How We Are All Manipulated by the Powerful
Propaganda is not a relic of the 20th century. It did not die with fascism, dissolve after the Cold War, or disappear with the invention of the internet. It adapted. It professionalized. It learned to wear the face of journalism, of entertainment, of social media outrage, and of everyday common sense.
The word itself carries a stigma we've been trained to apply only to enemies. When our government does it, it's called messaging, public relations, strategic communications, or simply the news. The techniques, however, are identical to what Goebbels used, what Edward Bernays pioneered, and what every authoritarian state in history has deployed against its own people.
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."
— Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)This page is not about pointing fingers at one party or the other. Both parties use these techniques. Their donors fund the machinery. The goal of this guide is pattern recognition — learning to spot the moves so we are not endlessly surprised when they are used against us.
The U.S. government has a documented history of running domestic propaganda operations, including the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which removed previous restrictions on government-produced information targeting American citizens.
Seven Techniques Used Against Us — Then and Now
These techniques were formally catalogued by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in 1937. They remain the foundational toolkit used by governments, corporations, and media operations to shape public opinion.
Attaching a negative label to a person, group, or idea to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence. Works by triggering emotional response before rational analysis can occur.
Using virtue words — freedom, democracy, patriotism, family values — with no concrete definition, linking a cause to emotionally powerful concepts so it cannot be questioned without appearing to oppose the virtue itself.
Carrying the authority and prestige of something respected — religion, the flag, science — and transferring it onto something being promoted, so the respect rubs off without examination.
The propagandist presents themselves as an ordinary, relatable person — one of us — to gain trust. Usually performed by those who are decidedly not ordinary people.
Selecting only the facts, statistics, or examples that support one argument while omitting all contrary evidence. Every side does this. The question is who does it most systematically.
Exploiting the human need to belong by suggesting everyone agrees, creating the illusion of consensus. Dissent becomes social risk. Silence equals manufactured consent.
Triggering the brain's threat-detection system so that rational analysis is bypassed entirely. Fear narrows thinking, increases conformity, and makes populations willing to surrender rights they would otherwise protect.
The Three Pillars of Information Control
These three tactics form the operational backbone of modern propaganda systems. They are not occasional moves — they are systematic strategies applied continuously.
I. Attack the Press
The free press is the only institution specifically protected by the Constitution because the founders understood that without it, all other rights become indefensible. This is precisely why undermining press credibility is the first move of every government that intends to operate without accountability.
The attack does not require silencing journalists outright — it only requires making the public distrust them enough to dismiss their reporting. Once achieved, a government can do anything and count on its supporters to call any documentation of that action "fake news."
The Committee to Protect Journalists documents that attacks on press freedom — including government officials calling journalists "enemies of the people" — directly correlate with increases in journalist harassment, surveillance, and violence worldwide.
The phrase "enemy of the people" (Volksfeind) was a specific legal term used in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia to strip citizens of rights and justify their elimination. Its reintroduction into American political discourse is not coincidental.
II. Control Information
Information control in the 21st century does not require censorship boards or book burning — it requires flooding the zone. When there is too much information, too much noise, too many contradictory claims, people retreat to sources that confirm their existing beliefs. The goal of modern information control is not silence. It is confusion.
Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon stated the strategy explicitly: "Flood the zone with shit." When everything is contested and nothing is certain, the powerful operate freely in the resulting fog. Citizens who cannot agree on basic facts cannot organize around shared interests.
Media consolidation has resulted in six corporations controlling approximately 90% of U.S. media — down from 50 companies in 1983. This consolidation concentrates editorial decisions and creates structural incentives that shape what stories are told and how.
III. Create Scapegoats
When economic conditions deteriorate — when wages stagnate, jobs disappear, healthcare becomes unaffordable, and retirement security evaporates — the anger that results must go somewhere. The propaganda system exists to direct that anger toward a target that cannot fight back effectively and will not threaten the actual source of the problem.
Throughout history, the scapegoat has changed. The technique has not. Immigrants. Religious minorities. Foreign nations. "Elites" carefully defined to exclude the actual billionaire class. Working people are pitted against each other while the extraction continues above them.
"The rich have always been with us. What changes is whether we talk about them or whether we talk about immigrants, or welfare queens, or criminals. The function of the scapegoat is to make the real cause of suffering invisible."
— Adapted from the work of historian Richard HofstadterFederal Reserve and Congressional Budget Office data show that since 1980, the top 1% of Americans have captured the majority of economic gains while median wages have stagnated in real terms — the period during which scapegoating of immigrants, minorities, and "elites" has intensified dramatically in political discourse.
Chomsky & Herman's Five Filters
In their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman identified five structural filters through which all mainstream media content must pass before reaching the public. These are not conspiracy — they are institutional incentives.
Media owned by large corporations will not systematically undermine corporate interests. The owner sets the parameters.
Revenue dependence on advertisers creates structural pressure to avoid content that alienates major corporate sponsors.
Reliance on official government and corporate sources as "credible" — marginalizing voices that challenge institutional narratives.
Organized attacks on journalists or outlets that step out of line, creating chilling effects on investigative reporting.
Maintaining a common enemy — communism, terrorism, crime, immigration — to frame all reporting and justify policy priorities.
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988) is available in libraries nationwide and remains one of the most rigorously documented analyses of media structure ever produced.
Edward Bernays and the Engineering of Consent
Edward Bernays is the person most responsible for how modern propaganda works, and most Americans have never heard his name. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays took his uncle's theories about the unconscious mind and applied them to mass manipulation on behalf of corporations and governments.
He coined the term "public relations" as a replacement for "propaganda" — after that word acquired negative connotations following World War I. The technique did not change. Only the name did.
Bernays worked for the United Fruit Company to orchestrate U.S. government support for the 1954 coup in Guatemala. He worked for the American Tobacco Company to convince women that cigarettes were symbols of liberation. He worked for the U.S. government to manufacture public support for wars. He documented all of it, with pride, in his writings.
"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?"
— Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)The 1954 CIA-backed coup in Guatemala (Operation PBSUCCESS), which overthrew democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, was preceded by a Bernays-orchestrated public relations campaign on behalf of United Fruit Company. CIA and State Department records declassified in the 1990s confirm the coordination.
How to Recognize When We're Being Played
These are not foolproof tests — but they are useful signals. When we see several of these operating simultaneously, we are almost certainly inside a propaganda campaign.
- The anger is aimed at people who have less power than you. Genuine accountability journalism makes the powerful uncomfortable. Propaganda makes the powerless seem threatening.
- The story produces outrage but no actionable information. You feel strongly but don't know what to do. That's often by design — outrage without direction exhausts people.
- The source benefits financially from your reaction. Outrage drives engagement. Engagement drives advertising revenue. Many outlets are economically incentivized to keep you angry and frightened.
- Complex economic causes are given simple human villains. When economic pain is attributed entirely to immigrants, welfare recipients, or foreign nations rather than policy choices, a scapegoating operation is underway.
- You are being asked to distrust primary sources. Court records, government data, peer-reviewed research, and official documents are the hardest things to falsify. Propaganda asks you to distrust these and trust the personality instead.
- The story cannot be verified anywhere but one ecosystem. If a story only exists in one political media ecosystem and is absent from or contradicted by primary sources, treat it with caution regardless of which side is telling it.
- Your identity is at stake, not just your opinion. When changing your mind about a fact would feel like a betrayal of your group, tribe, or identity — that is the most effective propaganda of all. It has moved from the mind into the self.
Documented Sources
Every claim on this page is traceable to primary documentation, peer-reviewed research, or major investigative journalism. Read the originals.