Michael T. Lester
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
For years it confused me how so many people could believe things that were obviously false. Smart people. Educated people. People I served with and respected. It made no sense to me. So I started researching, and the research turned into more research, and eventually I wrote a book and dedicated the first third of it to explaining how conditioning and propaganda work on the human brain.
Here is what I found. There is a pattern, and the pattern is not an accident. Propaganda has been a formal science for about a hundred years. The people using it on you right now know exactly what they are doing, and the research they rely on sits in public libraries where anyone can read it. Almost no one does.
The people who fall for propaganda are not randomly distributed across the population, and they are not stupid. They are unprotected. Propaganda is engineered to exploit specific, well-documented features of the human brain, and a brain that doesn’t know the machinery exists has no defense against it.
These are the four mechanisms that make propaganda work. Every claim here has an endnote. Check them.
1. The Engineering of Consent
In 1928, Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud and the man widely regarded as the father of modern public relations,1 published a book titled Propaganda. In it, he described exactly how public opinion is manufactured, and he was not confessing. He was advertising. Bernays believed that manipulating what the public thinks was a necessary function of a complex democracy, and he considered himself one of the small number of people qualified to do it.2 Years later he gave the method its lasting name in an essay titled “The Engineering of Consent.”3
Bernays put the method on public display in 1929. His client, the American Tobacco Company, wanted women to smoke, but social convention said women didn’t smoke in public. Bernays didn’t argue with the convention. He arranged for women to march in New York’s Easter parade smoking Lucky Strikes, and he told the press they were lighting “torches of freedom.”4 No one was presented with evidence that smoking was good. They were presented with a feeling, and the feeling was attached to the product.
That is the whole method. You do not convince people with argument and evidence. You make them feel something, and then you attach that feeling to whatever you want them to believe. Fear works. Outrage works. Belonging works best of all.
This method now runs at industrial scale in American political media, and I want to be precise here, because precision matters: this is not a critique of one network or one party. Researchers Jeffrey Berry and Sarah Sobieraj documented the business model across cable news, talk radio, and political blogs on both the right and the left, and gave it an accurate name: the outrage industry.5 The product these outlets sell is not information. The product is emotion, and the audience’s anger is the revenue stream. You do not come away from outrage media more informed. You come away more afraid, and more certain that your fellow citizens are your enemies. That certainty is worth billions of dollars a year to the people selling it.
2. The Repetition Trap
You have heard some lies so many times that you have stopped noticing they are lies. That is by design.
In 1977, psychologists Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino ran a deceptively simple experiment. They showed volunteers a series of plausible statements across multiple sessions spaced weeks apart. Some statements were true. Some were false. Some repeated from session to session, and some appeared only once. The repeated statements were rated as more true, and the ratings climbed with each repetition whether the statement was true or not.6 Psychologists named this the illusory truth effect, and it has been replicated for nearly fifty years.7 In 2015, researchers at Vanderbilt and Duke demonstrated something worse: repetition increased belief in falsehoods even when participants already possessed the knowledge to know better.8 Knowing the truth is not full protection.
The mechanism is mundane. Familiar information is easier for the brain to process, and the brain quietly interprets that ease as accuracy. No evidence changes. No argument is won. The statement just wears a groove.
Watch it work, in both parties and in no party at all. Between 2001 and 2003, President Bush and seven top administration officials stated unequivocally, on at least 532 separate occasions, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, was trying to obtain them, or had links to al Qaeda.9 In 2013, PolitiFact named “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” its Lie of the Year after President Obama repeated the pledge for years while millions of plans were headed for cancellation.10 And the claim that vaccines cause autism still circulates today, though the study that launched it was retracted by The Lancet in 201011 and its lead author was struck off the British medical register for dishonesty.12
Different decades. Different parties. Different subjects. The same groove. These beliefs were not built by evidence. They were built by volume.
