Looking up and down this thread and there are people you would agree with about our situation being awful, while being extremely reluctant to blame a planned and coordinated influence campaign by an adversary. It amounts to calling our fellow citizens chumps, and that's rude.

The private sector, for slightly more benign reasons, and sometimes less benign reasons like keeping cigarettes from being blamed for cancer and emphysema, uses the same mechanisms to sell products. If that didn't work, nobody would pay for advertising and PR.