The Secret Reading Groups Which Run The World
Leo Strauss, esoteric writing, and selecting close readers with good attention to detail
Why, yes, I did meet Peter Thiel in a Straussian discussion of Machiavelli.
You will not find much mention of Anthony Blunt in the obituaries to The Queen. Which is a shame because he remains one of the more interesting aspects of how the power behind the Monarchy really works.
Of course there was a secret cabal of queens who loved Her Majesty The Queen. Wherever there is power, you will find the Gays. What, you think Reagan was exempt?
Naturally Blunt was a back channel between the Crown and the Kremlin — a fact of upper crust life which persists through much of Torydom and which I have written about at length elsewhere. The closer you are to the Crown, the closer you are to the Kremlin.
Which is a shame because the Kremlin is awfully Chinese. The Soviet Union was taken over by Putin, himself an agent of China starting in his Saint Petersburg days when he was a mere tax cab driver. His oligarchs, Russian and Jewish though they appear, are really Chinese. Who, after all, do you think Dmitry Rybolovlev sells all that potash to? China, rather obviously.
We vastly underestimate the Chinese role in the Fall of the Soviet Union and we way overstate the degree to which there is, in fact, a Sino-Soviet split at all. Au contraire the autocracies are increasingly on the same team. Or taken another way, perhaps Putin’s destruction of the Russian Army is the beginning of China’s take over of resource rich Eastern Russia? Without a Russian army might Turkey also have a freer hand to take the Russian resources to fuel up its own imperial projects?
As times change, so, too, do the influence networks. The Russians have been replaced by the Chinese in everyday life. Russia indeed has become like Israel, or Malta, as a kind of middle manning country which spies on America in the service of China. You might look closely at British billionaire Paul Marshall, backed as he his by the Chisraeli private equity firm, KKR, as a vector for Chinese influence in the United Kingdom. Or, perhaps examine the strange career of Axel Springer SE’s German billionaire, Mathias Döpfner who is also backed by . . . KKR.
Nigel West argues in his magisterial, MI6: British Secret Intelligence Service Operations 1909-1945 that there are “six institutions” which “rule the world: Buckingham Palace, the White House, the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Vatican and the British Secret Service.” He claims that this was true only in 1920 but I suspect it’s true now in the 2020s.
You get Buckingham Palace through birth, the Vatican through machinations, the White House through selection and then election, and the banks through careerism. How does one get recruited to the British Secret Service? By being a good student — “a clever boy” — and by reading the Great Books — at least initially. In other words, by being a Straussian. Leo Strauss himself was cultivated by the Rockefellers and British between 1932-1937.
The best intelligence services cultivate the very best and force them into service of the state. You find these people in the elite bits of society — in the so-called elite colleges. Or so the thinking once went. Oftentimes there were groups of scholars who wound up being recruited altogether. They were spotted in exclusive poetry, reading, or debating clubs. These were nerds pressed into the service of the state.
Are there such clubs which exist today? No, not exactly. Spotting, cultivating, and developing assets could arguably be said to be the business of venture capitalists today. If you’re naughty, you wonder if, perhaps venture capitalism itself — or at least our current version of it — is a Chinese op designed to get our smartest brains working on problems which don’t even matter. It wasn’t always so. And yes, we very much can return to the world as laid out in VC: An American History or Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century — if we summon the will.
Do we even read anymore? Or has podcasting and blogging become the new way for smart people to get seduced and influenced? When was the last time you read a very long book on a very complicated subject?
No, everything is mass culture these days. To the extent that we have a mass culture — and not just a narrow cast one — social media then becomes the vector of influence. Today we are trained to prefer a mass audience to a private, elite one — which I must say is exactly why I’m happy writing for my Substack than for the very China compromised tech companies’ platforms. (That’s not to say that Substack doesn’t have its Andreessen Horowitz problems — it absolutely does — but I don’t want to be deplatformed for exposing them. Call me a coward if you will. Need I remind you that I am currently suing Huffington Post, purchased by Andreessen Horowitz portfolio company, BuzzFeed, all the way to the Supreme Court?)
And yet elites still matter and they matter a lot, especially when the economy is increasingly technological and therefore centralized. The elites need a defense for this centralization. And so they turn to Robert Bork and to “natural monopolies” and to Zero To One, a how to book for how you too can monopolize the economy. Before children can ascend to running their own rigged games, they must first be identified. You need not look far for which schools are elite and which are not. You can use the U.S. & World Report rankings as your guide. Other nations obviously do.
If we talk at all about the Cambridge Five, we dismiss them as something deceased, something which happened long ago and which has no import on our everyday life.
We don’t dare to think that there might be similar efforts to recruit our elites through reading clubs (or perhaps Slack or Signal groups) in the here and now and that we might have even partaken of these efforts, wittingly or not.
Yes, yes, we shut down the obvious Chinese fronts like the Confuscius Institutes, or persecute Chinese professors who got a bit too cozy with the mother country. (The convictions didn’t stick but then maybe they weren’t supposed to.)
We leave the less obvious fronts — like say, the Federalist Society — around. As the Chinese money constrains, these Chinese ops are increasingly at war with one another. It’s easier for the Chinese to fight one another here than in the home country. and, for our part, we prefer to let the mobsters fight amongst themselves than crown anyone a victor or finish them off.
To wit: to be a conservative at an elite law school is to signal yourself as odd and in a perpetual minority. It is a low status move. And yet it could well be a wise career move. Half the federal judiciary has been appointed by conservatives so the competition isn’t as severe if you want to be a federal clerk and ultimately a Supreme Court clerk.
