GWB didn't strike me as someone who could come up with the idea of prolonged Mideast conflict on his own. The think tanks that infiltrated his mind like the movie Inception is not unlike what is being described in the article. It's tough to accept how impressionable we are regardless of age. Just in tech companies we know salesman get into the ears of leadership and sell them on all sorts of ideas.
Even though Gen Z is under constant assault by Influencers, I think they are probably sharper about spotting it similar to how GenX/Millennials were to crude marketing. They are the generation that can combat this, but at the same time they are also the generation that most likely will perpetuate it.
During the Roman republic the thing that made something like a Ceasar was a standing army. If you had a standing army you had power. Some of these powerful people have standing armies on social media and thus have power over the narrative. It's a few times removed from having men with guns, but it is the same abstraction.