Hey everybody welcome back to the show today's guest is Weston Seger who is the

leading scholar on legal issues surrounding what he calls US state media and I would call it the government propaganda cartel against the American

citizens. His research has been published in Northwestern University Law Review, a bunch of very important law reviews,

and he's been interviewed by the New York Times, by the nation, by MIT Technology Review.

His work has resulted in government investigations

into and reforms of the federal agencies regarding their domestic

propaganda practices, the dissemination of U.S. state media to American citizens.

West and is a partner at Sager and Smith, a New Hampshire-based law firm. He was an assistant attorney general in New

Hampshire and interestingly he graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in Arabic language in literature,

which sounds like a spy curriculum vitae.

And then he went and researched Arabic language newspapers as a Fulbright scholar in Morocco.

Wow. So I've read your writings now and really interesting and you've settled in this niche which is absolutely I think

critical today to the kind of the rise of totalitarian elements in this country and a major threat to democracy that comes from the US control of our media, of the domestic media, and the US capacity to to

propagandize us. It's an interesting conversation now because the

Tik-Tok ban and I want to talk to you about that. But let's do a little bit of history because there was always a huge reluctance in Congress, a knowledge from the beginning of our history,

that it was dangerous to allow government to propaganda

as the citizens of a democracy.

Let's talk about the history of it, about how we started doing that.

I'm happy to. So I think that it's probably best to start at the beginning of what I would consider

to be modern propaganda, which is World War I.

So under the Wilson administration, they formed the Committee on Public Information, which was this state

media or propaganda, public diplomacy.

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