> isn't the fastest way to a failed state to have people believe that their security agencies are good and proper when in reality they aren't?
No, but it used to be.
The fastest way right now is propaganda.
I'm not sure when the transition happened exactly, given we've had smartphones and social media lies going around the world before fact checkers wake up (even a while back there were questions about if some violence or other was the same country or year), but right now any group with convenient access to a suitable AI can do something that passes well enough to fool a sufficient number of people to break everything.
This means that even if all the current stuff dies down in the USA, you can't go back to the old status quo. Free speech is really important (and not just for the public to take down the powerful, even the powerful themselves benefit from it to not become emperors who wear no clothes), but it's also extremely easy to exploit, and you can't even just rely on people learning to distrust certain sources as you have already started fighting over which sources to trust and fighting over the ability of anyone to say "${foo} is an untrustworthy source".
