Opsec Quotes

I loved Twitter: an open, rhizomatic forum where you could aggravate existing mental illnesses, shop for new ones, violate your Miranda rights, and get fired. A place to be judged on the character of your content, driven by rubbernecking and spite, where fame is a millstone and names are bad op-sec. Twitter was the right word for it, birdsong being a Darwinian squall mistaken for idle chatter, screaming for territory and mates. An improv class, press conference, intervention, Klan rally, comics convention, and struggle session all booked in the same conference room.

An equivalent set of attitudes could be seen all through the Magic Resistance as it started its campaign to use magic to unseat the Trump administration. Perhaps the clearest expression of that self-defeating approach was the insistence on the part of the movement’s public figureheads that three of the core rules of magical practice didn’t apply to them. Every competently trained mage knows that effective magic requires unity of intention. Every competently trained mage knows that effective magic requires what military personnel like to call OPSEC; for the rest of us, that’s operational security, better known as keeping your mouth shut. Every competently trained mage also knows that it’s much more effective to build your side up than to tear the other side down. The Magic Resistance did none of these things. What’s more, when these issues came up for discussion—and they did, all over the ends of the internet where occultists talk—leading figures of the Magic Resistance insisted angrily that neither of these three rules were valid and their magic was certain to triumph anyway.