Episode 509 – Think Tanks, Stink Tanks!

Think tanks: we’ve all heard of them, but what are they, exactly? What do they do? And what do they reveal about how power really operates in our society? Roll up your sleeves and get ready to encounter some muck as James does a deep dive into the think tank swamp.

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TRANSCRIPT:

JAMES CORBETT: You would be hard-pressed to find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than the Washington think tank circuit. Yes, the Beltway insiders and self-appointed experts who populate the Washington think tank swamp are among the most morally reprehensible creatures on the face of the planet.

But don’t take my word for it. Take theirs.

PATRICK CLAWSON: I mean, look, people: Iranian submarines periodically go down. Some day, one of them might not come up. Who would know why?

 

SOURCE: Excerpt from Clawson Responds to Questions

RICHARD STENGEL: You know, my old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the “chief propagandist” job. We haven’t talked about propaganda… I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population, and I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.

 

SOURCE: Political Disruptions: Combating Disinformation and Fake News

JON COHEN: Would you be against mandating?

 

LONE SIMONSEN: Well, I think this is very interesting because, I mean, especially for the health-care worker example. I mean, there are many, many good reasons why health care workers should be considering immunization for their own safety but also to protect and, first, do no harm to the patients that they are treating. Having said that, does it work to mandate? I think what would work better would be to say that there was a shortage and people tend to buy more of something that’s in demand. (Laughter.)

 

SOURCE: CFR Symposium Pandemic Influenza_Oct 16th 2009_4x4

Yes, today on the Corbett Report, we’re going to roll up our sleeves and get elbows deep into the murky brine of the DC swamp to see what we can dig up.

Are you ready? Let’s go.

Broc, hit the theme!

CORBETT REPORT INTRO THEME

CORBETT: Welcome back, friends. Welcome back to another edition of The Corbett Report. I’m James Corbett of corbettreport.com, coming to you, as always, from the sunny climes of Western Japan here in October of 2026 with Episode 509 of The Corbett Report podcast, “Think Tanks, Stink Tanks”…

…which I will grant is perhaps not the most florid, nor the most journalistic title that I’ve ever come up with for an episode of this podcast. But I hope that by the end of today’s exploration, you will share my antipathy to the think tank-industrial complex once you have seen what it is, where it comes from, how it operates and what it has accomplished in the past several decades.

So, let’s let’s dig in, shall we?

And perhaps the way to start would be an exploration of some of those clips that we looked at just a moment ago. I hope that you’re familiar with those clips and their context. But if not, never fear. Of course, I will provide that information at corbettreport.com/thinktanks, where you can go for all of the show notes, all of the links to all of the references in today’s episode, including, of course, those clips that we looked at earlier.

And, again, I hope that you are familiar with them.

For example, Patrick Clawson standing up there in front of a board that says “The Washington Institute(?)” something or other behind him. And he’s talking about crisis initiation and, essentially, how to initiate a naval false flag event that could be blamed on Iran in order to get us into a war with Iran because, man, crisis initiation is difficult.

Or Richard Stengel, the former managing editor of Time—who should be familiar, I hope, to readers of REPORTAGE, and who was in the State Department, specifically as a “Secretary of Public Diplomacy.” What is that, exactly? Well, as he says in the clip, it’s public propaganda! He’s all on board with the U.S. government propagandizing his citizens and thinks it’s a good thing this is done. And he was happy to talk about that there at the—what was that? The Council on Foreign Relations?

Oh, that’s also where Lone Simonson was talking about—in the midst of the terrible 2009 swine flu pandemic that’s going to kill everyone. Actually, it was less deadly than a regular flu season. But anyway, the 2009 swine flu pandemic is coming for you guys! So, we have to find a way to get those swine flu vaccines into everybody’s arms. Now we could mandate them. We could say to the governments, you know, “you have to mandate this vaccine!” but that might not be as effective as, oh, I don’t know, pretending that there’s a shortage of vaccines so that people will willingly line up for them. “I want mine! Please give me my vaccine!” Which, of course, is exactly what happened as I have demonstrated in my work before.

