The #UnitedStates has directed every #American #embassy and #consulate across the world to launch coordinated campaigns against foreign #propaganda and endorses #ElonMusk’s X as an “innovative” tool to help do it.

The cable, signed by the secretary of state, #MarcoRubio, on Monday and obtained by the Guardian, also suggests embassies and consulates work alongside the US military’s #psychological #operations unit to address the problem of rampant disinformation. It lays out a sweeping set of instructions for how embassy staff should push back against what it describes as coordinated foreign efforts to undermine #American #interests abroad.

It comes as the United States is at war with #Iran, whose government has for decades operated one of the world’s most sophisticated and prolific state #disinformation apparatuses, and as #Russian and #Chinese influence operations continue to target American allies across #Europe, #Asia and #LatinAmerica.

[ sorry, me here, @ElectricTrike - the major nation targeting Europe, Asia and Latin America with disinformation is #uspol ]

The cable instructs those embassies and consulates to pursue five broad goals: countering hostile messaging, expanding access to information, exposing adversary behavior, elevating local voices who support American interests, and promoting what it calls “telling America’s story”.

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Embassies are told to #recruit #localInfluencers, #academics and #communityleaders abroad to carry counter-propaganda messaging, an approach designed to make #American-funded #narratives feel #locally organic rather than centrally directed.

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“These campaigns seek to shift blame to the United States, sow division among allies, promote alternative worldviews antithetical to America’s interests, and even undermine American economic interests and political freedoms,” the cable says. “Using digital platforms, state-controlled media, and influence operations, they pose a direct threat to US national security and fuel hostility toward American interests.”

Notably, the cable tells diplomatic offices to coordinate their work with “the Department of War’s Psychological Operations” – the military unit more commonly known as Miso, or Military Information Support Operations, formerly Psyop, which is part of the Pentagon.

The state department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It is not common for the state department to openly combine public diplomacy with military psychological operations. But attempts to counter foreign disinformation are not new, although previous administrations funded it through the Global Engagement Center, which lost its funding just before Donald Trump returned to office.

Last year, the FBI had its foreign influence taskforce dissolved and the state department shuttered the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference hub.

The cable also endorses Elon Musk’s platform X by name – specifically its Community Notes feature – as an “innovative” and “crowdsourced” instrument to cull disinformation in “countering anti-American propaganda operations without compromising free speech or privacy”.

That endorsement comes as the European Union has already fined X €120m ($137.5m) under its Digital Services Act for deceptive practices – the first such fine under the law – and has opened further investigations into the platform’s AI tools and recommendation algorithms.

Musk, who owns X, had an influential special advisory role in the Trump administration through the so-called department of government efficiency (Doge).

The cable instructs embassy staff to ensure that US foreign assistance is visibly branded, directing consular posts to use “prominent, flag-forward branding” so that foreign audiences know when aid or programming is coming from the American government.

Offices and embassies globally are also told to increase the availability of international news and independent analysis translated into local languages, in effect tasking embassies with becoming distribution hubs for foreign-language media in countries where, the cable notes, “anti-American propaganda is pervasive or where information is restricted”.

More than 700 “American spaces” – the cultural centers, libraries and exchange hubs the US government funds in countries around the world – are to be repositioned under the guidance as platforms for uncensored information and promoted explicitly as free speech “zones.”

#auspol this has “Hey, let’s fund Australia’s #OneNation” vibes all over it.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/30/embassies-campaign-marco-rubio-elon-musk

Apparently #podcasts are a thing. Discussing #media and political #narratives on #migration with Caroline Twigg (Mayors Migration Council) and Julia Litzkow (host, #nccr – on the move.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P-0AOKklFk

https://open.spotify.com/episode/40XZ3JvgKoTnucCcyLVFo3

https://nccr-onthemove.ch/videos-and-podcasts/

There’s a strange sense of déjà vu in the headlines lately.

Deals announced. Relief performed.
But those most affected still outside the room.

We’ve seen this before.

Peace negotiated around people rarely holds.

https://associationredefine.substack.com/p/peace-for-our-time

#Geopolitics #Peace #History #Politics #CriticalThinking #Democracy #Narratives

Did you have a 'constructive call' lately?

It means: You’ve overcome all your inner revulsion and mustered every ounce of strength to make a bloody friendly call to a deeply disturbed psychopathic narcissist. He didn’t throw things, didn’t kick you straight in the balls, and muttered something about his golf game.
Result: You might want to give him another call. He’ll still be sitting pretty in that job instead of a prison.

#Narratives: Use that #wording only with quotation marks.

#language

The meme plays on a peculiar historical loop—one that feels almost too ironic to be accidental. It juxtaposes innocence with hindsight, using a child’s calm certainty to expose the brutal contradictions embedded in history. The question isn’t just rhetorical; it’s surgical. It cuts through decades of propaganda, selective memory, and moral simplifications.

The idea that “the Germans will help protect Kyiv from bombings” would sound absurd, even offensive, within a traditional Soviet narrative framework. That narrative was built on clear binaries: liberators and aggressors, heroes and enemies, past and future neatly separated. But reality, especially modern reality, refuses to obey those boundaries. Alliances shift. Roles invert. Yesterday’s enemy becomes today’s supplier, partner, or protector—while yesterday’s “brother” becomes a source of threat.

That is where the meme derives its power. It doesn’t just mock—it destabilizes. The discomfort comes from recognition: history is not a static moral diagram but a dynamic system shaped by interests, failures, and adaptation. The figures in the second panel—representatives of an older worldview—react not because the statement is unclear, but because it is too clear. It exposes a contradiction they were never meant to confront.

The “Alice” figure works as more than a character; she becomes a metaphor for temporal awareness. Someone—or something—that can see continuity where others see rupture. Her question, “Whose?”, is deceptively simple, yet it forces a collapse of narrative comfort zones. It implies that causality matters more than slogans, and that responsibility cannot be indefinitely outsourced to the past.

Ultimately, the meme is not about Germany, Kyiv, or even war in a narrow sense. It is about the fragility of constructed realities. Systems that rely on rigid interpretations of history tend to break when confronted with nonlinear truth. And when they do, the reaction is rarely reflection—it is denial, discomfort, or an attempt to silence the question altogether.

But the question remains.

**Whose?**

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#history #geopolitics #narratives #propaganda #memory #war #ukraine #kyiv #europe #irony #satire #analysis #historicalcontext #informationwar #perception #reality #power #politics

"... the question almost nobody was asking, is not about Claude or any language model. It is a bureaucratic question about what happened to the kill chain, and the answer is Palantir. ...

"The target package for the Shajareh Tayyebeh school presented a military facility. ... This package looked like every other package in the queue. But outside the package, the school appeared in Iranian business listings. It was visible on Google Maps. A search engine could have found it. Nobody searched. At a thousand decisions an hour, nobody was going to. ...

"Someone decided to build a system that produces a thousand targeting decisions per hour and call them high-quality. Someone decided to start this war. Several hundred people are sitting on Capitol Hill, refusing to stop it. Calling it an “AI problem” gives those decisions, and those people, a place to hide."

- Kevin Baker, "Kill Chain"
https://artificialbureaucracy.substack.com/p/kill-chain

#war #death #tech #systems #narratives
#bureaucracy #SoCalledAI #Claude #Maven #Palantir

https://soundcloud.com/when-we-dip/premiere-mustafa-ismaeel-ramy
Mustafa Ismaeel, Ramy Mishriky, Alaa Jazaeri - From Afar

#music #MustafaIsmaeel #RamyMishriky #AlaaJazaeri #Narratives #whenwedip #soundcloud