World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 23 May 2026How did Nazi Germany seize control of its youth by the end of 1936? In this episode, Spartacus traces the Hitler Youth Law, the Four-Year Plan, Winterhilfswerk, the Anti-Comintern Pact, Goebbels’ attack on criticism, and the tightening exclusion of German Jews.
Berlin, December 31, 1936. The Nazi regime did not need another single dramatic coup. It connected the household, the factory, the school, the street collection, the newspaper, and the foreign threat into one system of mobilization.
This episode covers how the Law on the Hitler Youth declared all German youth organized within the Hitler Youth; how the Four-Year Plan redirected recovery toward rearmament and autarky; how charity became mandated patriotic ritual through Winterhilfswerk; how anti-Bolshevik propaganda linked Spain, Japan, Italy, and Germany; and how Jewish Germans were pushed further into isolation through administrative humiliation and police control.
This is an educational historical documentary condemning Nazism, antisemitism, dictatorship, racial exclusion, and political indoctrination.
May 24, 2026
How to Indoctrinate a Generation – Death of Democracy 16 – Q4 1936
May 22, 2026
Achtung! Achtung! Extremely extreme extreme-right alert! Achtung! Achtung!
Shocking and dreadful news from democratic Germany comes to us from eugyppius, as the extremely extreme extreme-right Hitler Nazi Fascist party continues to soar in the polls, signalling existential danger for “Our Democracy”, just like the 1930s all over again:
Last Saturday, INSA published a nationwide poll that caused immense disquiet among the defenders of Our Democracy because it showed Alternative für Deutschland a whole seven fat points ahead of the centre-right Union parties. That beastly Evil Fascist Nazi Hitler AfD had never polled so strongly before and had also never clocked such a large lead over the Union before.
Suddenly 1933 was that much closer, and this made the Defenders of Our Democracy uncomfortable. Thus there ensued a lot of hand-wringing and panic and motivated reasoning about how this poll might just be an outlier and also too leftoid conspiracy theories that INSA because reasons and as part of a nefarious plot might be cooking the numbers to make AfD look stronger than they actually are.
People stopped saying things like that when Forsa, another polling operation, published their own nationwide survey three days later, which had the AfD at 28% with a six-point lead over the CDU …
[…]
The establishment received their latest shit sandwich this morning, in the form of yet another INSA survey – this time a state poll – showing that the AfD in the Free State of Saxony with 42% support, against a badly weakened CDU at 21%:
These numbers are very close to a recent poll of Sachsen-Anhalt. Together, these polls show that the AfD is on track to achieve outright parliamentary majorities across multiple East German states in the coming years. Basically, we’re looking at a preference cascade, as the press turns on a badly weakened Pigeon Chancellor Friedrich Merz, voters move their support to the only CDU alternative in view, and AfD support thereby becomes socially normalised – which draws still more voters towards the party in turn. Who knows when it will end, or if any of these alienated voters can ever be won back from Evil Nazi Hitler Fascism to Our Democracy, or how the Union can hope to survive the tectonic shifts that are already moving the ground beneath them.
These and other imponderables have driven our political establishment to the brink of psychosis. The CDU have responded to their impending doom by publishing a defamatory 36-page pamphlet screeching that the AfD are “Detrimental to democracy”, “Anti-Semitic” and “Nationalist”. The screed reads like it was written by a pinched schoolmarm and portions of it are very likely legally actionable, mainly because they contain straight-up unadulterated lies. The document raised eyebrows across Germany because its hysterical, desperate tone is so out of character for the staid, unimaginative propagandists of the Union. They must really be losing their minds over there in the CDU.
May 20, 2026
The Korean War Week 100: Mark Clark in Command – May 19, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 19 May 2026Mark Clark is the new UN Commander and will run the war in Korea, replacing Matt Ridgway, who leaves for Europe to take over NATO Command. The Koje-Do POW camp situation is resolved, but is a black eye for the UN, as are the allegations that the US has been practicing germ warfare in Korea and Manchuria, backed up by “confessions” from captured American airmen.
00:00 Intro
01:13 Recap
01:29 Demand and Response
05:35 What Went Wrong at Koje-Do?