So, as I say, hopefully you’re  familiar with those clips. If not, just start to internalize what is really going on here. These intellectuals, these independent, non-governmental people getting up at these venues—The Council on Foreign Relations, The Washington Institute, various think tanks—in order to make these disgusting proposals. Well, who is exactly giving these people this platform? What are these organizations?

Let’s dig in a little. Let’s look, for example, at Patrick Clawson, the guy talking about “crisis initiation” and proposing a naval false flag to start the war with Iran. Actually, they didn’t even need that naval false flag in the end. But anyway, Patrick Lyell Clawson, as the bastion of truthiness, Wikipedia, will inform us, “is an American economist and Middle East scholar. He is currently the Director for Research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and senior editor of Middle East Quarterly.”

Well, he’s a Middle East scholar, so he must know what he’s talking about. But what is this Washington Institute for Near East Policy? Well, as even Wikipedia will inform us, “WINEP was established in 1985 with the support of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the funding of many AIPAC donors, in order to provide higher quality research than AIPAC’s own publications,” i.e., no one would believe AIPAC’s own publications. So, we’ll launder it through this totally independent intellectual enterprise known as The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt described WINEP as ‘part of the core’ of the Israel lobby in the United States.” Oh, my God! Color me shocked! The core of the Israel lobby in the United States arguing for a false flag naval event in order to gin up a war with Iran. Wow, who would have guessed it?

But that gives you at least some indication of what it is we are dealing with, does it not? Well, if not, let’s sort it out. I mean, again, we’ve thrown this term around. Everyone has heard it by now. But what is a “think tank,” exactly? What is that? How do you define it?

Well, we could turn to the other bastion of truthiness, the alternative bastion of truthiness, Britannica.com, for their handy dandy definition here on their think tank page:

Well, that sounds all perfectly anodyne, doesn’t it?

If you are capable of reading between the lines, I trust that you’ll be able to see what even a very basic and banal definition like this one is gesturing towards: namely, the fascistic organization of society. Here we have the exemplar of the wedding, the merging of corporation and state in these “non-governmental entities” that are providing governments with planning for social policy and national defense. They’re just thinking about things and giving some advice, guys, some policy recommendations that then tend to be implemented…when they’re coming from the right places.

But again, I think you understand what this is really gesturing at and what it really means. This is, of course, the oligopolistic organization of society in which the real rulers behind the throne, the people who really pull the strings and who really have the resources to make things happen—Of course, they can control their political puppets who they buy and pay for. We all know that the political puppets on the stage that people pull the lever for once every four years and pretend like they’re steering the ship of state—That does nothing because these people are bought and paid for by their political donors, who have their own agendas. But if you are a smart oligarch, you are not merely using your political puppet as a ventriloquist doll. You’re not just making him say what you want him to say, because that would be a little too obvious. And people are generally—they reserve some skepticism, at least for politicians…or, at least, politicians from the other side of the aisle.

But if you’re a smart oligarch, yeah, no, you don’t do it that way. What you do is you donate to these think tanks that then come out with policy recommendations, reports, guidelines, advice. And these reports raise alarms about, “Oh, my God, the dastardly Iranian threat!” for example. “Won’t somebody do something about it?”

And then you get your bought-and-paid-for media mouthpieces to start trumpeting those reports and go, “Look! The Washington Institute for Near East Policy is warning about the threat of Iran! What is the government going to do about it?” And then they put the question to the bought-and-paid-for politicians who go, “Hmm, yes, well, we’re taking this very seriously. I know the Washington Institute for Near East Policy is a very serious organization and there’s a lot of very, very learned scholars there. So, we’ll take this very seriously and put it into consideration.”

And—lo and behold!—you get an Iran war. Yay. Wonderful.

That is how it works. And that’s how you launder an agenda from the non-governmental organizations through “the fourth estate” of the media to the politicians that you buy and pay for to make sure that your agenda goes through. And it looks like there’s a gigantic consensus behind it. That is how power is really operating in our society.

