 Today an empire. War machine funded war games, Facebook censors Hirsch, and more. There's a lot happening in the life of the Empire, so we're doing another multi-story article to wrap it all up. Today we're discussing four stories. One, Facebook is censoring multiple articles by Seymour Hirsch. Two, weapons industry funded think tank helps Congress discover that Taiwan needs way more weapons. Three, the New York Times really, really doesn't like RFK Jr., and four, Twitter drops its state-affiliated and government-funded media labels. Here's one. Facebook is censoring multiple articles by Seymour Hirsch. Facebook has begun censoring a sub-stack article by journalist Seymour Hirsch, which asserts that the US government, in coordination with Norway, was behind the bombing of the Nord Stream Pipelines last September. First flagged by author Michael Schellenberger on Twitter, this censorship is still occurring as of this writing some 36 hours later. If you try to share Hirsch's article on Facebook, as soon as you paste the URL, you get a notification which warns, before you share this content, you might want to know that there's additional reporting from factisk. Pages and websites that repeatedly publish or share false news will see their overall distribution reduced and be restricted in other ways. It also includes a link to a month-old article by factisk.no, a Norwegian fact-checking website produced in cooperation with Norwegian mass media and Norway's state broadcasting company NRK. Facebook then gives you the option to cancel or share anyway. If you opt for the latter, Facebook censors the article by pixelating the share like they would for images of extreme gore or hardcore pornography and attaching a giant warning label on it saying false information, checked by independent fact-checkers. Facebook does not explain how a fact-checking company, which operates in conjunction with Norwegian state media, can be regarded as independent regarding an article which explicitly accuses the Norwegian government of extremely egregious crimes. If you click through the second warning, you finally get to Hirsch's article. If you click the option to see why the article is being hidden from visibility, you are taken to a factisk.no article. I'm not going to try to pronounce the headline. It's in Norwegian. The English translation is more mistakes about Norwegian interference in the Nord Stream sabotage subtitled the award-winning journalist Seymour Hirsch accuses Norway of being behind the Nord Stream explosions, but his article contains several errors per machine translation. The article disputes Hirsch's claims using arguments that have been circulating since February, many of which have been disputed. But whether you think Hirsch's claims are valid or not, his reporting is indisputably a part of the conversation about the Nord Stream sabotage and is newsworthy in itself. The world's largest social media platform is straightforward interfering in news distribution. Facebook is also censoring another article by Hirsch published earlier this month, which alleges that the Ukrainian government has been embezzling at least four hundred million dollars from US taxpayers to illicitly purchase diesel fuel from Russia and that the CIA knew about this. If you paste the URL into the Facebook share box of that article, you get a warning like the one for the Nord Stream article. Only this one includes a link to an article by the Empire-funded Ukrainian Info War website Stopfake. As Mint Press News' Alan McLeod reported last year, Stopfake is funded by the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy and the Empire-funded NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council, as well as the British government and the Czech Republic. Despite this extremely obvious conflict of interest, Facebook has the temerity to call Stopfake an independent fact-checker in the warnings it provides while censoring Hirsch's Ukraine article. One even goes so far as to say that independent fact-checkers say this information has no basis in fact. The Ukraine article is pixelated just like the Nord Stream one. The Stopfake article looks nothing remotely like an independent fact-checker. Written in typical ham-fisted Ukrainian Info War style beneath the words FAKE in red capital letters and citing nothing besides government assertions and its own forceful tone. Dismissing the renowned journalist Seymour Hirsch's article as his personal blog, Stopfake informs us that quote, American auditors and the White House have repeatedly stressed that after more than a year of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine, they found no violations by Ukraine in the use of Western weapons and material assistance. Oh, well, okay then. Number two, weapons industry-funded think tank helps Congress discover that Taiwan needs way more weapons. The House of Representatives select committee on the Chinese Communist Party decided to role-play as generals in a war game simulating a PRC attack on Taiwan. The war game was facilitated by the Center for a New American Security, Senas, think tank, whose top donors include war industry giants Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing, as well as the US Department of Defense and the de facto embassy of Taiwan. Now this is gonna surprise you and astonish you and take you aback, but believe it or not the war game conducted by the weapons industry-funded think