Every conspiracy theory out there seems to revolve around the concept of psychological operations, and they're at least as right as a stopped clock. The problem I see with them is that when a military tactic gets used against civilians, it would seem to make a kinetic response both justified and ethical. This idea that deception is somehow more ethical or acceptable than violence or the threat of it is itself, a psychological operation with real and negative consequences. I get that we're all trained to reject violence and co-ordinate to use shame against anyone who doesn't proclaim that enthusiastically enough, but if an organization or movement uses covert military tactics to dissolve or fabricate norms that result in militarily strategic political and economic outcomes, the unintended consequence is it may morally justify a kinetic repsponse as proportional.
An example of this is the news out of the UK that they used "totalitarian tactics" (their own words) during covid to shut down the entire economy and wipe out a lot of small businesses, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/14/scientists-admit...
Arguably, a commensurate and proportional response to using psychological operations to destroy the livelihoods of perhaps millions of small business owners would at the very least be a traditional pillorying, if not something more severe. In radically eschewing the idea of violence (even including words and silence in its current definition), we've had the effect of normalizing deception to the point that we're completely destroying trust in institutions, and increasingly, each other, where all the minor incidents of violence that didn't happen because of organized deception now risk all happening at once.
Sure, do psyops against the Enemy, but when you turn them on civilians, it's worth considering you have to live with the people you use them on, and they have long memories.