There is a crucial dynamic to disinformation that historians often overlook. Propaganda generates blowback, where feedback loops themselves may be laced with disinformation that spins out of control.

In other words, experts in propaganda know that it’s danger is in how it creates artificial polarities that force false choices. It’s the art of social engineering that falsely rewards extreme positions over nuance, which has become known as “social media” platforms that profit in polarization. Entire populations are being driven into binary, brittle, explosive mindsets of machine-driven outcomes that are less and less about human nature.

The Jeffrey Epstein case is a good example where extremist right-wing propagandists pushed release of his “list” as a necessity, until the act became a threat to their own leader. Politicians who start using divisive rhetoric for tactical advantage often find themselves prisoners of the extremist movements they’ve unleashed. The rhetoric reshapes their base, which then demands increasingly radical positions. Trump can’t seem to get people to stop demanding exactly what he told them to demand.

Trump’s own MAGA base is squeezing Trump with massive pressure for Epstein file releases, where Republican lawmakers say it’s “the number one phone call” they get from constituents. Trump is pivoting to call the controversy he generated a “hoax” and blame “Radical Left Democrats” for the demands his own supporters are making in response to his order they make the demands.

Since that’s so fresh as to still be very confusing to people, lacking the hindsight of history, let’s look further back in time at some other cases. The world has seen this all before, many times.

Consider in the Salem Witch Trials the accusers eventually accused each other. Or consider in the French Revolution the revolutionaries consumed their own leaders. Stalin and Hitler infamously were so paranoid they destroyed their own inner circles, forcing suicide of their most loyal adherents, if not disappearing them.

When Britain spread false intelligence in WWI about coastal invasions to draw German forces away from the front, they were so convincing that their own intelligence services and military planners began to take the threat seriously. The fake became real in their minds, leading to genuine panic and resource misallocation on the British side.

This reveals the most insidious danger of propaganda: it corrupts the information environment for everyone, including those who create it. Once false or exaggerated narratives enter circulation, they take on a life of their own. The propagandists lose control of their own creation.

I can’t emphasize enough how disinformation experts recognize this pattern from studying the past.

McCarthyism in the US wasn’t just about cynical politicians exploiting fear, many of the anti-communist crusaders genuinely terrified themselves with their own rhetoric, leading to increasingly irrational policies. McCarthy himself died from alcoholism, discredited and caught by his own web of fear-mongering that drove him to total isolation.

The CIA’s Cold War propaganda operations often ended up misleading American policymakers who read their own disinformation in foreign media and assumed it was independent confirmation of threats. I documented a great example of this the other day, looking at the origin of the term “disinformation” itself (America likes to promote that it was a Soviet concept, when in fact it was American in origin).

CIA veteran Ralph McGehee documented the most revealing case of intelligence blowback in his own experience. In 1965, the CIA fabricated a story about weapon shipments supposedly sent by sea to the Viet Cong, planting it in foreign media to “prove” international support for the Vietnamese communist forces. The false story was designed to shape public opinion and justify American escalation.

But the fabricated intelligence didn’t stay confined to its target audience. It circled back through intelligence channels and contaminated the CIA’s own information files. Agency analysts, unaware the story was their own creation, began citing it as independent confirmation of foreign involvement in Vietnam. The lie became part of their threat assessment.

This feedback loop corrupted American decision-making at the highest levels. As one declassified CIA document admitted:

In deceiving the public, the decision-makers also deceived themselves, and eventually came to believe optimistic ‘military progress’ reports, released to the public based on the ‘latest intelligence,’ when in fact at the highest level, the estimates were based on misleading information from the field.

I’ve written here before, for example, about the “all in” conservative American drive to create the Taliban and then the urgency that same group seemed to feel that they must stop the Taliban monster that they had created.

In the 1980s under Ronald Reagan American military intelligence plastered Afghanistan with posters like the following one, promoting violent religious extremism as a form of invincibility.

It’s not unlike when I wrote how Palantir figured out a “God’s Eye” unaccountable business model of generating a whole new group of terrorists (ISIS), which they used to ask for billions more in order to stop the terrorist group that they had just created.

