The Smith-Mundt Act

Psyops Go Both Ways

As is probably the case with most everyone reading this, I was excited to see which Executive Orders and policy changes President Trump would make on his first day back in office.

Which destructive Biden policies would Trump reverse and how quickly would he reverse them? Which Biden-reversed-policies Trump made in 2017 would Trump get back in place? As we’ve seen, he’s made a lot of changes, and he’s still making a lot of changes, maybe even exceeding our expectations in regard to pace, effectiveness and breadth, including some things we hadn’t even considered.

Many of the doubters have been shut up. Those who feared, believed or propagandized that Trump wouldn’t follow through on the things he promised he’d do have slowly backed into the bush to disappear like the Homer Simpson meme. Their voices aren’t as loud as they once were. Their audience is no longer listening to them. They’ll have to find or create something else to fear or propagandize others to fear. It’s becoming extremely difficult to come up with anything to complain about anymore, to use in criticizing Trump and his allies. Any criticism now is just nitpicking. But the black pilled, the controlled opposition, the Neocons, RINOs and Liberals won’t give up. The sincere doubters are broken, stuck in a rut of negativity, and the insincere are corrupt and fighting for their existence.

When I think of executive orders that I was excited about, vastly increasing domestic oil production again makes sense. Eliminating DEI policies and regulations is an easy choice. Taking an axe to the Department of Education can’t happen soon enough, but at the same time, I realize the pushback Trump will get and how the Left will try to spin it. The Deep State has been excellent at disguising their money laundering and mind control operations as being something good. It’s how they have been able to get such buy-in, and why so many are resistant to change.

There is a long list of policies that need to change quickly, but one thing that I haven’t heard anyone else mention is getting the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 back up and running—the act that was put in place in 1948 to keep the American Government from using propaganda on Americans.

Now that I think about it, why didn’t Trump put the Smith-Mundt Act back in place his first time around in office?

It makes sense that he would have done this on January 20th, 2017. He had four years to do it, and he never did it. He’s been in office for over a month, and it’s yet to happen this term as well. Curious, to say the least.

I kind of let the cat out of the bag in the subtitle.

The only logical answer for Trump not reinstating the Smith-Mundt Act is that he wanted to use propaganda on the American people, but in this case, to remove the control the media has on them, and to take down the Deep State. Technically speaking, knowingly allowing the American people to believe that a person with dementia was actually running the country from 2021-2025 is propaganda.

Before getting ahead of ourselves, we should probably take a step back and define what the Smith-Mundt Act is, and how propaganda has been used in the past with great success.

Sigmund Freud had a nephew names Edward Bernays. Bernays is known as the father of public relations (PR), and modern advertising. He took what he learned about the human brain from his uncle and applied it to the influence and manipulation of individuals and societies. In 1928, Bernays wrote a book called Propaganda, in which he describes how propaganda can be used to control whole societies. But he goes one step further, and states that it is not only a useful tool for control, but that it is completely necessary in maintaining a healthy society.

Interestingly, Bernays had a nephew who went on to be a founding executive of a little streaming service called NETFLIX. Ta-dum. What are the odds?

It’s plain to see that the control we find ourselves under today started generations ago, and is a family business. Take a look at the families of people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and you quickly realize their origin stories aren’t quite what we are led to believe.

During WWII, propaganda was used very successfully by the Americans and the Brits to win the war. The MI6 puts the CIA to shame, as everything the CIA knows comes from the MI6 and British think tanks like the Tavistock Institute.

During WWII, the US had a propaganda agency that it used on its own people, the Office of War Information (OWI).

According to Wikipedia,

In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Office of War Information (OWI). This mid-level agency joined a host of other wartime agencies, including the War and State Departments, in the dissemination of war information and propaganda. Officials at OWI used numerous tools to communicate to the American public. These included Hollywood movie studios, radio stations and printing presses.

In short, propaganda was created to inspire Americans to join and support America’s involvement in WWII. Propaganda was also used to create and amplify hatred towards the enemy through exaggerated and false claims of the enemy’s cruelty and barbarism.

During WWII, the US Military had a psychological operations unit as well.

According to Wikipedia,

Psychological operations (PSYOPs) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their motives and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and large foreign powers.

