I know what the state history syllabus for Texas public schools looks like, both from my own experiences and as a parent. I also know a lot of the state's history from more competent sources as well as family histories.
To say there is no state run propaganda in the US is quite a statement.
Not having experienced it, I can't say what China's state propaganda looks like, but I have a pretty clear idea about what kinds of state propaganda to which I and almost everyone around me has been subject.
This is so bang on. What's so insiduous about the West is how inundated everybody is with propaganda, but there's plausible deniability built into the system that everybody believes they're a free thinker.
Reddit is a good example - one of the biggest aggregators and disseminators of information for tens of millions of people, primarily in the West. People who see themselves as above-average intelligence. Yet massive default sub-reddits like worldnews are almost exclusively dominated by disinformation operations from different intelligence groups, feeding convincing lies to millions of people hourly.
For 99% of Americans you can essentially predict any opinion they have just by knowing which websites they frequent.
/r/worldnews is a great example of the potency of American propaganda.
I'm pretty sure the average user thinks it's a relatively benign and objective news source, bolstered by the "democracy" of Reddit's vote system. And that couldn't be further from the truth.
Yep. That's the best example - completely inundated with government propaganda, and yet millions of people are freely consuming it daily and shaping their world view around it.
When you look at Reddit CEO's board affiliations, it starts to become clear this is not accidental.
Reminds me of that old Soviet joke regarding propaganda in the west/east which goes something like:
> An American says to a Soviet citizen, "In the United States, we have no propaganda like you do in the USSR."
> The Soviet citizen responds, "Exactly! In the USSR, we know it's propaganda."