A half-blind refugee is left in a parking lot by Border Patrol agents who mistakenly had detained him. For six days, his family searched the cold streets of Buffalo. Where was Nurul Amin Shah Alam? My story; images by Brendan Bannon. nytimes.com/interactive/2026…

The pork industry lost with voters. Lost at the Supreme Court. So they turned to Congress—and got the "Save Our Bacon" Act buried in the House Farm Bill. It's the biggest rollback of animal welfare protections in U.S. history. A thread. 🧵

NYT article is fake, and motivated, in two glaring ways: (1) As @UnderSecretaryF notes below, @StateDept never “dismissed” foreign propaganda threats. In @SecRubio confirmation testimony and my own, we framed these as serious challenges — but rightly excluded censorship of Americans as a response to them. Congress agreed, and declined to renew funding for GEC — even before our admin took office. An entire industry of “disinformation” experts strain to frame censorship opposition as sinister or naive. (They are eager to give quotes to journalists.) Once you’ve seen the intel and grasp the threat, they claim, you’ll understand why it’s vital to spend tax dollars suppressing content from outlets like @FDRLST and @unherd. If you disagree, they say, then perhaps you’re a foreign asset. Of course, that’s wrong. I have seen the intel and grasp the threat. Actors including Russia, China, and Iran — aided by unpaid volunteers who delight in spreading foreign regime propaganda for anti-American ideological reasons — do want to seed your timeline with slop. Effects of this are most acute in smaller, overseas info environments, where competing news sources can be sparse. This can harm American interests, and warrants an American response. We advocate a spectrum of them. But we exclude censorship — much to the chagrin of people who want to revive COVID-era absurdities and entrench them as the future of the internet. (2) Nobody instructed diplomats to prioritize tweeting (“push back on X”) as a response to propaganda. We did send a cable emphasizing counterspeech generally, which can be undertaken on any/all appropriate platform(s). And just as I’ve done publicly, our diplomatic cable highlights @CommunityNotes as an example of a constructive technology in the info space. This was a helpful counterexample to some of the censorious tech that governments previously promoted (eg, ad-blacklist tools). No single tool is a panacea, but crowd-sourced annotations show some promise, particularly when there are algo safeguards against dominance by “brigades” of coordinated users or ideological blocs. Finally, some reporters seem to find it notable that we mention coordination with DoW MISO ops (“psyops”). This is a longstanding practice, for obvious reasons: if State and DoW are messaging on overlapping issues in overlapping regions, one hand needs to know what the other is doing.

It’s only a war if it comes from the war region of France. Otherwise it’s just sparkling military conflict