OPINION:
I recently learned about the State Department’s now-shuttered Global Engagement Center, which was supposedly dedicated to rooting out online disinformation (“Countries shore up their digital defenses as global tensions raise the threat of cyberwarfare,” Web, April 20).
This office sounds like something out of a World War II movie. The previous administration established it in 2022 to target Joe Biden’s political opponents. That’s a far cry from the State Department’s mission of protecting U.S. security.
The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 made such an office unnecessary, but it was amended by President Obama. The act prohibited the State Department from disseminating government-made programming in the U.S. Why? The fear was that such material could “propagandize” Americans. With his changes to the ban, Obama opened our nation to what we are seeing today: a lack of public trust in federal agencies.
The Democratic Party opened this floodgate and it was Republican Secretary of State Marco Rubio who had to close it in December. I’m sure most voters are, like me, too busy with work and kids to be aware this office ever existed. We trust our federal officials to use taxpayer funds to protect our freedom of speech without government intrusion. I understand why it was necessary after World War II to combat the potential spread of fascism in America, but Obama didn’t consider the long-term impacts of eroding our ability to tell fact from fiction.
If this act were still in place in its original form, news outlets wouldn’t be running the sort of interviews CBS ran with Kamala Harris and Anthony Fauci on the origins of COVID-19’. There wouldn’t be widespread liberal indoctrination ideology and the mainstream media wouldn’t have been able to cover up the truth about Biden’s mental acuity.
It’s disappointing to see what has been done using our tax dollars.
GREG RALEIGH
Washington
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