Too distracted, too bored and too stupid to care? Brilliant piece by Lily Lynch:

I posted an observation on X yesterday that generated a lot of talk and hate. I wrote that I’d seen a lot of people complaining that there was no propaganda campaign in the lead-up to this war, no effort to convince the American public that we were at imminent risk. There was a rather haphazard, tacked-on attempt by Steve Witkoff to advance the idea that Iran was a “week away” from being able to build a nuclear bomb, but this messaging came late and contradicted the administration’s prior reports about an obliterated nuclear program. Indeed, the Trump administration’s foreign policy is warned over boomer neoconservativism, but unlike the neocons before him, he hadn’t tried to give the war on Iran a clearly defined objective or coherent propaganda narrative. On X, I suggested that this was because he no longer has to: there have been no mass anti-war protests like the kind that accompanied the runup to the invasion of Iraq. Several people objected to this, claiming that protests in 2003 only started after the war began, but this, as anyone who participated in those protests remembers, is false: there were massive protests against the war before even a single missile was launched. I suggested that the reason the government can count on our relative inaction is that the American people are largely pacified by technology, utterly stupefied and numb from online shopping and personalized algorithms mainlining a steady stream of mind-melting short-form video content to each individual. Of course, there are still pockets of virulent opposition on college campuses and in the streets which I don’t wish to diminish, but in wars past, protest was truly a mass phenomenon. And I do think that we are more atomized and more pacified today. Back in 2003, we hadn’t yet completely retreated into our screens.