A new article makes the strange claim that propaganda networks have “shifted” targeting from drugs to political activism.

New war: How the propaganda network shifted from targeting ‘addicts’ to activists.

The problem with such “new” analysis, any historian could probably show, is that activists historically have been called things like drug addicts to make them targeted more easily (avoid scrutiny of anti-democratic actions).

There is no shift, just recognition a system of heavy-handed criminalization uses encoding to escape proper scrutiny.

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Today extremist right-wing Americans just overtly say they are going with war with the “left” instead of pretending to care about drugs.