3. The Fire Hose of Falsehood
Repetition and emotion win believers one claim at a time. There is a faster strategy, and it does not care whether you believe anything at all.
In 2016, RAND Corporation researchers Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews published an analysis of modern Russian propaganda and named its signature technique the “firehose of falsehood.”13 The model has four features: high volume across many channels, rapid and continuous output, no commitment to objective reality, and no commitment to consistency. Russian outlets would broadcast multiple contradictory explanations for the same event, at maximum speed, without embarrassment.13
That looks like incompetence. It is strategy. No fact-checking operation on earth can keep pace with hundreds of simultaneous falsehoods, and the propagandist knows it. The fire hose is not trying to win any single argument. The fire hose is trying to make argument itself feel pointless. When a population can no longer sort true from false, it stops trying, and a population that has stopped trying cannot organize against anything.
RAND studied a foreign government, but the technique is not patented, and it is not loyal. Any political movement, any party, and any government, foreign or domestic, can turn on the hose. When you feel exhausted trying to follow the news, when you catch yourself thinking that nothing can be verified and everyone lies anyway, understand what is happening. The exhaustion is not a side effect. The exhaustion is the product.
4. The Identity Lock
The first three mechanisms work on almost anyone. The fourth is the one that makes propaganda nearly impossible to reverse, because the fourth converts a belief into something the brain will defend like a limb.
In 1954, psychologist Leon Festinger and two colleagues infiltrated a small Chicago group whose leader prophesied that a flood would destroy the region on December 21 and that flying saucers would rescue the faithful. December 21 came. No flood. No saucers. By the logic of evidence, the group should have dissolved in embarrassment. Instead, the members who had sacrificed the most, the ones who had quit jobs and given away possessions, became more committed, and for the first time began actively recruiting new believers.14 Festinger published the theory behind this behavior in 1957 and called it cognitive dissonance: when evidence collides with a belief a person has built their life around, the mind does not update the belief. It experiences pain, and then it manufactures whatever justification is required to make the pain stop.15
Fifty years later, Yale law professor Dan Kahan extended the finding and gave it a sharper name: identity-protective cognition.16 When a belief fuses with a person’s sense of who they are and which tribe they belong to, a challenge to the belief is processed as an attack on the person. The brain stops evaluating the information and starts repelling it.
Before anyone gets comfortable, this is not a disease of the other side. In a study published in 2017, Kahan and his colleagues gave participants a math problem about the effectiveness of gun control. The most numerate participants, the best mathematical reasoners in the study, were the most likely to get the answer wrong when the correct answer threatened their political tribe, and it happened to liberals and conservatives alike.17 Intelligence does not protect against the identity lock. Intelligence powers it. A sharper mind builds a sharper defense of the belief it needs to keep.
That is why arguing louder does not work. The belief you are attacking stopped being a conclusion a long time ago. It is a membership card.
All Four at Once: Iraq
Theory is cheap. Watch the four mechanisms operate together in a documented, bipartisan, and settled case.
The emotion came first. In August 2002, Vice President Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”18 The following month, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice supplied the symbol: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”19 Fear, attached to a target. Bernays would have recognized the craftsmanship.
Then came the volume. The Center for Public Integrity later documented 935 false statements about the threat from Iraq made by President Bush and seven senior officials in the two years after September 11, amplified by thousands of news stories across every channel.20 That is a fire hose, aimed inward.
Then repetition did its quiet work, and here the record demands precision. The belief that Saddam Hussein was behind September 11 appeared almost immediately: within days of the attacks, 78 percent of Americans already thought it likely he was personally involved.21 The administration never made that claim outright. It never corrected it either, and for two years it kept Iraq and September 11 in the same sentence. By August 2003, a Washington Post poll found 69 percent still believed it likely that Hussein was personally involved in the attacks, and 82 percent believed he had assisted Osama bin Laden.21 Neither was true. Asked on national television whether the 69 percent figure surprised him, Vice President Cheney answered, “No. I think it’s not surprising that people make that connection.”22 President Bush stated plainly that there was no evidence of Hussein’s involvement only on September 17, 2003, eleven days after the poll made news.23 That is repetition in its cheapest form. You do not have to install a groove the audience cut for itself. You only have to keep it worn, and decline for two years to fill it in.