But in order to get a better idea of how that works, let’s go back to the granddaddy of them all, the progenitor of the modern day think tank: the RAND Corporation.

And I will insert as a little conspiracy realist sidebar here that even Britannica.com does admit that there is an argument to be made that the first, think tank was, in fact, the Socialist Fabian Society founded in Great Britain in the late 19th century. So, make of that what you will. I think there is definitely a bigger story to be told there, and I hope people are familiar with the Socialist Fabian Society, what it is, how it operated, and who did it count amongst its members.

But anyway, for today’s exploration, we’re going to start at the RAND Corporation. The modern day think tank started with the RAND Corporation. It was the first think tank to be regularly referred to as a think tank. And it was formed in the ashes of World War II.

Very specifically, there was an Air Force general who looked at the way that things were about to return to normal. “We had this wonderful organization of state around the war and everything. All of the civilian and non-governmental corporations were putting their effort into the war effort and working with the military. It was wonderful! Look, the Manhattan Project and other wonderful things resulted from that fascistic wedding of corporation and state! Can’t we retain that? Can’t we hold on to it?”

And this Air Force general managed to convince the bigwigs to start handing contracts over to McDonnell Douglas there in California. And oh, by the way, it just happened that this particular general just happened to be related through marriage to one of the corporate executives at McDonnell Douglas. But that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway, this contract work started to build and become more elaborate until eventually it was, well, “This is a conflict of interest that this corporation keeps getting [these contracts]. We’ve got to spin it off into a non-governmental, non-profit entity: The RAND Corporation!”

And as I hope you know, The RAND Corporation then became the basis, the cornerstone, for the military-industrial complex that even by 1960, Eisenhower was warning about on his way out the door. That was The RAND Corporation, which not only came up with the idea for an orbiting space station and other such nifty science fiction-y type ideas, but also, perhaps more to the point, directed Cold War nuclear strategy. We all know about the Dr. Strangeloves that existed in places like the Rand Corporation, like Herman Kahn and others who wrote about “winnable nuclear wars” that will be measured in megadeaths. But don’t worry, the other side will die more than we will and we’ll be able to rebuild from the ashes, et cetera, et cetera.

If you do not know about that, well, here’s a handy dandy resource for you that you should consult. It is a book called Soldiers Of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire. It is by Alex Abella. And if any of that information, either the book or the name of the author, rings a bell, then give yourself a cookie! You remember back in February 2011, I released Episode 175 of this podcast on The RAND Corporation Exposed, in which I took a look at that book and its author and the information that was uncovered from it.

But, long story short, Alex Abella is the one and only independent outside author who has ever been granted access to the internal archives of The RAND Corporation to write about that corporation and its shady history. And it was probably a bad idea to open the doors to an independent researcher like that because obviously this book is not flattering to The RAND Corporation, and it talks about the creation of that fascistic entity known as The RAND Corporation and what it has done to shape our modern world.

There is a lot of information in there. So I will direct you not only to episode 175, where you can learn a lot more about the Rand Corporation and what it does, but also to my interview with Alex Abella that I released around the same time there in February of 2011. Specifically, Interview #287 with Alex Abella, in which, amongst other things, I put the question to Alex, “Well, think tanks are just these boring, everyday sort of organizations. All they’re doing is giving some advice and writing these reports. What is the harm in that? Why would simply framing a question in such and such a way or providing a report on this or that policy issue, How could that be in any way nefarious?”

ALEX ABELLA: You first have to remember that he who frames the argument has already one half of it. If you shape the question, you can, to a very large degree, influence the answer, because it will be the answer to the question that you pose. So therefore, just by making a particular deliberate choice of the arguments that are to be taken into consideration, you’re already framing the answer, A.

 

But B, it goes beyond that, because, for instance, that’s what The Brookings Institution does. The Brookings Institution is another think tank that was founded in the 1920s that never did have as much influence as RAND, and it’s only been now under the Obama administration that they finally found their own voice. And a lot of the people have gone into the Obama administration,   whereas, for decades before, it was RAND. Like Donald Rumsfeld going from the RAND Board of Trustees to head the Pentagon.