The purpose of United States psychological operations is to induce or reinforce behavior perceived to be favorable to U.S. objectives. They are an important part of the range of diplomatic, informational, military and economic activities available to the U.S. They can be utilized during both peacetime and conflict. There are three main types: strategic, operational, and tactical.

This psyop unit could be used to spread misinformation to the enemy, leading to confusion. It could mean using inflatable tanks or airplanes to fool the enemy into believing the US Military had more firepower than they really have, or that they were attacking from another direction or building up strength in another area. This psyop unit could be used to demoralize enemy militaries and their citizens. It could even be used to overthrow governments or government officials from within enemy states.

The use of psyops and propaganda was found to be a very effective tool during WWII, a tool that should be used with care. Following the war, it was determined that it should still be used against foreign enemies or potential enemies, but it should never be used on the American people themselves.

Now, onto the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948.

According to Wikipedia,

The U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (Public Law 80-402), popularly called the Smith–Mundt Act, was first introduced by Congressman Karl E. Mundt (R-SD) in January 1945 in the 79th Congress. It was subsequently passed by the 80th Congress and signed into law by President Harry S. Truman on January 27, 1948.

The Act was developed to regulate broadcasting of programs for foreign audiences produced under the guidance by the State Department, and it prohibited domestic dissemination of materials produced by such programs as one of its provisions. The original version of the Act was amended by the Smith–Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which allowed for materials produced by the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) to be made available within the United States.

In other words, from 1948-2012, US Government and government-controlled media propaganda could be used on foreign enemies, but it couldn’t legally be used on the American people.

For 64 years, it was illegal for the US Government to use propaganda on its own citizens. This doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, as, through Operation Mockingbird, the CIA has never stopped controlling and propagandizing the American people using all forms of media.

By amending the Smith-Mundt Act in 2012, the Obama Administration made it legal to propagandize the American people again.

Between 1948 and 2012, propaganda on the American people was like speeding; it was against the law, but unless one was very blatant about it, they likely wouldn’t be caught and punished. One likely isn’t going to be pulled over for going three miles over the speed limit. In other words, by only altering the truth a little.

Before this, the Smith-Mundt Act somewhat kept the media in check. While many of the lies were big, it kept the media’s lies from becoming parody-like. This was actually not a good thing, in that the American people trusted and believed the media because they appeared to be believable.

In 2012, it was like removing all speed limits, and now allowed the media to operate free of any legal ramifications. The only thing the media had to contend with was the loss of their audience. If one exaggerates, lies and shows extreme bias often enough, they will lose all credibility. They will eventually lose their audience. This is exactly what has unintentionally happened since 2012.

2012 is when fake news really took off. It was like steroids were being injected into political correctness, creating wokeness. Affirmative Action became DEI. LGB became LGBTQ+, and transgender bathrooms became a hot topic overnight. Moderate conservatives were now portrayed as rightwing extremists. Recyclers became climate activists, super-gluing themselves to roads and blocking people from driving to work. Everything became more extreme, and common sense seemed to disappear. Men could now menstruate. It was determined that people could be born in the wrong bodies.

Overnight, everything got crazier. Everything was amplified. Resistance to the new way of thinking wouldn’t be tolerated. Not only was the media and social media being used to push forward propaganda, but they were also used to stomp out any resistance to the changing cultural values. Pre-2012 values and beliefs were now toxic and dangerous to society. Freedom of speech was now a dirty term.

So why hasn’t Trump re-enacted the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, making it illegal again for the American Government and media to propagandize the American people? The only thing that makes sense is that propaganda has been and still is being used to take America back, to wake Americans up, and to defeat the Deep State Cabal.

Propaganda by the government-controlled media is still waking Americans up. Allowing propaganda to be used has painted the media and Deep State into a corner from which they cannot escape. Allowing propaganda is like providing your enemy with enough rope to hang itself. If Trump had re-enacted the Smith-Mundt Act during his first term in office, the media’s lies probably would have become more toned down, more subtle. The liars would have become more believable.

