Excellent article on X by a Polish philosopher, Krzysztof Szczawinski,@Kristof_Poland

In fifty years, history books will say Elon Musk won a war almost nobody knew we were losing. (maybe except for a few guys in Poland)

It began a hundred years ago, in an Italian prison cell. In 1926 Mussolini jailed a 35-year-old Sardinian intellectual. The prosecutor reportedly said: “We must stop this brain from working for twenty years.” His name was Antonio Gramsci. The brain never stopped.

His question: why did the communist revolution win in Russia and fail everywhere in the West? His answer: in the West, power doesn’t rest only on the police and the army. It rests on culture – on what people find normal and obvious. So don’t storm the palace first. Take the schools, the universities, the newspapers, the theaters, the publishers, the courts. When the culture turns, politics follows. Forty years later, Rudi Dutschke gave it a name: the long march through the institutions.

It explains a puzzle we lived with for decades: why almost every actor, singer, journalist and teacher seems to think the same way – even in countries that keep voting the other way. We were told that educated people are simply on the left. The real answer is simpler.

Whoever controls the grant, the job, the review, the prize and the invitation to the studio controls what becomes “culture.” That is one half of the machine.

The other half is exclusion. The one who doesn’t fit doesn’t get the grant, the job, the review, the prize or the invitation. And if he breaks through anyway, he is cancelled.

Money builds the chorus. Exclusion removes the dissenting voices. What remains looks like consensus. It is casting.

The same machine ran on a global scale – through NGOs, “independent” media and “civil society” programs, much of it paid for with Western money.

Then, in early 2025, someone did what nobody had dared. Elon and DOGE opened the books of USAID – untouchable since 1961, tens of billions of dollars a year. Most programs were cut; the agency was folded into the State Department. The tap was turned off. Latin America has been turning right, country after country, ever since. And on Sunday, in Brazil – with Jair Bolsonaro barred from running and sentenced to 27 years – his son Flávio came first in the first round, narrowly ahead of Lula. When the money stops, the chorus loses its microphones.

The last fortress is Europe. Brussels funds its own networks of NGOs, with an opacity even its own auditors have flagged. Add the big foundations, and the supranational bodies that make rules without ever facing a voter. It is starting to crack.

Gramsci was right about one thing: culture comes before politics. He forgot that it works both ways. When an artificial culture loses its drip, what is real underneath comes back up.

It took one man rich enough to depend on no one, crazy enough to try, and free enough to take the hatred that followed. Thank you, Elon. 🙏

But the rest belongs to the people. They can see it now – who was paid to applaud, and who was punished for not applauding. And they have had enough. The chorus is thinning. The excluded are being heard. And everyone who kept quiet is discovering they were never alone – they were the majority all along.

That is how a fortress falls. Not from the outside. From the moment the people inside stop pretending.