Words have meanings that we use to describe, navigate and refer to objective reality. In Quillette, Michael Robillard argues that our shared, real world dissolves before ideologies that demand linguistic accommodation and, as objective truth recedes, spawn their own priestly caste of magical people who “speak all of reality into existence.”
Toppling a Communist Empire for $2.7 Million
Though widely thought of as focused on waterboarding terrorists or poisoning foreign potentates, it was by smuggling paper that the CIA achieved its most monumental triumph. R.M. Gerecht in a book review for The Washington Free Beacon charts how the late Cold War-era operation to flood Poland with Western books, magazines, printing supplies and audio recordings fatally weakened the country’s Communist dictatorship, setting the stage for the downfall of the entire Soviet empire. Total cost: US$2.7 million.
