Have You Been the Victim of Epistemic Terrorism?

Union House after the fire on 2 May 2014. Photograph HOBOPOCC

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Or How the Capitalist Ruling Class Tries to Destroy Our Ability to Know

by Richard Steinhardt

If you believe the invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked by NATO expansion, or that the attack of Hamas took place independently of the blockade of Gaza, or that the reason why there aren’t enough council houses, and the NHS isn’t working properly, and that there is a lot of crime and there aren’t enough well-paid jobs is because of migrants, then it is highly likely that you have been a victim of epistemic terrorism.

The CIA World Factbook on 4 February 2026, after over six decades. The old model was a centralised, publicly verifiable document, honest about its provenance. The new model is AI-generated synthesis: alongside Wikipedia, the CIA’s point of view is delivered through many a chatbot’s confident voice.

Epistemic terrorism is defined here as the epistemic terrorism of the capitalist ruling class. The ruling class coins terms constantly: “conspiracy theorist”, “misinformation”, “extremism”, each presupposing a judgement. Epistemic terrorism is the deliberate or attritional erosion of a population’s capacity to know what its own experience and accumulated collective and independent learning testifies to.

The goal of epistemic terrorism is to sabotage people’s understanding of the nature of material reality, the source of all knowledge. It is within this framing that we could fruitfully examine the role of recreational narcotics, Hollywood, AI and the dyadic cyberlife of the world’s population, but instead let’s just explore the concept.

Gaza is the clearest example of epistemic sabotage and terrorism. The atrocity is not hidden. It is documented, filmed, reported, witnessed. And yet the understanding of the reality of it is actively sabotaged: the dead are removed from the category of people whose deaths count, so that the number is disputed rather than the killing. Zionist bots flood social media with cat and dog profile pictures, some feigning support for Palestine while spreading Israeli propaganda.

Genocide becomes “conflict”, “operation”, “legitimate defence”. What preceded it is dropped, so that the mass murder of Palestinians appears unprovoked. Doubt is weaponised because key figures opposing ‘controlling narratives’ are now calumnied in the state media and billionaire press and so-called alternative media.

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Epistemic terrorism and sabotage aims at producing the effect whereby no figure can be trusted enough, no testimony is clean enough, and every witness is unreliable.

The sheer volume of competing claims and paid-for, hyped-up, ridiculous, exaggerated information makes the disputed event unfindable inside the noise. The Russians slaughtered people at Bucha. Oh, it appears they didn’t. Oh yes they did!

Those who know the history of Ukraine or Palestine or Taiwan or colonialism and who pop above the surface to explain these histories are discredited, exiled and denied platforms, or worse. Some people who understand what’s going on in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and Taiwan begin to hedge and self-censor and to qualify what they say.

‘Of course, while I condemn Hamas, I think the Palestinians are being treated abominably.’

The result is not a metropolitan western population that believes a lie about Gaza. It is a population for which the reality of Gaza or Ukraine or Iran or Taiwan or migration is supposed to slip out of ken. That is the sabotage. In the case of Palestine it has not worked, but in the case of Ukraine it seems to have.

The Nordstream pipeline, according to Seymour Hersh, was blown up by the USA. Apparently, the virus was the result of a release from a research lab and not a sick bat. 42 Russians were burned alive on 2nd May in 2014 in a building in Crimea while Ukrainian nationalists celebrated.

The railway lines of your thought process have been blown up. When there is no place into which that information slots neatly, it derails and disappears.

But capitalism is not complicated. It’s about protecting the bottom line: profit. All the complexity hides that simple fact. Ask yourself cui bono and the possibility of fixing those trains of thought and getting them running again re-arises.

Propaganda seeks to convince. It wants a population to believe the official story. Epistemic terrorism does not. It creates a narrative that defines what is true and ruthlessly attempts to block, defame or destroy all threats to that narrative.

