Second example. The military/national security apparatus. Spicoli, if you're reading I'm interested in your opinion of this. I have to post the whole thing because it's from a business publication and I can't link it:




One autumn afternoon a few years ago, I took the subway from my Brooklyn apartment to a mansion on the Upper East Side. I was nervous. I had never met President Obama before, and it wasn't clear to me why I'd been selected to meet with his National Security Council and brief him on the situation unfolding in Iraq. I had no special knowledge of the country. All I knew was what I had been given in my prepared materials. ISIS forces, represented by a bright-red arrow, were making a push toward Baghdad, sending in suicide bombers and threatening the US Embassy. Iraq's prime minister was asking Obama to reinsert American troops into an active ground war.
When I arrived at the mansion, of course, I didn't brief the real Obama. Playing the role of the president that day was Max Boot, a seasoned think-tank veteran who, like almost every other self-appointed member of America's foreign-policy elite, had championed the invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan. The scenario was an exercise, part of a conference I attended as a newly appointed associate at a leading think tank. As the word "exercise" implies, it was a game, but a serious one, part of a larger campaign by the foreign-policy leaders of the reigning generation to indoctrinate their successors. Over the next several years, I would attend events hosted by the Aspen Institute, the New America Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Brookings Institution, among others. I had a formal luncheon with a Middle Eastern ambassador, a buffet breakfast with Thomas Friedman, and a guided tour of an Ohio-class nuclear submarine. At a conference table inside the headquarters of SEAL Team 6, I was told that SEAL Team 6 did not exist. I flew over the White Sands Missile Range in a Black Hawk helicopter, where I did my part for civilian-military relations by vomiting all over the seats and floor.
What I didn't do was actually go to Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead, I ate free buffet lunches, collected business cards, and mainlined off-the-record propaganda that both of America's long-running wars were worthy undertakings, steered by capable hands. Much of what we did included participation by the military, but that didn't strike any of us as odd. In fact, the uniforms and armaments are what made the whole thing seem real, something more than a bunch of kids in suits and ties playing Model United Nations. We weren't just drafting foreign-policy resolutions; we were helping guide our country to a better understanding of whom to kill, and how to kill them.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was being absorbed into what Ben Rhodes, Obama's speechwriter and longtime policy advisor, called the "Blob," the amorphous pro-war Washington establishment that Obama was supposed to oppose. In the Blob's view, it's the role of the Blob, not the voters or even the White House, to decide when America goes to war. The internal mechanics of those decisions are a black box, but we do know something about the inputs and outputs. Into one end of the Blob goes the money — gifts from corporations, wealthy individuals, and, in some cases, foreign governments. Out the other end comes white papers, books, op-ed articles, salaries, fellowships, and panel discussions. The content of the output varies widely, and contains occasional notes of disagreement, which is what makes it so much more slippery and effective than the classical authoritarian propaganda of the 20th century, which was intended to awe and manipulate crowds by playing to their basest emotions. Call it blobaganda, a process through which intelligent people are gently led to a preordained conclusion, brought to you by Raytheon and General Dynamics.

For years, Washington think tanks talked up the resilience of the Afghan government — only to watch it collapse in a matter of days as American troops withdrew. "Propaganda" is a loaded word, but I think it's appropriate to apply it here. The foreign-policy think tanks that hosted the military-adjacent events I attended take great pains to present themselves as neutral organizations, where diverse groups of officials and scholars and opinion writers can exchange views without fear of being quoted in The Times or shouted down by Code Pink protesters. But as I learned from the five years I spent inside the bubble of the foreign-policy establishment — all the off-the-record gatherings and the cozy meet-and-greets I attended — the neutral deliberations that take place behind closed doors occur within carefully managed boundaries. You can't work in Washington and not cross paths with smart, influential people who have been paid substantial amounts of money from a foreign-policy think tank, or the powerful dons who sit on one of their boards. If you have control over who's in the room, and who gets to sit onstage, there's no need to script the action. The ideologically correct opinion will organically percolate through the network. This is known as social contagion, and it goes a long way to explaining why America's leading foreign-policy experts keep producing disasters like Afghanistan.
In 2017, for example, the Aspen Institute invited a small group of ambassadors and cabinet-level officials to "a private breakfast conversation" with "representatives from Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company." According to an internal list of invitees, John Brennan, Michael Chertoff, Avril Haines, and Antony Blinken all RSVP'd that they would be there. I was not in the room, but I do have a copy of the outline for the discussion. It expresses worry about things like "the capacity surge of rising powers" and the maintenance of "critical security pacts." These are reasonable concerns. But it's worth asking why Lockheed Martin spent money for access to that particular group of people, and what it got in return. At that same conference, Gen. Joseph Dunford, then the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a public talk to a large gathering. In 2019, when he retired, he joined Lockheed Martin's board.
To understand how blobaganda works, you have to look for what isn't there. Not much airtime is given to dissent from what's often called "the rules-based order" or "the liberal international order." These terms sound technical and boring and unobjectionable; perhaps that is by design. In plain English, "rules-based order" has effectively come to mean "war is good." The foreign-policy establishment is ideologically committed to the faith-based proposition that America can use force against a country thousands of miles away and, if not remake it in our own image, then at least leave it better than we found it. "Liberal" and "rules" are strange words to apply to campaigns that rely so heavily on drone strikes and covert CIA operations. At one event hosted by the Blobosphere, I remember one of my peers raising his hand to ask how we could convince the American public that it was worth going to war to defend Montenegro, as we are obliged to under Article 5 of the NATO treaty. The room turned and looked at him as if he'd gone insane.