The Revolution Will Be Cognitive
This 4th of July, it’s not about fireworks — it’s about defending your mind from manipulation, coercion, and control.
The United States was founded on the premise that liberty is worth fighting for and that individuals have the right to freedom of thought, speech, and self-determination, among other fundamental and inalienable rights. But in 2025, the threats to these freedoms no longer come solely from tyrannical monarchs or foreign armies. They come from within our own devices, our information ecosystems, our own government agencies, and even our relationships.
Today, the fight for independence is an invisible struggle on the battlefield of your own mind, and the weapons are manipulation, surveillance, algorithms, disinformation, and coercive control. Tyranny in the modern era doesn’t announce itself by wearing a uniform or carrying a musket; it hides in algorithms designed to exploit your attention, in headlines crafted to inflame and divide, in controlling and/or abusive relationships masked as love or protection, and in institutions that use safety as a pretext for control. From AI-generated propaganda to data harvesting operations that microtarget you into submission, our freedoms are being slowly eroded in the name of convenience, security, and connection.
We live in an era where the most common way people lose their independence is not by force, but by subtle manipulation — where reality is bendable, attention is hackable, and truth is negotiable. In such an environment, reclaiming and defending our freedom requires more than patriotism. It requires cognitive sovereignty — the right to govern our own minds, to access truth without obstruction or deception, and to resist the forces that would bend or unduly influence our thoughts to serve someone else’s agenda.
To honor the legacy of July 4th, I am publishing a new kind of declaration — not for political independence, but for cognitive independence: a statement of our rights in the age of cognitive warfare.
A Declaration of Cognitive Independence
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for people to dissolve the invisible chains which bind their thoughts, distort their perceptions, and compromise their autonomy, a decent respect for the dignity of the human mind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to reclaim their freedom. We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all people are born with the right to cognitive liberty — the freedom to think, question, doubt, learn, discern, and act according to the dictates of conscience, not coercion; that these liberties are endowed not by governments, corporations, or algorithms, but by virtue of being human; that to safeguard these rights, ethical systems of governance, technology, and media must be constructed to serve the autonomy and well-being of the people, deriving their legitimacy from informed and voluntary consent.
Whenever any system, entity, or actor becomes destructive of these ends by manipulating, deceiving, coercing, isolating, surveilling, or psychologically subjugating the people, it is the right of the people to expose such abuses, to reject such systems, and to construct new ones that protect the integrity of their minds and the health of the shared information environment.
The history of our digital age is a history of encroachments upon the mind, having in direct object the establishment of control through deception, distortion, and distraction. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world:
They have deployed algorithms that manipulate our emotions, polarize our communities, and hijack our attention without informed consent.
They have flooded our media ecosystems with propaganda, misinformation, and pseudoscience, obscuring truth and sowing chaos.
They have weaponized our personal data, mining our fears, desires, and habits for psychological leverage and behavioral control.
They have permitted foreign and domestic actors to engage in influence operations that undermine democratic institutions and social trust.
They have embedded surveillance infrastructure into our cars, workplaces, and even bodies, normalizing the constant erosion of privacy.
They have enabled coercive control within families, communities, and courts, silencing victims through narrative manipulation and institutional complicity.
They have gaslit the public, dismissing legitimate concerns as paranoia, while quietly rewriting reality through information dominance.
They have punished dissidents and whistleblowers, not with exile or imprisonment, but with digital assassination, shadow bans, character defamation, and reputational ruin.
They have blurred the lines between news and entertainment, science and speculation, identity and influence, until no solid ground remained.
They have failed to ensure the integrity of information upon which our decisions, votes, health, and safety depend.
We, therefore, the mentally sovereign people of this digital age, do solemnly publish and declare: That we are, and of right ought to be, cognitively independent;
That we reject the claim of any entity corporate, governmental, religious, technological, interpersonal, or artificial to ownership or dominion over our thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, emotions, or behavioral patterns;
That we affirm our right to:
Think freely, without coercion, deception, manipulation, gaslighting, or psychological abuse.
Access truth, through transparent, ethical, honest, and pluralistic information systems.
Critically question all claims, narratives, authorities, and ideologies.
Control our data, and revoke its use when employed to influence us without our informed consent.
Be educated in cognitive defense and security, including media literacy, propaganda analysis, deception detection, and cognitive bias mitigation.
Refuse participation in any system that uses coercive tactics to alter thought, perception, or behavior.
Organize collectively to resist mass manipulation and cognitive subjugation.
Name the tools of oppression, even when they come disguised as connection, love, safety, or truth.
Be vigilant against the soft tyranny of nudges, euphemisms, black-box algorithms, and behavioral engineering.
Declare independence from psychological abusers, whether domestic or foreign, interpersonal or institutional, and to sever all ties that exploit trust and restrict autonomy.
And for the support of this declaration, we pledge to one another our vigilance, our courage, and our sacred responsibility to defend the minds of future generations from those who would enslave them.
True freedom is not only the absence of tyranny. It is the presence of sovereignty over your own mind. Today, that sovereignty is under attack not with bayonets and muskets, but with clickbait and deepfakes, coercion and data exploitation, narrative warfare and psychological abuse. If we fail to protect our cognitive liberty, then all other freedoms — political, social, bodily — become vulnerable.
The fight for freedom in the 21st century will be won or lost in the realm of thought. To protect our independence, we must become literate in the tactics of cognitive tyranny, skillful in the detection of manipulation, vigilant against coercion, and deliberate in our consumption of information. We must teach our children to identify falsehoods and recognize that a life lived through a screen is not a life lived at all. We must call out abuse even when it hides behind smiling faces, fame, religion, “helping” professions, or badges and uniforms. We must refuse to be nudged, herded, or hijacked. We must learn to identify cognitive biases, not only in others, but in our own thought patterns and judgments. We must become acutely aware of our own vulnerabilities so that we can successfully defend them before our adversaries successfully attack them.
This Fourth of July, my challenge to you is to do more than wave a flag or wear the colors of the USA. Make a commitment. Declare your independence not just from kings, but from lies; not just from control, but from coercion disguised as care. And not just for yourself, but for all who still struggle in silence. The revolution isn't coming — it’s happening right now, inside your mind. Your participation isn’t optional. You can either start fighting now to maintain your cognitive independence or start fighting later to try to get it back.
I like the way you think.
You are not Superman (or Superwoman) but you are a source of truth, justice, and the real American way. I feel fortunate to have found you when you were Caroline Orr. I learn a lot from you.