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A propagandised population believes the lie. A population subject to epistemic terrorism cannot reliably tell the difference between lie and truth at all unless it investigates thoroughly. That condition is not accidental. It is useful to capital: a population that cannot know who is really to blame for their low pay and lack of good healthcare and public services, and that is lost in Hollywood fantasies of celebrity and ‘making it’ and being Tony Stark or Beyoncé, is a population that cannot identify who its parasitical ruling class is and oppose it. The self-intoxications and delusions of ordinary people must be a source of endless amusement to the very wealthy who live in the Hamptons or Chipping Norton.

In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels said the class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production. The ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas because the ruling class directly or indirectly controls the apparatus that pays for them and produces and distributes them.

Epistemic terrorism is not a deviation from capitalism. It is the way capitalism operates in the realm of knowledge to protect and expand its interests.

To be clear, the capitalist ruling class are not super-intelligent villains, or even highly skilled or educated; they simply own the means of mental production, and the power to hire those who are. Cleverness is a commodity the ruling class purchases if it makes the right choices. The class is constituted by its relation to property, not by personal quality. Its function is to rule and sustain its proximity to the ‘money river’ (as Kurt Vonnegut put it) for the sake of its children and children’s children and all their friends and accomplices.

A PPE at Oxford and Cambridge for a member of the owning class is not primarily training in philosophy, politics or economics as disciplines. It is training in the management of people through those disciplines, the management of the intelligent, scheming people who will actually sit in government: the officials, the think tankers, boardroom rats and red top editorial page compilers. The self-designated role of members of the ruling class is not to know themselves, but to direct the knowers and attempt to shape what the governed can believe.

Traditionally, before the arrival of the Internet, the shaping of knowledge and its formation to benefit the owners of the means of production was described by Althusser as implemented and carried out using the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). Schools, universities, churches, media were all a part of it. The university is an ISA which naturalises the dominant order while appearing to pursue neutral truth. The problem, however, with this useful definition is that the apparatuses evolve and change, and so the analysis must evolve with it.

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Reforming academia is not the solution because academia is a primary source of the problem. The question is not where the most progressive institution is, but where a practice of knowing can be built that does not reproduce the machinery.

Currently the principal method of indoctrination is through social media. Epistemic terrorism becomes possible on social media for a number of reasons. People are made vulnerable:

First, social media induces individuals to publish private thoughts, fears, wants and insecurities. Individually trivial, collectively a psychological dossier. The surveillance is voluntary, distributed and self-administered. Second, engagement-optimising algorithms select for fantasy, the morbid, the inappropriate and sometimes the shaming, freezing a person’s inadvertent flip to a beheading and distributing it indefinitely. Thirdly, the belief is spread that nothing is unwitnessed; that the bathroom, the bedroom and the unguarded self are all on file. Whether or not this is literally true is beside the point. The belief is the weapon. The self-supplied record becomes leverage. Fears, wants and insecurities can be activated on command. The threat of exposure or shame disciplines dissent before it forms, while dissent itself is not refuted but made algorithmically invisible to other people’s newsfeeds and threads.

Perhaps it is not complete hyperbole to claim that the CIA’s KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual (1963) is the model of social media inverted. The KUBARK Manual, the result of the work of many academics, was designed to break individual prisoners and control them. The agents of the capitalist ruling class (primarily the CIA, NSA and the big tech companies) apply the same logic to the people who populate social media. The manual’s coercive section is about psychological demolition.

Let’s contrast them. In the KUBARK manual, the interrogator controls the environment. The epistemic terrorist controls the algorithm, visibility and amplification. The KUBARK makes threats of pain which break resistance. The epistemic terrorist threatens exposure and shame to break dissent. The recommendation of the KUBARK is that the subject inflicts pain on himself. For the epistemic terrorist, the subject supplies the ammunition via oversharing. For the KUBARK, sensory deprivation strips reality. In social media, algorithmic accentuation strips context. In both cases there is constant noise and a lack of sleep and isolation.

For the CIA interrogators, what is important is that freedom is promised through confession. Using social media, belonging is promised through compliance. The purpose of the operation of social media by epistemic terrorists is not confession; it is compliance with a narrative.

