 Pentagon-funded think tank simulates war with China on NBC. NBC's Meet the Press just aired an absolutely freakish segment in which the influential narrative management firm Center for a New American Security, CNAS, ran war games simulating a direct U.S. hot war with China. CNAS is funded by the Pentagon and by military industrial complex corporations Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, as well as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, which anti-war's Dave DeKamp has described as the de facto U.S. Embassy in Taiwan. The war game simulates a conflict over Taiwan, which we are informed is set in the year 2027, in which China launches strikes on the U.S. military in order to open the way to an invasion of the island. We are not told why there needs to be a specific year inserted into mainstream American consciousness about when we can expect such a conflict, but then we are also not told why NBC is platforming a war machine think tank simulation of a military conflict with China at all. It happens that the Center for a New American Security was the home of the man assigned by the Biden administration to lead the Pentagon task force responsible for reevaluating the administration's posture toward China. That man, Eli Ratner, is on record saying that the Trump administration was insufficiently hawkish toward China. Ratner is now the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs in the Biden administration. It also happens that the Center for a New American Security has openly boasted about the great many of its other experts and alumni who have assumed senior leadership positions within the Biden administration. It also happens that CNAS co-founder Michelle Flournoy, who appeared in the Meet the Press War Game segment, and was at one time a heavy favorite to become Biden's Pentagon chief, wrote a foreign affairs op-ed in 2020, arguing that the U.S. needed to develop, quote, the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China's military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours, end quote. It also happens that CNAS CEO Richard Fontaine has been featured all over the mass media pushing empire narratives about Russia and China, telling Bloomberg just the other day that the war in Ukraine could serve the empire's long term interests against China. The war in Ukraine could end up being bad for the pivot in the short term but good in the long term, Fontaine said. If Russia emerges from this conflict as a weakened version of itself and Germany makes good on its defense spending pledges, both trends could allow the U.S. to focus more on the Indo-Pacific in the long run. It also happens that CNAS is routinely cited by the mass media as an authoritative source on all things China and Russia, with no mention ever made of the conflict of interest arising from their war machine funding. Just in the last few days, here's a recent NPR interview about NATO expansion with CNAS senior fellow Andrea Kendall Taylor, a Washington Post quote from CNAS fellow Jacob Stokes about the Chinese threat to Taiwan. A Financial Times quote from CNAS Indo-Pacific expert Lisa Curtis, who I've previously noted was cited by the mass media for her expert opposition to the U.S. Afghanistan withdrawal. And a foreign policy citation of the aforementioned Richard Fontaine saying, quote, the aim of U.S. policy toward China should be to ensure that Beijing is either unwilling or unable to overturn the regional and global order, end quote. As we've discussed previously, citing war machine funded think tanks as expert analysis without even disclosing their financial conflict of interest is plainly journalistic malpractice. But it happens all the time in the mass media anyway, because the mass media exists to circulate propaganda, not journalism. This is getting so, so crazy that the mass media are now openly teaming up with war machine think tanks to begin seeding the normalization of a hot war with China into the minds of the public. Indicates that the propaganda campaign to manufacture consent for the U.S. centralized empire's final Hail Mary grab at Unipolar domination is escalating even further. The mass scale psychological manipulation is getting more and more overt and more and more shameless. This is headed somewhere very, very bad. Hopefully humanity wakes up in time to stop these lunatics from driving us off a precipice from which there is no return.