I think you got to the crux of it already, you have been in and out of the US your whole life. Most of us haven't, and so the US and it's hegemonic media and ideology were the world to us.

I came of age during the Bush era as a liberal, so I was intensely skeptical of invasions and the vague concept of "war". But I didn't really understand color revolutions or using proxies to carry out US interests. The last time I think I supported regime change was during the protests in Iran in 2009. Social media existed but it was mostly used for trying to hit on girls and find new bands to listen to. For information, I'd watch tv. I trusted Jon Stewart especially. I mean, he was against Bush and his oil wars, right? He was telling me how awful Iran was, and how they executed gay people and the people wanted to live like us but the evil islamist Government wouldn't let them.

Obviously there was pushback on that narrative, but I didn't see it. They weren't pushing back on the news, celebrities weren't pushing back, and even the punk bands I liked weren't saying anything against it. Besides, it's not like Obama was going to send troops, and if he did I would've been against it. I had been to protests as a young teen and to see people protesting a government that does actually do some bad stuff, I thought of course I'd support them. I didn't know anything about the protestors, and what they wanted to accomplish. For years I went on just accepting that the Iranian government was "bad" and the protesters had been "good".

This changed in 2014 with the Euromaidan in Ukraine. I was no longer a teenager and had been exposed to alternative media via the internet, even if I didn't pay too much attention to events abroad. I understood that liberal media was owned by corporations, and I knew Democrats weren't good. My family lost their house to the bank that got bailed out by Obama, and my mother died of cancer after slipping through the cracks of Obamacare. I was skeptical of power and anyone with money.

I would watch these protests, and at first they seemed like heroes. They were fighting to be closer to Europe instead of "authoritarian" Russia. But I noticed something. A lot of the protestors looked like neonazis that we would chase away from punk shows here in the US. Next to the Ukrainian and EU flags were these red and black flags with some guys face on them. I wondered who this dude was, and looked it up. It was Stepan Bandera. These guys were everywhere in that crowd and yet the liberal media didn't say one thing about people waving around a holocaust collaborator. Why weren't they mentioning this? Even Vice would just kind of brush it off like it was no big deal. That right there got me to look into regime change ops, and now I'm here.

Ps, I left out the Arab Spring because I was addicted to pills during that time and didn't pay attention to anything except getting high and getting money lol. I learned about that after the color revolution in Ukraine. Also, I want to add that the only reasons I changed my view is that my life was destroyed under a Democrat president, and I had the unique experience with neonazis by chasing them away at punk shows. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have been skeptical and would've thought the Banderites were just freedom fighters.

For those of you who were liberals, why did you repeatedly fall victim to regime change propaganda?

I wasn't old enough to vote until it became abundantly clear that the Iraq invasion/occupation was a complete shitshow. I only ever "fell for it" when I was a kid who passively absorbed the early post-9/11 insanity. When I've brought up drone strikes in Yemen and Libya to my gen X parents (in order to criticize Obama and Biden), or otherwise criticized US imperialism, they would fall back on excuses rooted in the kill-or-be-killed logic of Hobbesian geopolitics.

Liberals interpret "our troops keep us safe" not necessarily as the US military safeguarding American capitalist interests, but instead may genuinely believe that if the US didn't commit atrocities across the globe and maintain the largest military in the world by a wide margin, that other countries would attack, colonize, and oppress us the same way our government has to their peoples. Fictional stories featuring the US military written for US audiences tend to construct nightmare fantasy scenarios like this a lot - think back to all those times Jack Bauer just happens to prevent terrorists from bombing innocent civilians because he got his hands dirty and tortured enemy captives - and the average class-unconscious liberal will simply interpret those premises as realistic, with the conclusions (the US military as an institution can do no wrong; war crimes like torture can occasionally be justified; etc.) following smoothly from the misleading framing.

Put simply, US liberals fall for this kind of shit not only because of corporate news media pulling tricks like claiming "whataboutism" and human rights concern trolling, but through a combination of this nonfiction propaganda and fiction propaganda which helps civilians fill in the blanks, ridiculous stories in TV shows like 24 or the storylines of most Call of Duty games which say the quiet part louder and aggravate fears of imperialist boogeymen introduced through nonfiction propaganda. I can think of no other way that so many liberals went from being outraged about Abu Ghraib to calling you a Russian troll for daring to call out Obama for droning civilians overseas and pretending they were enemy combatants to cover his ass: seeing heroic characters like Jack Bauer, Jack Ryan, James Bond, Nolan's Batman, or MCU Iron Man do or co-sign similarly grisly shit and be presented as in the right for doing so.

