MindWar: How a Satanist Army Officer’s 1980 Paper Became the Blueprint for Modern Psychological Warfare on Americans
The documented trail from occult military doctrine to DARPA-funded social media manipulation. The target: your heart and mind.
In 1988, millions of Americans watched Geraldo Rivera interview a serving Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army, who defended his role as High Priest of the Temple of Set—a Satanic organization he had founded, after multiple allegations of sexually abuse of children were made against him.
Aquino’s significance extends far beyond his occult activities. Eight years before that television appearance, he had co-authored a document that would reshape American psychological warfare—and plant seeds that would eventually become the social media manipulation tools now used on American citizens.
That document was called MindWar, and this investigation will show how it defined Mike Flynn’s career and evolved, with his help and participation, into the technologies at the center of today’s modern warfare for your heart and mind.
The Doctrine
In 1980, Major Michael Aquino and Colonel Paul Vallely of the U.S. Army’s 7th Psychological Operations Group produced a paper titled “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory.” It proposed something radical: instead of treating psychological operations as a supporting function for military action, make strategic influence the centerpiece of warfare.
“MindWar is the deliberate aggressive convincing of all participants in a war that we will win that war.”
The key word is all participants—including domestic populations. Victory would come not through firepower but through “seizing control of the perceptions” of entire populations—including our own. Reality itself would become the weapon.
MindWar reflected Aquino’s satanic belief that those who can dictate the beliefs of the people can determine the future.
Vallely distributed the paper to military commands and received “extensive and lively” feedback. Though never officially adopted, MindWar’s core ideas—that beliefs could be weaponized, that whoever controls perception controls outcomes—percolated through the psychological operations community for decades.
MindWar continues to influence the psychological warfare we are subjected to on social media every day.
The Occult Connection
Aquino’s dual identity of avowed satanist and Army colonel wasn’t incidental to MindWar. It was foundational.
He joined Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan in 1969 while serving in the military. By 1975, he founded the Temple of Set, following what he wrote were instructions he received from Satan himself, drawing on practices aimed at bending reality through manipulation of consciousness.
The parallels are striking. Both the occult practices and the military doctrine center on the same premise: reality is constructed through belief. Whoever controls belief controls reality.
When Geraldo confronted Aquino about the Satanic Bible’s commandment “Death to the weakling, wealth to the strong,” Aquino calmly explained it was “never meant to be taken literally.” The Army had known of his religion for 20 years, he said. “There has never been a problem with it.”
Indeed, the Army had officially recognized Satanism as a legitimate religion and provided chaplains with guides for ministering to “the satanic soldier”—while allowing Aquino to continue developing psychological warfare doctrine.
According to Stephen E. Flowers, Aquino’s PSYOP duties in Vietnam included experiments using amplified sounds — at times including ‘demonic screams’ — from helicopters to disorient Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops. This mirrors techniques seen in the occultish-named Operation Wandering Soul, the U.S. psychological warfare campaign in Vietnam that involved broadcasting eerie audio over loudspeakers and aircraft to exploit beliefs about restless spirits.
Enter Michael Flynn
In 1981, just a year after the publication of MindWar at Fort Bragg, a young lieutenant named Michael Flynn was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg—the nerve center of American special warfare, home to the Army’s primary psychological operations units.
Flynn’s early deployments reinforced the lessons of MindWar. In Grenada (1983), loudspeaker teams and leaflets proved as important as firepower. In Haiti (1994), psychological operations convinced the ruling junta to stand down without a major battle. Flynn was learning that controlling hearts and minds could be more effective than controlling territory.
By 2004, Colonel Flynn had become intelligence chief for the elite Joint Special Operations Command under General Stanley McChrystal. Together, they transformed JSOC—and demonstrated MindWar in practice.
The campaign against al-Qaeda’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi became the textbook example. From 2004-2006, JSOC ran a coordinated propaganda effort designed not just to locate Zarqawi but to “enlarge his caricature” in Iraqi minds. Internal military briefings reveal something remarkable: the “U.S. Home Audience” was explicitly listed as a target.
