Politics & Power Quote by William J. Casey

It lands like a confession, but it’s built to function as a threat: power doesn’t just want to persuade you, it wants to make “truth” itself unusable. The most chilling word here is “complete.” It frames disinformation not as a tactic for a moment of crisis, but as an end-state, a finished architecture. “Program” adds bureaucratic coldness, the insinuation that mass deception can be managed like a budget line, scaled, audited, optimized. And “everything” is the tell of maximal ambition: not nudging opinion, but saturating reality so thoroughly that citizens can’t even locate the baseline from which disagreement becomes meaningful.

The subtext isn’t merely anti-democratic; it’s anti-epistemic. If everything is false, then accountability becomes impossible. Elections, wars, budgets, scandals, “success” itself: all become stories competing on volume and repetition rather than evidence. That’s not just propaganda; it’s the strategic production of helplessness. People who can’t trust any claim, source, or institution don’t become brilliantly skeptical. They become exhausted, cynical, and easier to steer.

Casey’s context matters because the line is most often attributed to him in the Reagan-era intelligence ecosystem, when covert action and narrative management were treated as instruments of statecraft. Whether he said it verbatim is contested, but its persistence is its own cultural fact: Americans recognize the voice of a government that learned the media age’s darkest lesson. You don’t have to win the argument if you can poison the concept of argument.