The collapse of American democracy is like the pandemic,” Stevens warns. “Whatever you say at the beginning will sound alarmist but likely prove inadequate at the end.” Many people have opinions about the case based entirely on what they think of the principals. When Bollea aka "Hulk Hogan" first won his lawsuit against Gawker, public opinion was generally in his favor. The trial had shown amply that Gawker didn't care in the slightest about truth or journalistic ethics. They would publish anything without regard for the impact on its subjects. The rich and famous were favorite targets, and everyone enjoyed the schadenfreude of seeing yet another celebrity being humiliated. Worse, they operated on the principal that they were essentially untouchable. "Never start a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel" - they relied on strong First Amendment protections coupled with the fact that even for a rich celebrity, taking on a multimillion-dollar media empire was doomed to be a losing fight. One question people asked a lot in the aftermath of Gawker's shutdown was: do we want to live in a society where a vindictive billionaire can spend years and tens of millions of dollars to ruin someone’s life? A better question is: do we want to live in a society where a blogger can spend fifteen minutes to do the same thing?

Bernays honest and practical manual provides much insight into some of the most powerful and influential institutions of contemporary industrial state capitalist democracies.”Trump beat Hillary Clinton, then lost to Joe Biden. His ambitions were only momentarily derailed. His chief challenger, the hard-right Florida governor Ron DeSantis, faded in primary polling. The rest of the field is running in place or approaching asterisk status. None can land a punch.

Ultimately it’s not about the key players, it’s about our history and the history of conspiracy, as an act. It’s a story of a modern day conspiracy and the players happen to be Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and Peter Thiel. But it’s more than that. It’s about our world and our current landscape, political and social. Who Really Killed Kennedy? (2013), by Dr Jerome R Corsi, also finds the mafia guilty, although with a little help from Richard Nixon and the French. Another work published to mark the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ, by Roger Stone, a Trump associate, implicates President Lyndon Baines Johnson, in close association with mobsters and US intelligence. The founding of Stanford University, however, was fraught with conflicts between Jane Stanford, who was obsessed with the spiritual world that she consulted to make academic decisions, and David Starr Jordan, the University’s founding President, who appointed his favorites and sycophants to the faculty. I doubt I'd have bothered with this book if it didn't have "Ryan Holiday" on the cover. I mean, can the story of Hulk Hogan suing Gawker really be that interesting? Who is the target audience - the intersection of "people who are fans of Hulk Hogan" and "people who know how to read"? But Holiday said it was his favourite thing he'd ever written, so I gave it a chance... and the response is a resounding "meh". I complain a lot about books (and movies) being overwritten, but “Conspiracy” is the first book in a very long time I wanted to re-edit – in-book, with a marker – and read again. Because as long as he’s staying on topic (the conspiracy to sue Gawker out of business), Ryan Holiday’s book is awesome. He competently lays the foundation and tells you the story in just about as complete a fashion as you could hope for.

The prominence of Mexico and Cuba in the Kennedy books means that those countries are likely to be among the most frequently searched words in the latest archive release. And those of us who find The Tears of Autumn the most plausible explanation of the assassination will look with particular interest at any CIA documentation dealing with Diem’s death. From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.” Witch trial in Salem, Massachusetts. Lithograph by George H. Walker. Undated. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

Don DeLillo, after extensive reading of the 26 supporting volumes to the Warren report, presented Oswald in his 1988 novel, Libra, as the stooge of a CIA attempt to promote war with Cuba. James Ellroy’s American Tabloid(1995) begins with Castro’s coup and ends with the Dallas assassination, which the novel attributes to a conspiracy involving the Cuban interests of the CIA and the mafia. This argument is counterintuitive, but not obviously wrong. And it's a good heuristic that when an argument is easy to dismiss but turns out to be hard to argue with, you should default to strongly believing it. If nothing else, when you find out you're wrong you do so in a way that leaves you better-informed than the conformists.The importance of gold and how it was to be secretly accumulated as it was the only true store of value Enter GamerGate and the culture wars and then the 2016 election, and the judgment against Gawker became fraught with implications that went well beyond the politics of outing and whether or not it's okay to publish someone's sex video without their consent. Cunning and resources might win the war, but it’s the stories and the myths afterward that will determine who deserved to win it."