12:06 Germ Warfare?
13:55 Mark Clark
15:45 ROK and Ammunition
19:53 Philippine Raids
21:16 Summary
21:28 Conclusion
22:09 Call to Action
May 17, 2026
Why Didn’t Germans Resist Hitler? – Death of Democracy
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 16 May 2026Why didn’t Germans resist Hitler? Were they all Nazis, or were they terrorized into silence by the Gestapo?
The truth is more unsettling. The Nazi regime ruled through a combination of targeted terror, social atomization, propaganda, popular support, opportunism, and broad accommodation. This episode examines why mass resistance never emerged — and why millions of ordinary Germans accepted, enabled, or benefited from the Third Reich.
00:00 Why didn’t Germans resist Hitler?
00:33 The myth of the all-powerful Gestapo
01:36 Targeted terror and selective repression
02:39 The Nazi seizure of power
03:09 Gleichschaltung and the destruction of civil society
03:38 Inner emigration and private conformity
04:16 Why early Nazi successes mattered
04:33 Unemployment, rearmament, and national pride
05:39 Versailles, trauma, and German victimhood
06:22 Identity, propaganda, and belonging
07:25 Volksgemeinschaft and the “Hitler Myth”
08:54 Kristallnacht and the failure of collective action
10:40 What the numbers suggest
11:47 Postwar surveys and lingering Nazi support
13:31 Terror, consent, and accommodation
15:07 Did this absolve ordinary Germans?
16:16 Democracy, responsibility, and Never Forget
Why the US Invaded Iraq
Real Time History
Published 21 Nov 2025The US invasion of Iraq was the culmination of several developments that started at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. In 2002, the Bush administration used the excuse of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) and claimed links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to justify the invasion.
(more…)
May 16, 2026
Canada’s imaginary “immigration consensus”
An informative post from earlier this year, showing how the much-talked-about “immigration consensus” was never any more than an expression of Laurentian Elite luxury belief:
Ever since immigration became a hot issue, it has become fashionable to say that “Trudeau broke Canada’s immigration consensus”. But this “consensus” was based on a false narrative that is easily disproved with data.
UNHEARD VOICES
Until about 10 years ago, I had also believed that there was an “immigration consensus” in Canada. But once my life in Canada had settled down enough for me to have the mental space to dabble in public debates online, I came across an opposing view. An Indian immigrant who was then working as editor for an English language community newspaper in the GTA wrote often about opinion polls showing a fairly high level of opposition to high immigration. His name is Pradip Rodrigues. I corresponded with him via email, and later we became friends.
What struck me at the time was that the lone voice talking about these polls was himself an immigrant. Some years later, I came across an article in [the] Vancouver Sun by journalist Douglas Todd, saying that Indo-Canadians in the Vancouver region were unhappy with the large influx of international students [from] India. Given how much value the Progressives (which category most of the MSM is a part of) put on “lived experience”, the reporting by Pradip and Mr. Todd should have attracted urgent attention.
But because the mess being created by excessive immigration hadn’t reached crisis levels by then, these voices went unheard. At best, they were preaching to the choir, and at worst, they were accused of racism (or, in the case of Pradip, “internalized racism”). Smart people see beforehand the problems that are coming and take steps to avert them. People of average intelligence attend to problems after they have occurred. Fools keep denying that problems have occurred, and it always takes a full-blown crisis to get them to accept that they have a problem on their hands – at which point they segue effortlessly to blaming others for the problems. We see this in many policy areas in Canada, and immigration is one of the most salient examples of this shortcoming in Canadian society.
RAISON D’ETRE
No politician will ever tire of saying that “Canada needs immigration to boost our economy”. An ancillary statement is that “immigrants pay taxes that support Canada’s social programs”. But as I showed in my article “Immigration Does NOT Increase Prosperity“, the inflation-adjusted compounded average growth rate (CAGR) in per capita GDP fell by a precipitous 84% between 1970 and 2021, ending up at an anemic 0.67% in the decade ending in 2021:
Clearly, the capacity of Canadians – long-time residents and newcomers alike – to “boost Canada’s economy” and “pay (more) taxes that support the social programs” has been eroded almost to zero. It is worth pondering how, in spite of clear signs evidenced by data, the exact opposite narrative could prevail over such a long period, and how so many people subscribed to it. This is as if Abraham Lincoln’s sage statement that “You can fool some people all the time, or all the people for some time, but not all the people all the time” was held in abeyance in Canada from 1970 onwards – or is that the case?
