papercraft

Some weeks ago it was suggested that the United States will expand (turn inward) its vigourous disinformation and propaganda operations to help sway domestic opinion. There mere hint of more government sanctioned red-herrings diluting journalism—especially when the mainstream and most hard-hittingest comes pre-fabricated in the forms of internet research, stock-photographs and sponsored articles (take the case of the on-going tumult of confusion in Syria, for example)—has met the requirement and served up a hopeless dose of distrust without doing anything further. To bring the level of skepticism this high effectively negates the public’s ability to rally around any cause (or any health-conscious person or stock-market croupier for that matter), since one is not just looking at stance, ideology and motivation with a suspicious eye, which was always advisable, but now has cause also to doubt the veracity of the movement itself. It is as if Anonymous or any protest group is not just prone to infiltration but could be nothing more than a strawman of stuffed-ballots and a colossal toolbox of popular sentiment. To bait the public with such hoaxes is the censoring of the word gullible from the dictionary but puts conspiracy into everything once there is no way of verifying trustworthy sources.