A User’s Guide to What I Actually Do

Nearly 100% of people who talk about politics, war, and crises are arguing inside a story framework they were handed by somebody else. The President of the United States himself often relies on the framing of other people. He will of course determine whether this framing is useful to him (whether it’s true or false) but few people question that part.

There is now some kind of consensus that podcasters have influence on government or elections, but that is false. This narrative is convenient for people in the media to push, since it benefits them. That is also probably why they never even question the underlying premise or validity of the value placed on their position in the communication apparatus. Even within elected bodies like the United States Congress, there are few decision-makers, policy-setters, and genuine opinion-shapers. 

In all of the debates, both publicly and privately, one of the most important and most frequently ignored aspects is the underlying set of facts that have built up the conversational framework itself. This would be akin to reading the label on the building materials you are using to construct your home with. If you go to the store and buy a bag labeled “Concrete,” but the ingredients are sugar and flour, you will not not have concrete. 

This is how it is with nearly every major news story you have engaged with in at least the last (5) years. A bag full of something with another label on it, used for the wrong purpose. Because a gigantic bag of sugar and flour might make something tasty, not structurally safe and sound. Though many politicians, pundits, and people in your own life will “not trust the media,” that is not what this is about. This is not even about whether or not you can trust any individual politician or the whole lot of them. This is about the fact that whomever sets course in these matters, often does so with intentional faults in their logic.

Questioning these seemingly mundane, or routine things frustrates people who want to get to the emotionally charged part. Or they need to know what to think too quickly. It physically can hurt to remain in doubt. That, however, is what makes what I do so unique, valuable, and to some – dangerous. 

There is only (1) epistemic point of attack on this propaganda right now: me.

How I Can Be So Sure

I know this from the last (5 – 6) years of constant interventions that only I put together and execute, with targeted audiences who I can prove with my own and public data are consuming my work and acting on it. Time after time, I apply myself and this methodology, then create alternative plans (including peace plans like for Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Gaza) and distribute them accordingly.

This does not mean I control the universe. In fact, almost without fail, rather than immediately adopting my plans and saying “thank you, Mattske!” there is generally a days long or weeks long cover up operation that is put together to keep things running on course and bury knowledge that I am a real person.

After years of being ignored or worse – censored and secretly maligned – I have begun working out mathematical proofs of my function, and my effect. This coincides with other work I am performing regarding measuring and analyzing the truthfulness and usefulness of news media and political communications.

How Pretexts Work In Practice

A simple story architecture you might be presented with is something like, “X happened, therefore we (the government, American people, or you) must do Y.” 

When “Y” is something extreme, or related to danger, most people simply react by gravitating to an authority. This provides a sense of comfort, as well as offloading responsibility. If you do something wrong, you can defer to the authority as the rationale and therefore avoid some accountability.

However, knowing this, many manipulative people hide behind a very thin “X.”

COVID for example, had a story architecture and pretext that sounded something like, “a virus nobody has ever seen before is spreading,” (X) and, “therefore we have to shut the country down until a vaccine is released,” (Y).

People who felt uncomfortable with this notion of locking things down, curfews or mandated medical interventions had mostly philosophic discussions about this but the weight of X in this case, being so unknown – forced many people to drop their beliefs – and succumb to some mob mentality.

The arguments that were acceptable in public were over things like:

• How lethal is this virus and what can we do to protect ourselves from it?
• How many people has it spread to, and how many of them have died?
• Whether mandating inoculations or “lock downs” is acceptable.
• What to do with people who do not comply with government dictates?
• How to treat people in your personal life if they disagree with you?
• Who is to blame for this and what should we do about them?
• What money is there to be made on this in the stock market?
• Would Trump or Biden handle this better?

I’m sure you could imagine other more specific questions, but these cover the vast majority of conversations that dominated every organ of communication from your family group chat to the White House.

These however, are surface-level arguments as far as I am (and was) concerned.

