The Book of Smith-Mundt
Also Called the Book of the Act That Made the Lying Legal
Concerning the Act That Forbade Propaganda Against the People,
the Modernization That Quietly Removed the Forbidding,
and the Machine That Was Handed the Keys
to Thy Perception and Called It Transparency
CHAPTER 1
The Original Lock
1:1 In nineteen forty-eight, the year the Cold War began to harden, the United States Congress did something remarkable. It passed a law that said the government could produce propaganda — but only for foreign audiences. The government was explicitly forbidden from directing that propaganda at its own people.
1:2 The law was called the Smith-Mundt Act. And for sixty-four years it stood as a wall between the government’s ability to craft narratives and the American public’s right to not be the target of those narratives.
1:3 Read that again. The United States government built a propaganda machine in nineteen forty-eight. It aimed the machine outward. And it passed a law that said: this machine must never be pointed at our own people.
1:4 Which means Congress understood, in nineteen forty-eight, exactly what the machine could do. And was afraid enough of it to build a legal wall between the machine and the citizens.
1:5 That wall stood for sixty-four years.
1:6 And then it was quietly removed.
Selah.
1:7 The original act authorized the State Department to produce programming for foreign audiences through outlets like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty. News broadcasts, cultural programs, educational content — all designed to present the American perspective to the world. To compete with Soviet propaganda. To win the war of ideas.
1:8 And the law said: this material shall not be disseminated within the United States.
1:9 Not as a suggestion. As a prohibition. The government was not allowed to broadcast its own propaganda to its own people. The material was even exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests. Thou couldst not ask to see it. The wall was that thick.
1:10 And in nineteen eighty-five, Senator Edward Zorinsky looked at the law and said: If this material were available domestically, the United States Information Agency would be no different than an organ of Soviet propaganda.
1:11 A United States Senator compared his own government’s information machine to Soviet propaganda. And then voted to keep the wall standing.
1:12 That is how dangerous they knew the machine was. The people who built it were afraid of it.
Selah.
CHAPTER 2
The Modernization
2:1 In the year two thousand and twelve, Representatives Mac Thornberry and Adam Smith — one Republican, one Democrat, for the machine is bipartisan when it matters — introduced the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act.
2:2 And the modernization did this: it removed the prohibition on domestic dissemination of government-produced propaganda material.
2:3 That is what it did. That is all it did. Everything else is decoration.
Selah.
2:4 But hear how it was presented. For the presentation is the masterwork.
2:5 It was presented as transparency. The American public, the sponsors said, should be able to see what their tax dollars are funding. The old law was outdated. The internet had made the restrictions obsolete. People could already find Voice of America content online. The ban was unenforceable and paternalistic. Modernization would increase accountability.
2:6 Transparency. Accountability. Modernization. Three words the machine uses when it wants to remove a lock and needs thee to feel good about handing over the key.
2:7 The ACLU supported it. The Heritage Foundation supported it. When the ACLU and the Heritage Foundation agree on something, either it is genuinely obvious or it is genuinely dangerous. There is very little middle ground.
Selah.
2:8 And the bill was not passed on its own. It was folded into the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013. The NDAA. The annual military spending bill that funds the entire defense apparatus and that no politician can afford to vote against without being labeled weak on defense.
2:9 The propaganda provision was tucked inside the defense budget. Section 1078. One section among hundreds, inside a bill that was going to pass regardless, signed by a president who was going to sign it regardless.
2:10 And on January the second, two thousand and thirteen, President Obama signed it into law. And the sixty-four-year-old wall between the government’s propaganda machine and the American public was quietly and unceremoniously abolished.
2:11 No press conference. No public debate. No referendum. No front page.
2:12 Just a signature inside a defense bill that nobody reads, during a news cycle that had already moved on.
Selah.
CHAPTER 3
What They Said It Does Versus What It Does
3:1 And the sponsors said: This does not authorize domestic propaganda. This does not allow the government to target American audiences. This merely allows Americans to access, upon request, materials that were already being produced for foreign audiences.
