We all have good reason to be excited about the reforms that Donald Trump is going to make to the federal government. The deep and pervasive rot in The Swamp is long overdue for cleansing.

There’s another problem that will be more difficult to reform without a constitutional fight. That’s the fake news media. President-Elect Trump isn’t kidding when he says the news is fake. The problem is that it’s much more fake than most Americans probably realize.

For example, a new report has proven that the largest “investigative journalism” company in the world—which is headquartered in Maryland—is a CIA front.

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) was founded in 2006. It’s registered as a 501(c)3 in Maryland, not far from CIA headquarters at Langley. It employs a team of more than 200 journalists who work at more than 50 news organizations in Europe, Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. It also works with some very recognizable newspapers, such as the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel.

According to a damning report from Drop Site News, the OCCRP is funded and controlled by the US government. It receives the money in the form of “charitable contributions” from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is administered by the State Department—the CIA, in other words.

The OCCRP is purported to be an investigative journalism organization that exposes organized crime and racketeering in governments around the world. Despite not having any offices or journalists located in America right now (the 501(c)3 filing in Maryland is just a piece of paper), can you guess what one of the big investigative stories that the OCCRP is right now?

They’re working up a big investigative report on Defense Secretary-nominee Pete Hegseth’s secret ties to the “Christian far right.” I could save them a bunch of time. The secret organization that Pete Hegseth belongs to is called the Catholic church.

Whatever BS the OCCRP ends up publishing about Pete Hegseth, it is a certainty that it will end up being publishing the New York Times. It will then be breathlessly repeated by all the television networks as they try to tank Hegseth’s nomination.

Just to be crystal clear:

The State Department/USAID/CIA is using your tax dollars to propagandize YOU into believing whatever nonsense they’re about to make up regarding Pete Hegseth.

It doesn’t take a genius to recognize what a very real “threat to democracy” this is.

How did we get to the point where the intel agencies are directly and brazenly propagandizing the American public like this? Like many of the problems currently facing America, it’s all Barack Obama’s fault.

The Smith-Mundt Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1948. The CIA—through the State Department—was setting up news operations around the world to propagandize people in other countries. At the time, it was a Cold War strategy to counter Soviet aggression. One of the main provisions of the Smith-Mundt Act was that it explicitly prohibited the State Department (and by extension the CIA) from propagandizing the American people. This was the law for 65 years.

In 2013, Congress repealed the Smith-Mundt Act at the request of Barack Obama. Former House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) teamed up to shepherd the repeal through Congress and Obama signed it into law. Conservatives complained about liberal bias in the media for decades before that, which was a valid concern. But starting in 2013, the news industry went to absolute sh*t.

They were no longer prohibited from propagandizing the American people. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations now routinely parrot propaganda talking points that have been invented by the CIA. The news really is fake.

It will be interesting to see whether Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will uncover a lot of this as they start tearing apart the budgets of the intel agencies. None of the agencies can pass an audit. Part of the reason is that so many of the “reporters” and “anchors” on network news are double-dipping salaries. They get a paycheck from NBC News or wherever, but they also get a second secret paycheck from whichever intel agency they’re working for.

How do we fix this massive problem? Reauthorizing the Smith-Mundt Act would be a good start. The question is whether we’d be able to get it passed by Congress because so many Senators and Representatives are now controlled and being blackmailed by the intel agencies.