TBQH there was never a time when it didn't seem like a psyop to see paint splashed on canvas being treated as a monumental artistic achievement and if anybody didn't agree they were just outing themselves as uncultured swine.
On a more serious note, he's actually making a very good point. This isn't something just the CIA does. You'll see industry trade groups and big business do it too. They just have less money so they're more surgical about it.
They have more than enough money, it's cheap. The astounding thing about middle-class people is that you can pay them to do this for a living, and they somehow still won't think it exists.
It wouldn't survive if they didn't provide the marketing and infrastructure.
It's important to remember that most will do it for free because they simply don't apply any standards to their defense of institutions (especially the ones who pay their rent.) You don't have to pay a ton of people to pretend that google paying firefox half a billion dollars a year for absolutely nothing makes perfect financial sense. Just pay a dozen, and praise and reward everybody who repeats it. You'll have an ocean of idiotic shallow dismissals barked out by volunteers. Give them updoots and they'll glow.
edit: here's the crackpot theory (everything else I said is documented in a million places, and not worth defending.) I think that the intensity of this tactic over the past 100 years in every aspect of Western life has been intellectually dysgenic. It has devastated western elites' thought processes in general, and the compartmentalization that allowed them to be competent in their actual jobs has failed. Things are only being held together by technicians who are aging out of the workforce.
Sometimes, just hiring them and dumping later is enough. The amount of ex-FAANG (mainly Google) "volunteers" brigading in this forum to defend anything Google is astonishing.
They're literally like "there's not really any evidence of this" in a thread about the millionth piece of evidence of this. And since it's the Paris Review doing a limited hangout about the Paris Review (the minor detail that the co-founder was a CIA agent), it somehow ends up admiring him for his love of nature.
The shame is how easy it is to do this now, not that it has been done for a century. Western elites have gotten so stupid and authoritarian that you don't even need to hide the seams anymore, you can joke about them and ban people who don't laugh.
edit: also notable about the Paris Review itself is that nobody reads it, most of what was published in it at its peak was horrible and turned out to be completely ephemeral. You won't have ever heard of most of the writers in it, who went on to university appointments (or never left them.) It was a tool for providing an income to particular writers and justifications for other initiatives; a thinktank. Comic books had more staying power.
