Connecting the Dots, Made Simple

For years, I’ve relied on a simple mental dystopian reality checklist to separate real information from engineered narratives, the kind pushed by governments, corporations, activists, or viral social media threads. I just called it connecting the dots.

Then I discovered that someone with far more serious credentials, Chase Hughes, a guy who spent twenty years teaching elite military and intelligence operators how to both run and detect psychological operations, had turned almost the same instincts into two formal tools: a lightning-fast ten-question version and a deeper twenty-question system that scores narratives from 0 to 100.

Here’s the quick ten-question test you can keep in your phone and use in thirty seconds flat.

1. Is the claim attributed to a specific, named person or organization, or is it just anonymous “sources say”?
2. Does the source have a verifiable track record of accuracy on this exact topic?
3. Is primary evidence—documents, video, raw data, direct quotes—actually provided or linked?
4. Are counterclaims or conflicting evidence acknowledged and fairly addressed?
5. Does the story lean mostly on emotional language and loaded adjectives instead of facts?
6. Is the timing suspiciously perfect for some political or economic agenda—October surprises, earnings weeks, deflections from bigger scandals?
7. Do multiple outlets from across the ideological spectrum report the same core facts, even if they spin them differently?
8. Has the claim already been walked back, clarified, or quietly edited after publication?
9. Is the evidence as strong as the extraordinary claims require?
10. And finally, if you swapped the parties or the ideology, would you still believe it?

You get one point for every yes on questions one through four and seven through ten, and one point for every no on five and six. Eight to ten means highly credible. Six or seven means it’s moderately credible. Four or five tells you to proceed with caution. Anything from zero to three is almost certainly an engineered narrative or outright propaganda.

The short version devastates modern propaganda because it fails the same handful of tests: anonymous sourcing, lack of primary evidence, heavy emotional manipulation, perfect timing, and coverage that remains inside one ideological bubble. Run it cold on the Russian “Ukraine biolabs” stories, the Jussie Smollett hoax, some of the early COVID lab-leak suppression efforts, or atrocity claims from both sides in the Gaza-Israel war, and they all collapse to one or two points.

The best part is that it doesn’t care whether the narrative flatters your politics or not; it only asks whether the story is built like journalism or messaged like a psyop.

The lengthier twenty-question version exists for the more dangerous cases: stories built around a kernel of truth but still weaponized to control what you think. Scores between forty and seventy are the most insidious because partial truth is the perfect Trojan horse.

Chase tested the entire system against hundreds of confirmed psyops and found the same twenty patterns every time: convenient timing, emotional manipulation, authority overload, uniform messaging across outlets, financial incentives, suppression of dissent, and so on.

The pattern shows up across history.

• The 1990 “Kuwaiti incubator babies” testimony that helped sell the Gulf War scored eighty-eight out of a hundred.
• Tobacco’s decades-long “doubt is our product” campaign hit eighty-two.
• Facebook’s algorithm-fueled ethnic hatred in Ethiopia in 2021 came in around seventy-eight.
• Both the early 2020 “lab leak is a conspiracy theory” push and the counter-campaign insisting “lab leak is obvious and anyone who disagrees is a Chinese shill” scored in the sixties and seventies.
• Recent waves of UFO whistleblowers from 2017 through 2025 routinely land in the sixties, perfect timing, hyperbolic language, uniform phrasing, upcoming books and companies, and very little verifiable evidence.

The playbook never really changes; only the delivery system gets faster. In the 1950s, tobacco companies employed scientists and bought advertisements in newspapers and on television. In 1990, a PR firm sold a war with a tearful teenage girl, and here in the 2020s, algorithms sell genocide for ad revenue. Same tricks, new medium.

So copy the ten-question version, paste it into your notes app, and start running it on every story that makes your blood boil or gives you that satisfying “finally someone said it” rush. You’ll begin to see the matrix everywhere. You’ll also become insufferable to friends who want permanent permission to stay angry online, but that’s a small price to pay.

Because every time we scream at each other over politicized narratives, we’re doing exactly what the engineers of those narratives want. The real question isn’t who’s pulling the strings. It’s why we keep handing them over?