You Control the Frame
How Fear Based Attention Harvesting Works and How to Stop Feeding It
This week I needed a simple way to name what’s happening, and this phrase keeps holding up.
Fear Based Attention Harvesting.
I do not mean this as a conspiracy theory. I mean it as a pattern you can watch in real time. The goal is not to inform you. The goal is to capture you. To pull your attention into a fear frame, keep it there, and then use that captured attention as leverage.
Once you see it, it gets harder to unsee.
This is why I chose an Alignment Movie Process session I wrote years ago, built around A Wrinkle in Time (2018). I did that session long before this current moment, and it has stayed with me ever since. Not because it gave me a new opinion, but because it gave me a new kind of awareness.
The awareness was simple.
Darkness does not always win by overpowering us. It often wins by setting the terms. It wins by taking control of the frame.
In the movie, Meg is pulled into a battle with a force that does not simply threaten people. It recruits them. It spreads through fear, sameness, and the surrender of choice. The movie calls it IT. I think of it as a dark swirl that grows when people give it their attention and their obedience.
The guides in the film are not warriors. They are teachers. And one of the most important details is that they cannot get too close to the dark swirl. Proximity shrinks them. It makes them smaller and less effective.
That is a teachable point.
Staying close to fear does not make you stronger. It makes you smaller.
Meg becomes free when she realizes the darkness only has power if it gets to define the terms. Fear sets the tempo. Attention gets pulled toward threat. Identity collapses into reaction.
Then she flips it.
She takes back control of the frame.
Once you see it, you can stop feeding it.
The script machine wants the frame
Fear Based Attention Harvesting works when the frame is centralized, urgent, and binary.
Here is what it looks like right now.
By centralizing authority for safety
Calls to nationalize elections are framed as protection and legitimacy. The move is the same. Shift trust away from distributed, transparent processes and toward centralized control.
By introducing anonymous force
Heavily armed masked federal immigration agents in tactical gear and unmarked vehicles have become part of the public landscape in Minneapolis, including viral video clashes that create fog and pull attention toward threat.
By escalating spectacle without resolution
The Iran cycle is a clear example. War fears rise, headlines intensify, markets react, and uncertainty persists. The spectacle works even when nothing completes.
By labeling before evidence stabilizes
In the Alex Pretti killing, “domestic terrorist” labels appeared quickly, while later reporting and video verification introduced contradictions to the first frame. Label first. Lock attention. Clarify later.
By compressing time
We live inside perpetual countdowns. We will know soon. We will have answers in two weeks. The effect is suspension. People stay activated, waiting, arguing, anxious. Fear thrives when time is compressed.
By forcing binary choices
Even culture becomes sorting. This week’s clean example is the Super Bowl halftime moment. Bad Bunny becomes an identity signal, and an alternate “All American” halftime show featuring Kid Rock is offered as a counter signal. The point is not music. The point is sorting.
By keeping outrage unresolved
Epstein is the cleanest example because it rarely completes. It stays teased, partial, and recyclable. Even when there are consequences, the public loop remains unfinished, and attention stays activated.
A lot of Americans feel like we are stuck in a perpetual rope a dope
This is where the boxing term fits.
Rope a dope pins a fighter to the ropes and drains their energy through endless reaction. The other side spends less energy, watching them tire out.
Fear Based Attention Harvesting is rope a dope for the nervous system.
You can feel it. The constant spike. The urgent frame. The unfinished loop.
The deeper pattern underneath it all: leverage extraction
Here is what I think is distinctive right now.
The fear frame is not only used to divide us. It is used as leverage, out in the open, to extract compliance and concessions from institutions and countries.
Fear spike. Frame lock. Identity sorting. Then the ask.
Sometimes the leverage is aimed at universities, law firms, agencies, or cities. Sometimes it is aimed at other nations.
Why the strategy is starting to break down
There are two reasons.
First, countries are learning. They are changing their relationships, diversifying partners, building redundancy. They are not panicking. They are adapting. EU leaders have publicly reassessed their relationship with the U.S. after the Greenland tariff whiplash. Canada has been explicit about reducing reliance on the U.S. and building new trade paths elsewhere.
