My guiding assumption is that people rationally make decisions based upon the information they digest. Thus, change their informational (media) ecosystem and you will change their beliefs and behavior, yet they will be convinced that they never changed--that they are the same person as always.
Don't read this if you want to continue believing in the fundamental goodness of the U.S. Government.
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More on Rocky Mountain Laboratory here:
If that wasn't enough, consider that the Pentagon is a major investor in the U.S. music industry.
Over at Facebook I often post news items (from X) that people won't see if they get their "news" from legacy outlets. In response, many people have tried to belittle me with many flavors of ad hominem attacks. It's amazing to see grown adults resort to such tactics. They also use many other tactics, most of which are described in an excellent book by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott: The Canceling of the American Mind.
I asked Grok 3 to summarize the tactics often used by people on the political far Left against anyone who disagrees, including people like me who had for many years voted for Democrats. No longer. I don't recognize the current Democratic Party and I abhor many of their positions, such as pro-war, pro-censorship, race-essentialism and advocating for confused teenagers to undergo permanent life-changing surgeries and sterilization through cross-sex hormones and so-called "puberty blockers."
When I criticize these positions on social media it doesn't take long for the attacks to start. Many of these attacks have been described in Chapter 6 of The Canceling, "The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress." These are not attempts to communicate. Rather, they are attempts to shut people up, to cancel them. I asked Grok to summarize these "barricades." Here's Grok's response (which I reviewed for accuracy):
These tactics are described as "barricades" that form an impregnable fortress, protecting the user from having to address arguments on their merits. Below is a summary of the 11 barricades as presented in the chapter, based on the book’s framework:
Fasco-Casting This barricade involves labeling someone as "conservative," "right-wing," "far-right," "fascist," or even "neo-confederate," regardless of their actual beliefs. By associating the speaker with a negatively perceived ideology, their arguments can be dismissed outright as inherently bad or unworthy of consideration.
Are You a Man or a Woman? This tactic questions whether the speaker’s gender disqualifies them from speaking on certain issues. For example, men might be told they can’t discuss women’s issues, creating a barrier based on identity rather than the argument’s validity.
It is all something to behold this morning on X (Twitter). Numerous people, many assisted by AI are trying to make sense of the JFK assassination documents released at the direction of Donald Trump. I'd already seen credible accounts that suggest many CIA connections to JFK's assassination.
An excellent place to start is The Devil's Chessboard, by David Talbot. Glenn Greenwald comments:
Reading Talbot's book is like getting a kick in the stomach. I'm partway through the book and I am convinced more and more that JFK's assassination was a CIA coup. And I am more and more convinced that most of our presidential elections have been orchestrated by the CIA through the use of powerful tools of propaganda and censorship that heavily influence (if not outright control) legacy "news" outlets.
[More . . . .]
I was happy to hear Trump's strong rhetoric on free speech. Unfortunately, he is making major missteps in the real world. Matt Taibbi is also concerned. This is an excerpt from Matt's article at Racquet News, "If Trump Blows it on Speech, the World is ScrewedWith civil liberties flatlined around the globe, Donald Trump is blowing off the First Amendment at the worst conceivable time":
China guarantees free speech, unless it undermines “the interests of the state.” You can be fined 14.7 million yuan for comparing the army to a squirrel. In Russia jails are filling with regime critics, while papers like Novaya Gazeta are forced to suspend publication until after the Ukraine war. British police routinely conduct speech raids against offenders across the spectrum, Germany boasts about its thought cops on 60 Minutes, and the EU’s vast censorship law, the Digital Services Act, just played a role in helping overturn an election result in Romania. Around the world, from Ukraine to Australia to Israel to India, free expression is in full retreat.
That leaves America, where the First Amendment is the last obstacle to a global movement toward bureaucratization of speech. In last year’s campaign Donald Trump and J.D. Vance rightly ran against the speech excesses of the Democratic Party, with Vance saying views on censorship constituted the “biggest difference” between Trump and Kamala Harris, and Trump upon inauguration naming censored figures like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to high office. The administration initially acted like it understood the gravity of the situation, with Vance confronting Europe over its civil liberties crackdowns. They seemed to know what they wanted to achieve on this issue.
That operation is now hanging by a thread. Trump is suddenly blowing it on speech in a big way, with two big categories of screw-ups: pandering to Israel, and reaching into the same emergency-power cookie jar that foreign counterpart-jackasses like Keir Starmer and Olaf Scholz and Thierry Breton have recently raided, in efforts to suppress populist movements like Trump’s own. Once he jumps on this bandwagon, we’re all screwed, because there’s nowhere left to run.