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.