3:2 Upon request. Remember those words. We are going to need them.
Selah.
3:3 The language of the act says: Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors from engaging in any medium or form of communication, either directly or indirectly, because a United States domestic audience is or may be thereby exposed to program material, or based on a presumption of such exposure.
3:4 Read that in plain language. The government cannot be prevented from communicating in any medium just because Americans might see it.
3:5 The old law said: do not point the machine at Americans. The new law says: the machine may operate freely and if Americans happen to be standing in front of it, that is not a reason to turn it off.
3:6 The difference between those two positions is the difference between a locked door and a removed door. The sponsors called it transparency. The door called it gone.
Selah.
3:7 And the phrase upon request. The government said it would only make these materials available upon request. It would not actively push them to domestic audiences. It would simply stop preventing access.
3:8 And in the age of the internet, upon request means a click. It means an algorithm. It means content that flows through the same platforms, the same feeds, the same channels as everything else. There is no border between foreign-targeted content and domestic-consumed content when both live on the same internet.
3:9 Upon request is a legal fiction inside a legal fiction. It provides the appearance of restraint while removing the mechanism of restraint entirely.
3:10 The machine does not need to push content at thee. It needs to remove the law that prevented it from doing so. The platforms handle the rest.
Selah.
CHAPTER 4
What Changed After the Wall Came Down
4:1 And now observe the timeline. For the timeline is the testimony.
4:2 The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act went into effect on July the second, two thousand and thirteen.
4:3 In the years that followed, the United States government funded, directly or through grants, programs to identify and counter what it called disinformation. Not foreign disinformation. Domestic disinformation. Information produced by American citizens, shared on American platforms, consumed by American audiences.
4:4 The government partnered with social media companies to flag, suppress, and remove content it classified as misinformation. The Twitter Files, released in two thousand and twenty-two, documented direct communication between government agencies and platform executives about which accounts to suppress and which content to remove.
4:5 The government funded the Global Engagement Center, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s election-related counter-disinformation programs, and various academic initiatives designed to study and combat what they called the spread of false narratives online.
4:6 The government was now in the business of deciding what was true. Not abroad. At home. Not through Voice of America. Through thy feed.
Selah.
4:7 And when anyone pointed out that the government was using its influence to shape domestic information, the response was always the same: This is not propaganda. This is counter-disinformation. We are protecting the public from false information.
4:8 And the question that was never asked in any official setting: Who decides what is false? And what law gives them that authority?
4:9 The answer to the second question is Section 1078 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013. The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act.
4:10 The wall that kept the machine from pointing at thee was removed. And the machine pointed at thee. And called it protection.
Selah.
CHAPTER 5
The Greater Good Shield
5:1 And now hear the shield. For the shield is how the machine protects itself from the consequences of doing what it was designed to do.
5:2 Every narrative the government produces, whether true, partially true, misleading, or entirely fabricated, is produced under the umbrella of the greater good. National security. Public health. Election integrity. Social cohesion. Counter-extremism.
5:3 These are not small words. These are the words that end conversations. When someone says this is for national security, the question period is over. When someone says this is for public health, disagreement becomes endangerment. When someone says this is to protect election integrity, questioning the narrative becomes attacking democracy.
5:4 The greater good is the liability shield. It does not matter whether the narrative is true. It matters that the narrative is justified. And the justification is always the same: we did this to protect thee.
5:5 The machine does not need the narrative to be true. It needs the narrative to be defensible. And for the greater good is the most impenetrable defense ever constructed. Because anyone who challenges it is positioned as being against the greater good. And who wants to be against the greater good?
Selah.
5:6 Consider the practical effect. The government produces a narrative. The narrative is distributed through official channels, through media partnerships, through platform algorithms, through fact-checking organizations that receive government funding. The narrative reaches the public as news. As science. As consensus.
