Based on Aaron Moulton’s The Influencing Machine, this is the story of the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art: a vast network of institutions that reshaped the Eastern Bloc in one of the most brazen and least acknowledged cultural engineering efforts in modern history... After the Cold War, Soros quietly built a supranational web of nested NGOs and private enterprises across 20+ post-Soviet countries to reprogram entire national cultures from the ground up—then the whole thing essentially vanished from memory, leaving almost no trace behind.

This is partially true. @PalmerLuckey is referring to CIA document 1035-960 written in 1967 which detailed the CIA's media strategy for counteracting criticisms of the Warren Report.

The document does indeed reference "conspiracy theories" and "conspiracy theorist," but...

https://twitter.com/AutismCapital/status/1890510819567505658

...it doesn't invent either of these terms. The offending paragraph and related section are attached below.

You can tell from context that conspiracy theories were already a known political concept and the authors assumed their readers would understand what these terms meant.

The meta-story of this week is once again that MAGA has completely circumvented legacy media. We select what stories matter, and how those stories get shaped and delivered to decision makers.

Sentiment created on X flows in a straight, disintermediated line directly to DC. This was always the big promise of the internet as a free speech platform, where legacy gatekeepers with built-in structural advantages to shape and manipulate the news would lose their power to do so...

But it really is only now that this is actually happening.

Still can’t believe there was like a 10 year period where Malcolm Gladwell was a dominant cultural figure There was an entire ruling ethos that all individual and social problems could--and very soon would--be resolved with This One Weird Trick

I’ve been telling anyone who will listen that the lib freak out is not going to happen or will be dramatically muted relative to 2016. The energy for it is just not there.

Their manic zeal from the first Trump term was never sustainable. They are ready to surrender.

https://twitter.com/asymmetricinfo/status/1854322105619255410

My hunch is that we are going to see broad capitulation on a lot of Trump’s agenda, especially with regards to tech, fp, crime, and infrastructure build out.

Whereas they will fight deportations and attempts to slash the bureaucratic state and especially the spook-state…

This is a good example of how even if Woke is waning, there are a few critical institutions like medicine where the sunk costs are too deep, morally and psychologically, for its stakeholders to walk away from it.

This is going to require generational churn.

https://twitter.com/bourne_beth2345/status/1848029626422947940

Or you treat woke holdovers like Bukele treats MS-13 members. You just round them up. Strip them of their licensing all at once, gut the med schools, the associations and specialty guilds of all bad actors. Remove them from the gen pop (so to speak) (in the ring) (in real life)

Marcellus Williams, Adnan Syed, Steven Avery, Central Park Five... all of these high profile cases where the guy is obviously guilty, why does the lib insist beyond reason the guy is not guilty and make impassioned moralistic pleas that we all submit to their delusion? At bottom, despite the trappings of cosmopolitanism, the lib is a provincial, small-minded creature. The lib, for all his openness and presumptions to empathy, cannot see beyond himself, beyond his own inclinations, cannot imagine there are people who are not at all like him

This is actually perfectly revealing of how the Richards—and this class of formerly right “centrists”—come to their politics. It’s not about policy or ideology, but embarrassment over the less sophisticated parts of the right, the narcissism of small differences toward the chuds

https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1837549433049043022

If you’re wondering why these guys obsess over the vulgarity of the right while ignoring the derangements of the left, this is why. The Richards are interested firstly in themselves, what makes them personally look good or bad.

The signature characteristic of the leftist is resentment for people who are richer than he is. The lowest expression of this resentment is the blind violence of the commie. The midwit version (see below) is vague, abstracted appeals to “fairness,” while the highest version (see the thread linked in reply), at least rationalizes it by making arguments about capital velocity or market efficiency or whatever, but it’s all the same thing: that other guy is richer than me which makes me feel inferior and I don’t like it. Resentment dressed up as economic efficiency:

https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/1829529422598394171

I know it’s been talked about a lot around here, but I finally saw First Man and it’s even better than I could’ve imagined. An A-tier film, not only about the space-race, but about masculinity, and the costs and requirements of great civilizational achievement. Must watch. There’s a great moment highlighting the social-political tensions of embarking on a project of this scale where Kurt Vonnegut makes a passive-aggressive plea to spend the money instead on making New York City safe, and communist poet Gil Scot Heron recites “Whitey on the Moon”

A minor academic book called "The Party Decides" was published in 2008 arguing that party insiders, donors, media, etc. all coordinate behind the scenes to pre-empt voter preferences to make presidential nominations despite the "democratic" pretext of the modern primary process... The book had a moment in 2016 when both Trump and Bernie Sanders looked like they might defy this thesis and return the selection process to the voters in direct opposition to party preferences.