“Defense lemon” contractors profit from both creating instability and then selling “solutions”. If you don’t know what I mean, ask any of the latest and most advanced “vibe” AI coding tools to write code, get charged a bunch of money for it, and then ask those tools to stop writing crap and clean it all up, and get charged a bunch of money for it.

Does anyone still read the Cat in the Hat? I mean seriously, this is kind of stuff kids are supposed to be able to recognize and stop early in the cycle.

If Dr. Seuss can teach 6-year-olds to spot this manipulation, why are Americans falling for it over and over again when corporations and governments do it?

Come on America, kick these fat cats out and stop the coup of stupid.

But I digress…

The most dangerous propaganda isn’t the obvious, heavy-handed stuff, it’s the kind that becomes so embedded in how we think about problems that we can’t see alternatives. It’s a technology company creating false urgency and offering false choices as the only options forward, both of which favor their bottom line while everyone else involved will suffer.

When societies become convinced that complex hierarchies, endless growth, or military solutions are “natural” or “inevitable,” they lose the ability to imagine other ways of organizing themselves.

Two powerful examples of embedded propaganda are the terms “civilization” and “feudalism” – words that seem neutral but actually force us into predetermined thinking patterns.

Take “feudalism.” Most people assume it describes a medieval economic system, but the term was actually invented during the French Revolution as political propaganda. Revolutionary leaders needed a scary name for the old aristocratic order they were overthrowing, so they created “feudalism” to represent everything backward and oppressive. This gave Napoleon a convenient strawman – he could position himself as the modern alternative to “feudal” chaos, justifying his own authoritarian rule as progress.

“Civilization” works the same way. The word carries built-in assumptions about progress and superiority – it implies that complex hierarchical societies are naturally better than simpler ones. This obscures the violence, inequality, and environmental destruction that often accompany what we call “civilized” systems.

The Romans perfected this linguistic trick. They called their conquests “bringing civilization” while the people being conquered called it invasion. Same violence, different vocabulary.

Modern examples follow the same pattern. “Developed” versus “developing” nations implies everyone must follow the same path – the Western industrial model becomes the only legitimate option. “Free markets” promises liberation while often delivering corporate domination. Even “Balkanization” gets used as a scare word, as if breaking up oppressive power structures could only lead to chaos rather than freedom from tyranny.

These aren’t accidental word choices. They’re propaganda tools that eliminate alternatives before we even think to look for them. When the vocabulary itself is rigged, every conversation starts from a false premise. It’s not unlike how animals are herded into pens, where the metal scaffolding of language channels our thinking in predetermined directions, denying agency of real choice.

Propaganda doesn’t just lie about facts, it corrupts how we process information entirely, training us to think in ways that serve power rather than truth.

To be any kind of genuine truth seeker in this environment, a scientist or a “woke” voice as some would put it, is to be labeled a threat to power desperate to keep themselves in power through propaganda. When leaders allow propaganda to become systematic, anyone who questions the framework itself becomes dangerous to those benefiting from it.

Historian Luke Kemp argues we’ve been conditioned by 5,000 years of what he calls “Goliath” propaganda, which are rulers convincing us that selfish dictatorships of hierarchical domination is natural and inevitable.

It’s always been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Goliaths [because] these are stories that have been hammered into us over the space of 5,000 years.

Kemp identifies the source of our propaganda problem: leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism.

These aren’t random personality defects; they’re the psychological profiles that rise to power in systems built on domination. The concept of “free markets” is really like “free ride” from Epstein’s private plane parked next to the Mar-a-lago spa, a trick for those seeking domination who use sweet rhetoric to justify the kind of awful predatory control that destroys freedom.

When such people control information systems, propaganda blowback becomes inevitable. The awful lies eventually trap the liars.

U.S. Steel in the 1960s displayed a “Portfolio of Possibilities” by Syd Mead. Notable among the possibilities was a walking garbage truck that didn’t mind the snow.

Of course everyone knows what happened next. The movie industry pivoted this optimistic artistic vision into the Evil Empire, a robot of destruction and death. The terrible garbage “walker” was depicted storming a snowy remote rebel stronghold in the 1980 movie called the Empire Strike Back.

