This is a truth that I have been preaching for at least two decades. With all of the benefits that the internet and cellphones have brought to life, I believe the net effect has been FANTASTICALLY negative. If I may name drop, I remember Dick Kleindienst shaking his head way back in 1995 and saying, "People have no idea what they are unleashing." Brains are physically being altered, patterns of thinking are being altered, opportunities for those with mental illnesses and sociopathic tendencies to bond and vent are everywhere. I am not someone who typically thinks in terms of "demons," but it almost seems supernatural.
I was in high school and college throughout the turbulent sixties. Yes, there was anger and violence, but NOTHING like we see today. I didn't spend one minute in fear for my safety or wondering if someone around me was dangerous. I had plinking guns in my dorm room and no one gave it a second thought. There has literally been an explosion that I can only attribute to the internet and the rise of social media. I have never had a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Anything Else account, but I have seen those things destroy relationships in my own family as members become obsessed with their like-thinking social media "friends" at the expense of real relationships.
Take the transgender phenomenon. I spent at least the first 60 years of my life without ever encountering someone confused about his or her gender. I lived in dorms, worked in journalism, practiced law. I had a couple of very good gay friends. But I never heard ONE WORD about gender confusion. I believe the entire "transgender" phenomenon is an artificial construct, almost entirely a product of the internet and social media (and, of course, an educational system that bears no relationship to the one in which I was educated for 19 years). And that's just one example.
In the 1920s, the Kremlin ran a very successful deception operation known as The Trust (look it up), incorporating such elements as Lenin's bogus "New Economic Policy," against the West for six years.
It ran other big deception operations, like "Sindikat-2," and in the early 1950s it ran a highly successful large-scale operation against Poland called "WiN" -- Wolnosc i Niezawislosc, ("Freedom and Independence") -- the Polish resistance organization that was commandeered by the Soviets.
In 1959, the Kremlin, realizing that the USSR and the Warsaw Pact couldn't defeat the U.S. and NATO militarily, decided to reinstitute Sun Tzu's tactics and get us to defeat ourselves (sound familiar?) by waging disinformation, "active measures," and mole-based strategic deception counterintelligence operations against us and our NATO allies. To do so, it set up top-secret Department D in the First Chief Directorate (today's SVR). General Oleg Gribanov, not to be outdone, set up his own deception-based Department 14 in his Second Chief Directorate (today's FSB) and, as soon as CIA's spy Oleg Penkovsky was arrested in such a way that wouldn't incriminate the mole in U.S. or British Intelligence who had betrayed him within two weeks of his April 1961 recruitment, sent GRU Lt. Col. Dmitry Polyakov and KGB Major Aleksei Kulak to the FBI's NYC field office to volunteer to spy for it at the U.N. Polyakov left the U.S. in late 1962, but Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover's shielded-from-CIA FEDORA, duped the Bureau for fifteen years and almost certainly formed CIA-controlling feedback loops with probable "moles" Bruce Solie and Leonard V. McCoy. Six months later, Gribanov sent putative KGB staff officer Yuri Nosenko to the CIA in Geneva to discredit what a recent true defector, KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, was telling James Angleton about possible KGB penetrations (there were many) of the CIA, the FBI, and the intelligence services of our NATO allies. In late January 1964, Nosenko reappeared to the CIA in Geneva, claiming to have been Lee Harvey Oswald's case officer in the USSR. Less than five years later, a probable "mole" by the name of Bruce Solie "cleared" Nosenko, and a short time later he was teaching "counterintelligence" to the CIA's and the FBI's new recruits.
"Former" KGB counterintelligence officer Vladimir Putin, who joined the KGB in 1975, learned all of the Sun Tzu's tricks I alluded to, above, and he's still employing them against us -- especially the disinformation and "active measures" aspects. "Social Media" has helped him immensely in this regard.
To wit: His professional St. Petersburg trolls were largely responsible for his successful installation of the "useful idiot" (or worse) known as The Traitorous Orange Bird (rhymes with "Xxxx") as our "president" on 20 January 2017.
