the part of the “conspiracy theory” about CIA funding is completely true: signal proudly say they get funding from the OTF, which at the time signal started was a subsidiary of Radio Free Asia, which started out as an open CIA project (before being relaunched as clearly still a CIA project but without the official acknowledgement).

I’m 50:50 on whether signal is a literal honeypot, but even if not it seems pretty likely that the US government wouldn’t have funded an app that could be used by people breaking its laws - let alone people actively organizing against it (foreign spies, domestic revolutionaries and insurrectionists) unless they were getting something pretty big in return.

Push the overton window to the left by dismantling a century of highly-effective anti-left propaganda. Educate yourself, then other people, on:

1. what “socialism”, “communism”, and “capitalism” truly mean
2. how many labor rights were won by unions (basically of them) vs kindly handed out by cApTaInS oF iNdUsTrY (basically none of them)
3. the US founders’ views on democracy, slavery, and Native Americans

developing basic literacy, media literacy, and critical thinking is also not a bad idea (I don’t mean this as a personal insult; we’re talking about a country where over half the adults are functionally illiterate, 20-30% of voters supported bombing a fictional country, and 42% of voters think the Russian government is communist)

there are many many practical steps to take as well, but it’s hard for me to see any of these leading to lasting change without fixing the (deliberately constructed) mis- and under-education in the USA.