Congress consumed the same information stream as the public. In October 2002, the Senate authorized the war 77 to 23, with majorities of both parties voting yes.24 This was not one party deceiving the other. This was a nation inside a single engineered narrative.
Then the evidence arrived. In September 2004, the CIA’s own Iraq Survey Group, led by Charles Duelfer, reported that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and no active production programs.25 The identity lock held anyway. Researchers at the University of Maryland found that the misperceptions that predicted support for the war persisted well after the invasion, and that how much a person misperceived varied dramatically with which news outlet they trusted.26 More than 4,400 American service members died in the war that followed.27
Every mechanism, verifiable, in one event. A Republican administration built the narrative. A bipartisan Congress ratified it. A commercial media amplified it. A frightened public locked it into identity. If your reaction to this story depends on which party it embarrasses, reread the section on identity-protective cognition.
The Machinery Today
None of this retired in 2003. On September 18, 2025, Clock Tower X, a firm owned by Brad Parscale, the digital strategist who ran President Trump’s 2020 campaign, registered with the Department of Justice as a foreign agent working on behalf of the State of Israel, through the German arm of the advertising conglomerate Havas.28 The contract terms are public because federal law forced them into a filing cabinet: 100 pieces of original content per month, at least 80 percent of it aimed at Gen Z audiences on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts, a pledge of 50 million digital impressions per month, and a fee of 1.5 million dollars per month.29 A supplemental filing shows the firm received 15 million dollars through the Havas network, and that websites affiliated with the operation published attacks on American commentators, including Tucker Carlson, who had grown critical of Israel.30
Set the contract beside the four mechanisms and watch them line up. Clock Tower X advertises an influencer ecosystem of “managed networks that amplify narratives through credible, distributed voices.”29 That is the engineering of consent, quoted from the seller. The messages travel through voices the audience already trusts, aimed at one specific tribe, because in-group messengers slide past the identity lock instead of triggering it. The volume commitments are the fire hose, itemized on an invoice. And the contract adds a mechanism Bernays never lived to see: a pledge to influence how AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini characterize Israel and its war, supported by websites built less for human readers than for the machines that now answer people’s questions.29 Bernays closed his 1928 book with a chapter on the propaganda machinery of his day, the press, the radio, the motion picture.31 The machinery changes. The method does not.
Be precise about what is documented and what is not. The filings establish the principal, the money, and the deliverables. They do not establish who repeated the suggested language, or for how much. TIME reported a network of influencers receiving coordinated messaging through private group chats and being paid by engagement, based on participants and internal messages it reviewed, and Parscale denies on the record that any foreign money paid any influencer.29 Both statements sit in the same article. What no one disputes is the target. This operation was not aimed at a foreign adversary, and it was not aimed at the other party. It was aimed at the political base of a sitting American president, by a foreign government, through that president’s own former campaign manager. The critique here is of a contract and the government that signed it, documented in federal filings, not of a people or a faith, and the same paragraphs would apply to any state caught doing the same. Russia runs versions of this playbook. So do Iran and China.29 The difference this time is that a 1938 American disclosure law dragged the operation into the open. The Foreign Agents Registration Act worked exactly as written, and it is nearly the only thing in this story that did.
