Oof. I've thought about using ChatGPT for this before. I'm skeptical on whether it's ethical, but AI-generated essays are...okay. Like, the writing itself is okay, but I could do better with some time. Plus, AI-generated essays don't really flow the same way a good writer does. And between the two, Claude does a better job at achieving flow than ChatGPT in my experience (over the last month).
To directly address the essay, nah: the masses aren't manipulated, at least by nefarious political actors. They manipulate themselves to be susceptible to weaponization. I mean, how else can a person rationalize being anti-vaccine and anti-mask as healthy during a pandemic? It's illogical, but that's the thing: it's not about thinking. They take what they feel as right and rationalize it second. Everybody does this, but intellectually honest people have some checks and balances, appeals to authorities on the matter being one of them. Those susceptible to weaponized stupidity have closed the distance between their feelings and understanding of reality. That is, their feelings are themselves an epistemology, a way of knowing the world.
So, science, with it's skepticism, is nonsense. It can't be that hard to know that the earth is round and flat and that the sun is only a few thousand miles above rather than 93 million miles away. It can't be that hard to know that only two genders exist. No more, and no less. It's obvious. And it's definitely obvious that freedom and liberty are concerned with the individual capacity to act. Limitations on whatever a person wants to do is evidently tyranny, by definition.
And many people believe these things (to the extent that they've thought about anything at all) before they're exposed to weaponized stupidity. That is, they're stupid before they're weaponized. It's only a matter of weaponizing that stupidity, not really crafting and molding it..