Tag: Royce Kurmelovs

The battle for the public mind is never-ending. And one of the key weapons remains… wait for it… books.

This below is inspired by reading Royce Kurmelovs’ review of a new tiresome pronuclear abundance tome that makes utterly baseless allegations about the funding behind “Friends of the Earth.” (Full disclosure, Royce is a friend, we’ve collaborated in the past and I had a very minor role in the research of this review).

A book is a “hook” – the author(s) get, er, booked, to appear on radio shows, tv programmes. The book is excerpted in newspapers, which are then quoted by columnists in papers and by politicians in parliament. The book can be the excuse for a tour of cities. The book gets you on podcasts. The book can get turned into instagram posts and tiktok videos.

None of this is new, but it is worth remembering.

Two particular (albeit American) examples should be part of any intelligent media-observer’s toolkit.

The first is the statement by Julian Simon about what the “conservative” movement needed. This from Jane Meyer tells you what you need to know.

His father evidently lost his mother’s fortune, motivating Simon to make his own. On Wall Street, he became a hugely successful partner at Salomon Brothers, where he was an early leader in the lucrative new craze for leveraged buyouts. But what neither Olin nor Simon had was influence over the next generation. “We are careening with frightening speed towards collectivism,” Simon warned.
Only an ideological battle could save the country, in Simon’s view. “What we need is a counter-intelligentsia. … [It] can be organized to challenge our ruling ‘new class’ — opinion makers,” Simon wrote. “Ideas are weapons — indeed the only weapons with which other ideas can be fought.” He argued, “Capitalism has no duty to subsidize its enemies.” Private and corporate foundations, he said, must cease “the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of politics, economics and history are hostile to capitalism.” Instead, they “must take pains to funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists and writers who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty,” as he put it. “They must be given grants, grants, and more grants in exchange for books, books, and more books.”
Under Simon’s guidance, the Olin foundation tried to fund the new “counterintelligentsia.” At first, it tried supporting little-known colleges where conservative ideas — and money — were welcome. But Simon and his associates soon realized that this was a losing strategy. If the Olin foundation wanted impact, it needed to infiltrate prestigious universities, especially the Ivy League.

Mayer 2016 (emphasis added).

The second is the Joan Peters debacle. Somebody wrote a book, published under her name in 1984, about how there weren’t any Palestinians in the 19th century – “a land without people for a people without a land” stuff, and the US academics lapped it up. Then along came Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky… I URGE you to read Chomsky’s account, here.

The beauty of the book technique is that – if it comes from a ‘reputable’ publisher – it gives any old bullshit argument a heft, a solidity, it doesn’t deserve. It sells copies (publisher happy) and the author gets exposure, and bandwidth gets taken up, nonsense talking points get repeated and regurgitated, no matter how many times the book is “demolished” (see Chomsky above)

See also