Story at-a-glance

• The United States has been unique in its dedication to free speech, but that Constitutional right has been slowly eroded in the name of national security and protecting public health
• In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed to have proof of a communist spy ring within the U.S. State Department. The lesson from that time was the destructive power of accusation
• In 2017, an organization called Hamilton 68 claimed to have proof showing hundreds of Russian-affiliated Twitter accounts manipulated the U.S. election to get Trump into the White House. It turned out to be a complete hoax, but media never updated the public with that truth
• In 1948, the same year the CIA launched Project Mockingbird, the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act (aka the Smith-Mundt Act) became law, which forbade the U.S. government from pushing propaganda onto the U.S. population. President Barrack Obama repealed this law in 2013, thereby legalizing the propagandizing of Americans
• For propaganda to be truly successful, especially in the long term, you also need censorship, and in the U.S., this requires the undermining of free speech rights. The undermining of free speech took off at the end of 2016 when Obama signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which opened the door to an offensive information war against the public