Title: Ministry of Truth, or of Propaganda?
Original CoS Document (slug): tx-ministry-of-truth-or-of-propaganda
Login Required to view? No
Created: 2022-06-12 00:06:56
Updated: 2022-06-20 03:00:01
Published: 2022-06-13 02:00:00
Converted: 2025-04-14T21:17:39.981862050
Propaganda in the United States has become a major concern. In fact, it has become a downright problem. But from all appearances, it's about to get worse.
During World War II, the United States was constantly aware of the danger of bad information in the right place, and good information in the wrong place. Thus such quips as, “A slip of the lip can sink a ship,” and many others were common.
But in the media of the time, it was necessary to boost the morale of the people while not making everything seem better on the war fronts than it really was. At the same time, sensitive information, such as number of troops in North Africa for instance, absolutely had to remain secret. This required government-run censorship of all communications going back and forth across the seas. See the wartime army training film Resisting Enemy Interrogation from 1944 for an example of how information can be used to break one's effective resistance and cost lives.
Censorship was common and people would receive letters from loved ones with snippets of information cut out of the letter.
But the censorship was done to protect America and the American people and spirit. Furthermore, it was limited to sensitive wartime information, not the telling of local broadcasters, media, and Hollywood what to say in order to alter the people's beliefs to align with what Washington wanted them to believe. There were too many independent, locally-run networks to have made that even possible. It is a sad commentary on today's mainstream media that it has lost all local identity and appropriateness by allowing itself to become centralized.
But today, censorship on public spaces such as Facebook and Twitter, Fake News, and dis-, mis-, and mal-information are terms that have become as common as expecting the sun to rise in the morning.
In 1948, the Smith-Mundt Act was signed into law by then-President Harry S. Truman (the constitutional way of making law, by the way, not by executive order).
But on July 2, 2013, a new reform, passed in January, was implemented. This “reform” allowed thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs to be broadcast for the American people.
Until this time, this U.S. programming produced by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks had only been allowed outside of the U.S. Though varying in tone and quality, it was being viewed in more than 100 countries in 61 languages.
These restrictions were the result of the Smith-Mundt Act whose original purpose was to regulate broadcasting of programs for foreign audiences produced under the guidance of the State Department, and it prohibited domestic dissemination of materials produced by such programs as one of its provisions.
This Act was amended several times, including by Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky in 1985. Zorinsky argued that such “propaganda” should be kept out of America as to distinguish the U.S. “from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity.”
Zorinsky sold his amendment to Congress and it was passed because they upheld the principal that American taxpayers shouldn't be funding propaganda to be fed to themselves; propaganda that is meant to tell Americans what to think.
The elitists tell Americans that the people are not smart enough to know the truth, so the government must tell us what truth we are to believe. They say this with their mouth while performing sleight of hand actions in a carefully concealed way. They do this because they are afraid we will see right through what they are actually trying to get us to believe. In other words, they know we are intelligent enough to know what's best for ourselves and they're afraid of this intelligence.
At this juncture, enter Biden's “Disinformation Governance Board.” It is so bad, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (a Democrat from Hawaii) nicknamed it the Orwellian “Ministry of Truth”.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has admitted that this new board will censor “disinformation and misinformation” ahead of the midterm election.
Unfortunately, the new head of this board, Michael Chertoff, has a rather concerning history when it comes to human rights abuses. Chertoff was a clerk under the judicial activist, Democrat Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr., later the U.S. Attorney General in New Jersey, and was also a principle author of the Patriot Act, which has done tremendous damage to Americans in privacy abuses. In fact, sections of the Patriot Act have been ruled unconstitutional and were later struck down by several different judges.
At a recent World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting, Australia's “eSafety Commissioner” Julie Inman Grant, previously working as a U.S. congressional staffer and then for Bill Gates, said, “Everything feels binary when it doesn't need to be. So I think we're going to have to think about a recalibration of a whole range of human rights that are playing out online, from freedom of speech. …”
She continued by discussing “online violence,” “data protection,” and “child dignity.” Online violence? Whatever happened to “sticks and stones?” And who is to decide what a conscience may or may not say?
Do we still have our First Amendment Right of freedom of the press, or don't we? Well, we still have the right, but we may not keep the freedom to exercise that right if this Disinformation Governance Board is allowed to get up and running.
From the censorship of doctors who were willing to put their practices and livelihoods on the line to speak out on the Covid issue, to the claims that parents addressing school boards were terrorists, to censorship and disappearing posts and videos that “someone” disagreed with, where is our free speech going?
The history of such boards (think China, the Soviet Union, Pakistan, etc.) has always been one of suppression of the truth. Even if a post is incorrect, or someone's speech is based on faulty information, this should be discussed in adult-style discourse and thus the truth be revealed. Every time something is hidden, someone asks why, and fear and mistrust find the perfect soil in which to germinate.
We want locally-driven free speech so that we can learn what we believe based upon our own observations. When we want blinders, we will ask the government for them.
Convention of States is a grassroots organization whose purpose is to constitutionally bring the power back to the people and states respectively by limiting the power of the federal government. Based upon Article V in the Constitution, our purpose is to call a Convention of States, based on historical precedence, where the states will propose and adopt amendments to the Constitution intended to rein in the feds.
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