Fast forward to today, and Trump has performed live shows as if trying to appear as Emperor of a garbage walker Empire, in heated campaigns where he regularly boasts he will strike back.

The Military-Industrial Complex Eisenhower Warned About

In 1961, Eisenhower warned the American people about the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex. He spoke of the danger when “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Today, that warning has materialized in a form he could scarcely have imagined: Palantir commissars attempting to subjugate our military institutions.

The latest evidence comes from the Army’s own announcements, where beneath diplomatic language lies a damning indictment of how one company—Palantir Technologies—nearly captured our military’s operational doctrine. But here’s what gives some hope: our military institutions are fighting back.

Contractors Acting as Commissars

At the recent LANDEURO Symposium, Army officials spoke with telling urgency about fundamental problems that should not exist in a properly functioning military. Listen carefully to what they’re really saying:

“We need to know each other to create and build trust,” said Harald Manheim from Airbus Defense. “It’s easier if you know the capabilities.”

This sounds routine until you understand the context. Our military leaders are having to explain why different systems can’t communicate with each other—not because of enemy jamming or battlefield conditions, but because of vendor lock-in.

“We work together and train together every day over here in Europe,” noted Richard Creed Jr. from the Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate. “We have meetings all year, discussing how we’re going to fight better together. Let’s use the same words and make sure those words have the same meaning.”

When a doctrine expert must plead for common language across our alliance, you’re witnessing the breakdown of military sovereignty. This isn’t about different nations using different equipment—it’s about proprietary systems preventing our own forces from sharing information.

Palantir Coup is Palantir

What Palantir attempted was nothing short of planned institutional capture. They intentionally embedded themselves so deeply into military operations that they could begin dictating how our forces could operate. Consider the brazenness: their Chief Technology Officer, Shyam Sankar, was commissioned as an Army Lieutenant Colonel while simultaneously denigrating the Pentagon by calling it “sclerotic monopsony whose communist approach to acquisition” has America “on a precipice.”

A contractor executive, drawing military pay, publicly attacking his own anti-communist customer as a “communist”? In Eisenhower’s day, he’d have called this what it is: gross insubordination with a profit motive.

But the real danger wasn’t Sankar’s caustic self-loathing rhetoric—it was the systematic constraint of military flexibility. Army officials now admit that Palantir “imposes significant limitations in our ability to exchange and modify information.” When a contractor can limit how the U.S. Army shares intelligence, you’ve crossed the line from outside supplier to inside controller.

American Flex is Institutional Resistance

Here’s what gives me confidence in our military’s character: they’re fighting back, methodically and professionally. The Army’s recent statements aren’t just technical discussions—they’re a declaration of independence.

“We need to massively produce ammunition and upgrade legacy systems,” Manheim noted. “Software-defined defense may be the future vision.”

Translation: we’re moving away from proprietary black boxes toward systems the military actually controls.

“There’s language barriers and differences in doctrine, how someone may describe a task, the outcome, how they describe an effect they want to achieve,” said Brig. Gen. Steven Carpenter. “It can add complexity to what is already a complex warfighting requirement.”

The General is being diplomatic, but he’s describing the core problem: when contractors control the language of warfare, they control the warfare itself.

Finances as Smoking Gun

The most damning evidence lies in the Army’s actions, not just their words. They’ve paid Palantir over $2 billion in new contracts since 2023 while simultaneously announcing plans to “contract considerably” and transition to a “multi-vendor ecosystem” due to “data ownership concerns.”

Our military is paying massive sums to a contractor while publicly planning to replace them because that same contractor has compromised military autonomy. It’s like paying the mob for protection while building a case against them.

Broader Warnings About Sons of Nazis

What we’re witnessing extends far beyond one company or one contract. It’s about whether American military institutions will remain sovereign or become subsidiaries of corporations run by men raised speaking German, running away from accountability, who refuse to condemn Nazism. Notably, while Soviet commissars were defensive political officers meant to ensure loyalty in a multi-ethnic army facing invasion, Peter Thiel’s grandparents were offensive racial warriors implementing genocide as policy. The pattern continues: Nazi officers implemented racial extermination policy, while Palantir commissars capture American military institutions for profit.