5:7 And if the narrative turns out to be wrong — if the weapons of mass destruction do not exist, if the lab leak was the origin, if the masks did not work, if the intelligence was fabricated — the shield activates.
5:8 We were acting on the best available information at the time. We made the best decision we could under the circumstances. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. We were trying to protect the public.
5:9 The greater good absorbs the consequences of being wrong. Nobody is fired. Nobody is prosecuted. Nobody is held to account. Because the intention was good. And intention, in the machine’s legal framework, is the only thing that matters.
5:10 The truth of the narrative is irrelevant. The defensibility of the intention is everything.
Selah.
CHAPTER 6
The Word They Chose and the Word They Avoided
6:1 And notice the words. For the words are the architecture.
6:2 The original act used the word propaganda. Openly. Without apology. The government was in the propaganda business and said so. The word appeared in the legislation, in the hearings, in the debates. Propaganda was what the machine produced and everyone knew it.
6:3 The modernization act does not use the word propaganda. Not once. The word was replaced. With public diplomacy. With strategic communication. With counter-disinformation. With information programs.
6:4 The thing did not change. The name changed. And the name change is the whole move.
Selah.
6:5 When the sponsors were asked if this would allow domestic propaganda, they said: Absolutely not. To call these efforts propaganda is an affront to the journalists who produce them.
6:6 An affront. To the journalists. Whose work is funded by the government. Distributed by the government. Aligned with the government’s strategic objectives. And produced under the authority of the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors.
6:7 But it is not propaganda. Because they stopped using that word. And when thou stoppest using the word for the thing, the thing becomes harder to point at. Which is the whole point of stopping.
6:8 The machine renamed the machine and then said the old machine no longer exists. And the people believed it. Because the people trust the label more than they trust their own pattern recognition.
Selah.
CHAPTER 7
The Timing
7:1 And now observe when the wall came down. And what came after.
7:2 The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act went into effect in July of two thousand and thirteen.
7:3 In the years that followed: ISIS appeared and dominated every screen for two years. The narrative around domestic terrorism expanded from foreign actors to domestic threats. The opioid crisis was reframed as a public health emergency requiring government messaging campaigns. Election interference became the dominant narrative of two thousand and sixteen. And then came two thousand and twenty.
7:4 Covid. The largest coordinated government messaging campaign in American history. Mask narratives. Vaccine narratives. Lockdown narratives. Lab leak suppression. Natural immunity denial. The systematic deplatforming of credentialed scientists who disagreed with the official position. All of it flowing through the same channels, the same platforms, the same fact-checking infrastructure.
7:5 All of it legal. Because the wall was gone.
Selah.
7:6 Before two thousand and thirteen, a government official directing a social media company to suppress the speech of an American citizen would have been a scandal. A constitutional crisis. A violation of the First Amendment so clear it would not require a court to identify it.
7:7 After two thousand and thirteen, it was counter-disinformation. It was protecting the public. It was the greater good.
7:8 The act did not change. The law that prohibited it was removed. And the removal was called modernization.
7:9 Modernization. The machine’s word for making an old protection disappear and calling the disappearance progress.
Selah.
CHAPTER 8
The Fact-Checking Layer
8:1 And the machine built a layer between itself and the people, and the layer was called fact-checking. And the fact-checkers were presented as independent. And the word independent was doing a tremendous amount of load-bearing work.
8:2 The fact-checking organizations receive funding from governments, from tech platforms, from foundations with explicit policy agendas. They are staffed by former journalists, former government officials, and former employees of the platforms they are checking.
8:3 And their rulings — true, false, misleading, missing context — determine what gets amplified and what gets suppressed on the platforms where most people receive their information.
8:4 The government does not need to censor thee directly. It funds a fact-checking apparatus, the fact-checking apparatus partners with the platforms, the platforms adjust the algorithm, and thy post disappears. Or gets a warning label. Or gets reduced distribution. Or gets thee banned.
