Emily Adams
Research-backed card series. Every claim is a real study.
The Social Engineering Series
How people get steered without noticing, told from the manipulator’s side with real posts from the feed, starting with the skill that protects you: understanding what you read.
Part 1: Why Literacy MattersWhat it costs when reading goes wrong in seven parts of ordinary life, with every number linked and its limits printed on the card.
Part 2: What Literacy MeansThe official definition, the six skills inside the word, a real example of each, and six questions to ask of anything you read.
Part 3: How Literacy Is MeasuredThe levels behind the headlines about adult literacy: how the test works, what each level means, where U.S. adults scored, and what the shorthand gets wrong.
Part 4: It Was Just a JokeThe first move: say it as a joke, see how it lands, then decide whether you meant it. The research, plus the administration’s own words, checked against official transcripts.
Part 5: It Feels TrueThe second move: repetition. Why a claim you have heard many times starts to feel like something you know, with the lab studies and current claims counted from official transcripts.
Part 6: That Is So MeThe third move: identity. How tying a claim, a product, or a position to who you are makes doubt feel like disloyalty, with the studies and the data behind every card.
Part 7: The DoseThe fourth move: escalation. One small step at a time, so each step makes the next one feel normal, in politics, at the store, and at home.
Part 8: Who Even Knows AnymoreThe fifth move: exhaustion. How a flood of claims, reversals, and fakes wears people down until they stop checking, and what to do about it.
Practice What You Read
Between the LinesA reading game. Read a current news article, answer twelve questions about it, and see your reading level on the same scale the international adult literacy test uses.Play nowIt Worked Last Time
A history series on propaganda campaigns: the coded phrases, who used them, what they were for, and what they cost. See all parts.
Part 1: The Code WordOnce saying it openly cost votes, the message moved into code: “states’ rights,” “forced busing,” “cutting taxes,” and finally a mug shot, in a campaign that came back from 17 points down to carry 40 states.
Part 2: Stabbed in the BackGermany’s generals demanded a ceasefire, then told the country the army had been stabbed in the back at home, a myth the Nazis rode to power. In 2020 the same move was called Stop the Steal, and it ended at the Capitol.
Part 3: Save the ChildrenSince 1977, campaigns have wrapped attacks on gay people, teachers, and political rivals in the language of saving children, so that anyone who objects seems to side with predators. It cost a civil rights law, a seven-year prosecution with no convictions, a rifle fired inside a pizzeria, and hotline time meant for real victims.
Part 4: InvasionFor a century, propagandists have called immigrants an invading army or a planned “replacement,” so that harsh laws and even violence feel like self-defense. The idea shaped the 1924 quotas that kept Jewish refugees waiting in 1939, was cited by gunmen in 2019 and 2022, and returned in official documents in 2025.
Part 5: Enemy of the PeopleFor years before they took power, the Nazis called Germany’s newspapers the “lying press.” Then they suspended press freedom, jailed editors, and boasted that Germans were “completely immune” to foreign warnings of war. The label “enemy of the people” has done the same job for more than one kind of regime, and in 2026 it became a White House ban.
Part 6: International BankersA forged Russian document “proved” a secret Jewish plot to rule the world through money, and Henry Ford’s newspaper spread it across America and, in translation, into Germany, where it helped shape a future Nazi youth leader. The plot survived its exposure under a polite name: “international bankers.”
Part 7: Security RiskIn the 1950s, the U.S. government purged gay men and lesbians from federal jobs by calling them a “security risk.” A Navy study found no data behind the claim, and the Navy kept it secret for almost 20 years.
Part 8: Protect the HomeTwice in the 20th century, campaigns told women that legal equality would cost them the privileges that protected their homes, and recruited women to carry the warning. Women won the vote anyway in 1920; the Equal Rights Amendment died three states short in 1982.
Part 9: Doubt Is Our ProductIn 1954, cigarette makers learned they did not have to win the argument. They only had to convince the public that the experts were still arguing. A 1969 company presentation called it “Doubt is our product,” and the same move later shaped the climate debate.
More Series
Sharia, ExplainedWhat Sharia is, where it is law, the extremists in both faiths, and where the claim that Muslims want Sharia in America came from. Checked against the sources.
Resources for Women to Micromanage Their Campaign PromisesTen asks, which office handles what, every number, the scripts, and the checklists. Up their asses, all the time.
What Men Reported, AnonymouslyA 2026 anonymous survey of 2,689 young men on sexual coercion and force, with every number checked against the paper and its limits printed on the cards.
The Argument for MatriarchyWhat happened to male violence when female bonobos held power together. Fourteen cards, twenty-plus studies, real photographs.
Raising Good MenHow men behave under pressure, what the research says to do about it, and the Cornell case read through it. By a mother raising boys.