Propaganda & Lies

This Article is Not Paid for by the Department of Defense

One of the most fun websites you can visit if you’re into politics and giving yourself high blood pressure is USASpending.gov. It’s an online portal into the depravity of what your tax money funds. Perhaps the most interesting case today (no doubt they’ll be a bigger, badder one tomorrow) is Reuters, a news service and one that up until recently had enjoyed a reputation of being, well, slightly more honest than Senator Liz Warren trying to get a job at Harvard.

Learn These Acronyms: LSD and ASED

Do you know what the abbreviations LSD and ASED stand for? No, not the drug. LSD stands for “large-scale social deception” and ASED stands for “Active Social Engineering Defense.” The USASpending.gov and other grant sites have abbreviations for these clumsy phrases because they’re used so often.

From 2018 to 2022, the Department of Defense (DoD) paid Reuters—an alleged “news service”—$9M. Why would the Pentagon be shoveling millions to a news service? Reuters was paid for LSD and ASED which basically means using their alleged “news” platform to spread propaganda. (A curious thing is that the documentation about this $9M grant said it “includes COVID spending” although the grant was issued pre-COVID… but that’s another story for another day.)

So if you’ve wondered why things don’t make sense—how a senile old coot won the White House in 2020, how an Indian woman became a Black vice presidential candidate, how the COVID vax had to be given to children who were at virtually no risk for the virus, how our borders were always closed, why crime is low, and why trans-ing little kids is a helpful thing to do—well, Reuters took money to tell you those stories. By stories I mean lies.

I suspect that if Reuters got $9M, there were handsome payouts to the other news services as well. After all, Reuters isn’t the biggest such news agency in the country. As a matter of fact, at the moment I write this, I heard rumblings that the Associated Press (AP) got an even bigger handout to tell us stories.

Now if this were a court case and I paid somebody to get on the stand and lie for me, that would be a crime. But it’s not a crime when the government pays news outlets to lie to the people in order to advance the government’s causes or hide the government’s many transgressions.

This explains why the news people on the mainstream side all repeat the same dorky talking points. Right now, it’s “Constitutional crisis.” In the past, it was “climate change is an existential threat” and before that “Trump is a threat to democracy.” And remember how “January 6 was the worst something or other in human history.” One rather foolish person on X remarked that January 6 was the worst event in American history since the Holocaust. I guess you don’t have to be smart to be a propagandist, just obedient.

Now we know for sure what we only once suspected: the media gets money to say specific things.

The alarming thing to me here is that this was funded by the DoD. The job of the DoD is not to spread propaganda, particularly not in peacetime and not in the home country. The DoD is to responsible for providing us with a powerful, lethal, cohesive military force to protect our country. No one told them to start paying talking heads to say moronic stuff.

But it does explain why so many people on mainstream media are willing to sound like morons. Listen to the people on The View or Morning Joe or listen to Rachel Maddow. They’ll lie and make fools of themselves, probably because it pays well.

The Villain Here is Barack Obama

The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 (SMA) was modernized in 2012 under Barack Obama into the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act. This sounds boring but it’s important.

The original 1948 SMA law helped to set up Voice of America and Radio-Free Europe and other entities to share propaganda to foreign countries. This was right after World War II and, for some reason, we wanted to spread propaganda during the rebuilding of Europe and Japan. The original 1948 SMA law limited the use of propaganda and other fiction-telling to foreign nations. We could lie to them, just not to each other.

Then along came Barack Obama. In 2012, he signed a National Defense Authorization Act, which was one of those jumbo bills that nobody reads. Even the name can put you to sleep. Well, one of the things nobody read was the fact that this 2012 law repealed the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948. You would think that would be a good thing, getting out of the propaganda business. But, no, Barack Obama just re-upped on propaganda. The new improved SMA of 2012 expanded the use of propaganda by allowing propaganda to be spread by the United States government to the United States people.

The SMA Modernization Act doesn’t have a slogan, but if it did, it would be: Lies by the government, for the government. Barack Obama said he was going to be the most transparent president ever but instead he expanded the use of propaganda. Then again, he also said if you like your health insurance, you can keep it.

