The Reagan administration pulled right-wing media executives Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife into a CIA-organized “perception management” operation which aimed Cold War-style propaganda at the American people in the 1980s, according to declassified U.S. government records.

Although some records relating to Murdoch remain classified, several documents that have been released indicate that he and billionaire Scaife were considered sources of financial and other support for President Ronald Reagan’s hard-line Central American policies, including the CIA’s covert war in Nicaragua.

A driving force behind creation of Reagan’s extraordinary propaganda bureaucracy was CIA Director William Casey who dispatched one of the CIA’s top covert action specialists, Walter Raymond Jr., to the National Security Council to oversee the project. According to the documents, Murdoch was brought into the operation in 1983 when he was still an Australian citizen and his media empire was much smaller than it is today.

Footnote with more information if you like learning about "perception management, propaganda, and how/why America has gone so far off the rails:

Rupert Murdoch is the most easily recognizable name mentioned in the main article, but you should really know the names William Casey and Richard Mellon Scaife in the context of creating the modern U.S. right wing propaganda machine:

•Early in his career, as a business lawyer, William Casey created the concept of a tax shelter to help his wealthy clients escape regulations mandated under the New Deal.

•In addition to being recruited by Casey into the perception management operation, Richard Mellon Scaife was also responsible for helping launch the conservative think tank, Heritage Foundation. Without Heritage, humanity never would have been blessed with the moral majority movement or Project 2025.

•The precursor organization to Heritage, which focused mainly on social (rather than economic) conservatism, was created by self described "political mechanic" Paul Weyrich (who would eventually coin the term "moral majority") and funded by heir to the Coors brewing fortune, Joseph Coors. When the precursor organization failed, Weyrich was connected with the economic expertise of conservative Ed Feulner. Soon, another investment from Coors helped launch Heritage, and Coors' money was then followed by large donations from Richard Mellon Scaife and other wealthy conservatives.

•Once they had funding, Heritage created their first edition of Mandate for Leadership (the most famous edition would become Project 2025), and both Carter and Reagan received a copy before the upcoming election. Carter ignored it. Reagan loved it.

•The Iran hostage crisis unexpectedly allows Reagan to defeat Carter. Except, the history nobody really talks about is the fact that Jimmy Carter and several members of his administration firmly believed that prior to the election, Reagan's CIA director, William Casey, traveled to Iran and helped orchestrate the delayed release of the hostages. The delayed hostage release (the October surprise) is believed to be the main factor leading to Carter's defeat and Reagan's victory. Once in office, Reagan implements the majority of the Mandate for Leadership within his first year and appoints William Casey as CIA director.

• Coincidentally, it turns out, Joseph Coors and William Casey were good friends, and when the Iran Contra scandal happens, Coors names Casey while testifying (which could really be a whole other TIL post). Casey dies very suddenly during the Iran Contra hearings and subsequently takes all the blame for the entire scandal.

The rest is history.

Footnote TLDR: Starting as early as the 1970s, the man who would eventually become Reagan's CIA director, (who also held intelligence ties due to his work with the CIA precursor, OSS, during WWII), joined forces with several wealthy oligarchs to do some wild shit to the United States. Including interfering with global political negotiations, influencing public perception, subverting democracy, and essentially setting into motion Project 2025 decades before it was written.

I know that sounds like a crazy conspiracy, but at the end of the day, it really just boils down to the lengths a group of nepo babies and their high powered lawyer went in order to: 1. Skirt the regulations created to protect the people they continue to harm and manipulate to this very day, 2. Avoid paying the taxes they continue to avoid paying, and 3. Stack the decks in their favor in order to remain in control.

Many conspiracies are real, people just spend too much time on the unrealistic ones (probably partly because people in power are deliberately pushing those to distract from the realistic ones). People like Murdoch already rather obviously act in the interest of rich nepo babies, a direct involvement of the US government is just the cherry on top.

I highly recommend “hypernormalization” on youtube.

Conspiracy theorists are the biggest sheep. They don't care about the truth, they just like making up insane stories about people they hate

This is fucking treason

And criminal as f

Wasn't that just "the cold war"?

Conspiracies are real but they’re a lot lamer and horrifying than what conspiracy theorists believe.

"Heritage" "Foundation" is a terrorist and extremist organisation.

I kept talking about the truly wealthy who don't advertise their wealth with flashy logos and brands recognizable to the untrained eye, who plan money and political moves in centuries, rather than years, but people mocked and shouted me down and were more interested in the outrage du jour, rather than doing any reflection, self-education of the most rudimentary sort, let alone history, politics, and even now, if it hasn't happened within the last election cycle, it's not only that people simply can not draw a line from why Roosevelt put forth a New Deal, to how that got us to where we are today, nevermind sinophobia, russophobia, the next Iran invasion, war, conflict, or Novus Ordo Seclorum, and the fasces (or arrows) being plastered all over currency and capital buildings, it's that the CBA. 🤷‍♀️

That and people refuse to see past the last or next five years.

