Right-Wing Blogger, Psy-Op Victim: Scaring a Man to Death

Some of the following is disturbing

November 9, 1991 – August 28, 2022

A number of young men involved in various kinds of right-wing activity, some violent, some not, have been dying under mysterious circumstances in the last few years. They’re dying young, from 29 to 35.

I know better than to try to change anyone’s mind about the politics here. If your first thought after reading the previous paragraph is, “good, another dead Nazi,” then go ahead and close this window, read no further. It’s probably for the best not to consider this anyway. Some of what follows is disturbing.

Bryce LaLiberte died last year, and his obituary lists endocarditis as the cause of death. He was a well-known figure in the neoreactionary blogging scene where he wrote as AnarchoPapist, and self-published several books—his Angelic Revolution preceded the New York angelicism scene by several years. I was not close with him, but I knew him parasocially for almost a decade and we met in person once.

I extended an offer to him at the Daily Caller to write an op-ed in 2013. It isn’t racist, or extremist, or anything like that. He had a style of writing I can only describe as autistic (he applied this word to himself often), great with concepts but not as good with words. It crosses my mind that my decision to invite him to write for a larger audience contributed to the kind of scrutiny that tormented him toward the end of his life, even though logically I know this isn’t true.

Toward the end of his life, Bryce went through something, his descriptions of which being indistinguishable from some kind of severe mental illness, possibly schizophrenia.

I spoke to Bryce about a year before he died, and he described to me intense paranoia, the sense he was being watched, synchronicities he believed were meaningful but may not have been. After he died I shared the messages with a few people. He claimed to have been contacted by the FBI. I believe him about that: around this time several other people active in this scene were contacted by them. These contacts are, at least theoretically, a matter of public record, now that he is dead. Other sources I am not able to disclose have made it clear this scene was being watched by other agencies too.

Bryce published a piece at The American Sun in April 2019, in which he tried to make sense of what was happening to him. They pulled it at his request, but you should read the archived version—and the editor’s note. It has all the tropes of writing we associate with the insane, he mentions “gangstalking” at one point and claims to have been dosed with LSD. He blames President Obama, domestic security services, and neo-Nazi hackers. He claims to be an MKUltra subject, and that his writing is what exposed him to this persecution. He writes of invoking demons—I’m old-fashioned enough to feel very strongly he should not have done this. (Even if you don’t believe in demons, if you invoke them and then get psy-opped, you’ll start to believe in them and wonder if they’re to blame for what’s happening to you, so just don’t do it in the first place.)

In specific, I think none of his attributions in that piece are correct. I don’t think he was dosed with LSD, though I can see why he felt like he was. But I do think he was subjected to some kind of psychological manipulation—the “referential mania” he identifies is a giveaway. It’s clear he was being targeted by some group of people, too. He says in the piece that someone threatened to expose him as a “groomer” and a pedophile. In late 2020 two anonymous accounts with no followers went public with the accusation. As far as I can tell there is no substance to it; no law enforcement agency appears to have taken it seriously. But someone held this over his head for a year and a half.

The new podcast American Psyop, about the travails of Wes Clark Jr., son of the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, has brought issues like these to the fore in a new way. There are many similarities between what happened to him and what happened to Bryce—the focus on numerological patterns is present in both men’s experiences, the sense both men had that they were selected for some special purpose, both had their normal human pattern-recognition hijacked and made to go haywire. When I finished the podcast I immediately thought of Bryce’s experiences.

I asked Wes Clark Jr. to read Bryce’s American Sun piece, and called him last week to talk about it (he’s given me permission to share that). He said a lot of it rang true with what happened to him.

These psy-op practices are very useful in the world of counterinsurgency, for neutralizing activism, as was done in Wes’s case, or for marginalizing a dissident like Bryce, making him look crazy, and then letting others steal his ideas. The question is whether it can also kill. I think Wes would tell you it can—the risk of suicide for psy-op victims is very real, as the guest in the ninth episode of his show mentions.

Bryce described to me, for instance, watching a movie one night. The next day people would be discussing the same movie on some forum. This ordinarily would be perfectly harmless, but in the context of receiving threats and talking to an FBI agent, it feels more than that. Then more coincidences happen. This moves from the world of felicitous viral synchronicity to the uncanny. You begin to wonder why this is happening, or who is doing it to you. Then people come into your life who start to know details about it that they shouldn’t. You don’t know why. You start to think your computer is bugged, so every time you log on, you experience stress. This can escalate to a dangerous place very quickly.

A recent cohort study on Swedes has linked stress disorders to the development of central nervous system infections and endocarditis. Bryce’s mother has a Nordic surname, fairly typical in Minnesota. I don’t want to speculate about a link between Bryce’s experiences and the infection that killed him, because I’m not a doctor, but such a link is possible.

There’s essentially no point in placing blame for any of this; the main flaw of Bryce’s piece is that he tries to. It could be anyone doing it—foreign intelligence, private security contractors; if the U.S. government were persuaded someone like Bryce was a threat, they might do it and call it a non-kinetic deradicalization measure, for instance. It could just be a group of people on the Internet. The same means could be put to the opposite purpose too, to radicalize a person and render him violent.

You look closely at these things and you see the idea that the Internet is making people sick is not just a figure of speech or a metaphor. I strongly suspect this sort of thing is more widespread than we know.