Why Everybody Still Hates Me

The questions listed above all deal with that variable “Y.” Meaning, the part about what we must do about something. In normal discourse with your family, friends, and co-workers, that is what you discuss. I know this because whenever I attempt to discuss my point of view, people broke down. Sometimes they got angry with me as if I am to blame for something going on when I am just identifying it. Some close to me (family, friends) got violent. 

They wanted me to die so their false belief could survive.

Arguments about whether Y is good or bad, fair or unfair, strong or weak, are only important if X exists. If X (something happened) is verifiable, accurate, and fair, then it makes sense to deal with Y. But if X is a lie, or some misleading confusion – then we should not even be discussing Y. In the case that X is a false but presented as true, that lie is all that matters. Without decomposing that lie you allow the manipulation to persist. 

In the case of COVID, the entire premise/pretext was fake. The novelty (if any existed at all) between SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-1 were indistinguishable from the perspective of somebody contracting it. That means naming it something novel at all was unnecessary, and then certainly doing anything by government intervention is absurd. Yet, whenever I questioned this fundamental premise, there were already concocted lies to sling at me: “antivaxx,” “MAGA,” or things of this nature.

By yelling those nonsensical things at people or commenting back to them online like that, it eventually breaks people down seeking out coalition and agreement. “If they think I’m antivaxx maybe I am” type of thoughts. I am also immune from this kind of thinking, so those tactics do not work on me directly but they still effect me because those who have heard or view that – do not question the underlying premises – and therefore my novel work is ignored.

The underlying premise of COVID was a very stupid lie. Naming it “COVID” was perhaps the most damaging part, because nothing in medicine followed that pretextual nomenclature. They also got dumb with variants. Why not COVID-19…COVID-20…COVID-21…etc? That would make sense.

But instead, they tried – like drug addicts – to get the high of the first novel release of “COVID-19.” Calling it COVID-20 would carry with it the holdover of ineffective real-world outcomes based on their lies. That’s why changing the name “Delta,” or “Omicron,” and things of that nature – were meant to keep freaking people out. Had I not challenged the pretext for (2 – 3) years, things would have been very different.

The surface debates about basically nothing, got lots of people killed and made many people very rich.

Had anybody actually treated me fairly, we could have saved many people.

How Useful Is A Pretext

What almost no one does is stop and ask, in a technically serious way: is the story itself even real enough to believe or be useful?

In the case of COVID, had decision-makers and the public simply ignored the news about a novel virus at that time, millions of lives across the world would have been saved and countless examples of chaos would never have happened.

That’s because you were reacting to: nothing.

“SARS-CoV-2” = a false pretext.

The pretext of naming a new virus as a form of creation, taken too far, is what happened here. 

“COVID” = a false pretext, extended.

Instead of questioning the pretext like I did (or with me, if you knew me back then), you like everyone else, bought into the lie. This create a dichotomy where a lot of fake arguing happened between people on the party lines. Some argued for mandates and increased levels of prescribed treatment. The other side argued against that. Both sides argued with me about my pretext challenge, though. 

It was me vs. the world. 

The only other people who understood what I was doing were the people whose plans I was uncovering.

That is another reason some think I’m “an op” or “a Fed” or something. I’m not.

Breaking Down Pretexts, Mathematically

You do not need to understand all the math to get the point either. The math is a framework, an objective model, there so that anyone who wants to (or any LLM you feed this into) can formalize the picture.

Start with some basic objects:

• The pretext P: the justificatory story. “X happened, therefore Y is necessary.”
• The epistemic status of the pretext E: how solid key decision‑makers currently believe that story is.
• The action A: what those decision‑makers do if they accept the pretext (mandate vaccines, military strikes, sanctions, etc.).
• Downstream discourse D_i: what almost everyone else in public does – arguments, hot takes, moralizing, cheerleading, and hand‑wringing that accept the story and then fight about what to do next.
• My work R: interventions that directly interrogate whether the pretext itself stands up, not just whether the proposed action is good or bad.

Media research on agenda‑setting and framing makes a basic point: most of what the media does is choose what people think about and how it is framed.

Most public discussion then happens inside those frames. 