There is one more law in this story, and it moved in the opposite direction. In 1948, the Smith-Mundt Act authorized the State Department to make America’s case to foreign audiences through outlets like Voice of America, and, as Congress hardened it over the decades, forbade aiming that material at Americans.32 The logic was blunt: our government may manufacture messaging for foreign populations, but not for its own. The wall was always partial. It never covered the White House press operation or the Pentagon, so it would not have stopped the Iraq campaign described above. But it named the principle. In 2013, the wall came down. The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, written by a Republican, Mac Thornberry, and a Democrat, Adam Smith, folded into the annual defense bill as Section 1078 and signed by President Obama, allowed government material produced for foreign audiences to be disseminated inside the United States.33 Defenders called it transparency for an internet age in which the old geographic firewall was already fiction, and that is partly true. Critics said the government had just made legal room to message its own citizens, and that is partly true too. In October 2025, Representatives Thomas Massie and Scott Perry introduced H.R. 5704 to repeal the 2013 change and rebuild the wall, with new language covering websites, social media, and podcasts. As of this writing, it sits in the House Foreign Affairs Committee.34 Of everything in this article, that bill is the one place where the concern has a docket number.
The Defense
Propaganda is a science, and the defense against it is also a science, and the defense is embarrassingly simple. It is knowledge.
Every mechanism above works best on people who don’t know it exists. The illusory truth effect weakens when you know that familiarity is not evidence. The outrage business model loses its grip when you notice an outlet is selling you anger and ask what the anger is costing you. The fire hose fails against a person who refuses to mistake exhaustion for proof that truth is unknowable. And when a machine answers your question, remember that someone may have paid to shape what the machine read. Even the identity lock loosens for someone willing to ask the hardest question in politics: what evidence would change my mind? If the honest answer is “nothing,” the belief is not yours. It was installed.
The lock is real, but it is not welded shut, and there is experimental proof. In the fall of 2020, political scientists David Broockman of Berkeley and Joshua Kalla of Yale paid a group of committed Fox News viewers, people averaging 14 hours of Fox a week, fifteen dollars an hour to watch CNN instead for a month, with quizzes to confirm they actually watched.35 The viewers did not switch sides. They learned. They became measurably better informed about stories their usual network had filtered out, and their attitudes moderated in the areas the other network covered.35 The researchers noted that had a Democrat held the presidency, they would have run the experiment in reverse and paid CNN viewers to watch Fox, because the mechanism they documented, outlets selectively reporting the facts that favor their own side, belongs to no single network.36 Then came the finding that matters most for this article. Two months after the experiment ended, most participants had drifted back to their old channel, and the changes had largely faded.36 Read that as bleak if you want. I read it as a specification. Propaganda is not a tattoo. It is a subscription. It bills you in attention, and it starts losing its grip the month you change what you feed your own mind.
I don’t ask you to take any of this on faith. Faith is the delivery mechanism for propaganda. Check the endnotes. Read the studies. Then teach someone else the machinery, because Bernays was right about one thing: consent can be engineered. But only from people who don’t know the engineering exists.
Now you know.
Endnotes
1. Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations (New York: Crown Publishers, 1998).
2. Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), 9-12.
3. Edward L. Bernays, “The Engineering of Consent,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 250, no. 1 (March 1947): 113-120.
4. Tye, The Father of Spin, chap. 2 (“torches of freedom” campaign, Easter Sunday 1929).
5. Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj, The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
6. Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino, “Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 16, no. 1 (1977): 107-112.
7. Alice Dechene, Christoph Stahl, Jochim Hansen, and Michaela Wanke, “The Truth About the Truth: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Truth Effect,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 14, no. 2 (2010): 238-257.
8. Lisa K. Fazio, Nadia M. Brashier, B. Keith Payne, and Elizabeth J. Marsh, “Knowledge Does Not Protect Against Illusory Truth,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 144, no. 5 (2015): 993-1002.
9. Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith, “False Pretenses,” Iraq: The War Card, Center for Public Integrity, January 23, 2008, https://publicintegrity.org/politics/false-pretenses/.
10. Angie Drobnic Holan, “Lie of the Year: ‘If You Like Your Health Care Plan, You Can Keep It,'” PolitiFact, December 12, 2013.