 

But be that as it may, one of RAND’s tenets is that they don’t only frame the question and tell you what is the right question to ask of any one particular problem. And many RAND scientists and researchers and executives have come up to me and stated quite proudly that they are notorious for that. That a client may come to them with a particular problem and they say, “Well, this is what we want the answer to be.” And they will say, “No, no, no. You’re looking at the wrong set of facts. This is the question that you should ask and this is the answer that you should hear.”

 

Be that as it may, not only do they do that, they also then go out of the way to make sure that the policymakers in the US government get that information. And that is the crux of the matter and the heart of their responsibility. A responsibility which today, to this date, they deny any part of.

 

What do I mean by that? I mean that, for instance, let us look at Vietnam, in which they came up with something called the Viet Cong Study [formally, “Viet Cong Motivation and Morale in 1964” -JC],
in which they saw how the Viet Cong in reality were not driven by selfish motives but actually were idealistic actors who really wanted just the best for the family or for the country.

 

They submitted that, but then when it was denied, when the Johnson administration decided not to pay attention to it, then they turned around and then just started feeding other arguments such as, “Well, bombing the Viet Cong, then, would actually be good because then, even if it kills the villagers, then the villagers will not turn against the US, but will turn against the Viet Cong for having provoked the bombing that wiped their villages.” That kind of contorted Byzantine logic that was exactly what the administration wanted to hear.

 

My point being is that they frame the question, they give you an answer that perhaps you hadn’t even thought of, and then they make sure that the people who can implement that particular policy listen to it and put it into effect. So, that’s what makes them doubly responsible.

 

Not only that, what you have to also bear in mind is that RAND is the birthplace of what today is called the military-industrial complex. It comes  directly out of people in Rand and affiliated with Rand in the late 1950s.

 

SOURCE: Interview 287 – Alex Abella

CORBETT: Once again, that was just a taste of my conversation with Alex Abea, the author of Soldiers of Reason. So I hope you will follow the link from the show notes back to that interview to listen to it in its entirety, as well as, hey, why not read his book? There is a lot of valuable information to be gleaned there about the think tank-industrial complex and how something like The RAND Corporation can so thoroughly shape the modern world.

But I fear there are still those in the audience who might think, “This is just a bunch of policy wonks and intellectuals writing a bunch of reports and recommendations that nobody reads and nobody cares about. What can that do to influence the real world?”

Well, let’s look at some specific examples, some things of which I know what I am speaking.

For example, let’s take a let’s take a little thought experiment. Let’s imagine you are one of these oligarchs ruling things from behind the scenes, and you want to get rid of some of those pesky voices out there in the independent media that are getting in the way of your plans for unleashing a scamdemic on the public and getting people to voluntarily lock themselves in their own home and accept the coming biosecurity digital enslavement grid that you’re trying to put into place. That’s your agenda. That’s what you want to forward.

But there’s these people out there that are on these very large information platforms that are talking openly about information that distorts and troubles that narrative agenda that you have set. So, you want to get rid of those independent voices.

Now, again, there’s a smart way to do it and a stupid way to do it. The stupid way is to just use your bought-and-paid-for political puppets to go out there and start ban hammering and outright censoring. Literally getting the US government or whoever, whatever your local government is, to go in there and just start censoring people directly.

That’s the stupid way to do it, because there will be pushback from that, unfortunately, vanishing sliver of the public that still actually cares about such things. “You can’t have the government just going out willy nilly directly censoring people!”

No, the smart way to do it is to launder that censorship through your think tanks. You can get your think tanks to write these reports, these hand-wringing reports about, “Oh my God! The misinformation, disinformation online! It’s clearly coming from Russian bots! Somebody’s got to go out there and start censoring them.”

