By Melissa Dykes

Some people still aren’t sure on this point, so just for the record, yes: US government propaganda use against American citizens has been fully made legal.

You see kids, once upon a time in 1948, we had something known as the Smith-Mundt Act (or, more officially, The US Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948). This act specified the State Department’s propaganda operations outside (key word “outside”) of US borders in a shift from wartime to peacetime use of propaganda as an instrument of the new post-World War II foreign policy.

The first restriction on this act was to prohibit domestic propaganda dissemination, with assurances that Congress, academia, and the mainstream media would filter out the foreign propaganda. As you can see, that obviously worked out really well.

Anyway, fast forward to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013, in which the Smith-Mundt Act was officially amended to allow materials produced by the State Department and Broadcasting Board of Governors to be released inside the United States.

In other words, Government use of propaganda against the American people became legal.

And free game. Obviously. Why else would we have scenes like this State Department spokesman bursting into laughter at welcoming the journalists to his press conference, which he referred to sarcastically as an “exercise in transparency and democracy”:

They aren’t even trying to pretend anything they say is true anymore.