Second, control of the frame is slipping at home because the world is now filmed from countless angles.
In A Wrinkle in Time, the guides cannot get close to the dark swirl. Proximity shrinks them. It makes them less effective. That is a teachable point. Staying close to fear does not make you stronger. It makes you smaller.
But the swirl also has a weakness. It cannot survive sustained light.
Today, that light is literal. Cameras in phones. Raw footage. Multiple angles. Distributed witnesses.
In the Alex Pretti case, the initial fear frame met video and evidence quickly, and the frame did not hold the way it used to.
That is not a victory lap. It is a sign of a new condition.
Darkness depends on delay, obscurity, and a single controlled angle.
Those conditions are collapsing.
Which means the work is no longer to win the argument. The work is to refuse the frame.
What this looks like in everyday life
You are at a dinner party. Someone starts repeating the script machine. The fear frame lands on the table like fog.
The old move is to engage, argue, correct, or win.
That is the good fight and it feeds the harvest.
The better move is steadier.
Go quiet. Do not take the bait. If the script keeps rolling, you do not escalate. You wrap up the evening kindly and leave.
Not because you are weak. Because you are not donating your attention to a machine designed to drain it.
That is A Wrinkle in Time in real life.
You control the frame.
The way out
I tell my clients something simple.
Once you’re aware, you’re halfway there.
You do not need my AMP session work to begin. Awareness alone gives you choice. You can change your focus. You can slow the tempo. You can stop feeding the swirl.
And you can borrow steadiness from voices that reliably return you to your better self.
Watch a few minutes of Jane Goodall on YouTube. Her presence has a way of restoring the human frame.
Listen to Maya Angelou read her own words. Sometimes just hearing her voice steadies your spirit.
Read or watch Carl Sagan for a dose of perspective big enough to loosen fear’s grip.
And if you need something even simpler, put on a show where kindness is the operating system. For me, I watch Jamie Oliver. It is his upbeat warmth that gets me every time.
Fear wants to control the frame.
But here is the good news.
You control the frame now.
Hold it in the light without feeding it. Stay steady. Stay human.
AMP Session statements including in A Wrinkle In Time
If you want a practical way to train this, here are a few Let Go and Allow statements from the A Wrinkle in Time AMP session.
There are over 300 intentions included in the AMP session. Below is a short summary of what you can expect if you choose to do this AMP session. For now, I’m making these intentions available to everyone.
Let Go
I release the buzz of sadness, the noise that’s always there.
I let go of the anxiety and perplexivness, betrayal, uncertainty, and sadness.
I break the anchor of sadness and see it for what it is.
I let go of my morning habit of wondering what pain and struggle I’ll feel today when I first awake in the morning.
I dissolve my hatred of political leaders and no longer let it to eat away at me.
I let go of the hate and guide this country.
Allow
There are only 24 hours of programming every day that I can offer so I learn to offer that which I want on the air.
I choose what I put on the air and this is my point of attraction.
I choose that each day is created with benevolent outcomes
I say each morning: This is a benevolent day because I’ve created it so
The darkness will not concur me today.
I no longer play into the arms of drama through fear.
I’m present and I don’t argue and I don’t have the need to defend myself or return fire I just love.
Intention Session
A reminder of why The Intention Session is the first step.
AMP is on your terms, not mine. You only receive what is right for you, in your timing, with grace and ease. I am simply putting up the resonance for anyone who wants it. People process in their time. It is meant to be graceful. So do this first, and you will get the resonance benefits listed below - on your terms and timing
Step one: The Intention Session
You only need to do this once before you watch the film A Wrinkle In Time (2018). If you have already completed an Intention Session, it carries over for all of the AMP movies I talk about, so you do not need to repeat it.
Speak these aloud:
I allow the changes in my timing and only integrate what I am ready to.
I have faith that I will receive the benefits I desire.
I am patient with myself as I make my changes.
I let go of feeling I am too busy to take the time for this.
I let go of needing to understand how AMP works and allow myself to receive the full benefits in my own timing.
Engage three simple modalities:
Nod your head yes.
Drink some water.
Take several slow, rhythmic breaths through your nose.
Then watch A Wrinkle In Time all the way through.