When Army experts stress the need for systems that can “bridge between existing systems to link them together,” they’re really saying: we need to escape the proprietary prisons we’re being locked into. When they emphasize “speed, interoperability and combat mass communications integrated across the alliance,” they’re describing everything that vendor lock-in prevents.

“We need commercial industry to assist us,” General Carpenter acknowledged, but he immediately added the crucial qualifier: it’s “not just a military effort. It’s a national effort across all 32 nations and the partners who join the U.S. military.”

This is the key insight: industry should assist the military, not control it. Partners should join to ensure battlefield dominance, not constrain the military to squeeze ransom payments.

Anti-Parasite Path Forward

The military’s response has been characteristically methodical. Rather than dramatic confrontation, they’ve implemented policy changes mandating open architecture, diversified vendor relationships, and reasserted data ownership rights. They’re invoking law and order, bureaucratically outmaneuvering Palantir’s attempted coup.

The Pentagon now requires Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) for all major programs, explicitly stating there’s “no room for a system that is completely proprietary.” They’ve split major contracts among multiple vendors and demanded full data rights. Most importantly, they’re rebuilding their own institutional capabilities rather than remaining dependent on contractor whims.

Palantir Fails the Eisenhower Test

In 1961, Eisenhower posed a simple test: does the military-industrial relationship serve the nation’s defense, or does it serve itself? The Palantir episode provides a clear answer.

When contractors can limit how our military shares information with allies, when they can dictate operational language, when they commission their executives as officers while criticizing military leadership—the relationship has become parasitic, not symbiotic.

Parasitic. I’ll say it again.

But our military institutions proved their worth. They recognized the threat, adapted their policies, and began the long work of restoring sovereignty over their own operations. They did this quietly, professionally, and effectively.

The military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned about was always going to evolve. He never could have imagined it would take the form of Palantir commissars who put on the uniform to demand the military adopt their “communist” practices. Eisenhower always had faith that American military institutions, properly led, would recognize and resist such overreach.

Today’s Army announcements, beneath their diplomatic language, represent exactly that resistance. The coup failed. Military sovereignty endures.

Eisenhower warned us:

Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.

Today’s alert citizenry should take note: the machinery may still work as designed. The guards were not all assassinated by DOGE…yet.

A computer science student, trying to start a career in AI, was drunk in a “self driving” Tesla. You’ll never guess what happened next.

Troopers responded at 12:46 a.m. on Sunday, July 6, to a crash near milepost 126.4 northbound in Sayreville, NJSP Sgt. Jeffrey Lebron said.

A Chrysler minivan was stopped on the right shoulder when a Tesla, operated by 21-year-old Anish Shriram of Livingston, slammed into the back of a Nissan….

The operator of the Nissan, Esther Paz, 58, of Brooklyn, NY, died of injuries sustained in the crash, Lebron said.

Anish Shriram had access to powerful automation, a weapon if you will. Prowling public roads with a deadly loitering heavy chemical munition, he was primed to cause catastrophic impact.

Would Anish walking around drunk with an assault rifle pointed at people be any different, really, when the news tells us he shot and killed someone?

With decades of experience studying asymmetric warfare, I recognize this predictable tragedy in a context of socio economic conflict that is far more necessary than people realize.

Back in 1990 I pressed into some communities of remote Nepal. My path uncovered Maoist rebels who expressed a bizarre faith in the power of a single man, who encouraged them to rise with the help of automatic weapons. These young adults were convinced their magical leader would deliver them prosperity wherever he told them to go. And I don’t mean they understood what that meant. You couldn’t actually converse about the theories or reality of philosophy, it was doctrine. Musk said this. Musk said that. What did Musk say? That is what the faithful ask, and not question whether Musk is completely wrong.

So when I read tragedy after tragedy about young adults who cite Musk as some kind of inspirational leader, right before they misfire their Tesla and kill someone, I see extremism of the Maoist kind (when I don’t see the Khmer Rouge).

For me it’s like history all over again, observing the weaponization of believers, like those Maoists I met with who had strapped on Kalishnakovs in the hills of 1990 Nepal.