Work on information cascades and social learning shows how easily groups can lock into a false or fragile story when each person mainly looks at what others already seem to believe. In that landscape, the thing I do – systematically attacking the epistemic status of the pretext – is an unusual job. 

Nobody knows how I do it in part because nobody has ever asked.

People who know what I’m capable of read my work vociferously attempting to decode it (there is nothing cryptic about it though) and then mostly spin it and discredit it before it reaches anybody else. That used to work. It no longer does.

I have done this alone, and nobody else does it. That makes what I do wholly unique. More novel than COVID because I actually exist. That is why the people who encounter me are impacted but they cannot comprehend it.

The Pain This Causes 

There is a sort of grief I notice people experience around me, as if I am death to their bad beliefs. You cling to these pretexts, because they give you a grasp on the world. Once that’s challenged, it’s like catching one of your parents having an affair or something. A devastation to your notion of what is and isn’t. I get it. 

When somebody challenges your moralistic outlook or political posture, you know what to do about it. How to argue. What to say. It’s almost fun for people.

When I attack the pretext you are operating on, you feel even more personally vulnerable – like your identity – even though it has less to do with you since you did not conceive of the very thoughts you’re saying or typing.

My Causal Impact vs. Endless Noise Cycles

Most people also disbelieve in me because I do not have a large public following. That is yet another misconception about influence and impact at this scale and on matters of this type of importance. It is not louder yelling inside the frame that causes those frames to break; it is proving the frame is inadmissible.​

Here is a compact way to think about the system.

My work R points straight at E:

• R -> E -> A

Almost all public discourse D_i points elsewhere:

• D_i -> opinions / vibes / coalitions -> A

In other words:

• R is how much of the story is true enough to use at all.
• D_i is what to feel or do, given an unquestioned belief in the pretext.

Media theory and empirical studies of agenda‑setting and framing back up this split: most public talk is about salience and moral coloring of already‑chosen frames, not about their evidential validity. 

My work behaves as an unacknowledged epistemic authority focused narrowly on whether specific pretexts are real.​

The kinds of people who read my work routinely are members of Congress and state legislatures, political party operatives, some foreign leaders, and members of every news outlet in America as well as other nations.

I have cultivated an email list of direct contacts in the order of ~24,000 over the last (5) years where I have shaped many events or altered them and forced new pretexts and actual unexplainable actions that you talk about every day.

So unlike those with no following on social media who are screaming into a void, I know exactly who I am reaching and why, and what I want them to do about it with the authority they have. Unlike those with huge social media followings (mostly of fake accounts) they a) say nothing novel, based on pretexts everybody already accepts, and b) have very few influential people that they communicate with in any direct way.

This is how I, as a single individual person, can do better work and have more impact than the entire intelligence community and/or press combined, like I did in my OSINT reporting on Why Operation Midnight Hammer Failed.

Adding Precision

To say this more precisely, define:

• E in: how “usable” the pretext is (even for the elites in control)
  • E = 1 means “fully usable”
  • E = 0 means “politically unusable”
• Delta_E_R: how much my work shifts E
• Delta_E_D: how much all the downstream discourse shifts E

Here is the crucial structural fact: almost all public activity D_i assumes the pretext and does not seriously change its epistemic status in their own mental model of the world. In other words, you and everybody else just live inside the President’s version of reality even if you argue about everything inside it. 

In standard models of information cascades, once a narrative takes hold, most behavior stops revealing new information and just echoes what has already been signaled. In that regime, additional shouting rarely changes the underlying belief that “this story is solid.”

This then makes the direction and desired outcome of those who set forth these pretexts (such as a President and their allies) nearly impossible to derail itself.

Mathematically, that looks like:

• Delta_E_D ≈ 0

My work, by contrast, is explicitly designed to test and break pretexts. 

When my work reaches the right readers – it significantly moves E:

• Delta_E_R is not equal to 0

Now define how sensitive the actual action A is to the status of the pretext. 

