CCP’s Film Bureau. Scripts are submitted months in advance.
Can you spot the pattern? In Transformers: Age of Extinction, American Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) is a broke inventor, paranoid, and on the run. Su Yueming, played by Li Bingbing, is CEO of a Chinese tech giant, brilliant, poised, and helps fund the heroes.
In The Meg, Jonas Taylor played by Jason Statham, is an alcoholic, divorced, blamed for deaths, his career ruined. Compare with the Chinese protagonist Suyin Zhang, played by the same actress as before. She is a top oceanographer, submersible pilot, single mom, and holds at least 1 PhD, with possibly more.
Then there’s Marvel. Doctor Strange’s Ancient One bleached of Tibet. Iron Man 3’s arch-villain quietly rewritten from Mandarin warlord to American capitalist. No Chinese villains allowed. Good luck finding one in a film. World War Z’s zombie plague uprooted from Chinese labs and replanted in North Korea. In modern times, the Covid-19 bioweapon was removed from Wuhan’s labs and put in a faraway bat market.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was pulled when Beijing demanded Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth not humiliate Bruce Lee—too much Western dominance, too little Eastern deference. Pixels swapped the Great Wall’s destruction for the Taj Mahal’s, lest a national symbol fall to pixel aliens. Actor John Cena fell all over himself to apologize to China for saying Taiwan was a country.
Story supremacy is the real Art of War. And owning studios costs less than aircraft carriers priced at 18 billion dollars. The return is measured in minds, not tonnage. The enemy does not need to brandish a foreign flag when he already owns the studio. Compare. Legendary Studios was purchased for 3.5 billion by the Chinese-controlled Wanda Group, and targets our student age population. Our universities finish the job with “Confucius Institutes,” communist indoctrination under the guise of language training. No mention of Mao in their materials, the murderer of millions, just the fortune cookie guy that dispenses bite-size wisdom.
China is not alone in the telling of stories. And there is no bigger story than the one told on election night. China manufactures the machines, and hosts servers in Serbia with Dominion at the helm. Venezuela’s narco-terrorists put their rigged code inside. All that was left was a soft power campaign to dumb us down. I saw the red hand and thought the threat was external.
But it’s clear that Satan doesn’t confine our enslavement with an allegiance to human geography, or political ideology. The only battle lines that truly matter are between the Kingdom of Darkness and the Kingdom of Heaven, and U.S. politicians turned traitors are hard to differentiate from those that don the Hammer and Sickle. The World Economic Forum’s 2021–2023 “Great Narrative” project openly called for “new global narratives” to replace our national ones.
And that’s our topic for today.
“Reclaiming America’s Stories: The Nonlinear War of Soft Power”
In the forties, as the world burned, the Office of Strategic Services—the wartime spy outfit that would birth the CIA—raided Hollywood’s backlots for talent, pulling in over a thousand writers, directors, actors, and technicians to wage the shadow fight on American minds.
At first it was innocent enough. Marlene Dietrich crooned morale-boosting tunes for GIs in foxholes; Julia Child, not yet a kitchen queen, cranked out coded messages from a desk in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka; Sterling Hayden wired explosives for partisan raids in the Balkans. The recruits weren’t just cover—they built the reels: training films that taught frogmen to blow bridges, morale shorts that turned Rosie the Riveter into a national creed.
Wild Bill Donovan turned Warner Bros. into a propaganda forge, churning out “Know Your Enemy: Japan,” where Disney’s animators sketched Emperor Hirohito as a bucktoothed rat gnawing at freedom’s edges. The reels rolled out to theaters, to bases, to the home front—simple stories that made the abstract horror concrete, the distant war personal.
Victory came, but the machinery hummed on. Things turned darker. Quickly. And the Cold War made the soft power fight industrial. Operation Mockingbird put four hundred journalists on the payroll; declassified files showing the taps and the plants. These numbers pale in comparison to the modern-day money poured into NGOs by the election rigging narco-terrorists. Oh, the stories they told about elections.
Films like The Manchurian Candidate—that 1962 fever dream of brainwashed pawns pulling triggers on cue—leak the playbook, or so the theorists say, tied to MKUltra’s acid tests. Now, look at the class of Washington candidates. Eric Swalwell declaring we should vote from our phones. One uniform script. “W” looking blank after the towers fell. Biden lost on a stage.
But why the movies?
To inoculate: make the puppet-master real enough to thrill, fictional enough to dismiss, so when whispers surface of presidents marching to hidden strings the public shrugs: “Seen it in the movies.”
