The Perelman Performing Arts Center was unveiled in September 2023, steps from the footprint of the Twin Towers. Critics called it “glamorous” and “a retort to terrorism.”

But no one mentioned something almost too strange to believe: It’s a ringer for the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest shrine. The cube-shaped building is even veiled in marble that recalls the Kaaba’s black kiswa, and one corner points directly toward Mecca.

This is not an internet conspiracy theory. It’s a thing anyone could see. But not a single one of the dozens of distinguished art and architecture critics and urban planners who commented on the site for dozens of high-level newspapers and magazines ever so much as noted the similarity to the Kaaba, even in passing. Standing on a site visible to hundreds of thousands of people, the building has somehow rendered itself invisible. One of the most bizarre yet permanent-seeming afflictions of our time is reality blindness. It’s not willful ignorance, not propaganda, but a kind of social disease—where even the most obvious things vanish from view. Today’s afflicted aren’t aware they’re blind. Large portions of reality simply disappear—and pointing them out only makes you look insane.

Why? Because the sheer overload of contradictory information has broken our ability to discern meaning. It’s safer to stare blankly than to see something that others refuse to acknowledge. Reality blindness makes sense as a protective mechanism: with so much information circulating, the number of potential contradictions of what we take to be basic information about reality approaches infinity.

Reality blindness isn’t new. But now it’s endemic.

It’s why elite journalists who “won Pulitzers” for Russiagate still haven’t apologized. Why COVID theater was sold as “science.” Why nobody blinks when social media is openly censored.  And because it is so common, especially within the consensus-making apparatus, the cost of reality blindness for most people is zero. It is those with the annoying habit of pointing out visible gaps who pay the price.

In other words, it would in fact be entirely normal for someone to have built a 138-foot tall, marble-clad ringer for the Kaaba on one of the most trafficked corners of downtown Manhattan, the still-beating heart of America’s most populous city ever since the country’s very first census was taken in 1790, and for not a single soul to have noticed what they were looking at.

On May 8, Bill Gates announced to the New York Times that he planned to spend down the $200 billion in his foundation’s coffers by Dec. 31, 2045—several decades before originally intended.

A month later, Gates revealed that the majority of that money will go to bolstering the work his foundation has been doing in Africa.

But what, exactly, have they been doing there?

In January, @ArminRosen traveled to Nairobi, where he discovered not only that Kenyans are the raw material for Gates’ better world—but that they hold the key to understanding what’s in store for the rest of us too. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has 2,000 full-time employees—about four times as many as George Soros’ Open Society Foundations—and a $1.6 billion yearly budget. It has given out $91 billion in grants this century, making it the richest and most generous American charity in history.

At this point, one thing that unites disparate outfits like the World Health Organization, NPR, and the Chinese government is that they are all, in some form or another, Gates-funded institutions.

And they are all angled toward a global-scale drive toward one man’s concept of progress.

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As the ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel looks to be complete, we gathered a roundtable of the sharpest minds of Tablet's extended universe to try to understand what the hell is going and answer some of the underlying questions on everyone's mind. Scroll founder Jacob Siegel argued that Trump’s adoption of Biden’s “failed framework” could represent a retreat from the successful foreign policy vision that guided his first term, but that Bibi is no fool and likely has reasons for accepting the deal

The Rise and Fall of the Obama Thought-Machine 🧵

Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other...

From "Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment" by David Samuels

1/14 The collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid and its replacement by monopoly social media platforms, made it possible for the Obama White House to sell policy—and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices—in new ways.

In constructing echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that influenced and controlled the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion”.

2/14

Brokenism 🧵

In 2022, Alana Newhouse wrote about the decline of American institutions. How it’s splitting people, particularly Jews, into two groups:

Status Quo-ists and Brokenists

1/18 In the wake of Trump’s victory, these institutions' denial about their decline has begun to ebb.

Just in the past few weeks, prominent publishers have lamented the deterioration of the art world, the literary sphere, elite universities, Hollywood, and even cable news, all at the hands of a certain ideology.

2/18

Brokenism 🧵

Back in 2022, Alana Newhouse wrote about the decline of institutions, and how it’s splitting people, particularly Jews, into two groups:

Status Quoists and Brokenists
1/18 In the wake of Trump’s victory, the denial of decline by mainstream institutions has began to diminish.

Just in the past few weeks, prominent publishers have lamented the deterioration of the art world, the literary sphere, elite universities, Hollywood, and even cable news, all at the hands of a certain ideology.
2/18

The People Setting America on Fire 🧵

How are all anti-Israel protests alike? We followed the money to find out.

From the article by Park MacDougald

1/23 Georgia, 2023: prosecutors bring RICO charges against anarchists involved in the “Stop Cop City” protests in Atlanta.

The indictment identified a network of fraudulent nonprofits, fiscal sponsors, and bail funds that were, in reality, front groups controlled by three anarchist roommates, who used millions in tax-exempt funds on an alleged violent criminal conspiracy involving the illegal occupation of public land, planned confrontations with police, doxxing and harassment campaigns.

2/23

Re: news of US officials worried about a high level security breach after an Iranian telegram channel published leaked US intel docs on Israel's prep for an attack on Iran, see this from last year: High-Level Iranian Spy Ring Busted in Washington
tabletmag.com/sections/israe… The Biden administration’s now-suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments, according to a trove of purloined Iranian government emails.

How To Tell the Difference Between Good and Bad Conspiracy Theories

In a world in which the sitting president of the United States is first declared to be functioning at the height of his powers and then abruptly replaced on the Democratic ticket by an unseen hand because he is senile—raising the question of who is actually running the most powerful nation on earth—it’s hard to dismiss the idea that conspiracies are real, and that mainstream accounts of events are pap.
And yet, negotiating a landscape in which conspiracism is the lingua franca doesn’t mean simply believing in whatever “conspiracy theories” come down the pike; rather, it requires a far greater degree of intellectual rigor and torque than reading a newspaper did, back in the days when publishers and editors could credibly promise to tell the truth to their readers. It requires being a good reader, which presupposes the ability to see the language and forms of conspiracism as separate from the content of a “conspiracy theory,” which like any other theory can be empirically shown to be either true or false.
One easy way to tell whether a “conspiracy theory” is potentially constructive or dangerous is by evaluating its effects on believers. An obsession with the poisons in your water may be constructive—and indeed, of enormous social benefit—if the old battery factory next to your house is leaching carcinogens into the regional water supply. An obsession with the aliens who built the pyramids, or a focus on people who change into wolves at night and steal your chi, is unlikely to tell you much of anything about the forces that actually impact your life, though it may deepen your suspicion of authority. Absent any ability to demonstrate causes and effects related to real-world phenomena, however, these “theories” or fixations are simply kooky.

By the time one gets to the hidden hand of the illuminati in fixing global energy prices, one is more likely to find oneself a prisoner of a “conspiracy theory” of the repetitive, totalizing, self-validating sort that causes its believers to wind up angry, alienated, and depressed. The totalizing thrust of these beliefs progressively separates believers from the world of observable causes and effects, causing them to lose their hold on reality.

A good example of this is the obsession with Jews who control the world.