THE NEUTRALIZATION: The Playbook They Used on You
This is not about what happened to me. This is a documented account of a method used against anyone who refuses to comply. I am simply the case study. Read it and ask yourself where you have seen these steps before. Then ask yourself who ran them.
The final season of the Handmaid's Tale began just as we entered the final season of my father's life. I knew what the show would ask of me emotionally, and I was not in a position to answer. So I waited.
A lot happened in that year. My father died. I came back to writing on Substack, quietly, the way you return to something that kept you sane before. Then President Trump shared my work and everything exploded. None of that was the plan. The plan was just to keep writing.
When I came back up for air and finally finished the series, knowing my emotions were under control, I watched as Aunt Lydia faced what she had done. And after I finished the series, I turned off the TV and started writing this.
A note on pricing.
When I launched My Reflections from the Edge I was not sure the platform would work for me or if this was where my work belonged. Over the last year I have gradually focused my attention solely on my writing and on making sure I am offering real value to the people who trust me with their time and money. I believe I have lived up to that. And I have more coming in the year ahead.
Starting on 6/01, the monthly subscription moves to $9. The annual rate will be priced at a discounted rate of $80, which remains the better deal and the one I would encourage.
If you have been reading free and have been on the fence, now is the time. I am grateful either way.
Ada
There is a playbook. It has no official name because naming it would require admitting it exists. It is not emotional. It is not reactive. It is a sequence, run with cold deliberateness on anyone who becomes credible enough, visible enough, and unwilling enough to be managed quietly. It has been run on dissidents, on whistleblowers, on local candidates, on mothers at school board meetings. It was run on me.
I am not writing this to tell you my story. I am writing it because the playbook is still active and most people cannot see it while it is happening to them or to someone they know. By the time they recognize it, the damage is done and the people who ran it have already moved on.
I kept every receipt. Consider what follows the manual.
STEP ONE: IDENTIFY THE THREAT
The first thing to understand is that you are not selected because you are dangerous. You are selected because you are inconvenient. There is a difference. Dangerous people can be arrested, discredited on the merits, or ignored. Inconvenient people are something else entirely. They are credible. They are present. They are not going to stop. And they are starting to be heard.
In 2021 I ran for a school board seat in West Chester, Pennsylvania. My position was not extreme. Keep schools open. End the mandates. Trust parents over bureaucracies that had spent two years proving they did not deserve it. I was a mother and a medical professional with years of training inside the system I was criticizing. I was not shouting. I was not performing. I was making a documented, grounded case and people were listening.
That was the problem. Not what I believed. Who might start believing it with me.
STEP TWO: BUILD THE CONTAINER
Before they come at you directly, they construct a container. A label. A category tight enough that once it is fixed to your name, nothing that comes out of your mouth requires engagement. The label does not need to be true. It needs to be sticky and it needs to travel fast, and it needs to arrive in people's minds before your actual words do.
They called me insane, dangerous, a grandma killer, a conspiracy theorist.
I need you to understand what those labels were. It was not frustration. It was not even contempt. It was a tactical decision. Once I was ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ Ada, my credentials became irrelevant. My evidence became suspect. My positions became symptoms. A label like that does not just dismiss you. It pre-dismisses everything you will ever say, to anyone who receives it before they receive you. That is the point. That is the design.
An anonymous Facebook group appeared almost immediately. Anonymous, because the people running it understood that accountability is a tool they preferred to aim outward. Its purpose was not debate or dialogue. It was containment.
I did research Q posts. I did run an online research group. I was doing what any informed citizen paying attention to an emerging movement should do. I documented. I analyzed. I shared findings with others who were trying to understand what they were watching. That is called research.
They called it membership.
They took the same set of facts, stripped every shred of context, and repackaged them as evidence of radicalization. West Chester's own Marjorie Taylor Greene. The QAnon Princess. Then the QAnon Queen, promoted even in their insanity. Cuckoo. Each label arrived without a single question directed at me, without a single attempt to understand what the group actually was or what I was actually doing with it. Not one of those claims engaged a single position I had taken on schools, on mandates, or on anything else I was running on.
The Philadelphia Inquirer ran my name. NBC News picked it up nationally.
(Philadelphia Inquirer, May 12, 2021) (NBC News, July 7, 2021)
At no point did anyone from the Inquirer or NBC call me to ask whether any of it was true.
The Washington Examiner reviewed the same coverage and concluded the allegations against me were dubious at best, and that no clear connection between my positions and QAnon had ever been established. (Washington Examiner, July 9, 2021)
They did not lie about what I did. They lied about what it meant. That is a more deliberate and more dishonest operation than simple fabrication. And it is the one they never had to answer for.