Consider 1997’s “Wag the Dog.” Two weeks before a presidential election, the incumbent U.S. President is caught in a sex scandal with an underage girl. To distract the public and save his re-election, spin doctor Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) is brought in. Brean’s strategy: invent a fake war. Remarkably, the film was released just weeks before the real-life Clinton/Lewinsky scandal and the U.S. bombing of Sudan and Afghanistan—events that many immediately compared to the movie’s premise.
Then there is 2006’s “Man of the Year,” a satirical comedy where late-night comedian Tom Dobbs (Robin Williams) unexpectedly wins the U.S. presidency due to a software glitch in the new Delacroy electronic voting machines, which miscounts votes in key states. Fast forward and relative newcomer Barack Obama beats Hillary Clinton, a household name, after co-founder of Smartmatic, Roger Piñate, gamed the election in Cook County, Illinois. It spurred Obama to preselected victory in the primary.
The rest is history. Smartmatic’s chairman, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, sat on the board of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations for 18 years and is a deputy chairman of the World Economic Forum. The same tiny circle that scripts the movies also funds the “election integrity” NGOs and voting-machine companies.
And what about censorship? Internal TikTok documents leaked in 2023 (confirmed by Forbes and The Intercept) show that content mentioning Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or Falun Gong is throttled to zero visibility in under 60 seconds — globally, not just in China. The app is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company with a CCP committee embedded in its governance. 170 million Americans now get their “stories” from an algorithm that disappears anything Beijing dislikes.
American censorship rivals it. Censorship expert Mike Benz explains, “The two most censored events in human history are the 2020 election and the Covid 19 pandemic…. You could literally be on your toilet seat and tweet, “I think that mail-in ballots are illegitimate.” And you were essentially then caught up in the crosshairs of the Department of Homeland Security, classifying you as conducting a cyber-attack on US critical infrastructure.” Tucker Carlson responds in disbelief, “Complaining about election fraud is the same as taking down our power grid!”
Misdirection as craft. The Committee of Three Hundred lurks in the fringes, John Coleman’s ninety-two pamphlet sketching a cabal engineering the endgame through celluloid: depopulation flicks, New World orders in the margins, occult nods in the credits.
The online forums hum.
And the false flags: The Lone Gunmen’s “Pilot” episode aired March 4, 2001, and is now legendary for its eerie prescience. In it, the protagonists uncover a secret U.S. government faction planning to hijack a commercial airliner by remote control and crash it into the World Trade Center. The motive? To stage a terrorist attack, blame it on a foreign dictator (in the story, a fictional Middle Eastern country), and boost defense spending in a new Cold War-style conflict. Six months later--9/11, The Patriot Act, and a two decades long “War on Terror” lines the pockets of the military industrial complex.
Before that, Fight Club’s buildings fell like cards, anarchists resetting the financial sector. Because we saw buildings drop before, we didn’t question the misdirect, where suits, and not Tyler Durden, reset the scales in favor of Wall Street during the 2008 Great Recession. Eight trillion dollars vanished from our balance sheet.
Afterwards, then Congressman Alan Grayson grilled the Inspector General of the Federal Reserve, Elizabeth Coleman, stating: “What have you done to investigate the off-balance sheet transactions conducted by the Federal Reserve, which according to Bloomberg, now total $9 trillion in the last eight months?”
Coleman responds, “I’ll have to look specifically at that Bloomberg article. I, I’m not, um, I, I don’t know if I have actually seen that particular one.”
Grayson replies, “That’s not the point. The question is, have you done any investigation or editing of off-balance sheet transactions conducted by the Federal Reserve?”
The Inspector General had no clue where $9 trillion went.
Not a reset for the people. Just the banking elite.
Disney acted as predictive programmer. Disney never needed a quota from the Party. They volunteered. Frozen’s Elsa, ice-blue gowns and sharp cheekbones, singing “Let It Go” right before another ice queen Hillary wore ice-blue pantsuits. Closeted tropes, effeminate snowmen. This wasn’t just a movie. It was a subliminal political campaign that required no disclosures to the FEC (Frozen’s budget was $150 million).
Hillary was unpopular, but if we could imagine a person underneath the icy exterior, and “Let it Go,” she would be coronated. Toy Story 4’s Forky—a spork that insists it is trash, demanding to be called a toy by Woody. He exclaims, “…this spork… uh THIS TOY, is crucial to Bonnie getting adjusted to kindergarten.”
