It was probably one of the best investments CIA ever made.
I've heard it claimed that they generally don't try to start movements because it's too difficult, but instead just promote and amplify things that are already leaning the direction they want them to go or is beneficial to their agenda somehow. Makes sense to me!
Find existing propagation lines (whether positive or negative), and gently encourage them.
Much recent online propaganda, particularly from Russia and China (though those are hardly the only actors) operates along these lines. Russia generally tries to stir up fracture points amongst its adversaries, China seeks more to distract through diversion (e.g., TikTok) though it also has active antagonistic campaigns.
Another classic CIA tactic was not to seek out intelligence, but to plant it, through manufactured journalism. This came out in several 1970s US Congressional investigations of the Agency, by the Church Committee and others.
See "CIA and the Media: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence" (1978):
<https://archive.org/details/CIAMedia1978Hearings/page/n3/mod...>
Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame) wrote a multi-part series on this, which I've indexed here:
<https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/cdec9a80ce3b0139a0df00...>
- “The CIA’s 3-Decade Effort to Mold the World’s Views” (1977-12-25) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/25/archives/the-cias-3decade...>
- “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.” (1977-12-26) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/26/archives/worldwide-propag...>
- “C.I.A. Established Many Links To Journalists in U.S. and Abroad” 1977-12-27) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/27/archives/cia-established-...>
- “Colby Acknowledges U.S. Press Picked Up Bogus C.I.A. Accounts” (1977-12-28) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/28/archives/colby-acknowledg...>
- “U.S. Correspondents Give Views on C.I.A.” (1977-12-29) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/29/archives/us-correspondent...>
- “Ex‐Envoy Says Risk of Exposure Negated C.I.A. Propaganda Value” (1977-12-30) <https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/30/archives/exenvoy-says-ris...>
which was inspired by the success of Cool Britannia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Britannia
They drove the perspective for the sake of propaganda. They promoted american movies and art everywhere.
And it worked. This is how they got young kids in Europe, Asia and S.America to side with them.
Through a vague notion of coolness, individual liberty, sophistication, and tying that to progress and to America.
If you look at anti-colonial documentaries you can see it very evidently. One that comes to mind is "The hour of the furnaces" about the argentinian US backed dictatorship. There is a chapter in there where all the yuppie city dwellers are very counter culture oriented and welcome the external influence in their country.
The way they infiltrate the youth is through this very cultural operation.
The world wide phenomenon of counter culture was a CIA fabrication.
PS: Communist bloc art is not bland and conformist, it's just about daily life or about collective life. Some of the best western art is also about daily life and society. But thats just my opinion.
I believe it's particularly hard for people whose profession is to think, design and engineer, to accept a world where there is no mastermind and where randomness and chaos sit at the bottom of history.
Except the stuff people actually care about like purchasing power, bills, wages, and housing are manipulated by purposely designed economic policies and not by randomness.
Should we subsidize industry X is rarely a question decided on economic merits alone. And so it goes with individual interests shaping the entire global economy in surprisingly profound ways. Extreme ultraviolet lithography for example shapes industries, but has a history steeped in various public/private partnerships and global politics.
We're not talking about facts of nature like gravity or the speed of light. You don't exist in a truly random system but one where you're playing by the rules made by someone else, rules that can change on a whim, as the government intervenes at every level to manipulate the scales, for better and for worse, resulting in it picking winners and loosers.
I would note that the public conspiracy theorists tend to be "exactly wrong", though. Claiming that everything is a conspiracy, without evidence, except the things that have documentary evidence about the conspiracy.
Because where is the fun in that? If something is documented, your brain is not doing any work; it's where the canvas is clean, that you get a sense of satisfaction by firing synapses in original ways.
Conspiracy-theorism, at its core, is fundamentally a creative endeavour. It's not a coincidence that, in the '90s, that world overlapped pretty hard with fandoms of open-world franchises like Star Trek, where it's easy to expand and enrich the original content with your own productions.
1. It's something for bored people to do and to believe.
2. It's something that offers supposed explanations for various real or imaginary events or states of affairs at a lower cost than actual explanation.
3. It gives people something more satisfying than "shit happens", and in this way, gives people a feeling of the possibility of control over the unpredictable (superstitions like astrology and fortune telling have the same motive).
4. It allows people to rationalize their misfortunes, dissatisfaction, and grievances, and to deflect responsibility from themselves, or to give their envies the appearance of a moral basis.
For example, the loudest Epstein conspiracy theorists have spent the past ten years screaming about a conspiracy of pedophiles in their specific outgroup, while ignoring every hint of evidence that indicated their preferred leader was somehow tied to the mess (remember when Trump appointed Epstein’s sweetheart-deal prosecutor to his cabinet during his first term. Wtf!) They were led by the nose to a conclusion that anyone could have seen was highly questionable, because their reasoning and judgement absolutely sucks.
"anti-conspiracy theorists" aren't claiming that conspiracies don't exist, so no. I don't think anyone is actually "debunking" Epstein other than conspiracy-minded Trumpists who were laser-focused on the Pizzagate/satanic cabal/Monarch deprogramming bullshit until for some reason they decided Epstein was a cool guy who did nothing wrong. Many such cases.
99% of the time, this is the same picture.
Peel back the layers of just any popular conspiracy theory, study its origins and the people who started it, and eventually you'll get to the part where "it was the Jews all along."
This seems a bit of a contradiction, no? "folk" beliefs seem like the opposite of religion (which, to my ear, requires organization and some sort of canon).
And the CIA definitely creates some things/narratives.
But on the note of natural development, I do agree. You can call it conspiracies or incentives, its the same, really. If its not democratic its conspiratorial by definition.
They use tax money (and drug money, possibly) to do this, so they have a lot of funds. If you watch the video I link he talks about HOW they actually do this.
He doesnt claim they sit down and brief professors, he says they built an apparatus that simply filters through them and fund the right ones.
He talks about how its hard to find jobs if you dont peddle the right narratives and topics.
The more realistic claim is that CIA promoted abstract expressionism which is a primarily American 1950s art movement which is of course a sub-movement in modern art.
The wider claim is that they controlled the dissemination and narrative around art and the humanities in the US and around the world in order to inflate the opinion of the United States while promoting narratives about the Soviet Union that even the CIA knew were false, as stated by them in released memos.
This is the claim: that large sections of the art and humanities were funded and controlled by the CIA for propaganda purposes.