Not all of the people, but enough of the boomer generation who were raised with the constant drumbeat of propaganda from the Liberals — Canada’s “Natural Governing Party”, as they liked to refer to themselves — and now that most of them are comfortably retired, they seen no reason to rock the boat, even when their own children and grandchildren tell them how bad Canada has become since their prime.
“Do not expect a quick fix or some magical solution”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eve Chipiuk points out that it’ll take more to get our governments out of the habit of kicking the can down the road than just change of faces at the top:
Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.
No one said it would be easy. Nothing worth fighting for ever is.
Fighting powerful institutions is what I have done my entire life. It is not easy, but it is worth it because you know what is at stake.
This is also not a new problem. History has repeated this pattern before. “The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.” — Ernest Hemingway
Most do not want to give up an inch of their power or control because many have built their identity, influence, and livelihoods around those systems. Some have convinced the public that they know what is best for everyone else better than citizens know for themselves. Yet all you have to do is look around to see the lie. We are not better when people are divided, angry, fearful, and distracted, turning on each other instead of asking harder questions about the institutions and incentives driving the problems in the first place.
And if good people stop standing up, asking questions, and pushing back when something is wrong, those institutions only become more powerful and less accountable. That has been happening for a long time, which is exactly why many systems are so entrenched and disconnected from the people they are supposed to serve.
History repeatedly shows that when governments and institutions avoid addressing deeper structural problems, they rely on temporary measures, slogans, fear, distractions, and promises of quick fixes to maintain stability and public support. But eventually reality catches up, and and ordinary people bear the cost.
So do not expect a quick fix or some magical solution. Democracy, accountability, and freedom require informed citizens willing to stay engaged, stay principled, ask difficult questions, and do the hard work necessary to protect them.
Because in the end, what is more important to fight for than freedom, accountability, and the society we leave behind for future generations?
May 13, 2026
“Electoral authoritarian” regimes
eugyppius points out that the reflexive descriptions of the former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s government as “electoral authoritarian” fail to note just how authoritarian the rest of the EU’s national governments have become:
this description of an “electoral authoritarian” regime applies far more aptly to Germany than to Hungary. What did Orbán do, defund a few NGOs? meanwhile our police, intelligence agencies & state media have all collaborated for years to keep the opposition out of power.
And after some harumphing from the cheap seats, he followed up with:
Various people are clapping back at this, so let me tell you what is happen in liberal democratic non-authoritarian Germany:
– Getting raided by police, charged with speech crimes, etc. because you post online is a professional risk, I personally know various people to whom this has happened and I live my life with a bunch of opsec annoyances for the day it happens to me.
– State media coordinates with intelligence agencies to smear and harass not only the political opposition but their prominent supporters, for example by doxxing them, getting them fired, subjecting them to harassment.
– The state funds a vast “civil society” network of violent street thugs to intimidate the political opposition and also anybody identified by state-sanctioned ops like those detailed in the above item. Opposition party congresses, other events routinely disrupted by coordinated civil society protests, where the local population is sympathetic (as in many east German venues) they bus in protesters from the west and the big cities to create the necessary atmosphere.
– Domestic intelligence agencies use espionage methods to surveil and compromise the political opposition; among other things they pay informants, tap telephones, read emails, and so on. We’ve had various indications that materials gathered in these operations are then used for state media smear campaigns.
– Yes, domestic intelligence openly coordinates with state media and certain private media elements too. Various aspects of political coverage in Germany are staged by secretive unelected bureaucrats.
