It's just depressing. Most people posting here are talking about how propaganda affects all the dummies that voted for Trump and only affects dumb people. I thought propaganda was just too silly to actually work on anyone except the dim or the credulous. Maybe I'm just dumb, but it affected me and I like to imagine I'm a relatively intelligent person. Maybe I'm not that smart after all, but I'm starting to suspect that even smart people are vulnerable to an effective propaganda campaign.

The end result now is I'm a lot more paranoid with information, which sucks because that is also one of the goals of Russian propaganda, to make Americans cynically skeptical of everything. So now I get a new nugget of information and I have to wonder "Is this from Putin? David Brock? Bannon? Interests in the pharmaceutical lobby? Does this point of view have an agenda that aligns with mine?" And that's if I even realize I'm internalizing it, which I might not. I might just read something in passing without thinking on it and then it sticks in my brain.

It's exhausting. And it's only going to get worse as the rest of the world discovers memetic engineering and the techniques get more sophisticated for various interests.