As someone from the Midwestern US born in the late 80s, I can try to offer my perspective, looking back. I can elaborate on much of this, but I’m trying to be somewhat brief.

A) I came from a reasonably comfortable background, so there was no pressing need to be more political than voting for “the good one” every so often. So you don’t need to look into anything really, because your country is seemingly OK and that other stuff doesn’t really affect you in a tangible way. We simply don’t care, except maybe in like an Instagram “raising awareness” sort of way, at best.

B) People from the US have an incredibly warped sense of history, if they have one at all. This encompasses all time frames, from forgetting lies or “inconsistencies” you were told relatively recently, to straight up not knowing world history except for some “western tradition” stuff that the US incorporated into its self image (Greek democracy, enlightenment, etc). We simply don’t know, and don’t care enough to find out.

C) Conservatives have a monopoly on questioning mainstream news. It’s part of the culture wars that republicans are the crazy ones who don’t believe what the experts are saying. Our politics only admit two sides, and if you question respectable journalists (or whatever democrats say) you’re not a good liberal and must be fooled by Republican propaganda.

When I was a liberal, I was really just extremely apolitical and liberal by default. So I don't know if I so much as fell for regime change propaganda as much as understood the world as it was told to me by people I trusted. Like, there wasn't really anything else that I could've believed without putting in the kind of effort that I didn't have the ability to yet, since I had no ability to understand politics. When I saw "regime change propaganda", or, "the news," shared by friends from big American news sources (because I didn't really read the news, just got news from friends) I just sort of trusted it by default because my natural state was not to distrust CNN, etc. It's not like I knew any better, I didn't really know anything, I probably couldn't have even named any non-MSM news source. So I think it was just sort of default like, these are the trustworthy news sources, they're not going to lie, or if they do, it's an honest mistake.

And then I guess once I started to move left, I think the problem with still falling for regime change and other propaganda was that, I guess its like, once I recognized how untrustworthy new sources like CNN could be, well really any news source could be just as untrustworthy. So it took a while to get from generally trusting CNN to now finding news sources that I can trust, and it was a long middle period of being highly distrustful of any news source, MSM or not. And to find news sources I could trust, I first had to build up a political understanding. And for the most part I did that alone because I had no leftist friends or no leftists in my life IRL. So I think that's another problem - fully recognizing the extent of US propaganda and fighting it really puts you at a distance from many of your friends and family. So I think there's a hesitation, or maybe a slowness, in leftists fully recognizing how much of their lives are shaped by propaganda, since it goes against most of what you're taught and its very isolating, especially with the state of the left in the US, especially pre-2015. Which is why sites like this are good!

So, to sum up I suppose, to not fall victim to regime change propaganda, one would need a political understanding that most Americans do not have and is not taught to them, so the two choices are generally trust MSM with all it's flaws (that you might recognize but at the same time say it's better than other sources). Or become highly distrustful of all news sources since you recognize the flaws and lies of MSM, but you haven't developed any political understanding to fight the propaganda, or recognize a trustworthy news source - which creates a very nihilistic. And then to recognize US propaganda can make someone who has grown up with it their whole life feel like they're heading into tin foil hat conspiracy territory, and also make them feel increasingly at odds with friends and family.

Not sure I have too much to add, but when I was an aimless young lib I had maybe an above average understanding of the concept that War Is A Bad Thing from having read some Kurt Vonnegut and stuff in high school. Nevertheless, it was pretty easy to convince me that some supposed dictatorship was starving its people and that war would be better than continuation of that status quo. So I guess my ideology was more like War Is A Bad Thing, But Sometimes Necessary For "Liberation" where my positive examples were like WWII, the American Civil War, and I guess probably the American Revolution. Even growing up with the vague understanding that the Iraq War was some bullshit to get more oil, I still assumed that most of the time the US went in with relatively good intentions, especially when there wasn't an obvious natural resource angle to the intervention. A vague mix of American Exceptionalism, the "Bumbling Empire" media trope (per Citations Needed), and connecting fed media narratives to all those "just war" examples.