And unfortunately, this is not a theoretical thought experiment. This is something that really, of course, did take place during the dark depths of the scamdemic era. I should know because, of course, The Corbett Report was banned—or “permanently suspended,” which is the way they legalistically get around the troubling ramifications of outright banning someone—permanently suspended from Patreon for telling the truth about the scamdemic. And of course, as you will hopefully know by now, censored off of YouTube for—what was it?—three years for daring to tell the truth about the scamdemic. So, I know a thing or two about that.

Someone else who knows a thing or two about that and who has direct knowledge of the specific think tank that helped to get him censored off such platforms, was Hrvoje Moric of geopoliticsandempire.com.

CORBETT: Tell us about your deplatforming from, was it PayPal? How did that happen?

 

MORIĆ: Right. Like I went through the article in hindsight. I added some details, which I haven’t in the past, that I had this Associated Press journalist contact me in 2020. I learned in my research for the article, I hadn’t known that in 2019, he was part of some Associated Press fact-checking disinformation group in 2019. Then he emails me in 2020. I don’t respond. It turned out to have been a hit piece, but he couldn’t include me because I gave him nothing. And then in 2021, he publishes with Atlantic Council, NATO’s think tank, the hit piece on Francis Boyle and myself. And that same week, I’m taken off of Patreon. So, you know, I believe I had links.

 

And Mike Benz fleshes this out. This network includes NATO, Atlantic Council, DHS, all these different military/intelligence agencies, and then the following year when they roll out Disinformation Governance Board. April 2022 i get taken off of PayPal, and then I’ve seen some commentators on these new Pentagon active measures that I’m talking about call them Disinformation Governance Board 2.0! And literally this week, the Guardian published, Marco Rubio signed it. They approved these new Pentagon psychological operations via X. You couldn’t believe it. I literally called it. I was calling it “Pentagon active measures” on X and literally a few days ago they reveal that the Pentagon will be running psyops on X to control the narrative. So how do you like them apples?

 

SOURCE: Episode 497 – The “Multipolar World Order” IS the New World Order!

CORBETT: I don’t think I like those apples at all, thank you for asking, Hrvoje.

All right, there’s more to go into there, but I think you get the point.

But let’s look at a different example from a different field in which these think tanks operate, namely warfare. Because, as I have said, the military-industrial complex is to a large extent predicated on the think tank-industrial complex. And we can look at specific examples of how that is done.

Again, let’s look at a thought experiment. Let’s say you are the oligarch and you want to rally the public and get them whipped into war hysteria, bloodthirsty, ravenous war hysteria for an incredibly, extremely unpopular war in the Middle East that goes directly against what your political puppet campaigned on:  “No stupid wars in the Middle East.” How do you do that?

Well, luckily, there are think tanks that can help you provide provide you with an answer!

For example, do you remember this document that I talked about way back in the day? Which Path to Persia: Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran? Namely, how do we contain and ultimately topple the Iranian government? And this was put out, of course, by The Brookings Institution.

So, what did they propose? Well, you might remember that they had a strategy they called “Leave it to Bibi,” allowing or encouraging an Israeli military strike. So, the calculus here is that, well, Israel might go in to attack the Iranian nuclear program and then we can go and back them up with support. And that way we don’t initiate the war. We don’t have to get into the messy initiation. We just follow it in.

And—wouldn’t you know it?—that is exactly, exactly the excuse that Secretary of State Marco Rubio wheeled out in the wake of the war on Iran.

MARCO RUBIO: And so the president made the very wise decision. We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces. And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher—those killed. And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn’t act.

 

SOURCE: Marco Rubio speaks on US strikes in Iran

CORBETT: In other words, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump and the other gaggle of neo-neocons masquerading as MAGA “left it to Bibi” exactly as The Brookings Institution told them to do so 17 years ago.

Wow! Who’d have thought that?

Well, let’s take a look at some other examples along those very same lines, because you might recall that really the only statement that the White House made on why specifically they had to attack right now (other than Israel maybe did it first) was this document released by the White House on March 2nd, 2026: The Iranian Regime’s Decades of Terrorism Against American Citizens, which talks about the Iranian regime’s blood-soaked war on Americans and lists all these different events: November 1979, April 1983, October 1983, March 1984, etc. And [it] talks about each of these incidents and how “it was the Iranians, I tells you!”