– Procedural rules, other laws are routinely changed in ad hoc ways to disadvantage political opposition, though we haven’t had any outright gerrymandering like in the US so that means Our Democracy is safe. 👍
And:
I’m sure I’m forgetting some things. I’ve spent years documenting this shit on my blog and literally none of the present Hungary hyperventilators have ever given the slightest shit. Orbán was a guy who observed the Euro freak show as it is manifested in countries like Germany and tried in a kind of inept half-hearted way to imitate this machine from the right, the results were ridiculous and transparent and like 25% as effective as what the German state gets up to but nevertheless all these clowns confronted with a hint of their own methods started shrieking about FaSciSm.
May 10, 2026
How to Make Nazi Germany Look Normal – Death of Democracy 15 – Q4 1936
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 9 May 2026How did Hitler use the 1936 Berlin Olympics to make Nazi Germany look peaceful — while preparing the country for war?
Berlin, September 30, 1936. Under the Olympic flame, Nazi Germany staged one of the most successful propaganda spectacles of the twentieth century. Foreign visitors saw order, ceremony, technology, pageantry, and athletic triumph. But behind the facade, the regime hid antisemitic persecution, rounded up Sinti and Roma, intensified police repression, intervened in the Spanish Civil War, and moved toward a massive new war economy.
In this episode, Spartacus Olsson looks back at the third quarter of 1936: the Berlin Olympics, Jesse Owens’ victories, Hitler’s secret war memorandum, the Four-Year Plan, Nazi propaganda, Germany’s growing involvement in Spain, and the dictatorship’s attempt to sell peace to the world while preparing for conquest.
The Olympics gave Hitler international validation. The Four-Year Plan revealed what he truly intended.
In this episode:
– How Nazi Germany sanitized Berlin before the Olympic Games
– How the regime temporarily hid antisemitic violence from foreign visitors
– How Sinti and Roma were forced out of sight before the Games
– How Jesse Owens challenged Nazi racial mythology on the track
– How Hitler moved Germany toward a war economy
– How the Four-Year Plan tied German recovery to rearmament
– How Germany’s intervention in Spain marked a new stage of escalation
– How propaganda, spectacle, and controlled media helped normalize dictatorshipThis is not just a story about the 1936 Olympics. It is a story about how authoritarian regimes use spectacle, national pride, media control, and international complacency to hide what they are becoming.
Never Forget.
May 7, 2026
Great success! Honda “postpones” their Ontario EV project
As part of their mindless fanboyism for anything remotely related to “Net Zero”, the federal government and the Ontario provincial government have been serving up subsidies for electric vehicles and hastening the “inevitable transition” away from internal combustion vehicles. Through legislation and regulation, they’ve been doing everything they can to close down the traditional car and truck manufacturing sector and replace them with zero emission vehicles. The various governments have handed out subsidies amounting to billions, and yet one after another after another the much ballyhoo’d EV factories, battery plants, and other futuristic projects fall by the wayside, leaving very little in exchange for those billions:
There was a time, not very long ago, when Liberal politicians treated EV battery announcements like moon landings.
Hard hats. Safety glasses. Giant ceremonial cheques. Breathless speeches about “the future”. Every battery plant was “historic”. Every subsidy package was “transformational”. Every corporate press conference looked like a motivational seminar for people who think buzzwords are infrastructure.
All we were missing was a fog machine and Bono.
Meanwhile ordinary Canadians were standing in grocery aisles doing mental math over bacon prices, delaying dental work, and wondering whether they could survive another winter utility bill without sacrificing whatever scraps remained of their savings.
But while Canadians were trying to keep their heads above water, Ottawa was busy launching one of the most expensive industrial subsidy experiments in modern Canadian history.
AI-generated image from Melanie in Saskatchewan
The Honda EV project in Ontario was supposed to be one of the crown jewels of this brave new green economy. Politicians lined up in hard hats and safety glasses like a traveling theatre troupe performing The Future Is Here. Canadians were assured this was proof the country was becoming an EV superpower.
Turns out it may have been more of a very expensive PowerPoint presentation with taxpayer financing attached.
[…]
In March 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed Mark Carney as an informal economic adviser during the COVID recovery period. Over the following years, Carney increasingly promoted “green transition” investment frameworks, climate-linked financial systems, ESG-focused economic planning, and massive public-private investment partnerships tied to decarbonization strategies.
