The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has urged U.S. politicians and media outlets to spew anti-Trump propaganda in order to oust the Trump administration from the White House.
The CFR is among America’s oldest and most powerful think tanks, with government insiders filling up its ranks.
Zerohedge.com reports: The CFR’s Richard Stengel, a former editor of TIME magazine, told an audience at a CFR event in late April called Political Disruptions: Combating Disinformation and Fake News that governments “have to” direct “propaganda” toward their own populations.
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At a Council on Foreign Relations forum about "fake news," former Editor at Time Magazine Richard Stengel directly states that he supports the use of propaganda on American citizens – then shuts the session down when challenged about how propaganda is used against the third world pic.twitter.com/ClAT5POv7G
— William Craddick (@williamcraddick) May 11, 2018
Stengel, himself a former high level official who headed the US office for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department from 2013 to 2016, is also a regular pundit on MSNBC.
He explained:
Basically, every country creates their own narrative story and, you know, my old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the ‘chief propagandist’ job. We haven’t talked about propaganda… I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population, and I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.
Stengel’s personal bio site notes that he “helped create and oversee” the Global Engagement Center at the State Department whose official mission is to “counter propaganda and disinformation from international terrorist organizations and foreign countries” (with a “special focus on Russia”).
The full CFR event. Stengel openly argues in favor of propaganda against US citizens starting at 1:15:26 of the video.
But more worrisome for a guy who openly expresses views clearly implying that he’s “not against propaganda” on the US government’s “own population” is that he was recently named a “distinguished fellow” as part of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab).
Two weeks ago the DFRLab announced its team has partnered with Facebook to “monitor disinformation” and protect elections. The DFRLab defined the new initiative as follows:
The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab today announced a partnership with Facebook to independently monitor disinformation and other vulnerabilities in elections around the world. The effort is part of an initiative to help provide credible research about the role of social media in elections, as well as democracy more generally.
The Digital Forensic Research Lab is launching a partnership with Facebook to support the world’s largest community in its efforts to strengthen democracy…
Though it currently receives little commentary or attention, it must be recalled that Obama administration lifted the prohibition on domestic propaganda in 2013.
Disturbingly, we are probably only just now experiencing the beginning phase of what the State Department and intelligence agencies’ propaganda planners had in mind when the domestic propaganda ban was overturned but these few short years ago.
