Strategic Intelligence Field Dispatch: Lincoln City, Sushi Counter, PsyOps Edition
Codename: Operation Nigiri Mindwar
Author’s Note: I’m currently traveling the Pacific Northwest for business. As things catch my eye, I’ll be pushing out Intelligence Dispatches like this one.
Intelligence Dispatches blend fact, observation, and strategic interpretation. Some characters are real. Some scenes are lightly fictionalized. All insights are deadly serious.
June 28, 2025: I’m in Lincoln City, Oregon. A town stitched together with driftwood, neon lights, and regret. Surf shops peddle wetsuits that haven’t felt saltwater since Obama’s first term. But I wasn’t here to surf. I was here to eat questionable sushi and hunt intelligence.
I found it at the bar.
Next to me, a man in a hoodie that smelled like jet fuel and menthols launched into a monologue—unprompted, unfiltered, undeniably American. He was explaining, loudly, that Iranians chant “Death to America” because we used napalm in Vietnam.
I corrected him. Gently, but firmly. “It’s about the Shah. The U.S. meddled in their democratic government, installed a brutal monarch, and backed him until a theocratic counter-revolution burned it all down. That’s why they chant.”
He squinted at me like I was a Fed. Told me I watched too much lamestream media. I asked which outlet that was.
“Anything on TV or satellite.”
Fox News and CNN? “Same station,” he said.
This man believes in a post-platform reality. If it has a budget, it’s propaganda. If it has a studio, it’s lies. If you’ve heard of the source, it’s tainted. He doesn’t trust algorithms or people who work in buildings.
He doesn’t watch Rogan. Too mainstream.
He doesn’t read the BBC. Colonialist psyops.
Then came the pharmacy bit. He said they’re gone. No need for them.
Dispensaries have everything: weed, kratom, and the sweet numbing fog of pseudo-enlightenment. “They don’t fix you,” he told me. “They just make you not care.”
Here’s the Strategic Intelligence Lesson:
We are witnessing a quiet insurgency—not with guns, but with epistemology. A war over how people decide what’s true.
The target audience is the untethered man—paranoid but not stupid, unmoored from traditional authority, and increasingly unreachable by institutions that rely on trust. He doesn’t believe in your facts, your history, your media. But he is loyal—to a vibe, a tribe, a worldview defined by inversion:
If it’s credentialed, it’s corrupted.
If it’s popular, it’s propaganda.
If it’s nuanced, it’s deception.
This is not just a cultural phenomenon. It’s a security vulnerability.
Every YouTube-taught epistemic mercenary is one step closer to falling for foreign influence ops, snake oil investments, or radicalization. Not because they’re evil—but because they are exhausted by bullshit and have no map left that they trust.
For intelligence professionals, business leaders, and policymakers, the takeaway is this:
You’re not fighting bad actors.
You’re fighting bad frameworks for deciding what’s real.
In a world where truth is crowd-sourced, and trust is dead, we need to stop selling facts and start selling epistemology. Train people how to think, not what to think.
Because if we don’t?
The sushi bar becomes the battlefield.
And we’re losing.
Codename: Operation Nigiri Mindwar
Location: Lincoln City, Oregon
Threat Level: PsyOp in a soy sauce bottle
Recommended Action: Rethink your comms strategy. The post-truth insurgents aren't watching cable. They're microdosing doubt, mainlining dopamine, and weaponizing “Do your own research.”
Over and out.