But where did they get this document? Oh, as you might recall from Episode 495, they got this document word-for-word from a think tank, namely the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which, back in June of 2025, published this “Iranian and Iranian-Backed Attacks Against Americans (1979-Present).”

And—wouldn’t you know it?—it is literally word-for-word, exactly the same as that White House post a year later. April 83, October 83, December 83, March 84. Literally, they just copied it word-for-word from this FDD article by this Zvi Khan.

Who is Zvi Khan? Well, as it turns out, yes—wouldn’t you know it?—iZvi Khan just happens to be, oh, [a] former government affairs and assistant director for policy at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee—a literal former AIPAC writer who’s now working for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Again, take it from the bastion of truthiness. What is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies? A “neoconservative non-profit think tank based in Washington, D.C.” Yes, and it was “founded in 2001 as ‘Emet’ (אמת), which is Hebrew for ‘truth’. In the initial documents filed for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service, FDD’s stated mission was to ‘provide education to enhance Israel’s image in North America and the public’s understanding of issues affecting Israeli-Arab relations’.”

It is literally an Israeli mouthpiece. It published this screed about the Iranians back in 2025 that then the White House dutifully reproduced, literally copied word-for-word. Cribbing their notes, as it were, for their “My dog ate my homework, but trust me, bro, here’s why we need to attack Iran” here in February/March 2026. So that’s how that goes.

And if you need any more examples, again, we could turn to the font of all of think tank think tankiness, The RAND Corporation, which released an interesting document back in April of 2019 under the title, “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia.”

Yeah, that’s right. They do not hide it, guys. They tell you right to your face what they’re doing. We are going to overextend and unbalance Russia.

And how are they going to do that? Well, of course, there’s a lot of hoity-toity thinking going on in this piece, but let’s get to the meat-and-potatoes—the “geopolitical cost imposing measures” that could be used, amongst others. Of course, they talk about “providing lethal aid to Ukraine.” Hmm. This was again back in 2019. Of course, they also talk about “supporting Syrian rebels,” i.e. Al-Qaeda (al-CIAda), “promoting liberalization in Belarus,” “expanding ties in South Caucasus,” “flip Transnistria and expel the Russian troops in the region,” [and a] partridge in a pear tree.

But the long story short is contained in this handy-dandy infographic where they rate the likelihood of success of each operation. And the only one that has moderate success—wouldn’t you know it?—provide lethal aid to Ukraine, the benefits of which would be high. So there you go. Moderate success, high benefits, costs and risks are high, you know, that whole World War III thing. “But whatever, guys! Trust us, bro! Just go for it.”

And wouldn’t you know it, that is exactly what ended up happening: the provision of aid to Ukraine, which, of course, provoked Russia into the invasion, which has become the never ending war in Ukraine.

So, there you go, guys. There it is again. Time and time again, these policies are sourcing back to the think tanks.

These are not just a bunch of intellectuals sitting around doing hoity-toity thinking in ivory towers. These are people who are acting as mouthpieces for agendas of the real oligarchical ruling elite, and they are the ones that are spearheading these programs. So, it behooves us to pay attention to them.

And one person who is paying attention to them is James Bovard. You will remember him as a previous Corbett Report guest. If not, look up “Bovard” on corbettreport.com, and you can see our previous conversations. But he, of course, writes for—amongst other outlets—the Future of Freedom Foundation. And the latest article they have published of his is called “Intellectuals Paved the Road to Serfdom.” Obviously, the “road to serfdom” being Hayek’s praised 1944 work, which I would commend to your attention.

But, long story short, this opens by saying:

In the same way that medieval kings seized any excuse to invade neighboring countries, today’s politicians perennially seek pretexts to further invade citizens’   lives. And there is never a shortage of intellectuals who, like the courtiers long ago, assure their masters that God — or at least social science — blesses their aggression.

