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The importance of gold and how it was to be secretly accumulated as it was the only true store of value Until recently, exhibits at University museums and family narratives represented the Stanfords as an ideal nuclear unit destroyed by the tragic death of Leland, Jr., at age 15 from typhoid fever. Jane Stanford devoted the rest of her life to honoring her son by creating a great university. After McConnell helped Trump’s judicial nominees over the finishing line, the senator became expendable. He emerged as a target for Trump’s rants and loathing, including potshots at Elaine Chao, McConnell’s Chinese American wife, who resigned from Trump’s cabinet – if only after January 6. At times, McConnell’s disdain seeped out. Ultimately, though, he maintained sufficient devotion to his Caesar: McConnell blamed Trump for January 6 but refused to vote to convict at the second impeachment trial. But the most interesting of all the literary retorts to the Warren report is Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (1995), which used KGB material released in post-Soviet Russia to illuminate the formative period that Kennedy’s presumed assassin spent in the USSR as a young man. However, despite this period deepening the mystery of Oswald’s motives, the generally anarchistic Mailer eventually concludes: “Every insight we have gained of him suggests the solitary nature of his act.” Mailer’s sly comparison of the assassination with masturbation underlines his theory that the killer was driven by narcissistic egotism, rather than an external commission. Ultimately it’s not about the key players, it’s about our history and the history of conspiracy, as an act. It’s a story of a modern day conspiracy and the players happen to be Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and Peter Thiel. But it’s more than that. It’s about our world and our current landscape, political and social.
Anything that is happening today can be, if you so choose, understood to be part of the incredibly byzantine and hidden plan of the Illuminati that may seem confusing to us on the surface but you can trust as an article of faith that is part of their grand plan. They are both omniscient and omnipotent (unlike God they’re not benevolent) but they are working behind the scenes and that explains the world. What does seem new is that QAnon is this weird hybrid of a very dangerous, quite racist and homo- and transphobic conspiracy theory mixed with an online multilevel marketing scheme and also a community forum for puzzle solvers,” he says. I’ve long been a fan of Ryan Holiday, so take that for what it’s worth, but I believe this to be yet another book that seeks to enlighten and educate. As Stevens sees it, the late Weimar Republic and the US today have plenty in common. As was the case 90 years ago, democracy could be made expendable, particularly if the donor class goes along for the ride.
From MMR to Covid-19, vaccines have been a prime example of how initially reasonable concerns over possible side-effects can career into an insidious irrationality. Trump understood the true nature of the Republican party better than those who were the party’s leaders,” Stevens writes of Trump’s first campaign, launched in 2015, a tacit admission that the author himself did not fully comprehend the world around him. It was about resentments, not upward arc: “Hate was creating a surge of appeal.” This is his first bit of journalism. He does a good job investigating and telling the story about a real, honest to goodness conspiracy. Most publications have been sceptical of this finding. On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison (1988), a Louisiana lawyer, and L Fletcher Prouty’s JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F Kennedy (1992), featured key source material for Oliver Stone’s movie JFK(1991), which suggested that the president was executed by a vast cabal of businessmen, gangsters, politicians, soldiers, Cuban dissidents and spooks.
A friend of mine compares the free speech debate to the gun control debate: when they wrote the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers could never have imagined that a high-powered Assault Press like Gawker could end up in the hands of a civilian. Bernays honest and practical manual provides much insight into some of the most powerful and influential institutions of contemporary industrial state capitalist democracies.”While there certainly was intrigue, I did find the pace slower than I expected, especially with Ryan Holiday re-iterating multiple times the ideas around conspiracies and what happens when people feel wronged/vengeful, rather than focusing on the details of the story. What I wanted to do with this book is to lay out that this is almost like a playbook that gets run and that one step to defeating it is being aware that it’s used like this. When the next one comes along – because there will be a next one – maybe we’ll be able to get out ahead of it a little bit faster.” Enter GamerGate and the culture wars and then the 2016 election, and the judgment against Gawker became fraught with implications that went well beyond the politics of outing and whether or not it's okay to publish someone's sex video without their consent. What??? Where did that come from? This book would have had to have been written in the final months of Trump's first year as President. How can he possibly conclude that it is a travesty? Bernays gives an insight into how the elites actually subjugate the masses through the media, and this will resonate with those theorists who contend that humans are highly programmable through radio and television. It does seem to be a battle of brainwashing to an extent, with various government controlled media outlets each sending out propaganda to its citizens. Thus American, Russian and Chinese citizens are all given different propaganda and different versions of events. Bernays states in the book that:
A conspiracy theory is an explanation of an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful actors, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable. The term has a pejorative connotation, implying that the appeal to a conspiracy is based on prejudice or insufficient evidence. Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular reasoning: both evidence against the conspiracy and an absence of evidence for it, are re-interpreted as evidence of its truth, and the conspiracy becomes a matter of faith rather than proof. Witch trial in Salem, Massachusetts. Lithograph by George H. Walker. Undated. Photograph: Bettmann ArchiveI think we’re much more likely to change [Trump] because if he is president, he’s going to have to deal with the sort of the right-of-center world, which is where most of us are,” McConnell told CNBC. The prominence of Mexico and Cuba in the Kennedy books means that those countries are likely to be among the most frequently searched words in the latest archive release. And those of us who find The Tears of Autumn the most plausible explanation of the assassination will look with particular interest at any CIA documentation dealing with Diem’s death. This argument is counterintuitive, but not obviously wrong. And it's a good heuristic that when an argument is easy to dismiss but turns out to be hard to argue with, you should default to strongly believing it. If nothing else, when you find out you're wrong you do so in a way that leaves you better-informed than the conformists. There is a wide variety of alternative history conspiracy books to choose from; however, these seven are a little more robust in terms of reliability and evidence. It is arguably worthwhile reading an alternative view of history and then making up your own mind, instead of just accepting the official version as fact. There is much evidence that, at least in some cases, official versions of events are not as they seem. And authors such as Bernays, Fuller and Epperson give a good reason as to why this is the case.
Re-read and a radical shift of my opinion. I jumped to conclusions too soon first time round. I finally get this book!For some reason the author frequently writes in the present tense. For example (not a real quote, just to illustrate), "In 2012, Thiel goes to the store. He sees his rival, and debates what to say." Perhaps it's my historian bias, but this tense just seemed wrong and distracting. Bollea was genuinely crushed by all these events. When he sued Gawker, though, he didn't really have a hope of winning. He wasn't nearly rich enough to take on the Gawker empire. Until Peter Thiel came along. Cunning and resources might win the war, but it’s the stories and the myths afterward that will determine who deserved to win it." Absorbing + fascinating, one of those tales that's impossible to believe is a true story. Ryan Holiday is so quotable throughout the entire book, little nuggets of wisdom on society, moral high ground/obligation, conspiracy, power, history, perspective, decency, wealth, the media, the legal process, strategy, psychology, war-- I bookmarked a few of my favorites. So much to learn from this book, I wish all nonfiction was written this way. I complain a lot about books (and movies) being overwritten, but “Conspiracy” is the first book in a very long time I wanted to re-edit – in-book, with a marker – and read again. Because as long as he’s staying on topic (the conspiracy to sue Gawker out of business), Ryan Holiday’s book is awesome. He competently lays the foundation and tells you the story in just about as complete a fashion as you could hope for.
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