One narrative appears on social media and opposition to it is fumigated. Not because that narrative is consensual (nobody wants to follow Jacob Rees-Mogg into battle with Russia) or because it persuaded anyone, but because everything and everyone else that contradicted it was intimidated, ignored or self-suppressed into silence.

As Paulo Freire would say, the oppressed and exploited internalise their passivity and come to believe they lack the capacity to know their own reality, when in fact they should become co-investigators of reality in collaboration with their peers, with the goal of conscientisation and politisisation and the development of critical consciousness: the capacity to perceive and act upon the structures that shape one’s life.

For Franz Fanon, colonialism was not merely physical force. It was violence in everyday behaviour; violence against the past, in which the past is emptied of substance and history is rewritten; and violence against the future, in which the colonial regime presents itself as necessarily eternal. The violence against the past is the rewriting of history. The violence against the future is the destruction of the capacity to imagine an alternative. This formulation of Fanon fits the current situation in Palestine perfectly.

Epistemic terrorism under colonialism works by attempting to make the colonised disbelieve their own experience, installing the coloniser’s gaze within the colonised psyche. The Palestinians have heroically resisted this epistemic terrorism in its racialised form, developed in Israel and generalised to the USA and Europe.

Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (2025) provides the material analysis of how epistemic control operates through the funded production of knowledge. Rockhill argues that the US empire wages a systematic project to control the realm of thought and the imagination of what is possible. This is policy, not metaphor. For Rockhill, knowledge production is a commodity-driven system focused on exchange value—career advancement, book sales, symbolic capital—rather than use value for liberation. Sabotage comes when an alternative Marxism, incisive in cultural analysis but detached from the organised dismantling of capitalist social relations, is consciously created by the epistemic terrorists at the CIA; a compatible left that sometimes protests, or protests selectively, but offers no substantive resistance. Dissent is channelled into critique without rupture.

Epistemic terrorism and sabotage are not an aberration; they represent the ideological apparatus functioning as designed in order to reproduce the conditions under which capital accumulates by producing subjects who cannot readily imagine any alternative. In other words, it’s about looking after the bottom line. It’s about who gets to accumulate wealth. Ask Ewan Blair.

There are many other varied examples of epistemic terrorism. To mention a few, they include forging archaeology and manufacturing origins. Morton Smith’s “Secret Mark” was demonstrated to be a forgery. The James Ossuary trial, ten years of legal battle, left authenticity disputed. “Greater Israel” archaeology, where biblical geography is falsified to justify claims to the land.

Perhaps attributing African and Latin American achievements to aliens is the most ridiculous: the Nazca Lines, the ruins of Zimbabwe, the Pyramids of Machu Picchu.

The tobacco industry’s approach spent millions on creating doubt about the carcinogenic and other damaging effects on human health of smoking without ever openly denying the charges.

The oil and gas industry’s war against global warming mitigation measures and the attacks on climate science.

The reframing of slavery as the achievement of the British in abolishing the same evil that they were primarily responsible for.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, once ubiquitous and to this day still present, demonstrate that epistemic terrorism does not require the suppression of truth. It requires the production of a narrative useful enough so that the truth becomes irrelevant. The forgery was exposed. The narrative survived. And it served capital by directing revolutionary anger away from the ruling class and toward a scapegoat: the migrant, the vulnerable outsider, the minority, the Jew, nowadays the Muslim.

Again, the clearest example of epistemic terrorism comes with the arguments over the use of the word genocide in Gaza. Here the genocide is not hidden. It is renamed, and the renaming is enforced epistemically. The victims must first be removed from the category of people whose deaths count. The killing can then proceed and be narrated as defence, security, counterterrorism, regrettable but necessary, or unproven. The architecture enforces the renaming. Oversharing and algorithms drown the testimony of victims and witnesses, or present them as engagement. Total monitoring leads witnesses to self-censor. Intimidation punishes, discredits and exiles those who use the word genocide. Ghosting means evidence is not refuted but ignored, and witnesses are denied uptake. Internalised enforcement leads people to stop trusting their own eyes. Narrative monopoly means only “legitimate defence” is sayable. And there is always the possibility of an IDF bullet to the back of the journalist’s head; the ultimate epistemic terrorist act.