If you’re very good — or rise high enough — you’ll even be protected. You’ll be a sort of made man. Yale professor (and Federalist Society recruiter) Amy Chua voiced a defense of Bret Kavanaugh. He was appointed and not long after selected Amy Chua’s daughter — Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld — to be a Supreme Court clerk— right after she became an Army JAG officer.
In so doing she follows in the path of another JAG officer seeking political power. He’s also a fan of the Federalist Society who he works with to appoint all the justices.
Grooming, apparently, starts early.
Furioso was James Jesus Angelton’s literary effort in a different time and a different era. Angleton later recalled: "I was brought up in England in one of my formative years and I must confess that I learned, at least I was disciplined to learn, certain features of life, and what I regarded as duty." In other words, the half Mexican became more English than the English. That was how it was done in those days. You confirmed to the type.
To understand CIA counterintelligence officer James Jesus Angleton, it helps to watch the 2006 film, The Good Shepherd, which is De Niro’s telling of how the WASPish CIA behaved. It misses key details but it does get right the role of literary societies in recruiting people. Poetry then and philosophy now serves a kind of neutral place where people can recruited and developed.
Dr. Fredericks, who our protagonist Edward “outs” as a German sympathizer at Yale before later learning that he works for British intelligence, offers this assessment.
The very qualities that make a good intelligence officer, a suspicious mind, a love of complexity and detail are the very qualities of someone you'll be observing. The mental facility to detect conspiracies and betrayal are the same qualities most likely to corrode natural judgement. Everything that seems clear is bent and everything that seems bent is clear. Trapped in reflections, you must learn to recognize when a lie masquerades as the truth and then deal with it efficiently, dispassionately.
You have to be highly attentive to the details and in so doing, risk alienation altogether.
Now I suspect that The Collegiate Network, backed as it is by Federalist Society donor Peter Thiel, might be another such effort. The group helps identify promising but antisocial young conservative men and women — Dinesh D’Souza, Laura Ingraham, etc. among them — and to get them to run publications hostile or critical of the liberal excesses — and there are lot — at our so-called elite institutions. That is, when the conservative publications and student clubs aren’t serving as gay dating services for closeted young men. I suppose it serves multiple functions.
I myself ran one such publication — The Claremont Independent — and yes, we poked perhaps too aggressively, perhaps too often in the wrong direction, the administration of our college. When I exposed the Hamas sympathies of a professor of Middle East studies ahead of a proposed grant from Kuwait, I quickly discovered I had a lot of Israeli friends on the West Side and in Tel Aviv all of a sudden who were only too happy to have me take out a Middle East studies program at an elite school, which, in effect, is what I did. Live and learn, I suppose.
For my efforts I was rewarded with both an Eric Breindel (a drug addict!) and Robert Bartley (a fraud!) fellowship at News Corps’ Wall Street Journal. I worked directly for Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss. In other words, I was a foot soldier, or perhaps a stormtrooper in Neocon High Command. Neither they nor I want to talk to about it much. What was it that got me? Could it have been the Syrian war they pushed? Or the anti-environmentalism masquerading as sophistication? I did enjoy reading Stendhal’s The Red and The Black and Conrad’s Lord Jim but given the plot of both books I suspect Stephens was making of fun of me by encouraging me to read them.
I’ve more or less come to the view that the college I attended was a deep state recruiting school before the 1980s. There are more of these such schools when you look closely. Colleges get turned, though, just as people do and no one would seriously look upon Yale as an indicator of what the deep state wants.
And yet their older alumni belonged to another world. Lee Hanley — a Florida billionaire I knew — was the roommate of Porter Goss at Yale. This billionaire had backings from both the Russians and the WASP deep state though he was himself a converted evangelical.
We worked together to expose the perfidy of Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey whose ties to the Kushner family and their lawyer, Abbe Lowell, have never been fully examined. Lowell reportedly got Trump to pardon Salmon Melgen, the eye doctor with the private plane. (Hanley and I worked together on tracking Melgen’s planes.) Together Hanley prepared a reading list for me and I dutifully read all the books he recommended. The Hanleys had had Ted Cruz and Peter Thiel at their home for Christmas.
His widow, Allie, is close to Candace Owens — she was there for Candace’s wedding to George Farmer — and to Rebekah Mercer, the Russian-Chinese backed billionaire behind Parler. I reached out to Mercer about storing the servers. She preferred to store them in Russia.
After all, why read when you can control the means of communication?
Movies, too, are a way of having influence. Mercer is not content just to back alt tech companies like Steve Bannon’s Breitbart. No, that’s not enough.
She was a backer of Armie Hammer’s early career. (You know, the cannibal loving, abusive and self abusing actor who is a part of the Armand Hammer family.)
Hammer acted in a short film, 2081 — a takeoff of Harrison Bergeron — backed by the Motion Picture Institute. It was funded by Rebekah Mercer, of course. You have to get them early on. That is, before they star in the Social Network.
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that she’s an investor in LSD with Wirecard backer Christian Angermayer. Or that she backs Breitbart.com. Or that she’s friends with COVID fraudster Matt Michelsen. Or that she did Cambridge Analytica with the tacit knowledge of Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg.
No, I’m sure she’s just a contrarian you guys— a contrarian whose family and friends own $7 billion in taxes — and yet still have money for J.D. Vance.
Did I mention that soon to be felon Steve Bannon threatened “to shit down my throat” for contacting Rebekah Mercer after we met — where else? — at a Gold Conference in Wyoming? This is, of course, after he plagiarized a lot of my reading list, claiming to have actually read books he never did— as he recounted implausibly in Benjamin Teitelbaum’s War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers.
Well, to borrow a phrase or two, “suck on this, Sloppy Steve.”
Enjoy prison, you Boomer bully. You belong there. They’ll be plenty of time to read.