After Zarqawi’s death, U.S. forces released video showing him fumbling with a jammed gun and wearing Nike sneakers—imagery designed to confuse their insurgent and counterinsurgent targets. After years of making Zarqawi look like a mastermind of terrorism, U.S. forces presented the exact opposite image, showing him as nothing more than a puppet of foreign countries.
This tactic of building false expectations and hopes that they often have a hand in crushing themselves remains a key radicalization tactic employed by the Flynn network to this day.
As head of JSOC, Flynn’s teams also conducted deception operations: exploiting captured phones to send fake messages from insurgent leaders, broadcasting false communications. One PSYOP officer, Colonel Phil Waldron, later revealed he “worked with Flynn on secret projects” involving sophisticated influence techniques.
Waldron later was helping to run Allied Special Operations Group (ASOG), which was running a complex and carefully coordinated psychological warfare operations against MAGA in the days and weeks after the 2020 election. I will be covering that in much more depth in the near future.
“Fixing Intel”
In 2010, Flynn published “Fixing Intel,” arguing that eight years into the Afghanistan war, U.S. intelligence was “only marginally relevant” because it focused on enemy combatants rather than populations.
“Lethal targeting alone will not help us win,” Flynn wrote. Intelligence officers needed to understand “the people we are trying to protect and persuade.” (emphasis added) The paper lamented that American intelligence was “ignorant of local power brokers and how they might be influenced.”
This was MindWar doctrine articulated for a new era—intelligence as the foundation for psychological control of populations. Flynn was aggressively advancing Aquino’s vision for shaping reality by manipulating the hearts and minds of the public.
The DARPA Programs
In 2012, Lieutenant General Flynn became Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He arrived at a pivotal moment: DARPA was developing unprecedented social media manipulation capabilities throughout Obama’s second term.
The Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program, launched in 2011, was MindWar updated for the digital age. Launched about a year after Fixing Intel was published, Flynn’s work and paper was clearly an inspiration for the project. Its goals:
Detect and track the spread of narratives (”memes”) and misinformation
Recognize persuasion campaign structures across platforms
Identify participants in influence operations and measure effects
Counter adversary messaging - “active measures.”
The $50 million program sponsored research into “meme tracking,” “inducing identities,” “modeling emergent communities,” “trust analytics,” “automated content generation,” and “bots in social media.” Researchers were developing capabilities to map how beliefs spread—and intervene in that process.
Simultaneously, another DARPA program, called Narrative Networks, studied “how narratives influence cognition and behavior—even at the brain chemistry level,” funding neurobiological research on how stories change hormone levels and activate emotional responses. They were searching for the “hackable vulnerabilities” in human cognition.
Flynn’s DIA was a natural partner. In 2012, Flynn commissioned “National Security Challenges: Insights from Social, Neurobiological, and Complexity Sciences”—a white paper that included DARPA’s Dr. Bill Casebeer on its editorial board and examined radicalization mechanisms and population influence.
Flynn wrote in the preface that “irregular warfare is the template for future battlefields”—wars fought with narratives, not tanks.
The Transfer
After Flynn’s 2014 forced retirement from DIA, he co-founded Flynn Intel Group—registering it at Stanley McChrystal’s home address.
In 2016, Flynn became an advisor to SCL Group, parent company of Cambridge Analytica. This firm harvested data from 87 million Facebook profiles to micro-target voters with psychological profiling.
The DARPA connection is not speculation. Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, testified to the U.S. Senate that in 2013 he “stumbled across some research funded by the U.S. military agency DARPA into psychological profiling using social data” and applied those findings to political campaigns.
The specific research was Dr. Michal Kosinski’s work demonstrating that Facebook “Likes” could predict personality traits better than friends could. Kosinski’s funders? Boeing and DARPA.
Wylie described Cambridge Analytica as “cyber warfare for elections” and called it a “psychological warfare tool.” The company employed NATO PSYOP veterans. SCL had Pentagon and DARPA contracts for counterterrorism. The same techniques developed against jihadists were now targeting American voters via their social media.
In late 2016, as Flynn was named Trump’s National Security Advisor, SCL received a $500,000 sole-source State Department contract for “online psychological warfare.” Senator Menendez demanded answers about whether Flynn had steered the contract.