Epistemic terrorism operates in two directions: as a weapon of the perpetrator, to make the genocide unsayable, and as a weapon against the witness, to break the person who saw. The target is the knower. The goal is to destroy the knower’s relationship to what they know.

Limits to Epistemic Terrorism

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A parasite that kills its host dies with it. Capital is a parasite on human society and cannot afford to destroy the conditions of its own reproduction, including the knowledge those conditions require. So epistemic terrorism has limits built into it. It can exhaust the capacity to know up to a point. It cannot destroy the knowledge required to keep the organism alive.

That is why there are still engineers, doctors, farmers, electricians and chemists. Capital needs those knowers. It can afford to make political knowers go dark—the people who ask why, name causes and organise. It cannot afford to make technical knowers go dark.

Epistemic terrorism is therefore selective. It destroys the knowledge that threatens the bottom line and cultivates the knowledge that serves it. That is its sustainability condition and its limit.

This is not a comfort. The parasite limits itself to the degree necessary for survival, not for the well-being of the host. It can sustain the organism while poisoning it: enough technical knowledge to keep production going, and enough epistemic pressure to prevent organisation against exploitation. The equilibrium is a population that can fix anything and understand nothing.

But there is a contradiction capital cannot resolve. It needs the population knowledgeable enough to produce but ignorant enough not to resist; education strong enough to train engineers but weak enough that those engineers do not ask why. That tension is the site of struggle, and it is permanent, because both requirements are real.

The limits to epistemic control and sabotage are what makes us human and what we care about. This gives us the power to resist. The things we want together, the values we share, cannot be permanently falsified because these are not claims about knowledge and the world; they are about needs and wants.

The ruling class can poison the well. It can curate knowledge, exhaust the knower, enclose the narrative and rename the atrocity. It cannot make people stop wanting a better society, or stop caring about their children, their neighbours, their dignity and their freedom.

That longing is not knowledge, which is why it cannot be epistemically terrorised. You cannot flood a want, curate a care, or ghost a need for dignity. The poison goes into the well of claims about the world, and that well can be poisoned. But the longing is not a claim. It is what makes claims possible. In the end, our own and our personal and collective relationship with reality teaches us what is real and what isn’t, not some bot on the internet.

No matter how much poison is poured down the well, in the end people can learn, see and understand what they care about and empathise and decide what we want together. That is the spring, and it cannot be poisoned. Despite everything being done to sabotage support for the people of Gaza, the majority of the global population supports the Palestinians fiercely in their plight and detests the murderous Zionists.

The perpetrators of the holocausts of capitalism live calmly and well among us. They sit on boards, endow fellowships, appear on panels, teach, write op-eds and fund studies. They are respectable.

They can live this way because for the moment their control of narratives and epistemic terrorism has succeeded. If the curated narratives, forged histories, drowned causes, manufactured doubts and renamed genocides were visible as what they are, these people would not be safe or honoured.

The calm respectability of the perpetrator is evidence that the terrorism worked and that we are complicit.

The clearest contemporary demonstration of the framework is the billionaire-owned press and platforms, and their cultivation of hatred toward migrants and difference, culminating in the UK riots of summer 2024 and the incitement that surrounded them.

The press is owned by billionaires. The platforms are owned by billionaires. The distribution of what can be known is in the hands of a small number of people whose class interest is identical to that of every other fraction of capital. No conspiracy is required. There is a shared position and a shared bottom line.

The material causes of popular distress, privatisation, outsourcing, pollution, tax avoidance, capital flight, stagnant wages, crumbling services, are erased and replaced with a vulnerable target: the migrant, the refugee, the asylum seeker, the “different”.

