This tweet is posted at Small Dead Animals. I think it needs a signal boost.
In 50 years, history books will say that Elon Musk won a war that no one knew we were losing. A war that began 100 years ago in an Italian prison cell. In 1926, Mussolini had a 35-year-old Sardinian intellectual arrested. At the trial, the prosecutor reportedly said: “We must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years. » His name was Antonio Gramsci. His brain never stopped working. In prison, it filled thousands of pages that became one of the most influential political texts of the 20th century. I think we're living the moment his theory collapses. Let me explain. Gramsci was asking a simple question. Why did the communist revolution succeed in Russia but failed everywhere in the West? His answer: in the West, power does not only hold by the state, the police and the army. It is bound by culture. By what people find normal, obvious, “common sense.” He calls it cultural hegemony. So, to take power, you must not take the palace first. We have to take the spirits first. The schools. Universities. The newspapers. The theater. The edition. The courts. This is the “war of position”: a slow conquest, institution by institution. When culture has changed, politics follow itself. Forty years later, German activist Rudi Dutschke will make it a slogan: the long march through the institutions. For decades, we lived with an enigma that no one really could explain. Why are almost all artists left-wing? Actors, singers, teachers, journalists, a good part of the judiciary. Why could a country vote right-wing after election and still see its culture speak with one voice? We were told, “It’s because educated people are left-wing. » I think the answer is simpler. Gramsci had written the recipe, and it was applied. When you control who gets the grant, the position, the right review, the price, the invitation on the set, you control what becomes "culture." The same enigma existed on a world scale. Why did so many developing countries, especially in Latin America, vote again and again for socialist or radical left-wing governments? Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Argentina of the Kirchners, Colombia of Petro. The economy collapsed, the cartels flourished, chaos settled. And yet the same vote came back. My conviction: poverty was not an accident of the system. He was an electorate. And around it, there was a whole ecosystem of NGOs, “independent” media and “civil society” programs, largely funded by Western money. Then, in early 2025, something happened that no one had ever dared to do. Elon and DOGE have opened the books of USAID. An agency almost untouchable since 1961, tens of billions of dollars a year. The vast majority of the programs were cut, and the agency was absorbed by the State Department. The tap has been closed. And look what's happened since then. Bolivia: MAS loses power after almost twenty years. Ecuador : Noboa re-elected. Honduras: the right is taking over the country. Chile : Kast elected. Argentina: Milei largely wins the midterm elections. And two days ago, Brazil. Jair Bolsonaro is ineligible, sentenced to 27 years in prison. The left thought it had closed the chapter. Lula, 80, was running for a fourth term against a country that was said to have been acquired. On Sunday, his son Flávio came out on top in the first round. More than 47% against nearly 45% for Lula. Lula himself acknowledged an “unexpected” result. The largest country in Latin America is in a second round of rocking. The continent’s biggest right turn in decades. Coincidence? I don't think so. When the funding disappears, the story loses its speakers. There is one last real stronghold. Europe. Brussels finances its own NGO networks, with an opacity that even the European Court of Auditors has pointed out. The great foundations like the Open Society of Soros. Supranational entities that produce the norm without ever passing before a voter. It is the last fortress of cultural hegemony. And she's starting to crack. I'm convinced that this is all going to collapse, and faster than we think. Gramsci was right on one essential point: culture precedes politics. But he had forgotten that it worked both ways. When an artificial culture loses its infusions, what is true below rises to the surface. What comes next, I think it's a rebirth. A culture that begins to love beauty, ambition, science, the civilization that gave birth to it. And in history books, it will be remembered that it all started when a man decided to look at the accounts. It took someone rich enough not to depend on anyone, crazy enough to tackle it and free enough to take the hatred that would follow. Thank you Elon.
It is true that Elon was instrumental in finding and destroying US-AID. But somebody hired him to do that. The one who hired him was Donald Trump.
'Nuff said.