Which is important context now, because the EV subsidy era did not emerge out of thin air. It grew out of a broader worldview that treated government-directed green investment as both economic policy and moral mission. The assumption underneath all of this was breathtakingly simple:
“If government wants it badly enough, reality will cooperate.”
That is usually where things begin going sideways.
Canadians were told the EV transition was inevitable. Questions about affordability, charging infrastructure, winter range, electrical grid capacity, or consumer demand were often brushed aside like annoying little details raised by peasants who simply lacked sufficient enlightenment.
Then came the subsidy gold rush.
[…]
Corporations are not charities. They are not loyal patriots. They are not emotionally attached to government slogans.
They follow incentives. They chase profitability. They change direction when conditions change.
That is exactly what Honda did.
Meanwhile Canadians are left holding the bill for another “historic transformation” that produced:
- endless announcements
- glossy photo ops
- consultant buzzwords
- government self-congratulation
- escalating subsidy exposure
- and corporate renegotiations every time market conditions shifted
- while producing no completed Honda EV manufacturing hub and no fleet of Canadian-built EVs rolling proudly off Ontario assembly lines.
What remains instead is a stalled megaproject, a confused tariff policy, a government spinning contradictory narratives depending on the week, and taxpayers once again discovering they were voluntold into becoming venture capitalists for political vanity projects.
Apparently this is what “economic leadership” looks like now.
Hard hats. Press releases. Fifty-plus billion dollars in EV-related exposure. And a factory plan slowly evaporating into the mist while Chinese EVs roll through the front gate anyway.
Pay no attention to the Laurentian Elite behind the curtain!
Canada before Confederation was largely run by the Family Compact, an informal oligarchy of wealthy and influential families who had a virtual monopoly on social advancement, political appointments, and the justice system. As kids we were all told in school that this all withered away and now we live in a wonderfully meritocratic society (that’s also a genocidal racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic dystopia, but those are later lessons after the land acknowledgements). They didn’t fade away, of course, and the behind-the-scenes power brokers are still there, still wielding informal but widespread control over the government and the economy. We just call them the Laurentian Elite, so that’s totally different than the bad old Family Compact, eh?
The Laurentians very effectively keep themselves out of the public eye. Most Canadians don’t even know this class exists. So, they are in that sense a shadowy cabal.
Of course Canadians want prosperity and whatever. Everyone does. Of course they think this is the purpose of the government. Of course the government’s messaging is largely around economics.
The government’s actual activities, however, are immensely economically destructive. This is because of their religious fanaticism. Canadians believe in “peace, order, and good government”. The Laurentians believe in multiculturalism, mass immigration, gender woo, and climate change. They just lie about these things being good for the economy. It’s now obvious that they are very bad for the economy, and yet, they continue, so.
The gimmigration restrictions are a joke. The government is continuing to hand out PRs and passports like Halloween candy, and turd worlders are continuing to grab them like the black kids who think the whole basket is all just for them. It is allowing TFWs to flood the asylum system, which it uses as a back door to keep them in the country. The numbers they publish are a bullshit accounting game, but even if they’re to be believed, letting in hundreds of thousands of new PRs every year isn’t a reduction from anything but the truly insane spike in 2022-24.
The housing market is fucked, yes, but I’m skeptical this is because immigration has been “reduced”. It’s more likely that a decade of zero economic growth, rapid inflation, even more rapid asset inflation, shit jobs, and high taxes means that no one can afford the overpriced housing, so no one buys it. The shoebox condos they threw up all over Toronto are a contributing factor: no one wants to spend $500,000 on a 500 square foot condo, so no one does. Investors can’t afford to sell for less, so they sit on them. Developers look at tens of thousands of units of unsold inventory, and refuse to start new projects. Whole system is seized up because of many years of malinvestment, not because the government has meaningfully reduced the invasion.
You say that Canadians will go back to Laurentian rule once the excesses are curbed. That presumes Laurentian rule slackened for even a moment, and that the Laurentians have any intention of curbing their excesses. Neither of these are true. They are doubling down on everything. Destroying Canada — as one element in the destruction of Western civilization — is a religious imperative for them. Nor was their power ever threatened, because it is propped up by brainwashed parasitic client groups — boomers, women, immigrants — that now comprise the bulk of the country.
