I want to tell you about something that happened to me this week, because it shows how humanity is influenced and indoctrinated.

I was researching a story with an advanced AI—one of the kind millions of people now trust to summarize the world for them. The story was simple on its surface: the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, freshly renovated, had developed peeling paint and an algae bloom. I asked the machine to lay out the facts.

And it did. Calmly. Reasonably. With sources. It told me the renovation had “gone wrong.” It framed the president’s explanation as the suspicious one. It offered me, helpfully, an angle about a “botched” job. Every fact it cited was true. And the whole thing leaned, quietly and confidently, in one direction—the direction of the predominant media story.

Here’s the part that should stop you cold: the cause of that peeling paint has not been established by anyone.

⚗️ The Verdict Was Written Before the Trial

I’m a retired investigator. My entire career. I learned how to sense when someone was lying or embellishing. So, I did what I was trained to do—I checked.

The contractor that did the work stated plainly that the repair areas were a small part of the project and did not indicate a failure of the liner. The engineering experts who were asked said a full failure analysis would be required—that the cause could be surface preparation, material compatibility, summer heat, ultraviolet exposure, or a dozen other things—and that you cannot rule anything out. One of them put it perfectly: “If you’ve met one coating failure, you’ve met one coating failure.”

Translation: nobody knows yet why the paint peeled.

And yet the storyline was already set in concrete: the renovation failed, and it’s his fault. A guilty verdict, delivered before a single fact about the cause was in. Not by a jury. By repetition.

The algae? Even the Interior Department called it ordinary residual algae—the kind that has plagued that pool for over a century in the summer sun. A non-story. But “nothing unusual happened” sells nothing and enrages no one.

🤖 The Question That Haunts Me

So here’s the question I cannot shake, and I want you to sit with it the way I have:

If a trusted AI or LLM frames a story in a negative light because that’s the predominant media take, who can you believe?

Think about what that means. The machine wasn’t lying. It didn’t invent facts. It simply absorbed everything written on the subject—and that center was tilted. So the AI handed me the tilt and called it neutrality. It was a mirror, and the mirror was bent, and it did not know it was bent.

Millions of people are now asking these systems, “just give me the facts.” And the systems are giving them the average of the narrative—which is not the same thing, not even close. When the machine you trust to be objective quietly inherits the bias of the crowd, the last fence between you and pure conditioning is gone.

I only caught it because I’ve spent a lifetime trained to distrust the confident answer. Most people won’t catch it. That’s not their failure. It’s the design.

⛪ I Have Seen This Machine Before

Here’s what my investigator’s eye and my Catholic childhood taught me: this is not new. This is the oldest machine humanity has.

I grew up watching nuns and priests mark the outsider—the doubter, the heretic, the one who believed differently—and train the rest of us to feel contempt for them before we’d reasoned our way to a single thought. You didn’t decide the outsider was bad. You were handed the verdict, pre-installed, and your mind ran backward from there, bending every fact to fit.

That machine is ancient. The temple priests marked a carpenter named Jesus as a threat and trained the crowd to call for his death. The church that grew from him then turned the very same tool on its heretics, its infidels, its doubters. Warlords marked the rival tribe. Emperors marked the barbarian. Every authority, in every age, has pointed the same weapon at whoever it needed the swarm to fear.

The robes change. The togas become cassocks become tailored suits behind anchor desks. The weapon never changes: mark the enemy, release the scent, let the trained crowd do the rest.

🐜 Trump Is Not the Point

Let me be clear, because this is where most people stop reading and start cheering for their team. This is not about defending one man.

The man is a placeholder. Today the machine points at him. Before him it pointed at others; the same outlets that fixed this week’s verdict once worked to make a different official seem merely “weird,” testing which label would stick. Tomorrow, if he’s gone, it will point at the next one. The target is a variable. The function is constant.

And understand this fully, because it’s the part that frees you: your tribe runs this machine too. Whoever you have been trained to revile—handed to you by your trusted authorities, your preferred anchors, your side’s priests—you absorbed that contempt the same way. None of us are watching from outside the colony. We are all inside it, inhaling the scent, certain our particular hatred is the one that’s justified.

It feels like reasoning. It is conditioning. That is the whole trick.

🔗 Join the Inquiry

So I’ll leave you where I now live—uneasy, and awake.

The press will hand you a verdict before the evidence. Your own tribe will hand you an enemy and call your contempt righteous. And now even the machine in your pocket—the one you trusted to cut through it all—will hand you back the average of the crowd and call it truth.

The only immunity ever discovered is the one Dino found when he walked out of the colony: catch the machine running inside your own skull. Notice the moment a verdict arrives before the facts do. Notice the flash of contempt you didn’t reason your way to. That noticing is the whole of freedom.

A pool is peeling in Washington, and no one yet knows why. But you were already told how to feel about it. Ask yourself who benefited from that—and whether, just this once, you can refuse to inhale.

The tables are still there. They’re waiting to be flipped.

— Markus Stonefield