11. The Editors of The Lancet, “Retraction: Ileal-Lymphoid-Nodular Hyperplasia, Non-Specific Colitis, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder in Children,” The Lancet 375, no. 9713 (February 6, 2010): 445.
12. General Medical Council, Fitness to Practise Panel, “Determination on Serious Professional Misconduct and Sanction: Dr. Andrew Wakefield,” May 24, 2010.
13. Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model: Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It, PE-198-OSD (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016).
14. Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956).
15. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957).
16. Dan M. Kahan, Donald Braman, John Gastil, Paul Slovic, and C. K. Mertz, “Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White-Male Effect in Risk Perception,” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 4, no. 3 (2007): 465-505.
17. Dan M. Kahan, Ellen Peters, Erica Cantrell Dawson, and Paul Slovic, “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,” Behavioural Public Policy 1, no. 1 (2017): 54-86.
18. Richard B. Cheney, “Remarks by the Vice President to the Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd National Convention,” Nashville, TN, August 26, 2002, White House Office of the Press Secretary transcript.
19. Condoleezza Rice, interview by Wolf Blitzer, CNN Late Edition, September 8, 2002.
20. Lewis and Reading-Smith, “False Pretenses.”
21. Washington Post Poll, “Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 Attacks,” conducted August 7-11, 2003, by TNS Intersearch (1,003 adults, +/-3 points), published September 6, 2003; see also “Hussein Link to 9/11 Lingers in Many Minds,” Washington Post, September 6, 2003. The September 13, 2001 trend figure (78 percent) is from the same published trend table; note that it and the 2002-2003 interim figures were fielded by Time/CNN with slightly different question wording.
22. Dick Cheney, interview by Tim Russert, Meet the Press, NBC News, September 14, 2003.
23. George W. Bush, remarks to reporters following a meeting with congressional leaders, Washington, DC, September 17, 2003 (“We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th”).
24. U.S. Senate, Roll Call Vote No. 237, 107th Congress, 2nd Session, on H.J.Res. 114 (Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002), October 11, 2002.
25. Charles Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, September 30, 2004).
26. Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay, and Evan Lewis, “Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War,” Political Science Quarterly 118, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 569-598.
27. Nese F. DeBruyne, American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics, RL32492 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, updated 2020).
28. Clock Tower X LLC, Foreign Agents Registration Act Registration No. 7649, U.S. Department of Justice, filed September 18, 2025 (registrant owned by Bradley Parscale; foreign principal Havas Media Germany GmbH, acting on behalf of the State of Israel), available at efile.fara.gov.
29. Eric Cortellessa, “Trump’s Ex-Campaign Manager Is Running an Israeli Influence Operation Targeting the MAGA Base,” TIME, July 13, 2026.
30. “Former Trump Campaign Aide Makes Glaring Error in Foreign Agent Filing,” Daily Caller News Foundation, June 24, 2026 (reporting supplemental FARA filings and informational materials in the FARA database).
31. Bernays, Propaganda, chap. 11, “The Mechanics of Propaganda.”
32. United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (Smith-Mundt Act), Pub. L. 80-402, codified at 22 U.S.C. 1461; domestic dissemination restrictions strengthened by amendment in 1972 and by the Zorinsky Amendment of 1985.
33. Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, enacted as Section 1078 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013, Pub. L. 112-239 (effective July 2, 2013); see also H.R. 5736, 112th Congress (2012), sponsored by Reps. Mac Thornberry and Adam Smith, summary at congress.gov.
34. H.R. 5704, Repeal the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2013, 119th Congress, introduced October 8, 2025, by Reps. Thomas Massie and Scott Perry; referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
35. David E. Broockman and Joshua L. Kalla, “Consuming Cross-Cutting Media Causes Learning and Moderates Attitudes: A Field Experiment with Fox News Viewers,” Journal of Politics 87, no. 1 (2025).
36. “When Fox News Viewers Flip to CNN, Their Opinions Shift Too, Study Finds,” Research UC Berkeley (news release), April 7, 2022.
