Have we gone back to the 1950s - 1960s obsession with thought control? That era birthed the CIA's MK-Ultra progam of research in 'behavioral modification', the

Have we gone back to the 1950s - 1960s obsession with thought control? That era birthed the CIA's MK-Ultra progam of research in 'behavioral modification', the 'winning hearts and minds in Vietnam' effort (also called 'pacification'), along with other psychology-inspired behavioral research & social manipulation programs. A lot of this seems to have taken off in the 1950s with Ford Foundation funding for programs at places like Stanford, e.g. https://casbs.stanford.edu/news/casbs-origins https://casbs.stanford.edu/news/casbs-origins Claims that the Chinese government is running social engineering programs aimed at American citizens are identical to the justifications for the Johnson/Nixon Operation MHCHAOS CIA-led program that ran from 1967 to 1974, and its partner progam COINTELPRO run by the FBI around the same time - i.e. fears of foreign infiltration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHAOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHAOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO The US government is caught in a Catch-22 situation, however - it's clear they want a population that's susceptible to domestic propaganda and that lacks critical reasoning and analysis skills and isn't skeptical of media and government pronouncements, and which has 'faith in institutions' (the same goal the Chinese government has with respect to its own population), but this kind of population is just as susceptible to foreign propaganda as it is to domestic propaganda. The only real solution for anything approaching a free and open society is to improve education for all and teach skills like logical reasoning, research and analysis, etc., all informed by a healthy dose of basic skepticism.