In other words, the U.S. government can now lie to the people— officially, legally, and with governmental blessings and the puerile impunity only a career bureaucrat could muster.

The Complicit Press

In order to spread propaganda, you need a willing and compliant press. I guess that’s where the $9M comes in for Reuters. It means the government can write news stories (published under non-government by-lines), choreograph news shows, script opinion pieces, and state what may and may not be reported in the news (and how what is allowed to be reported must be contextualized).

Of course, the crack research staff at Ricochet Cafe can’t prove they’re doing this (there’s just one of us here on the Research staff and we’re going to lunch soon), but we can prove that propaganda by the government to American citizens is not just legal, it’s funded. It pays. Makes me think that The View is a bunch of dreary old ladies who hate each other but are paid to spew talking points against Trump.

Under this new law, reporters can legally and ethically report what they’re told to report.

• Trump is a Russian agent

• Trump is senile but Biden is sharp as a tack

• The Hunter Biden laptop has all the “earmarks” of Russian disinformation

• Biden is so energetic that Karine Jean-Pierre couldn’t keep up with him

• Trump called our military men and women “suckers and losers”

• Melania wants a divorce and, besides, Jill is so much more elegant and beautiful

• There is no lawfare, Trump was fairly convicted on reasonable charges

• The border is closed, Kamala did a great job securing the border

• The economy was perfect and booming under Biden

• Biden was an orator on par with Churchill

• Trump smells bad (one of the Penn & Teller guys said this—the tall one. The one who talks)

• Biden doesn’t grope little girls on camera, he’s just friendly

Unlike doctors who write medical papers and must disclose any payments they receive from pharmaceutical companies or other healthcare businesses, the press has no obligation to disclose their governmental pay-offs. If Rachel Maddow is taking government payouts directly or indirectly through MSNBC, she doesn’t have to tell us.

Those kooks who favor the SMA Modernization Act of 2012 will argue that it advances national security, makes us a more harmonious nation, defends truth, and protects the public from misinformation and disinformation.

Miss Information

I think there should be an annual competition for the female journalist who spreads the most lies. Let’s call it “Miss Information.” My favorite candidate so far is Whoopi Goldberg, but the year is still young.

You know the difference between misinformation and disinformation? According to Encyclopedia Brittanica, these two newly minted terms apply to saying or writing something “wrong” intentionally (disinformation) versus accidentally (misinformation). It’s a matter of intent. If I yell “snake!” when there is no snake, it’s misinformation if I believed there really was a snake—but it’s disinformation if I knew there wasn’t a snake and I just wanted to scare you. The subtle distinction of intent is hard to prove. For instance, when 51 intelligence officers signed off that Trump was working in cahoots with Russia, was it misinformation? Did they all just get something wrong but have pure hearts? Or was it disinformation, in that they knew it was wrong and did it to harm Trump?

The real power of the SMA Modernization law of 2012 is not so much that Rachel Maddow is going to put on her gargantuan eyeglasses, stare painfully into the camera lens, and tell us some lies—we know that is what she does—it’s that she is freed from any and all constraints in her duplicity. She can lie to us knowingly, and it’s legal. She may even think it’s ethical, you know, for the good of the country. She can leave the studio and go to a bar and have a drink with Anderson Cooper, laughing about the lies they just old on the air.

It’s why the mainstream media have to be the fact-checkers: the facts are what they say they are. Journalists are paid to lie. They can win Pulitzer prizes, have high-paying fancy jobs, fat expense accounts, and carry White House press passes, all while being nothing more than paid liars and who spread falsehoods with malice aforethought.

But if you research this on your own, you likely won’t find it unless you look for “Smith Mundt.” (The search engines are in on the scam and hide truth as best they can.) If you look up websites about Barack Obama’s use of propaganda, you’ll be assured by the fact-checking sites that that isn’t true at all. He was the most transparent president ever! He is truth personified and the greatest president ever.

Which is exactly what they are paid to say.

The Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review

No, it’s not another drag show. Its a pseudo-scholarly publication that claims to seek articles by “journalists, technologists, policymakers, educators, and other practitioners working the information, media, and platform landscape.” They say they give priority to article submission written with “real-world implications.” They welcome articles on scientific misinformation although they do not welcome articles by scientists. Hmmm.

They’re funded by a bunch of people who were part of USAID, so it’s hard to say if they’re still in business. Elain Schuster and the Schuster Media and Technology Endowment Fund give a lot of money to the Misinformation Review. They give enough that they get a special mention on the website. The Schusters are pretty cozy with the Clinton Global Initiative, so you know the kind of people they are.

The purpose of the Misinformation Review is to expose mendacity in media and social media and open our minds to the truth. Naturally, they know what truth is.

In order to measure something, you need a reliable instrument—a yardstick, a light meter, a pressure gauge, a scale, or something similar. So what is the measuring stick for truth? Right now, many media outlets would have you believe they KNOW what is true and therefore can judge what is misinformation and what is disinformation. You don’t need a yardstick, you just ask them. (And since motive and intent are so crucial to the alleged identification of misinformation and disinformation, these fact-checkers measure truth not by any sort of objective measure—truth is a feeling. It’s what they like. Disinformation is what they don’t like. This is why they sound insane when they talk.)

Let’s harken back to the Italian Renaissance and a guy named Galileo who invented the telescope, with which he conducted considerable work plotting maps of the planets, the moon, and the stars in the heavens. Being a very smart man, Galileo soon realized that his observations on planetary motion only made sense if the earth orbited around the sun. However, Galileo lived during a time of very limited understanding of celestial mechanics. The Renaissance authorities—who had great taste in painting, by the way— maintained with all the authority of the academy, the scholars, the government, and the church that the truth was this and only this: the sun orbited around the earth.

Galileo could prove it was the other way around, but he had to do it with math and charts and boring things. He had to call on science and observation and reason. People preferred to accept the prevailing narrative, which was that the earth was stationary, the sun traveled around the earth, and everything else was disinformation. So they sent Galileo to the Fact Checkers, which in those days were the guys who worked in the torture chambers of the palace dungeons. Galileo was incarcerated and tortured. Modern-day fact-checkers yearn for this sort of system today.

Irony can be so ironic. Galileo turned out to be right. The wheels of science, like the wheels of justice, grind slowly but eventually everyone came to realize that Galileo was right. Too bad they tortured him, locked him up, and ruined his life.

The point is that proclaiming oneself to be an arbiter of truth versus disinformation with no measuring stick other than being told to promote a specific narrative is rather like building the Tower of Babel and asking everyone to call you Nimrod.

In science, medicine, and many other things, what we know now is not necessarily the same as what we will know tomorrow and neither of them may be the whole truth. We know what we know at this point in time. The best we can do is study, learn, debate, and clearly state what we know to the best of our knowledge and try to gather and apply more evidence.. Early human beings assumed the earth stood still while the sun circled around it. That belief was comforting, seemed true, and was widely accepted. It wasn’t until people like Galileo challenged the status quo that knowledge increased.

Yet to the disinformation police, challenging the status quo is a crime. It’s an insult, it’s a threat to democracy, it’s unconstitutional, it’s malevolent, it’s evil.

The prophet Isaiah was onto something when he wrote, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.” This pronouncement plays out in many different ways, but we see it right now in the alleged journalists who look at truth, take a bag of cash, and lie to our faces.

Galileo was a conspiracy theorist, but he ended up being right. Noah was a conspiracy theorist, until it started to rain. And right now, conspiracy theorists are saying there are huge portions of our government which are operating like a criminal cartel and laundering our tax dollars back into their own pockets. The mainstream media are howling that these investigations are a threat to our democracy and that the leader of this investigation, Elon Musk, is an “unelected bureaucrat” and a “billionaire” (as if these are bad things), but what they’re really worried about is that like the Tower of Babel, this is all going to come crashing down.

Disclaimer

I take no money from the DoD to write these stories. I wouldn’t take it even if they offered it, but the truth is, no one offered it.