• Watch out for the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act.
By Mark Anderson —
A bill quietly brewing in Congress would create an official “Ministry of Truth” in the federal government. That’s what critics are saying about H.R. 5181—officially named the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016.
Given the United States government’s already dim view of Russia, this bill appears to signal a return to the propaganda wars of the good old days of the U.S. Cold War with Russia. Co-sponsor Representative Adam Daniel Kinzinger (R-Ill.) noted, “As Russia continues to spew its disinformation and false narratives, they undermine the United States and its interests in places like Ukraine.”
Kinzinger, who’s working with co-sponsor, Taiwan-born Representative Ted W. Lieu (D-Calif.) on this bill, helped introduce it because, “the U.S. has a role in countering these destabilizing acts of propaganda.”
But, if passed, the risk is that this legislation will allow American propaganda to even further infiltrate cable, online, and mainstream news outlets whenever the U.S. government deems necessary.
Ironically, Central Intelligence Agency news–infiltration already has been happening for decades under Operation Mockingbird and in other unofficial capacities. Congress’s new bill, should it become law, would only legitimize it.
Besides, big media toe the government line most of the time anyway, especially when it comes to upholding the rationale for the unconstitutional practice of worldwide policing and intervention by the military in a “war on terror.”
All told, pushing a bill to create an official truth ministry would simply cement and intensify the disinformation that’s already flowing in the U.S.
To hear Kinzinger (an Air Force veteran) tell it in his May 11 news release, the U.S. is the citadel of truth amid oceans of deceit: “At a time when countries like Russia and China are engaging in hybrid warfare campaigns, the United States has a unique opportunity to respond to foreign manipulation by encouraging the free flow of truthful information. This can further prevent conflict and ensure future stability.”
His news release added, “The United States needs the proper tools to defend its interests against this type of foreign manipulation and effectively defeat these new and emerging threats, while also utilizing on-the-ground communities who are targeted by these disinformation campaigns.”
The bipartisan House bill is a companion to S.2692 introduced by Senators Robert Jones “Rob” Portman (R-Ohio) and Christopher Scott “Chris” Murphy (D-Conn.).
In early 2014, Murphy spoke at a forum put on by the European Union Delegation to the U.S., praising the trans-Atlantic agenda being developed by Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission, and the Atlantic Council—the main hubs for promoting world governance.
The bill assigns the State Department, of all agencies, to coordinate the bill’s provisions with the director of national intelligence and the obscure Broadcasting Board of Governors to set up a “Center for Information Analysis and Response”—eerily reminiscent of the truth ministry from George Orwell’s 1984. (One has to wonder if Orwell had a time machine; his predictions of the future have been so uncannily accurate.)
Americans must also ask whether this country needs yet another costly bureaucracy, especially when the government has plenty of existing agencies and resources to counter those relatively rare real threats that sometimes emerge.
Moreover, such a ministry would run the risk of further distorting the already untrustworthy reporting that often flows from most U.S. media.
Mark Anderson covers the annual Bilderberg meetings and is chairman of AFP’s new America First Action Committee, designed to involve AFP readers in focusing intensely on Congress to enact key changes, including monetary reform and a pullback of the warfare state. He and his wife Angie often work together on news projects.
U.S. Government Effectively Scares Dissenters Into Silence
By Victor Thorn
Nearly 70 years ago in a fiction novel entitled 1984, George Orwell introduced concepts such as “newspeak,” “thought police,” and “doublethink.” Today, President Barack Hussein Obama’s Big Brother-style government and Congress’s proposed “Ministry of Truth” has pushed propaganda and historical manipulation to new totalitarian heights.
With Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals author Saul Alinsky as his role model and social engineer Cass Sunstein by his side, Obama’s “Ministry of Plenty” (otherwise known as the Bureau of Labor Statistics) regularly distorts employment numbers to conceal his abysmal economic record.
Emigrate While You Still Can! Learn More . . .
With this sentiment in mind, on June 7 this reporter interviewed Anna Kroyman.
Speaking about Internal Revenue Service (IRS) harassment of conservative groups that transpired before the 2012 presidential election, Kroyman began: “We took down our website because we were afraid of being targeted. Plenty of other groups did, too. In 2010, Indiana had 94 tea party groups. Today, only four of them still remain.”
When it comes to the IRS, Kroyman stated: “It’s the same technique used by the IRS. First the administration lies about targeting certain groups or individuals, and then later they get caught. This week the government released the names of 426 different conservative, tea party, and religious groups that had been illegally scrutinized by the IRS.”
Kroyman continued. “It was all preplanned, and orders came straight from inside the White House. None of these departments does anything this drastic without White House approval. Believe me, the people in Obama’s inner circle have read 1984. They know what they’re doing. For the past seven years, Obama has used the best people available to scrub data from many different sources that they didn’t find favorable.” During this election cycle, Obama has shielded his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, from scrutiny concerning her illegal use of a private email server.
“Hillary knew what she was doing from the start,” said Kroyman. “She set up a private server to avoid Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] inquiries. Hillary didn’t want anyone accessing the information contained in her emails through [a] FOIA [request]. She’s guilty as hell.”
Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) still hasn’t decided if Mrs. Clinton engaged in criminal actions pertaining to this matter, Kroyman remains suspicious: “Tons of pressure is coming down on the FBI from the White House. If FBI Director James Comey does call for Hillary to be indicted, I seriously doubt that Attorney General Loretta Lynch will prosecute her. At that point, it’s imperative for Comey to go public with his evidence.”
In 1984, Orwell coined the term “doublespeak,” which refers to language that has been deliberately obscured, distorted, altered, or reversed with the intention of confusing people. Kroyman considers the recent transgender bathroom debacle as a perfect example of this idea: “Obama had no problem lighting the White House in homosexual rainbow colors after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, but not once has he done it in red, white, and blue. To me, it’s a big deal because he’s perverting our country with this nonsense by bringing it down to a
Sodom and Gomorrah level. In true doublespeak fashion, Obama is a fraud. He said, ‘If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.’ It’s obvious that we could never trust a word he said.”
Victor Thorn is a hard-hitting researcher, journalist and author of over 50 books.