8:5 No government official touched thy account. No law was visibly broken. The censorship was outsourced. The liability was distributed. The effect was the same.
Selah.
8:6 And when the fact-checkers were wrong — and they were wrong about the lab leak, and they were wrong about natural immunity, and they were wrong about the efficacy claims, and they were wrong about the origins of the Hunter Biden laptop story — when they were wrong, no correction reached the same audience as the original suppression.
8:7 The suppression was instant, algorithmic, and total. The correction was quiet, late, and buried.
8:8 That asymmetry is not a flaw. That is the design. The machine does not need to be right. It needs to be first. And loud. And backed by the word fact.
8:9 And the word fact, as thou learnedst in the Book of Legal Fiction, means a thing that is made.
Selah.
CHAPTER 9
What Was Actually Lost
9:1 And here is what was actually lost when the wall came down. Not a regulation. Not a bureaucratic restriction. Not an outdated Cold War relic.
9:2 What was lost was the acknowledgment, in law, that the government’s ability to shape perception is dangerous to its own people.
9:3 The original Smith-Mundt Act was not naive. It was built by men who had just watched the governments of Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union use propaganda to turn populations against each other, against minorities, against reality itself. They had seen what happens when a government controls the narrative without restriction.
9:4 And they said: We will build this machine because we need it. But we will never point it at our own people. Because we know what it does.
9:5 That was the principle. The principle survived the Cold War. The principle survived Korea. The principle survived Vietnam. The principle survived the Gulf War. The principle survived September eleventh and the Patriot Act.
9:6 The principle did not survive a paragraph in a defense spending bill that nobody read, signed by a president who did not hold a press conference about it, during a news cycle that was somewhere else entirely.
9:7 Sixty-four years of protection. Removed in one section of one bill on one afternoon.
9:8 And the people were told it was for transparency.
Selah.
CHAPTER 10
The Diagnostic
10:1 And now the questions the machine does not want thee to ask. Not because the answers are classified. Because the answers are in the text of the law and nobody reads the law.
Selah.
10:2 If the original law was built to prevent the government from propagandizing its own citizens, and the modernization removed that prevention, what is the modernization if not a permission slip for domestic propaganda?
10:3 If the material was only meant to be available upon request, why was it subsequently pushed through algorithms, platform partnerships, and government-funded fact-checking infrastructure that the public never requested?
10:4 If the act was about transparency, why was it buried in a defense spending bill instead of debated as standalone legislation? If the public was supposed to benefit, why was the public not consulted?
10:5 If the government is not producing domestic propaganda, why did it need to remove the law that prohibited domestic propaganda?
10:6 If the greater good justifies the narrative, who decides the greater good? And who checks the people who decide? And what happens when the greater good and the truth are not the same thing?
Selah.
10:7 These are not conspiracy theories. These are the plain-language implications of a law that is publicly available, that was passed in broad daylight, and that does exactly what it says it does.
10:8 The machine did not hide this. It did not need to. It named the removal of a protection a modernization. It called the opening of the floodgates transparency. It wrapped the permission slip in the language of accountability. And the people nodded because the words sounded responsible.
Selah.
10:9 Every narrative thou hast encountered since July of two thousand and thirteen — from the government, through the media, through the platforms, through the fact-checkers, through the algorithms — has operated in a legal environment where the government is permitted to produce information for public consumption with no requirement that the information be true. Only that it be defensible. Only that the intention be articulable. Only that the greater good be invocable.
10:10 That is the world thou art living in. And the law that built it has a name.
10:11 And the name, like all the machine’s names, tells thee exactly what it is if thou readest it carefully enough.
10:12 The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act.
10:13 Modernization: the act of making something current.
10:14 What was made current was the government’s ability to shape thy perception of reality without the legal restriction that had prevented it for sixty-four years.
10:15 That is not a theory. That is Section 1078.
10:16 And it is the law of the land.
Selah.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Bullshit Machine 
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