The Shepard Scale Digest: May 2025
The articles you might have missed last month, and why now is a great time to circle back and read them.
In May, The Shepard Scale dropped 10 articles, and each one focuses on trust, infiltration, and the ways your own blind spots and unresolved trauma can affect your activism work.
If you lead, vet, or operate in any mission-driven group, especially under pressure, these pieces are critical to understanding both how to be successful and why you might not be. Together, they map the exact fault lines manipulators exploit and the internal fractures that make collapse inevitable.
This last month was full of some pretty serious deep dives including two detailed case studies of real groups that screwed up. We also look at the intersection of underground resistance, counterintelligence, group dynamics, and even trauma psychology. Let’s take a look at the May digest.
The Visibility Trap
We started out the month talking about the need to be seen ‘doing patriot things,’ and why it’s dangerous. Oversharing in the name of “transparency” is killing your security. This article calls out the ego behind visibility addiction and offers a reality check for those who confuse attention with effectiveness.
The System of Trust
Next up, we dug into the biggest need of all in a group: trust. It is the foundational structure of solid groups. This piece defines the elements of a functional trust system and shows how informal, misplaced trust erodes team stability faster than betrayal ever could.
When Liking Replaces Trust
Liking someone doesn’t make them trustworthy. Here’s how personal bias and emotional reasoning create blind spots in vetting, and how it opens the door for manipulation and internal sabotage.
A deep dive into how a lack of emotional discipline, unchecked ego, and misplaced loyalty allowed infiltration to thrive in a real-world patriot group named American Patriots III%, or AP3. Read this if you still think your group’s camaraderie is going to save you.
People Tell You Who They Are
Early behavioral patterns are not random, and if you know what to look for, you’ll be able to predict them. This article explains how manipulators leak their intent and how your denial keeps you from seeing it—until it’s too late.
Modern Resistance Demands Discipline: Stop Making Yourself a Target
Contrary to the conventional wisdom presented as principled defiance, being on a watchlist doesn’t actually help your cause. This article breaks down personal OPSEC failures and demands a higher standard of discipline for anyone claiming to be serious about resistance.
What Sun Tzu Got Right That We Still Get Wrong
Everyone quotes Sun Tzu. Few really get what they’re quoting. This post clarifies what The Art of War actually demands, and how misunderstanding it leads modern “strategists” into ego-driven failure.
Deception, Sales, and the Influence Hype
The influencer economy has infected activism. This piece exposes how manipulative sales tactics, rebranded as leadership, create false authority and sucker in the desperate and untrained.
Case Studies Are Necessary
Case studies, used properly, are doctrine. This article defends the use of real-world breakdowns as essential training tools, even when they make people uncomfortable.
Case Study: The Lightfoot Militia
There are a thousand ways to compromise a movement or specific group, but few are as efficient—or as humiliating—as doing it to yourself. What follows is a real-world lesson in how emotional needs, performative tactics, and strategic blindness create soft targets from the inside out.
A full autopsy of how one group’s refusal to self-regulate led to collapse. The Lightfoot Militia's story is a warning shot for anyone who thinks training or even image matter more than vetting and structure.
Missed a few? Start with these three:
You’re here because you’re part of a very narrow niche: someone who’s interested in making a difference for their community and nation through political activism or resistance…and you want to do it correctly and effectively.
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