And we skeptics have already agreed that this phenomenon occurs.
The problem we have is that HMW takes it to such an absurd extreme that it either 1)makes it easier to dismiss the phenomenon entirely; or 2) leads adherents to HMWs surmises to belief in a mind-bogglingly detailed micromanagement of perceptions that requires omnipotent, omniscient control that would be at least an order of magnitude greater than the historic examples of secret agencies in totalitarian states like the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic.
It has to be a much more arduous and expensive task to generate HMWs hypothesis of ultra-detailed degrees of smokescreen media control than it is to simply censor, which has been the primary technique of media control in totalitarian states.
Consider how ludicrously extreme some of HMWs examples are- how detailed and unwieldy the means must be, even as the conjectured ends that they serve becomes more and more generalized and nebulous. Although he's never actually detailed the means specifically, preferring to repeat dark warnings about how none of the skeptics realize how much "Behavioral Science" has advanced over the last 50 years; i.e. if one doesn't share his dire perceptions, they've been duped- if, that is, they aren't active agents of the Conspiracy themselves.
You want an authentic "keyword hijack" example? The term DRUGS. I've been aware of that for around 35 years. The cultural-political hegemonic status quo performs the contextual legedermain which exploits the inherent ambiguity of general term "drugs" to lump all sorts of disparate substances together, regardless of their effects and hazards, to villainize the word in one context, and to use it benignly in another.
No consciously managed plot is necessary. All that's required is acceptance of the ground rules, and a media social consensus that declines to ever challenge them.
Don't get me wrong- there's obviously a lot of power holding that status quo in place. But it isn't done through directives from some conjectured CIA Office of Subliminal Perception Management, in order to enforce its dictates.
And the "keyword hijacking" of the term "drugs" doesn't work at all to channel perceptions in the sort of narrowly delineated ways that HMW avers in relation to the phenomenon. It serves as an example of how people are led to conform their thoughts to a contextual status quo arbitrarily imposed by Authority, rather than as an exploitation of some supposedly predictable reaction to the term itself.
Otherwise, presumably most everyone would have cleaned out their medicine cabinets by now, no?