The “pivot” was about two weeks of campaign rhetoric, during which a fast-talking globalist banker gave the boomers a reach-around about “British and French heritage”, which dazzled the affection-starved senile coots because it was the first time they’d heard something nice about themselves in a generation. Since then there’s been no rollback in DEI. No rollback in gender woo. No rollback in net zero. No rollback in Internet censorship. To the contrary, it has been full steam ahead on every single one of their hateful programs.
No revolution? You’re probably right, although the Freedom Convoy suggests that there are possibilities. Nevertheless the most likely scenario is that Canada devolves into Argentina Del Norte, its bones picked by vultures posing as patriots, kept in power by the most mind-raped boomers on planet Earth.
I do not think this is a good thing, obviously. I love my country very much. I suppose the reason for my vehemence on this matter is that I do not see any future for Canada with the Laurentians remaining in charge. We cannot work with them. They aren’t going to change. They aren’t going to slow down. They need to be removed, prosecuted for high treason, their assets seized, their oligopolies nationalized, and many of them sent to the gallows. Absent this, Canada is doomed.
May 3, 2026
How to Declare a Live Person Legally Dead – Death of Democracy 14 – Q2 1936
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 2 May 2026In Q2 1936, Adolf Hitler consolidated power after the Rhineland gamble, tightening the machinery of dictatorship while projecting strength abroad. As Hermann Göring took control of Germany’s economic lifelines and Heinrich Himmler centralized the police, the regime accelerated its transformation into a fully integrated police state.
Behind Olympic pageantry and propaganda triumphs like Max Schmeling’s victory, the Nazi system deepened repression. Courts enforced the Nuremberg Laws with chilling logic, reducing Jewish citizens to a state of “civil death”, while Joseph Goebbels expanded total control over media and public discourse.
At the same time, Germany’s economy bent further toward war, with dwindling foreign reserves and rising dependence on autarky. Yet domestically, resistance remained minimal as propaganda, fear, and perceived stability drove growing public support.
Globally, the quarter exposed the weakness of the League of Nations during Italy’s conquest of Abyssinia, saw Léon Blum’s rise in France, and witnessed the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in Palestine — signs of a world drifting toward instability.
This episode examines how dictatorship consolidates not just through terror, but through law, economics, and consent — and why, by mid-1936, meaningful resistance inside Germany had largely vanished.
May 2, 2026
“… a New York Times bestseller!”
I thought this was well-known years ago, but it still apparently surprises people to learn that the famous New York Times bestseller list is … not actually in any way a valid measurement of book popularity and sales:
For those of you not familiar with the total scam that is the NYT bestseller list, as a NYT bestseller myself, it’s utter bullshit. It’s not an actual list of bestsellers. It’s “curated editorial”.
As in, stuff they like gets on there, and stuff they don’t like doesn’t. Or stuff they like places higher, and stuff they don’t like but obviously sells too much to deny its a bestseller gets on there lower.
I still tell people I’m a NYT bestseller because most regular normies think that actually means something impressive, and it’s just quicker to say that to establish that you’re a certain level. Within the actual publishing industry its fairly meaningless and everybody knows it.
In reality I made it on there a couple of times early on in my career before they realized who I am and what I’m into (the totally wrong politics, loudly!), because then it was like a post it note got stuck on the wall there saying FUCK THIS GUY, because after that no matter how many copies I sold, even if I was mud stomping half their list in actual sales, I wasn’t getting on there ever again.
Everybody is aware of this scam. The key to getting on the list is the NYT wanting to promote you. They don’t actually track all book sales. They track certain “reporting stores” (which are supposed to be secret but we all know how they are). But then the NYT takes whatever reality is and massages it to fit their narrative.
It isn’t just to keep wrong thinking pariahs like me off there either. I’ve got friends who are apolitical or even mildly liberal who still make the list, but who get bumped down a bunch of spaces from what they should be because there’s somebody else with a new book out the NYT wants to fluff.
Even when the NYT isn’t putting its finger on the scale, it also only measures velocity, as in how many books sold that week. So if you sell 20k copies that week, but never sell another book again, you’re a bestseller. But a guy who sells 1k copies a week every week for an entire year, is not.
