At the Brussels Signal, tech analyst Norman Lewis has been discussing a form of indoctrination that is becoming increasingly popular in the European Union, and doubtless elsewhere: prebunking — “a preventative measure that aims to prepare audiences to recognize and resist information risks.” (UNHCR)

Prebunking is beloved of bureaucrats and you will hear a great deal about what a good thing it is from many sources — sources that should, under the circumstances, give pause for thought:

● “What Is Prebunking? It’s better to inoculate against disinformation than to debunk later.” (Psychology Today, 2021)

● “False information is everywhere. ‘Pre-bunking’ tries to head it off early” (NPR, 2022)

● “What is Pre-Bunking: The Power of Framing Before the Facts” (Simply Put Psych, 2025)

Essentially, what these sources are all describing is counter-propaganda aspiring to be a science. One focus, of course, has been vaccine hesitancy:

● “This chapter highlights the scientific progress in the application of the theory, from its roots as a ‘vaccine’ against brainwashing in the 1960s, to the modern advancements that have demonstrated the promising effects of gamified interventions in tackling the infodemic. (From “Chapter 8 Prebunking Against Misinformation in the Modern Digital Age,” Managing Infodemics in the 21st Century: Addressing New Public Health Challenges in the Information Ecosystem [Internet], 2023.)

Wait, what?

In the wake of the recent Anthony Fauci “diary” revelations about the true nature of government Covid responses, we should take note of efforts to make a science out of preparing us to believe whatever we may be told about the next big panic.

At the Signal, Lewis comments that in the EU, a target of the European Commission’s Digital Education Action Plan is schools:

Pre-bunking is the educational wing of a broader system of speech governance. The same political imagination that sees social media as a systemic risk, elections as vulnerable information environments, and dissenting narratives as potential manipulation now arrives in the classroom as lesson plans…

The danger is not that children are being taught to check sources, identify fake images, or recognise clickbait. Those are reasonable educational aims. The danger is that pre-bunking shifts the teacher’s role from cultivating judgment to administering anticipatory suspicion. Children are not merely being taught to ask: “Is this claim true?” They are being trained to ask: “Is this the kind of claim I was warned about?” That is a very different intellectual operation. It is not an inquiry. It is conditioning.

“Part I, the classroom as psychological vaccination site: The EU’s war on ‘wrongthink’,” May 13, 2026

Essentially, children are conditioned to think that any given narrative or shift in narrative from an authority figure is Correct and other information is suspicious — wrongthink, essentially, and perhaps even thoughtcrime. That would certainly discourage otherwise curious minds from critical analysis.

In Part 2, Lewis notes that the EU’s goal is intellectual submission:

The most alarming aspect is that the document does not confine itself to clear fraud or obvious fabrications. The pre-bunking section tells teachers to warn students that they are likely to encounter content that “questions established authority“. That phrase should make every parent and democrat sit up. Since when did questioning established authority become a warning sign of manipulation? In a free society, questioning authority is not a symptom of infection. It is the starting point, the very definition of citizenship. …

Under this framework, much of democratic politics itself starts to look like a disinformation risk.

“Part II: What? Commission says pupils must not ‘question established authority,’” May 14, 2026

Indeed. Democratic government is always a “disinformation risk” because it is friendly to unexpected sources of information that upset the status quo. For example, if the United States did not have democratic changes of government every so often there is a good chance that Fauci’s very revealing (and politically embarrassing) Covid papers would never have come to light.

But does the EU even want democratic government?

The document tries to reassure the reader by invoking “critical thinking”. But the model of critical thinking on offer is peculiarly institutional. Children are encouraged to recognise “high-quality sources”, use fact-checkers, consult official or academic references, report suspicious or harmful content, and orient themselves through approved frameworks. Again, some of this is unobjectionable in isolation. But taken together, it trains children to outsource judgment to credentialed authorities. It does not ask them to interrogate power; it asks them to recognise authorised knowledge. “Must not ‘question”

One field that will never benefit from this approach is science. All new discoveries overturn established authorities. That’s just their nature. At his Substack, What a piece of Work is Man! Lewis writes,

Prebunking is not really a theory about misinformation. It is a theory about humanity. And a grim little theory it is, too. It looks at the human being, that pesky, quarrelsome, meaning-making creature who built cathedrals, split the atom, wrote King Lear, stormed Bastilles and occasionally believes nonsense on Facebook, and sees not a reasoning citizen but a damp biological surface upon which dangerous ideas may settle. Even worse, like malign viruses, they horrifyingly spread these pathogens by being social beings.

“Galileo Would Have Been Prebunked,” May 15, 2026

We know we are living in a changing world, when Europe is striving to be China. Stay tuned.