tank has revealed that Taiwan is gonna need a lot more weapons. We are well within the window of maximum danger for a Chinese Communist Party invasion of Taiwan and yesterday's war game stressed that the need to take action to deter CCP aggression and arm Taiwan to the teeth before any crisis begins, said the incredibly hawkish chairman of the Senate Select Committee, Mike Gallagher, in a statement. Another thing that's gonna shock and astonish and surprise you, and you might want to sit down for this, is that none of the reporting on this war game from the political media class has ever made any mention of the immense conflict of interest that the Center for New American Security would necessarily have in this war game. Articles by Reuters, The Hill and the National Review, ominously inform their audiences of the grave findings of the war game and made precisely zero mention of the think tanks funders, giving the impression that this is just an impartial panel of foreign policy experts and not indirect employees of the war profiteering industry. As I never tire of reminding my readers, this is journalistic malpractice. It is never legitimate to mention war machine funded think tanks, promoting more war and militarism, without also informing readers of their obvious conflict of interest in the matter. The Center for a New American Security is one of the nastiest think tanks pulling the strings in the information ecosystem today. As we discussed last year when CNOS bizarrely hosted another one of its war games on MSNBC, it has extensive degrees of overlap with the Biden administration and has been playing a crucial role in marketing war with China to American liberals. One of the most insane things happening in the world right now is the way the entire political media class routinely cites war machine funded think tanks in the promotion and formulation of important foreign policy decisions without ever disclosing this extreme conflict of interest to the public. Future generations, if there are future generations, will scarce believe we once allowed war profiteers to directly influence government policies on war and militarism using the money they made from profiting off war and militarism. It's one of the most evil arrangements you could possibly come up with. Number three, the New York Times really, really doesn't like RFK Jr. The New York Times has published an article in its news section, not labeled opinion or anything, smearing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for his Democratic presidential primary candidacy with jaw-dropping aggression. The article's author, Tripp Gabriel, comes right out of the gate claiming that Kennedy has announced a presidential campaign built on, quote, shaking Americans faith in science, end quote. Again, I cannot stress this enough. This is presented by the New York Times as a hard news story. Gabriel describes Kennedy's campaign announcement speech as rambling, calls him a fringe presidential aspirant, and strongly implies that Kennedy is only running to bring attention to himself. He goes out of his way to say that Kennedy's campaign has appalled members of his famous Democratic family and quotes a former aide to Ted Kennedy as saying RFK Jr.'s presidential run is, quote, contrary to everything his uncle Ted Kennedy ever did. I'm not going to support any US presidential candidate. And it's as certain as sunrise that whoever gets sworn in on January 2025 will be a corrupt and murderous swamp monster like all the rest. But I do expect that candidates like Kennedy will cause the propaganda machine to overextend itself in some ways that can be useful in highlighting its nefariousness for the public. Framing an obvious spin piece as hard news is brazen journalistic malpractice. One more item on the mountain of evidence that the New York Times is garbage. Number four, Twitter drops its state affiliated media and government funded media labels. In some positive news, Twitter has taken the unannounced step of removing all government funded and state affiliated media labels from all accounts of every national origin. The state affiliated media labels have been removed from accounts like RT and Press TV, as well as from individuals who'd been branded with that label because of their associations with state media. And the government funded label has been removed from analysts like NPR, PBS and CBC. If this turns out to be a permanent move, it's an objectively good thing. The use of these labels has always been blatantly propagandistic and obscenely biased in favor of the US and its allies, and should never have happened in the first place. It's not Twitter's place to make sure people trust Western propaganda outlets and distrust propaganda outlets from Russia and China. That's the role of a propagandist, not an impartial platform for free communication. I've been very critical of Elon Musk's Twitter takeover and generally dismissive of claims that his ownership is a marked improvement over the previous owners. But if this is for real, I'll have to eat a big steaming pile of crow, because Twitter functioning less as a US propaganda organ is indisputably a significant improvement. If his free speech values aren't just limited to easing hate speech restrictions and actually create a more egalitarian information ecosystem on real matters of international consequence, I was definitely wrong, and the platform is better off under his control.