@Semi_Hemi_Demigod @rumschlumpel Truth is way more terrifying than fiction.

Fucking Reagan. EVERYTHING about this shit swamp we are in comes from that fucker and his henchfucks. Including the Bushes.

The same fucking agency that had black people as the enemy of the states at one point? The history is just a one giant non british shit show.

Tbf, a lot of the "classic" conspiracy theories would legit be quite horrifying were they actually true, they just tend to be so ridiculous that its very hard to seriously contemplate them.

Lowest election turn out of it's era

Reagan leaned heavily on the heritage foundation.

Sound familiar?

I mean in his defense he literally was just an actor (for the most part). He was chosen to fill a role.

I don't say that in defense of Reagan's presidency, but if it wasn't him, it literally would have been somebody else. I think we can see the same in Trump.

Oligarchs don't name themselves king for a reason (with the exception of Bush Sr. and he failed to get reelected). His kid did slightly better, but almost his entire presidency was him just doing what his dad's friends told him to do.

They also don't like to pick people who might fall out of line. Like the fact that Milton Friedman called fucking Nixon a "socialist," and the fact that the end of Nixon marked the beginning of Heritage Foundation, really says a lot.

They wanted total control, and to do that they needed to find somebody who could look into the camera and say his lines without giving it a second thought.

Yes, I’ve always said if Ronnie was your literal neighbor, you’d probably have liked him.

Doesn’t change the point unfortunately. He still said and did all the evils.

Here's an excerpt, for those who prefer not to go in blind on a 2h46m documentary 😁

Well yeah, it was tradition by that point and had only gotten worse. Here's a video link talking about another, mildly less damaging (?) Case

in his defense he literally was just an actor (for the most part)

An actor with Alzheimer's for most of his second term, no less. He was definitely a piece of shit, but he was a piece of shit front man for a group of pieces of shit.

This 💯

The fascist shit we're dealing with actually started with Nixon and Kissinger.

And honestly Strom Thurmond and his ilk all gathering in the Republican Party were the precursor to that.

It's easy to get caught up in Trump's theatrics, but it's important to remember that there were in fact worse presidents than Trump. Presidents that have caused more damage than Trump.

Like Ronald Reagan. The fucko Trump is trying to emulate.

And George W. Bush who was also emulating Reagan but more successfully.

Trump is just a symptom of the problem. The problem is America as a whole.

Did we find astronaut Kurp Mebsker's account?

There's a fucking sadistic Cristian cult of evil, with very twisted and inverted morals, actively making the world a living hell.

Our path was not unavoidable, it was even unlikely after WW2.

But just a couple of these fucks...and now billions .ust perish.

Fuck Reagan indeed, but the propaganda runs much deeper. I post this every time people start the clock at Reagan:

People act like Reagan invented the mess we’re in, but Carter helped open the door. He deregulated major industries, embraced austerity politics, empowered Paul Volcker, and helped shift the Democratic Party away from New Deal economics toward market discipline, weakened labor, and “responsible” technocratic cruelty.

That’s the world we still live in: wages crushed, unions weakened, public goods privatized, housing treated like an investment vehicle, and both parties pretending the market is a law of nature.

And abroad, his “human rights” branding didn’t stop him from backing dictators, arming reactionaries, and helping set the stage for decades of intervention and blowback. Reagan didn’t create that machinery from scratch, he inherited and escalated it.

Carter was the polite beginning of the catastrophe. Reagan made it louder. Clinton made it bipartisan. Bush made it apocalyptic. Obama made it sophisticated. Biden made it normal again. Trump is now making it permanent.

Carter was nowhere near Reagan.

If “All US Presidents bad” then, ok.

You just described Trump. It's the same thing over amd over again.

I hear Hitler was just some old, sick man on meth, and that his general and other folks were pulling the strings.

This world is ruled by demons.

You missed the point. It's not a competition for who's worse, it's whose side are they on.

Reagan wouldn't have been able to do half the damage he did if Carter didn't setup the mechanisms for him. Carter's damage wasn't immediate, but Reagan built on it.

If it weren't for Carter, we'd still have strong regulations and labor protection, or at least we might be able to blame someone else for doing it. Carter did it, he took foundation blocks from the very bottom of society and gave Reagan a sledge hammer, but yes Reagan is the one that brought the wall down.

All US presidents bad, sure. Carter is portraid as an exception, as a leftist, as a humanitarian, it's all sanctification and proganada, he royally fucked American citizens for the benefit of corporations, and every single mess we're dealing with today can be directly traced back to those actions.