Barack Obama’s Literature List for 2025 —Connecting the Dots

As senior OWI officials saw it, “Books do not have their impact upon the mass mind but upon the minds of those who mould the mass mind—upon leaders of thought and formulators of public opinion. The impact of a book may last six months or several decades. Books are the most enduring propaganda of all.

John B. Hench, Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 70

Barack Obama’s Literature List for 2025 —Connecting the Dots

Related:

Books differ from all other propaganda media, primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader’s attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium… this is, of course, not true of all books at all times and with all readers – but it is true significantly often enough to make books the most important weapon of strategic (long-range) propaganda.

Liberated Texts: The power of books as propaganda

How Good Books Can Change a Person

How Good Books Can Change You

CIA and the Cultural Cold War (Anti-Communism)

Don’t Blame Karl Marx for ‘Cultural Marxism’

Don’t Blame Karl Marx for ‘Cultural Marxism’

You might think that a history of cultural Marxism would start with Marx, but the poorly coiffed Prussian has almost nothing to do with this tale of insidious infiltration. Instead, the theory took off in the late 1990s due to speeches, essays, and books by William Lind, then with the Free Congress Foundation, and Patrick Buchanan, the firebrand conservative columnist, TV talking head, and sometime presidential candidate. (The idea, though not the name, was hatched earlier, in a 1992 monograph called “The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and Political Correctness.” It was written by a disciple of the noted conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche.)

Related:

The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism

Free Congress Foundation:

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The CIA, Universities, and Anti-Communist Marxism

On this week’s release of “On the Barricades,” host Maria Cernat speaks to the French-American writer, cultural critic, and activist, Gabriel Rockhill. Gabriel completed his graduate studies under the direction of Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and Alain Badiou, and is now a professor of philosophy at Villanova University. Gabriel’s work in academia led him to a very close understanding of the bourgeois cultural and intellectual apparatus for its fundamental, historical role of bringing leftist thinking in line with the interests of the corporate elites and capitalist order. He wrote an article called “The CIA and the Frankfurt school’s anti-communism,” the content of which is the starting point inspiration for today’s discussion.

The CIA, Universities, and Anti-Communist Marxism