The term "propaganda" derives from Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, which means Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. It emerged in the 1620s as a tool of the Catholic Church to disseminate information defending the Catholic faith against the Reformation. In the 1790s, England saw the emergence of propaganda in a political context, which acquired negative connotations. In the modern context, we typically associate propaganda with information that has a hostile political bent and malicious intent to mislead its consumers.
Passed in the shadow of World War II, the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 was a law created to permit the United States to deploy foreign propaganda against a burgeoning Soviet Union while protecting the American public from the reach of this information. The propaganda was produced by the United States Department of State, disseminated by CIA publishers such as Radio Free Europe, and closely regulated to preserve truth and the minds of Americans. It is no surprise that in the infancy of President Donald Trump's second administration, his first target for reform was the State Department, where both of Trump's impeachments found their origins. His former opponent, Hillary Clinton, after all, was the secretary of State during a majority of the Barack Obama administration, and he was intimately familiar with the apparatus that she would deploy in the Russiagate scandal to undermine and stymie the first Trump administration.
It was during this same period that the United States Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which reversed the decades-old policy of prohibiting this propaganda content domestically within the United States. Though Congress openly suggests that it does not promote the broadcast of this information, it allows domestic publishers to request and then broadcast it domestically. You won't find this content on your local Radio Free Europe syndicate, but you well may find it on NPR or PBS, or even redistributed by corporate and cable broadcasters such as ABC, CBS, and NBC. This subversive workaround has exposed the American public to a range of insidious untruths and half-truths, ultimately dividing a once unified nation sharply.
Think back to September 12, 2001, and how unified America was in its patriotic fervor and resolve. You likely held friendships and familial relationships with people who felt very differently about any number of current affairs. However, you were Americans first and still broke bread around the Thanksgiving table with joy and gratitude. That is why it strikes at the heart of America, at the polarization on display when a young man like Charlie Kirk, full of youth, vigor, a sound mind, and a heart for conversation, is struck down in front of an audience of millions. By this point, we are all intimately familiar with the dichotomy of extreme sorrow for our nation on one side and the jubilation on the other that has seen thousands announce their utter lack of humanity in the face of this tragedy.
Many will say that this divide originates with the first administration of Donald Trump and his mean words, but Google Trends tells a different story. Google Trends tracks internet traffic dating to 2004, and it is during the first campaign of then-candidate Barack Obama that we begin to see a sharp rise in the American dialogue painting the right wing of America as Nazis, fascists, Hitler, racists, etc. Then, during the 2016 presidential campaign cycle, we began to see this language amplified. It is when the mainstream corporate press adopted this vitriolic language that we began to see an increase in the amount of political violence. This vitriol culminated in then-president Joe Biden's Reichstag speech denouncing the right wing as the enemy of the United States, in front of Independence Hall, against a blood-red backdrop.
With several notable social movements of the late 2020s, such as MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and LGBTQ+, the public has been treated to battle cries suggesting that women no longer control their bodies, minorities are being hunted in the streets, and the LGBT community faces genocide. These ideas don't stem from the mainstream press, but ideas that were sewn in backchannel forums and conversations are validated and take root when propagated by leftist mouthpieces in politics and the corporate press. What we are left with is small, dispersed, but violent communities fighting fictional civil rights movements between their ears.
The danger in the mainstream press affirming these messages lies not just in the socially isolated schoolroom shooter, but also in your grandparents’ home. Imagine living sixty-five years and gleaning your understanding of the world from trusted sources, and then, in 2012, the trusted sources begin to adopt inciting rhetoric, and you are left believing that this is an accurate worldview. That is precisely what we have begun to see with forty thousand–plus teachers, doctors, and public-facing employees announcing their elation at the demise of their tormentor, who dared to sit down and discuss political differences with them.
Restoring the Smith-Mundt Act is not a panacea for a decade of damage inflicted on the psyches of the American public. Still, without a thorough review of when and where we went wrong in little more than a decade, we cannot hope to return to our collective sanity. This is an important step in restoring truth to a confused and anxiety-riddled population.
