Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
It’s probably worth flagging the fact that the president of the United States is promoting the establishment of a Ministry of Truth to restrict speech in a suggested law called the “Charlie Kirk Act”.
President Trump’s Truth Social account posted a viral video from TikTok on Saturday in which a Trump voter named Elly May blamed the assassination of Republican political operative Charlie Kirk on the press, urging the president to push for legislation which would make “news corporations accountable for lying to the American people and spreading propaganda instead of truth.”
May frames the idea as a revisitation of the Smith-Mundt Act, but then goes on to describe authoritarian measures which have nothing to do with Smith-Mundt.
“President Trump, as a supporter who voted for you 3 times, I am hoping and praying that you will revisit what Barack Obama and Joe Biden got rid of back in 2013, which is the Smith-Mundt Act, which held news corporations accountable for lying to the American people and spreading propaganda instead of truth,” May says. “I think instead of bringing it back as a Smith-Mundt Act, you name it the Charlie Kirk Act, make it a law, and you make it damn near impossible for these people to continue to lie to the American public, which has brought chaos, hatred, division, and anarchy all across this country. Fines out their ass which will damn near bankrupt their companies should they lie to the American people ever again.”
“Because of their constant lies, a man lost his life, because of the constant hateful rhetoric of calling him a fascist, and a Nazi, and a white supremacist, and a bigot,” May said. “I think this would be a great legacy for him to have a law named after him to force journalists to finally start telling the truth and having the integrity that they have lacked for over a decade.”
“We are on a dangerous path right now with the constant lies and the propaganda,” May says. “And that doesn’t end just at news journalists. It needs to go to content creators who consistently spread lies and propaganda and half-truths across the internet. This needs to end, and people need to start being held accountable for baseless claims over absolute abysmal things.”
“Get this in front of Congress, get this passed as a law, and start holding these news corporations — be they right, left or center — accountable for their behavior,” May concludes.
May has been promoting a Change dot org petition to “Enact the Charlie Kirk Act to Restore Media Accountability,” which as of this writing has tens of thousands of signatures.
“This amended act will hold media outlets, radio stations, educators, and content creators accountable for the false narratives and erroneous information they spread deliberately or irresponsibly,” the petition reads, proposing heavy fines for those deemed to be in violation.
A couple of issues with this.
Firstly, the Smith-Mundt Act had nothing to do with holding “news corporations accountable for lying to the American people”; it was a Cold War-era law which prohibited official US government propaganda created by institutions like the State Department and the USAGM from being disseminated domestically. This law was controversially revised under the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 in the name of combatting Al Qaeda propaganda campaigns in the United States.
Returning Smith-Mundt to its original iteration would be a fine idea. American right wingers tend to make a much bigger deal about the changes made under the Obama administration than is actually warranted — anyone who remembers the lead-up to the Iraq invasion knows the US government had no trouble getting immensely consequential propaganda circulating throughout the American press prior to 2013. But anything that inhibits the US government’s ability to disseminate propaganda to Americans might be somewhat helpful, and couldn’t hurt.
But that isn’t what this “Charlie Kirk Act” push is advocating. Smith-Mundt placed restrictions on what the US government is allowed to do with regard to propaganda, while the proposed “Charlie Kirk Act” would give the US government sweeping new powers to decide what does and does not constitute propaganda and untruth and administer penalties accordingly. One limits the US government’s ability to manipulate public information, while the other explicitly expands it. Nobody anywhere is claiming that propaganda generated by the US State Department or USAGM projects like Voice of America got Charlie Kirk assassinated by calling him a Nazi; they’re talking about creating a new law to stomp out the free speech of “media outlets, radio stations, educators, and content creators.”
The other issue is of course that giving the government the authority to penalize propaganda and lies means giving the government the authority to determine what constitutes propaganda and lies. They could decide it’s a lie to say Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, for example, or that it’s propaganda to say the US shouldn’t be waging a proxy war in Ukraine. The “Charlie Kirk Act” is being pushed in the name of fighting propaganda, but it would actually be giving the US government unprecedented authority over what Americans are permitted to say on any platform.
This could of course turn out to be nothing and fizzle right away, but when the president of the United States starts pushing for the establishment of a Ministry of Truth to determine what Americans are allowed to say, I think that’s worth drawing attention to.
I’m just amazed at the virality of this whole thing. The American right’s frenzied emotional hysteria about the murder of Charlie Kirk has them promoting an initiative that is not meaningfully different from the Ministry of Truth proposed under the Biden administration’s “Disinformation Governance Board”, which was aborted after massive public outcry from the right. And that was just three years ago.
I’ve said it many times before and I’ll surely say it many times again: when everyone’s emotions are running hot, that’s when it’s most important to be intensely skeptical of everything your government does. We learned this lesson after 9/11, we were reminded again after October 7, and we may very well be getting another lesson with the killing of Charlie Kirk.
_________________
The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
https://www.the-reframe.com/acceptable-losses/ "He would set up camp at a folding table with a microphone next to a sign that said PROVE ME WRONG. And a lot of people would prove him wrong, too, and then Charlie Kirk would prove how extremist right-wing bigots like Charlie Kirk utilize the trappings of debate—not as a way of coming to mutual understanding, but as a tool to normalize extremist ideology, which he would accomplish via the trick of making a big show of refusing to be persuaded by truth no matter how wrong he had just been proved."
“Ministry of Truth” - straight out of Orwell’s 1984