Leadership Quote by John McCarthy

Six hops is all it takes to turn truth into ventriloquism. McCarthy’s line isn’t really about pedants nitpicking footnotes; it’s a warning about how power moves through language once it leaves its original mouth. The specificity of “six levels” gives the claim a quasi-scientific chill, like a rule of physics for propaganda: distortion isn’t an accident, it’s a predictable outcome of repetition under incentives.

The intent reads as defensive and offensive at once. Defensive, because politicians live inside quotation marks; a single clipped phrase can become a cudgel, and McCarthy signals he knows the game. Offensive, because the quote quietly indicts the entire media-activist-opposition ecosystem: a chain where each retelling adds a tiny editorial tilt until the meaning collapses and the new version serves someone else’s agenda. It’s not just “people misunderstand.” It’s “people can make you say anything,” which turns public discourse into a battlefield over attribution rather than argument.

Subtext: misinformation doesn’t require a grand conspiracy. It can be an emergent property of motivated summarizing: a staffer paraphrases, a reporter compresses, an opponent weaponizes, an algorithm rewards the spiciest version, and suddenly you’re defending a sentence you never spoke. The quote works because it’s compact enough to be repeatable while implicating the act of repetition itself.

Contextually, it lands in an era where secondhand quotes travel faster than primary sources, and where “context” is treated as optional metadata. McCarthy is pointing to a brutal asymmetry: correction is slow; misquotation is frictionless.