where were the front-page retractions, telling citizens, "hey, we know you're in a heightened emotional state of fear because of everything that (we told you) has happened, and we just told you to be more afraid of yet another new thing, but, guys, guess what, it was an honest mistake, just a lab error, sorry about that, we'll be better going forward when it comes to getting people who have been in basically a nonstop state of panic for months now riled up about yet another thing, when it turned out to be nothing. again, sorry!"

no, nothing, it was just quietly phased out of headlines and trending topics, with zero remorse or reflection. and this is just one of many examples of this happening in the past few years.

when are people going to realize that mass-scale emotional manipulation of the populace for political and/or financial gain for an elite few is not only totally viable in this world where everyone has the Internet in their pockets, but actually, provably what has been going on for quite awhile now?

that contemporary politician you were taught, at one point (which point exactly? you've long since forgotten), to have endless simultaneous fear of and hatred for? maybe all of that was kind of overblown. maybe you can still dislike him and even be politically opposed to him and everything he stands for, yet still intellectually recognize that you were actively, consciously, willfully gaslit into perceiving him as Mecha-Hitler.

or maybe you say to yourself, that was never me, I was never like that. okay, maybe you were one of the lucky ones who saw through at least some portion of the charade, but it is irrefutable that the constant nonstop plural-year top-down entrenched government propaganda has conditioned millions of people to have an entirely irrational set of emotions deliberately programmed into them that trigger upon mere mention of this person's surname.

once you understand how conditioned emotional responses are fully capable of entirely overriding the logical faculties of even the smartest people you know or know of, you start to see the scope of what is at play here.