Also, I don’t know if it is still this way, because I quit paying attention to what makes the NYT list years ago after I understood what a joke it was, but it was only for physical books, not ebooks, not audio. And there are authors who crush it in ebook who sell very few physical copies in stores. I don’t know if this is still the case on what they claim to track or not today.
So basically it is a biased list of what one small part of the industry sells in a short period of time that the NYT then tweaks to ignore reality if they feel like it anyway. And this isn’t just my opinion as a disgruntled former NYT bestseller, this has gone to court. Authors have sued the NYT which is where the “editorial” thing comes from.
This gets some attention periodically when somebody really famous raises a stink about it. A couple years ago it was Elon. Before that it was Mike Rowe. Etc. But then regular people all forget and go back to thinking the NYT‘s bestseller list isn’t as full of shit as everything else the NYT does.
April 27, 2026
Abstract Expressionism “… wasn’t even real art … just a psyop”
When I first got married, we had several friends in the Toronto arts community, and while I enjoyed their company, for the most part I heartily disliked their art. Everything seemed to be consciously designed to be unpleasant to look at: jagged, rusty metallic edges, weird proportions, bilious colour choices, and so on. I was assured more than once that this was what “art” was meant to be: if it didn’t evince a strong reaction, it wasn’t doing its job. On Substack, Celina discusses the claim that modern art was actually a psyop sponsored by, inter alia the CIA:
Abstract Expressionism is arguably the most famous American art movement of the 20th century.
There’s a 95% chance you’ve seen a painting by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, or Mark Rothko, even if you didn’t know their names.
And if you’ve spent any time online, you’ve probably heard the rumours:
They were funded by the CIA.
It was all propaganda.
It wasn’t even real art … just a psyop.That sounds absurd.
Except … there is a large, large grain of truth behind it.
Jackson Pollock, Number 1A, 1948, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA.
Manufacturing Consent
After the First World War, the journalist Walter Lippmann helped pioneer the view that the control of information and, more importantly, the control of public response, had become essential to the stability of modern democracy. This was especially true in moments when the state required certain reactions from the public, as it did during wartime. Lippmann, who famously popularised the phrase “the manufacture of consent“, argued that representative government could no longer function without the deliberate use of mass communication in the supposed service of the public good:
That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements, no one, I think, denies. The creation of consent is a very old act, which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy, but it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.1
Lippmann’s ideas about the “manufacture of consent” would not remain theoretical for long. After the Second World War, they were tested on an unprecedented scale by the American establishment.
Poets, philosophers, critics, and intellectuals became participants in it. They were recruited, funded, and mobilised to form the cultural front line of a struggle against the Soviet Union. But this was not a conventional war. There were no trenches, no battlefields, no declarations.
Instead, it was a war of ideas, fought in publishing houses, universities, art galleries, and across the airwaves. At the centre of this effort stood the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
And its story reveals just how far a democracy was willing to go in shaping what its citizens and the world would come to believe.
- Lippmann, W. (1922). Public opinion. Harcourt, Brace and Company.
April 26, 2026
How to Stage (and Win) an International Crisis – Death of Democracy 13 – Q1 1936
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 25 Apr 2026In early 1936, Adolf Hitler took one of the greatest risks of his rule — sending German troops into the demilitarized Rhineland in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact. It was a gamble that could have triggered immediate war. Instead, it became a turning point that transformed Hitler from a powerful dictator into a figure many Germans saw as a national savior.
In this episode of Death of Democracy, we examine how the re-militarization of the Rhineland, combined with the propaganda spectacle of the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, helped cement Hitler’s popularity at home while exposing the paralysis of Britain and France abroad. Through contemporary voices like William L. Shirer and Victor Klemperer, we explore the uneasy mix of fear, relief, and growing enthusiasm among ordinary Germans — alongside the continued escalation of repression against Jews and political opponents.
This quarter reveals a crucial dynamic: how foreign policy success, propaganda, and public sentiment fused to elevate Hitler into something approaching a political messiah — while simultaneously closing the space for resistance.
History is not inevitable — but moments like this show how easily it can be shaped.