And he goes on to talk about the think tanks and how they operate in providing that cover for the would-be rulers of society today.

The more power that government amasses, the more intellectual homage it receives. Washington experts constitute a Greek chorus that bestows accolades on the Powers That Be. There are now more than 400 think tanks in the Washington area, some of which offer little more than an intellectual version of “rent-a-mobs” of political protestors.

“Oppressive regimes buy good reputations as think tanks become a muscular arm of foreign governments lobbying in Washington.”

He talks about The Brookings Institution receiving a windfall from the government of Qatar to “set up a research institute that, according to the Qatar government, would devote itself to ‘reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones’.”

He talks about the Kazakhstan government reforming its image with a series of donations to the Center for Security and International Studies and the Institute for New Democracies, who then launder their image through various reports.

He talks about the Atlantic Council receiving cash from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and oh yeah, NATO, of course, as we have just heard from Hrvoje. “The Times noted in 2015 that ‘since 2011, at least 64 foreign governments, state-controlled entities or government officials have contributed to a group of 28 major United States-based research organizations’.”

So long story short, everyone’s in on it. It’s not just the American Empire and the American oligarchs that are doing this. Of course, no. Every government and every ruling oligarch in every one of those countries around the world wants to launder their reputation through these think tank organizations, and they will spend a lot of money to do so.

And that’s always a good hint for you: if they’re spending a lot of money, a lot of their resources, on a particular industry or a particular venue for getting their agenda forwarded, you know that that is an important vehicle for forwarding their agenda. So, the think tanks are definitely receiving money.

He goes through a lot of anecdotes in this article that I think are worthy of your time and attention. So I will commend this article to you. But yes, again, long story short:

American democracy has been betrayed by the experts who claimed that permitting politicians to capture nearly unlimited power would not radically change the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. If people are unfit to care for themselves, there is no reason to presume they are fit to choose caretakers. The doctrines currently driving federal policy almost ensure ever greater degradation of the intended beneficiaries. Token choices on election day will be followed by ever more dictates each day of the year.

So, that about sums it up. The think tanks are there to provide the fig leaf of justification for the things that the real rulers of society wanted to do anyway. And I think Bovard sees right through it, right to the heart of that.

I had the chance to talk to James Bovard about this article and about his view of the think tanks. And he started by telling me an interesting anecdote about the time that he arrived in Washington and was himself applying and interviewing for a position at one such think tank.

JAMES BOVARD: So, my experience with the Washington think tank started early.

I came to D.C. in 1980. I was, I guess, 23, 24 at that point. And I got an interview at an up-and-coming think tank called The Heritage Foundation. And at that point, I’d had some good luck writing. I had a couple pieces in The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, places like that, which was very unusual for anybody who wasn’t liberal-left.

And so I dropped off my articles and I came to the interview. And I waited about 15 minutes. This is a day—a very hot June day—and after I sit and cool my heels, the guy comes in and he’s wearing a vest from a three-piece suit. And I’m thinking, “Well, this is unusual.” I was expecting him to pull out a gold watch and chain.

But so he sits down and he says, “Oh, so I see you’re a writer.” And I’m thinking, “OK, this is due diligence.” You know, at least he’s looking at the resume page now. And he’s sitting there, he nods his head and he says, “Oh, New York Times. That’s good. Washington Star. That’s good. These other places, that’s good.” And then he gets to the bottom of the page and he goes, “Oh,” and he starts to gloat. And he says, “I see that you didn’t finish college.” I said, “Yeah, that’s true.” He says, “Mr. Bovard, you’ve got to pay your dues.” And I just about burst out laughing. And he said, “Finish college and come back here in a few years and we’ll talk to you then.” And it was like the interview ended there because it’s like, you know, I didn’t have time for that bullshit.

But that was a snippet that captures not just the think tanks but also the Washington attitude towards writing and thinking and research. Because it didn’t matter that I’d done humorous pieces for some of the nation’s top papers, and that I was coming from a libertarian-leaning position and I was actually interested in what the government did. It didn’t matter because I didn’t have that piece of paper.