Trump prevailed.

Bernie did not.

Got started on my Khmer Rouge reading by the leading American scholar on the subject. In the first 30 pages I encounter a totally unnecessary political claim about biological race, followed by a ham-handed reframing of the KR as not truly communist but instead “reactionary”



This all follows a long intro where the main antagonist is US/Nixon/, who certainly were catalysts, but while completely washing over the role of the North Vietnamese. All a bit surprising until I did quick author search and discovered he was a KR apologist in the 70’s

Fascinating short thread on Tasmanian aborigines. Living for thousands of years isolated from inter human competition, the Tasmanians become more primitive over time. They lost the knowledge/will to fish, to make fire, had no clothes, and never got around to making boats.

https://twitter.com/haravayin_hogh/status/1802650863502303631

Tasmania isn't a particularly mild climate either. It's cold, windy, and the winters would bring them to the brink of starvation. Yet, they never really adapted at all. Mostly, at least the men, sat around and did, well... nothing

Caught 30 mins of a CNN special on the “misinformation” crisis. A very telling piece of media to understand present regime psychology. Premise is CNN bugman reporter (looks like a bug) goes around the heartland doing pseudo-anthropology on “Trump’s America.” On its face it’s the usual sop to a lib audience who need constant affirmation of their moral and intellectual superiority. Fear porn about white rural rage, plus Q-mania, plus “Christian Nationalism,” with special emphasis on J6.

The other thing happening here is that teen social life has become hyper-structured in general.

Pre cell phone/internet, teen life depended on some level of spontaneous coordination. You’d show up at the Taco Bell parking lot and sort of wait around for whatever came next.

https://twitter.com/l0m3z/status/1799093494113562912

Lots of idle loitering, flirting, smoking cigs, getting into trouble, discovering in real time with a highly variable and loosely bounded group of peers how to spend the day/night.

Social life outside the home/off-line now seems to all be pre-planned *by parents.*

Would like to read a piece of longform writing or novel on Gen X turbo normie youth sports family.

I’ve encountered this quite a bit. Highly functional, pro-social, well-adjusted families but that expend 100% of discretionary resources/time on kids sports. Seems to be mostly a Gen X suburban UMC phenomenon. Why?

Seems to be some kind of secular lib filtering mechanism. Resource intensive and requires planning and long term commitment, therefore self-selects out the community’s dysfunctional/pathological elements.

When I first came to Twitter and even before that in comments sections at various blogs like UR and Xenosystems and iSteve what drew me to these places was a spirit of open intellectual inquiry, experimentation of ideas, and a sense of play, of humor... This was totally at odds with the academic environment that was and still is ruled by prescriptive thinking, dogma, and witless, self-serious pretension. Constipated intellkshuals tickled by the overwrought contortions required to squeeze out a fart...

Breaking: the Guardian has exposed a family man with a loving wife and many beautiful children, who played college basketball, worked for Google, traveled the world, then had a 10-year career in academia before starting a highly successful publishing company.

I'm shook. This person has been stalking "Lomez" for months. He is a Portland-based ANTIFA activist paid by a multi-billion dollar media conglomerate to harass people. He's been emailing and texting presumed former colleagues. Texting my wife. Attempting to get friends fired from their jobs for merely knowing me. Invoking my deceased father. Threatening to “expose” my blog posts from 20 years ago, my high school and college athletic achievements (please do), and even my nickname from middle-school. A truly deranged individual.

Virtually everyone I talk to, across a variety of institutions and ideological priors, all point to 2014 as the real Year Zero of the Woke Revolution. By now it has become the conventional wisdom. And I do think it's true, but I have yet to read a detailed account of this... I have my own pet theory, which is that the culmination of Obergfell released a bunch of activist energy and created the conditions for newly embarrassed and defeated conservatives to be bullied into conceding on successive "next current things"

https://x.com/L0m3z/status/1519709524935856128

Woke isn't dying. Woke isn't going anywhere.

Friend told me his small red town in a red state 500 miles from the nearest international airport just announced it's having it's first ever Pride parade, including a drag show for kids sponsored by the town council. This also came with a "Proclamation" issued by the city declaring the town a safe space and condemning bigotry blah blah blah, suggesting that any objections, let alone active resistance to a city-sponsored Pride week and kid's drag show is somehow verboten...

While you were playing your switch on the airplane, I decided to torture myself by watching the interahamwe film “Dear White People” using disposable airline headphones I could barely hear through, and now I am going to write a review: Stylistically, the movie is a feature length low-brow teen soap opera you might’ve seen on 2000’s era WB, but with pretensions of making some big sociological/political statement about race and class, which it does pretty clumsily, but not without some (accidental) insight.