Long read, haven't read it myself or heard of the guy before, but watched him on Morbid Symptoms and the historical material & analysis contained stuff I've not seen before, eg: the CIA's sponsorship of French intellectuals after WW2 to try and steer them away from communism and marxism and more towards individualism, sexual liberation, eventually leading to today's woke idpol 'leftism'. Here's the MS interview if you prefer watchy watchy to ready ready:








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https://ryanperkins.substack.com/p/the-ghost-in-the-machine

The Ghost in the Machine Part 1
How the CIA created the modern Left and why the Right still think its a Marxist plot

Ryan Perkins
Jul 30, 2025

The Ghost in the Machine: How the Cold War Created the Culture Wars

Today’s so-called “culture wars” feel intensely present, a chaotic battle over identity, history, and the very foundations of truth. From heated debates over critical race theory and gender ideology to the perpetual skirmishes on university campuses and social media, it appears as a fundamental schism between a “woke” progressive left and a traditionalist conservative right. The standard narrative, particularly on the populist right, often frames this as a long-term victory for a form of “Cultural Marxism”—a deliberate, subversive plot to undermine Western civilization by attacking its core values and traditions.

But this narrative, while compelling, misunderstands the true origins of this ideological conflict. The roots of the modern “woke” left are not found in the halls of the Kremlin, but in the boardrooms of Washington, D.C., and the covert operations of the CIA.

The bitter polarization we see today is not the culmination of a Marxist conspiracy, but the unintended consequence of a different, largely forgotten war: America’s Cold War campaign to save the West from communism. In the ashes of World War II, as socialist and communist parties surged in popularity across the West, the United States intelligence services made a fateful decision. To counter the materialist appeal of class-based politics, they financed a covert revolution of their own. Their mission was to construct an alternative, anti-communist left—one that was radical in its aesthetics and intellectual fervor but fundamentally individualistic, rejecting class consciousness and revolutionary politics in favor of cultural critique and subjective transformation.

This is the story of how the CIA, through fronts like the Congress for Cultural Freedom, weaponized abstract art, atonal music, and disaffected intellectuals to win the hearts and minds of the European left. It is the story of how this anti-communist cultural ecosystem, later inherited by foundations like Ford and Soros’s Open Society, incubated a culture of critique that would ultimately turn on its liberal creators. The very infrastructure built to inoculate the West against one form of radicalism inadvertently provided the platform for another.

The following history, erased from popular memory, reveals that the fragmentation, identity politics, and subjective realities of our current moment are not the fruits of a foreign ideology, but the ghost in the machine of Western liberalism itself—a phantom that continues to haunt its creators.

[contd at link...]

pt 2:

https://ryanperkins.substack.com/p/ghost-in-the-machine-part-2