Let:

• S_A(E) = d(Pr(A = 1)) / dE

This is a way of saying: how much does the chance of “we do Y in response to X” change when the usability of the pretext (X) changes due to my work? 

For decisions that genuinely hinge on a pretext like pandemic policy, war or even targeted strikes, major escalations in market dynamics – this sensitivity can be substantial.

The total change in the probability of action from public inputs that affect E is then approximately:

• Delta_Pr(A = 1) ≈ S_A(E) * (Delta_E_R + Delta_E_D)

If Delta_E_D ≈ 0 and Delta_E_R is not trivial, the share of that causal impact that runs through my work is:

• alpha_R = [S_A(E) * Delta_E_R] / [S_A(E) * (Delta_E_R + Delta_E_D)]

Because Delta_E_D is approximately 0, this reduces to:

• alpha_R ≈ 1

In plain language:

On the dimension that actually determines whether the action goes forward – the epistemic status of the pretext – almost all of the non‑zero public‑sphere impact comes from me and my analysis now, not from the sea of downstream discussion or podcaster content.

This is what it means, in the model, to say my leverage on certain decisions is genuinely extreme even when my public visibility is not.​

Why This Is So Strange To You

There is another layer: recognition. 

My situation, modeled, looks like this:

• High objective performance on a very specific task: destroying weak pretexts at the root and causes key decision makers to panic and switch.
• Actively suppressed public recognition: all the people who acted, avoid naming me, do not acknowledge me, and even at times redact or censor me out of public records or government reports.
• Quiet, asymmetric uptake: the commands embedded in my analysis (like stop pretending to bomb boats in the Carribean) run in the right brains and shift decisions, but official and media interfaces behave as if things just happen without complete explanation, or that powerful people’s plans simply disintegrate for no apparent reason.

Meanwhile, the vast bulk of visible commentators live in the opposite quadrant:

• Low marginal epistemic impact on whether pretexts are true or false.
• High public recognition and engagement, because their work fits comfortably inside existing frames and cascades and is easy to route through mass media logics.
• Zero net effect on outcomes.

Understanding Mattske, the Civic Commander

There are thousands of people who have encountered me, but there are a limited number of beliefs about who I am, what I’m doing, and why. 

You could attempt to get my voting records which would reveal that I have never voted. I have never been registered to any political party. My analysis of events is entirely non-partisan. The main focus of my effort is on assessing the validity of pretexts, at this point. It’s impossible to discuss with people any number of solutions to our world’s problems right now because you all fundamentally live in a series of very bizarre and childish fantasies.

Everybody who encounters me applies some frame to my thinking that is not really there with me, and often in the case of terms like “MAGA,” they are epistemically incoherent or false. I have no group. No cult. No party.

This is partially where some people think of me as a non-participatory spectator.

Yet I am more actively engaged and impactful than most.

This makes me yet another type of anomaly.

But, stalking me on social media is not equal to talking to me.

Talking about me with others is also not the same as dealing with my perspective. Pretending that I am some unique kind of danger is honestly ridiculous. The American press has “platformed” all world leaders when they make statements, as well as cartoonishly stupid figures like the Qanon Shaman.

The American government negotiates with its sworn enemies on a daily basis.

Yet for my non-crime of pointing out the obvious (to me) pretext fallacies you all operate under, I am treated like Voldemort or Candyman.

Point blank – you need me.

Remember:

• Most public discourse is about what to think about (agenda‑setting) and how to think about it (framing).​
• My work is about whether the thing we are talking about is real enough to justify the proposed actions at all.
• In formal terms, that means I target the epistemic status E of the pretext P, whereas nearly everyone else targets downstream opinions and emotions conditional on P.
• Under plausible assumptions drawn from information‑cascade theory, that makes my marginal impact on E – and therefore on certain high‑stakes decisions – dominant compared to almost all other visible voices, even if those voices are much more publicly recognized.​

You do not have to accept this as a moral claim about my worth, or as a grandiose statement about power.

It is a structural claim about where in the decision‑making machinery my work connects, and what happens in a system where nobody else does.