In retrospect, actually not just in retrospect but some of you are not ready for that conversation, it's really funny that people were so scared of Russian propaganda when it's so obviously terrible.
As I often point out, Western propaganda is vastly superior because the people doing it don't even realize it's what they're doing. It's very organic and that makes it extremely effective.
On the big things, government, academia, entertainment, etc. are very ideologically homogeneous, so you don't even need to coordinate shit for the most part. There is something really beautiful about it.
Even the dissenters serve a function because they show it's still a free society and that the prevailing opinion is not imposed on people under threat of violence, but most of them are weird/stupid people that actually help to demonize dissent and create incentives against it.
For instance, I watch a lot of American movies, and I'm often amazed by how quickly writers pick up on the zeigeist. Relations with Russia started to deteriorate ~15 years ago and, all of a sudden, the villains were increasingly Russian again. Nobody told the writers to do that!
None of that is new, Tocqueville already explained the basic mechanisms almost 200 years ago, but it represents a remarkable and largely unheralded progress in political technology. Propaganda in authoritarian regimes doesn't hold a candle to the way we do things!
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