The Things They Sold Us

This playlist isn’t just background music ... at least not for me... it’s part memory. These are the songs I was listening to when I first started questioning everything. Rock Against Bush, protest anthems, loud declarations from bands that felt like they were yelling the things no one else would say.

I found this through a friend... printed it off the family printer, and read it over and over. It wasn’t polished or balanced. It didn’t pretend to be neutral. It was angry and sarcastic, but it was also the first thing I’d ever read that flat-out said... something’s wrong here.

Dan Berman breaks down the Bush administration’s lead-up to the Iraq War using a mix of historical reference, personal outrage, and satire. It’s part essay, part rant, and part early-2000s internet zine. He outlines a 10-step plan for manufacturing war, compares media complicity to propaganda, and draws parallels to empires and regimes past. Some of it’s messy.

This was the first time I really questioned what I’d been told. The first time I realized someone could say these things out loud... online.

The original site is gone now. But this archived version still exists. And I think it still says something.

Robert McNamara, one of the architects of American military power in the 20th century, sits alone and walks us through decisions that cost millions of lives. It’s not quite an apology. It’s something stranger.. measured, conflicted.

The storytelling is masterful, but what stuck with me was the cold clarity... how methodical, how strategic, how normal the cruelty became. Watching this felt like peeling back the idea of America as the “good guy” and seeing just how often that story has been self-written.

I haven’t read all of this book... but the parts I have read stayed with me. A People’s History doesn’t tell the story we’re taught in school. It tells the one underneath... the voices left out, the costs hidden behind flags, and the patterns of power that repeat again and again.

The stories it reveals about war, labor, racism, protest don’t just reframe history. They reframe your place in it. Reading even a few chapters made me realize how much I’d accepted without ever asking where that version came from. It’s not a comfortable read. But it’s one of the first things that made me understand that discomfort isn’t something to avoid it’s something to listen to.

This film looks at how deeply the military-industrial complex is embedded into the fabric of American life through policy, economics, media, and even identity.

It made the idea of endless war feel less like a theory and more like a business plan we’ve all been quietly funding. Watching it made me realize how normalized that cycle has become.