Delivered to three-year-olds as a parable of self-creation. Subliminal transgender grooming: you can be whatever you want. The children sang along. The parents paid for the tickets.
The story did its work.
First Man left Ryan Gosling’s Neil Armstrong staring at the lunar soil, but the flag had to be planted off-screen due to communist script doctors. Gone is the human triumph of the stars and stripes waving in vacuum. Artistic choice, they said. But the omission lingered like a shadow. And a paradox emerged. In the corners of forums, the old questions stirred—how much of our space program’s boasting is real? Who were the bigger liars, foreign or domestic? Conspiracy or not, the doubt seeded incoherence: if the greatest stories are faked, even for a time, what else?
Building Seven fell straight down that September afternoon, steel and office paper in freefall, never struck. Reports later said steel fell because of fire. The footage looped in basements, whispering of controlled charges, inside jobs, a narrative too tidy for the chaos. Tucker knows. I think Trump and Guiliani do as well. Will there be more declassification incoming? Or will the political machine continue to win out with our continued programming?
They say politics is downstream of culture.
But the culture is downstream from our stories.
And the father of lies has always understood sequencing.
But God also fights with stories, and in times of war, allows for permissible deception. Rahab hid the spies under flax. She told the king’s men, “They went that way.” The men ran. Jericho later fell. Rahab lived. Gideon gave three hundred men jars, torches, trumpets. At midnight they smashed the jars, blew the horns, shouted. Midian woke to fire and noise everywhere. They fled, killing each other in the dark. Not one Israelite sword was drawn.
David pretended madness before Achish, drooling and scribbling on gates—false appearance to slip Philistine nooses. Jehu drove hard into Samaria. “Ahab served Baal a little,” he said. “I will serve him much.” He called every Baal-worshiper to a great sacrifice. They came. He locked the doors and killed them all. The temple became a latrine. God said, “You have done well.” Ehud hid a sword on the wrong thigh and spoke honeyed words to a fat king—tactical deceit, a left-handed stab that felled an empire.
Five lies leading to victories.
In kinetic war the rules are clear: ruses are lawful, treachery is not. Camouflage, feigned retreats, dummy tanks—yes. False surrender, misusing the Red Cross—no.
But we are not in kinetic war.
We are in the long, undefined non-kinetic war the generals now call Phase Zero, the war for the mind before the first shot is fired. In that war the old boundaries blur, and the church has been slow to remember its own precedents. God never told us to be transparent with demons. He told us to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. He told us to overcome evil with good, not with press releases. He told us that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty for pulling down strongholds. One such demonic stronghold are stories that has been believed too long. It spends billions to keep the stronghold standing. It grooms, infiltrates, converts.
It waits for the moment a man is tired, a woman is lonely, a child is confused, and it whispers a better ending than the one God wrote. Stories can turn.
The health of a nation mirrors the health of a man. When a man knows whose son he is, he stands straighter. When a nation remembers whose it is, it does not bow to dragons—foreign or domestic. We have been lied to long enough to recognize the voice. We have been edited, redacted, recut.
Now we learn the craft ourselves—not to lie as the father of lies lies, but to tell the truth in a way that cannot be censored by quota or algorithm. We conceal not to hide, but to reveal—at the right hour, to the right ears. We tell the old stories again: the crossing of the Red Sea, the walls of Jericho falling at a shout, the empty tomb that made every empire’s propaganda obsolete.
We tell new ones: the pilot who kept the flags on his jacket, the actress who refused to self-censor, the father who taught his daughter the real ending of the Forky story—You were fearfully and wonderfully made, and no spork gets the last word on that. The astronaut who plants the flag, for real, I hope. The engineer who questions Building Seven not with rage, but with quiet files and open eyes—holy concealment until the truth breaks free.
The war is nonlinear.
So is the victory.
A single true story, told at the right moment, can shatter a stronghold that a thousand tanks could not touch. The enemy has had the megaphone long enough. It is time for the sons and daughters of the King to remember who they are, pick up the weapon we were born to wield, and tell better stories. The devil has been doing it since the garden. We are late to the fight.
But we are not too late.
When the enemy flooded the world with lies, God did not send more facts — He sent a Man who said, ‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.’ The ultimate counter-story was a Person. Our job is to tell the world His name again, in ways the algorithm can’t delete.
David K. Clements is a seasoned attorney, former law professor, filmmaker and dedicated advocate for election integrity and constitutional rights. If you think he's on to something, consider being a monthly sponsor of his independent journalism at:
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