The pre-2012 media didn’t seem to exceed enough American’s tolerance limits for fake news. The post-2012 media caused the majority of Americans to reach their boiling point. The media has been lying to Americans their whole lives, and it wasn’t until the past decade, or even less in some cases, that many Americans finally said ‘enough is enough,’ and no longer have any trust or faith in the media.

Allowing the Deep State the ability to destroy itself through propaganda is one aspect of the plan. But only a fool would believe that Trump and his allies haven’t been using propaganda directly as well. It has been used to set traps, to shake the bush to see what scampers out. It has been used to make the Biden Administration turn Democrats into Republicans.

If Trump had a group overseeing the Biden Administration through a Continuity of Government act (Devolution), propaganda had to be legal to allow the Biden Administration to masquerade as being in complete control.

Does anyone really think that Biden handpicked Rachel Levine and made her a four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, becoming the first openly transgender four-star officer in any of the United States uniformed services, as well as the first female four-star admiral in the Commissioned Corps?

There is no way Rachel Levine wasn’t hand-picked by Trump to embarrass the Biden Administration. Dressing Levine up in a four-star admiral’s uniform is comedy gold.

I don’t think people give Trump enough credit for his comedy genius.

There is no way a Chinese spy balloon slowly floated across the whole United States without being shot down. Or that mysterious drones flew over the Northeast for weeks with no one in the media or the Biden Administration knowing whether they were friend or foe. This is beyond unbelievable.

Have you seen the video of the US Airforce cargo plane evacuating people from Kabul, Afghanistan during the fall of Kabul in 2021? It is clear to me that the plane was an inflatable plane, similar to the inflatable tanks and planes used during WWII. Look at the windows of the plane, they look like they are made of black Glad garbage bags. People walked in front of the massive jet engines without being sucked in. They really weren’t trying to fool us that hard. And let’s not forget about the people clinging to the landing gear who fell to their deaths as the plane climbed in altitude.

Trump couldn’t help himself, ‘now CGI in some guys falling from the sky, LOL.’

Who had Hamas attacking Israel with flying go-carts on their bingo card? Or an angry lover attacking Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer? Or Biden crapping himself in front of the Pope? Or Elizabeth Warren finding out she is less Native American than the average American? Or Eric Swalwell being caught having an affair with a Chinese spy named Fang Fang? What are the odds that Zelenskyy was a comedic actor before he became the president of Ukraine?

Recently, Trump paraded around Larry Ellison, Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son, discussing America’s commitment to building out its AI infrastructure. The use of AI for mRNA cancer vaccines was mentioned, infuriating many in MAGA and bringing much more attention to the project and the importance of AI infrastructure. The next week, China’s DeepSeek came out. Later, Elon Musk and his four-year-old son spent the day in the Oval Office, showing their great relationship, and shortly afterward, a ‘conservative influencer’ claimed Musk is the father of her five-month-old child. You can’t get ahead of a story if you don’t already know the story that is coming.

This is propaganda; it may not be as obvious as inflatable tanks, alien invasions, false accusations of rape or wrongdoing, but it’s still propaganda nonetheless.

The whole Biden Administration was a psyop, a psyop used to wake people up. A psyop used to give Trump an overwhelming majority in the 2024 Election. More than 70% of Americans now approve of Trump gutting the Federal Government and its corrupt and wasteful slush funds. This four-year psyop, as painful as it was to endure, was necessary to get America to where it is today.

As a result of this very successful psyop, the Deep State is being systematically dismantled, with very little pushback from the American people, real people. Slush funds, and programs and departments are being shut down, corruption is being exposed and stopped. None of this would be happening if it had been a ‘business as usual’ changing of the guard—one party replacing the other for four to eight years. It is happening only because the American people have been propagandized so hard, and so obviously, that they finally woke up.

The Smith-Mundt Act likely won’t be re-enacted until the mission is complete, when there is no useful need for propaganda any longer. When the Smith-Mundt Act is re-enacted, we will know the preponderance of Americans are now awake. When the Smith-Mundt Act is re-enacted, we will truly know the game is over.

---

Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.

---

If you enjoyed this contribution to Badlands Media, please consider checking out more of Erik’s work for free at Erik’s Substack.

---

Badlands Media will always put out our content for free, but you can support us by becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter. Help our collective of citizen journalists take back the narrative from the MSM. We are the news now.