Given your own charge that other people are mindkilled it's interesting that you see that charge as an insult and not as a factual description.

It is a claim of irrationality; yes, it should be taken as insulting.

I didn't intent to insult, but to state a hypothesis. A hypothesis that I stated with the word "maybe" to mark uncertainty. Don't generalize from one example.

I hypothesize you may be an idiot. (Do you see the issue?)

The opposite of fighting the hypothetical is to avoid critical thinking and not challenge it's assumptions.

Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence. Something can be poor rationality, and its opposite can be poor rationality as well.

The problem with the hypothetical is that it ignores how beliefs in a society actually form. That's a process that's vital to the topic at hand. At a core it assumes that a society has beliefs about a war hold 50 years ago that have nothing to do with propaganda.

No it doesn't. It makes it clear that there's motivated reasoning - and thus propaganda - going on on both sides of the equation.

What does "conspicuous" mean here? That you should treat people as being an enemy tribe? That's tribal thinking.

No. It means there are clear and obvious problems with the article that COULD have been criticized, but weren't, in favor of dumb tribal things to criticize.