There's an incident I heard about at the time: a Belgian (Danish? Dutch? I don't remember exactly) dredging company offered to lend dredging ships, got a "no thanks," and went to their local press to blame it on the Jones Act, which is protectionist legislation that requires only using American-made ships unless the President grants an exception. It got picked up by the conservative blogosphere, made it to conservative TV as a "look at how pro-union legislation hampers our emergency response and destroys our environment, and how Obama doesn't really care because otherwise he would have granted an exemption" and then got responded to by administration officials and at about this point I stopped paying attention.

So, there's a way to have factual support for that position, but it's obviously unclear whether or not they had that in mind.

How do we model for people whose cultural contexts and information delivering authorities are fundamentally different from our own, without lumping them into a faceless group?

A giant question mark. Don't try to extend your beliefs to cover as much as possible but as little as you can defend.