Digital Soldiers
In 2016, Flynn declared that Trump “was elected by an army of digital soldiers” representing “irregular warfare at its finest, in politics.”
The language was precise military terminology. “Irregular warfare” means conflicts fought through insurgency, subversion, psychological operations. Flynn was explicitly stating that psychological warfare had won a U.S. election.
When Jeff and Shannon from the MG Show appeared on the Bigger Truth Show, they described what appeared to be a carefully planned and coordinated operation to recruit and influence the Q influencer movement, starting almost immediately after Q launched in late 2017.
Flynn used a network of Discord channels to recruit, motivate and manipulate his growing army of Q influencers, who increasingly saw Flynn as their “General.”
By 2019, Flynn publicly embraced Q. He and his family recorded a “digital soldier oath” video. The general who spent decades waging psychological warfare against America’s enemies was now leading an influence operation targeting Americans.
Meanwhile, McChrystal advised a Democratic PAC called “Defeat Disinfo” that used AI “originally developed to counter ISIS propaganda” to fight Trump’s messaging through 3.4 million social media influencers. Defeat Disinfo became a global army of digital soldiers that attacked anyone who dared support Trump or criticize the official COVID narratives.
Two generals who pioneered psychological warfare against jihadists were now waging MindWar against each other in a convenient dialectic—and against the American public on both sides of the political aisle.
Flynn’s Public Occult Declarations
Even as he has aggressively promoted the idea that he is a devout Christian, speaking at countless churches across the country, Flynn himself has publicly dabbled in the occult, as Michael O’Fallon expertly explained here in 2024:
Whether we look at his military career, his writings, or his words, the pattern becomes obvious: the overriding defining quality of Mike Flynn’s career since 1981 is the core occult belief of MindWar: those who determine the beliefs of the people determine the future.
Timeline
This timeline shows the progressive institutionalization of the occult-originated ideas and mind control tactics of MindWar throughout Flynn’s career.
1980: Aquino and Vallely write MindWar, proposing psychological influence as the primary weapon of warfare—targeting “all participants.”
1981-2001: Flynn trains at Fort Bragg, deploys to Grenada and Haiti, absorbs psychological operations culture.
2004-2010: Flynn and McChrystal conduct psychological warfare against al-Qaeda, targeting foreign—and domestic American—hearts and minds.
2010: Flynn publishes “Fixing Intel,” arguing intelligence should focus on “influencing” populations—that is, determining our beliefs.
2011-2015: DARPA’s $50M SMISC and Narrative Networks programs (among several other similar DARPA programs) develop social media manipulation and neurobiological influence tools.
2012: Flynn becomes DIA Director, commissions research on radicalization and social influence with DARPA participation.
2016: Flynn advises Cambridge Analytica (which used DARPA-derived techniques). Declares Trump elected by “digital soldiers” waging “irregular warfare.”
2020: McChrystal deploys DARPA-funded AI domestically. Flynn leads Q adherents in “digital soldier oath.”
2021-2026: Flynn leads ReAwaken Tour, coordinates psychological operations against churches through Citizens Defending Freedom, and develops an expansive social media influencer network aimed at subverting Trump’s agenda.
Conclusion
Michael Aquino believed he could determine future outcomes by manipulating the public’s consciousness through occult practices. His MindWar paper proposed doing the same through military science. Michael Flynn spent his career putting these ideas into practice at scale. The technology developed to fight America’s enemies abroad has now been turned inward—against the right and the left.
The question isn’t whether the tools of MindWar exist. They do.
The question is: who is wielding them against you—and what future are they trying to create?
“MindWar is the deliberate aggressive convincing of all participants in a war that we will win that war.” Sounds exactly like the Q pysop!
“MindWar is the deliberate aggressive convincing of all participants in a war that we will win that war.” if that isn't the core of the Q psyop then i'll eat my hat. i have friends who literally wouldn't get involved with GOTV efforts because they believe that Q already fixed everything and we are just watching a show. how many conservatives did they take out of action while the dems continue on with their own GOTV and win?