A Look at the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: A Historical Look at the Politics of US Information Warfare

Notes & details behind my 8-minute presentation

Since mid-2022, my primary outlet has been mountainrunner.substack.com. The mountainrunner.us site will continue to exist, and I will occasionally repost articles from my substack here. However, these reposts, like the one you are about to read, will be neither timely nor include all of my substack work. In other words, if you want to follow my writing, I suggest you subscribe to my substack where this post first appeared on 24 April 2023. The substack version of this article includes substantial footnotes that were not copied to the version below.  

I spoke at the #Connexions Conference on Global Media in Diplomacy and Foreign Policy this past Monday. The event was held at the University of Texas at Austin, and while I was remote, Dr. Nick Cull, the discussant, and Jeff Trimble, the moderator, were both in-person. 

The conference keynote was given by Ukrainian Ambassador to the US Oksana Markarova, whose comments are worth your time

Our panel was titled “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: A Historical Look at the Politics of US Information Warfare.” We immediately followed the Ambassador’s keynote to provide a kind of scene-setter (at the 1hr mark at the above link). That was the hopeful intent to try to push conversations into either accurate and meaningful invocations of history in support of their arguments or leave aside the history they misread, don’t understand, or invent. One subsequent presentation, for example, checked all three boxes quickly, even as the presenter could have left out their (inaccurate) historical narrative without affecting anything. 

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No, the Smith-Mundt Act does not apply to the Defense Department, and it never did

Bart Simpson writing No, the Smith-Mundt Act does not apply to the Defense Department

This post appeared at mountainrunner.substack.com on 22 February 2023. It has been slightly modified here for clarity. Subscribe to my free substack for new posts through email, the web, or through the substack app. Posts are copied here when I get around to it.

The misinformation around the Smith-Mundt Act now borders on willful disinformation. It is really quite fantastic. Unfortunately, at some point, much of it, including public legal analyses and especially internal legal and other guidance, seems bent on earning the label of disinformation. I had not planned on publishing this screed, but I was, I’ll admit, triggered to do so by a reference to the Smith-Mundt Act.

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It’s been said…

Time for some words from the past. Whether history rhymes, repeats, or we find patterns regardless, I often share quotes from the past that seem highly relevant to the present. I do this to show that we’ve often been in a situation we think is unique to the present. It is not infrequent that past statements have the potential to reveal deficiencies in modern analysis, framing, and recommendations, but your perceptions may differ.

Below are ten quotes that I previously shared on Twitter and likely elsewhere (email correspondence, articles, presentations, etc.). The quotes are intentionally devoid of attribution below. At my other publishing (and, to be honest, where I primarily publish now) site — https://mountainrunner.substack.com/p/its-been-said — each quote is followed by a poll for the reader to select which of three possible years the statement was made. Those polls are time-limited, so pop over quickly as they will close soon. Feel free to leave comments below with your guesses. We’re on the honor system here, so no cheating by Googling or searching this blog.

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