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Obama’s Christmas Gift to Trump: A Ministry of Truth

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The "Lenin" train of literature and ...
The “Lenin” train of literature and propaganda (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the Friday before Christmas — the kind of time politicians pick to do things they hope you won’t notice — US president Barack Obama signed the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act.

Along with the usual terrible, horrible, very bad, no good NDAA stuff (all the little mandates involved in continuing to operate the most irresponsibly bloated and expensive military machine on the planet), this NDAA included an ugly little Christmas gift for incoming president Donald Trump: The Countering Foreign Disinformation and Propaganda Act.

The CFDAPA (yes, I’m going to give that mouthful an acronym) started out as a separate piece of “bipartisan” legislation  introduced by US Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) Chris Murphy (D-CT). It got rolled into the NDAA for the same reason Obama signed it on the Friday before a holiday weekend. That is, to minimize public attention and mute criticism.

Some of the more overheated responses to the CFDAPA paint it as a scheme allowing the federal government to “outlaw” media outlets that don’t toe the government’s line: Just wave a magic wand, declare an impertinent blog to be “foreign disinformation and propaganda,” shut the blog down, and maybe drag the blogger off to Gitmo for a long chat.

No, it’s not quite that, at least in theory, but the prospect shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. And in some ways it’s actually worse.

Even given the regrettable decline in Americans’ vigilance against threats to our rights over the last few decades, straightforward, openly admitted political censorship would provoke widespread and likely effective resistance.

Instead, the CFDAPA sets aside $160 million over two years to, among other things, “support local independent media to refute foreign disinformation and manipulation in their communities.” That is, to bribe local media to publish Washington’s disinformation and propaganda instead of disinformation and propaganda from foreign sources. Not an entirely new project — the Office of National Drug Control Policy has been paying Hollywood to lie to us about marijuana for decades now.

The CFDAPA’s purpose is to set the federal government up as the plenary arbiter of truth and to marginalize any and all narratives that don’t accord with whatever line gets pushed out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in drag.

Overt censorship might not be far behind.  Facebook and Twitter are already cooperating with the US government in “countering Islamic State Disinformation and Propaganda.” And  remember that only a only a year ago, Donald Trump publicly called for “closing” parts of the Internet used for recruitment by the Islamic State.  CFDAPA isn’t just bad on its own merits — it’s also tailor-made for abusive expansion by an unbridled chief executive.

Repeal of this abomination should be 2017’s policy priority number one for freedom-loving Americans.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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About That Foreign Meddling in US Presidential Elections …

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English: Russian president Vladimir Putin with...
English: Russian president Vladimir Putin with former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Jewish Community Centre in Moscow. Français : Président russe Vladimir Poutine avec l’ancien premier ministre israélien Benyamin Netanyahou, au Centre Communautaire Juif en Moscou. Русский: МОСКВА. С бывшим Премьер-министром Израиля Биньямином Нетаньяху в Еврейском общинном центре. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So we had an election and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump won it. If I had all the ink that’s been spilled on why and how Trump defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, I’d be an ink tycoon. Much of what passes for analysis focuses on alleged “foreign meddling” in the election. There certainly was some of that. There always is.  But some meddlers get more attention than others.

Mainstream anti-Trump opinion leaders claim that the Russian government, at the direction of president Vladimir Putin, intervened to affect the outcome. Through various means, including but not limited to cyber attacks on the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, they believe — although the belief remains unsupported by any publicly revealed evidence — that the Russians illicitly put a thumb on the scale, advantage Trump.

I don’t doubt that Putin preferred Trump to Clinton, or that he acted in furtherance of that preference. Whether or not he went to the lengths asserted is a different question. The fervid denunciations of pols and pundits seem geared more toward stirring up a new Red Scare than toward shedding real light on the subject. They smack of excuse-making and  a desire to incite hysteria.

But while we’re talking about foreign meddling in US elections … what about Israel?

Every four years, American presidential aspirants prostrate themselves before the Israeli lobby. They visit Israel. They refer to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “my good friend.” They compete to see who can most convincingly thump a lectern and proclaim the strongest “commitment” to funding and defending a foreign state and its ruling political party (Likud) at the expense of US taxpayers.

There’s a reason for that. Israel and supporters of a “hard line” (versus Iran, versus the Palestinian Arabs, etc.) Israeli regime put a lot of work and a lot of money into propagandizing for — and in effect buying — the most supportive US government they can get. This year one Israel-focused donor alone — casino magnate Sheldon Adelson — spent $25 million boosting Trump’s campaign and another $40 million helping congressional Republican candidates.

There’s little doubt that US policy toward Israel is Adelson’s primary motivator. He’s married to an Israeli, owns a pro-Likud newspaper in the country, spends big money helping Likud hold on to power there, and puts on a quadrennial party in the US to see which presidential candidates can most convincingly kowtow to Netanyahu’s every whim.

Any presidential candidate who spoke of and acted toward Vladimir Putin and Russia the way most of them speak of and act toward Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel would be treated as presumptively a sinister agent of a foreign power. Not, to my mind, without justification.

Clinton’s margin of defeat was almost certainly far smaller than the number of American voters captivated by pro-Israel propaganda and brought out by pro-Israel campaign spending. Where’s the outrage at this clear-cut and ongoing meddling in US presidential elections by — or at the very least on behalf of — Israel?

Apparently some meddlers are more equal than others.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Capital Punishment: Can We Cut it Out Already?

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English: Original Death Chamber at the Red Hat...
English: Original Death Chamber at the Red Hat Cell Block at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. The chair is a replica of the original. The Red Hat was closed in the early 1970s. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Hill reports that capital punishment is fading away in America. Government employees have ceremonially killed fewer prisoners this year (20) than in any year since 1991, and fewer criminals (30) have been sentenced to death than in any year since the option became available again in 1976 (after a US Supreme Court ruling resulted in a four-year national moratorium).

There seem to be several reasons for the precipitous decline, ranging from difficulty getting the drugs used in executions (manufacturers and pharmacies don’t like the stigma) to increased court scrutiny of sentencing. Whatever the reasons, it’s good news. Capital punishment should be brought to a speedy and permanent end in the United States.

I’m not saying that there aren’t crimes worthy of death. In fact, I heartily support the killing of violent criminals in defense of self or others at the scene of the crime.

But once a criminal has been apprehended, disarmed and caged, killing him or her isn’t self-defense any more. Execution is just the gratuitous, vengeful taking of a human life for public show. And no matter how much lipstick the practice’s supporters put on the pig to try and turn it into something else, that’s all it will ever be.

Capital punishment is also completely incompatible with the notions of “limited government” that most libertarians and some conservatives claim to support, not to mention the basic civil liberties that both libertarians and liberals publicly sustain. If the state can decide with impunity that someone needs to die and then kill that person in cold blood, what CAN’T the state do?

This would be true even absent the growing number of death row inmate exonerated by new evidence. Who knows how many innocents have been sacrificed to Moloch before the mistake could be discovered and corrected?

Capital punishment seems to be going away, but it can’t go away fast enough. Even as the Libertarian and Democratic Parties finally added opposition to the death penalty to their platforms this year, majorities in California, Nebraska and Oklahoma voted, to their shame, to retain the barbaric practice.

The US is part of a shrinking club of evil, a club composed mostly of favorite holiday destinations like North Korea and Saudi Arabia. Guinea, Mongolia and Nauru became the latest three nations to abolish it in 2016.

Surely we’re better than this. In 2017, let’s show it by finally and forever ceasing the evil practice of capital punishment.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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