Selective filtering to propagate a narrative is a well known technique to deceive. Appeal to experts, rather than the tedious and unassailable process of reproducible evidence and rigorous tested reason, is weak and tenuous as a substitute for independent thought. Experts are usually more adept at collecting and evaluation, but tend to make the largest errors due to sunk cost fallacy. It is hard d to turn a large institutional groupthink error from the cliff edge.

I agree that he was wise in speaking the words of the speech Tony is referring to here. Unfortunately, that wisdom did not include disbanding, or at least bringing to heel, the intelligence agencies of the FBI and especially the CIA which by his time in office had formed a shadow government. Watch a video lecture by an ex-CIA employee named Kevin Shipp in which he clearly delineates how all of these intelligence agencies had formed a shadow government by 1960, even though the CIA had only been created just after World War II by President Truman, who later expressed regret at having created that agency because they had gone way beyond the mandate for which he created it, which was essentially simply to advise the president on intelligence matters.

Eisenhower was wise before his time. What would he have to say today? Would people listen to him, I suspect not. The edge of the cliff is the way the human race is heading.