On 29 July 2024, three girls were murdered at a dance class in Southport. Within hours, false claims spread online that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker named “Ali Al-Shakati”. The name received over 30,000 mentions on X across 18,000 accounts before police confirmed it was false. The attacker was a British-born 17-year-old.

Elon Musk, owner of X, posted that civil war is inevitable in response to a video blaming mass migration for the disorder. He later amplified a false claim that Keir Starmer was considering detainment camps on the Falkland Islands; the post was viewed over a million times before deletion. In September 2025, Musk addressed the “Unite the Kingdom” rally organised by Tommy Robinson via video link, telling the crowd: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.” He called for the dissolution of parliament. A Home Office minister described his words as borderline incitement of violence.

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The beneficiaries are identifiable. The privatisers: the anger that would have gone to them goes to the migrant instead. The outsourcers: the workforce is divided against itself, and every division suppresses a wage and prevents a union. The polluters: the river can be full of sewage while the front page is about the Channel. The tax-dodgers: the revenue lost to avoidance is not named as the reason the NHS is short; the migrant is. The profit-exporters: the factory closed and the mine shut are attributed to the people who arrived, not to capital.

The cui bono test passes. Who benefits if migrants are targeted rather than the privatisers, outsourcers, polluters, tax-dodgers and profit-exporters? The answer is immediate and checkable: the billionaires who own the platforms and the press, and the class that owns the means of production and mental production—the same class that funds the think tanks, fellowships and political parties, and that pays no price when a hotel full of asylum seekers is burned.

The YouGov polling from August 2024 suggests the public is not wholly enclosed. Two-thirds say social media companies should be held responsible for posts inciting criminal behaviour during the riots. 71% say the companies did a bad job tackling misinformation. 70% believe social media firms are not regulated strongly enough. The longing for a better society, in which anger is directed at the actual cause, remains present.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion directed revolutionary anger away from the ruling class and toward a scapegoat. The billionaire press and algorithmic feed do the same, without needing a forgery, because they own the means of distribution. The structure is identical.

But we know better. We ourselves might be migrants, our neighbours might be, our schoolmates and workmates and fellow hobbyists and team players. We live alongside each other in harmony and peace for the most part and enjoy each other’s company and the richness that diversity brings. It is not my hard-working Korean neighbour making sushi at his restaurant, nor the Polish builder, nor the Sikh taxi driver or the Kenyan accountant who put me on a zero-hours contract and lowered my wages continually over a period of a decade.

Cui bono. The capitalist ruling class live high on the hog selling weapons and useless insurance and charging sky-high rents, and we are supposed to fight each other over the crumbs?

Pull the other one!

References

About the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual. National Security Archive, George Washington University.

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Key Concepts in Cultural Theory, edited by Andrew Edgar and Peter Sedgwick, Taylor & Francis, 2005.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1963.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 2000.

Full Fact. “Full Fact Report 2025: Chapter 2 – The 2024 UK riots.” Full Fact, 2025.

Hersh, Seymour. “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.” Substack, 8 Feb. 2023.

“Is the ‘Brother of Jesus’ Inscription on the James Ossuary a Forgery?” Biblical Archaeology Society, 17 Nov. 2025.

Manzi, Zoe, and Hannah Rose. “What the UK riots taught us about social media failure.” Full Fact, 28 July 2025.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. Edited by C. J. Arthur, International Publishers, 1970.

“Musk’s interventions demonstrably shaped online discourse.” Written Evidence submitted to UK Parliament, 26 Feb. 2025.

Rockhill, Gabriel. Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? Monthly Review Press, 2025.

YouGov. “Two thirds of Britons say social media companies should be held responsible for posts inciting riots.” YouGov, 9 Aug. 2024.

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Richard Steinhardt is a committed socialist and a radical humanist and has published in the Morning Star and a variety of other communist and socialist publications. He believes that human conscience and understanding should always precede dogma and deterministic formulas posturing as ‘social science’.