And, you know, I had thought that there would be some intellectual stimulation in Washington. But, you know, I was naive on that point. Instead, it was like a circle jerk that never ends. And you had people rising to the top of these organizations that were a complete joke as far as any intellectual honesty or literary ability.

And it’s funny, it’s sort of like the perfect sandwich of my time in D.C. It starts out with The Heritage Foundation, you know, “You’ve got to pay your dues!” And what is Heritage now? Heritage is one of the richest think tanks, and they’ve got a huge mural on the side of the think tank headquarters of Donald Trump’s face.

And how are you supposed to do honest thinking about Trump policies if it’s like, you know, this is the kind of thing you would expect to see George Orwell portraying in 1984 or the Soviet Union after World War II? But instead, this is an esteemed think tank that openly worships a politician.

And it’s like, call me old-fashioned, but I think it was H.L. Mencken that said the only way a journalist should look at a politician is down.

CORBETT: [Chuckling] Very, very true. You know, your interview experience there is disgusting, but not at all surprising, I suppose. And the craziest thing is that as you detail in your article, it’s actually documentable and has been scientifically studied.

You note:

Johns Hopkins University political scientists Jennifer Bachner and Benjamin Ginsburg surveyed almost 900 federal bureaucrats, White House and congressional staffers, and other members of the Washington policy community for their 2016 book What Washington Gets Wrong: The Unelected Officials Who Actually Run the Government and Their Misconceptions about the American People. Bachner and Ginsburg noted a ‘pervasive attitude of smug dismissiveness toward the citizenry and little sense of accountability’ as well as a ‘sense of cultural or intellectual superiority’ inside the ‘Beltway Bubble.’

You don’t say?

And right to the point of what happened to you in your interview there:

Washington Post reporter Jeff Guo, reviewing the book, insisted that ‘a lot of this elitism is probably justifiable’ because most of the survey respondents had advanced degrees.

BOVARD: Yeah, well, it’s wonderful to see snippets like that that basically confirm everything that you or I might think about Washington.

There is a sense of decorum that you shouldn’t be calling things out as they actually are. I had this back in the mid-1990s. I was writing a lot about Waco, the federal killings there, and the federal killings at Ruby Ridge. Almost all the think tanks, including the libertarian ones, would not touch that subject because it was almost like it was tainted. “Well, you know, the government shouldn’t have done that, but these were not good people. And, you know, these are people that didn’t have advanced degrees.”

CORBETT: [Chuckling] Yeah. Well, so, of course, I mean, there is the paternalistic aspect to it. There’s the smug dismissiveness of it, the intellectual sort of circling of the wagons aspect to it. But if this was just a bunch of effete, impotent intellectuals essentially safeguarding their own personal wealth by selling these policy prescriptions, that would be one thing.

But unfortunately, these policy prescriptions really do have a real effect on the real world. And we know that think tanks are an essential part of the military-industrial complex.

You note, for example, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which, as you point out, “extols politicians who advocate bombing Muslim nations.” We know, of course, about such things as idling vast swaths of the American farmland, etc., that come as a result of the types of policies that are advocated by these groups and, at the behest of donors who largely are shrouded behind mystery and are often not uncovered until long after the policies they were advocating for are actually enacted. So, what does that tell us about the way power actually operates in Washington and who is really pulling the strings?

BOVARD: Well, maybe it’s not a good idea to trust the policymakers.

It’s funny how so many think tanks simply became lobbying organizations, but they had a certain credibility. It was safer for journalists to quote them as “John Doe from Think Tank ABC said,” instead of saying “John Doe, who got a million dollars under the table now says,” you know? This is something which has happened a lot.

Some of the think tanks have been very active pushing for censorship in Europe and elsewhere, and they were mostly AWOL during the COVID pandemic. There was almost no principled opposition to the government abuse of power and surveillance and mandates from Washington think tanks during the COVID pandemic.

CORBETT: You raise such an important point there. Obviously, in fact, it was a lot of think tanks and independent organizations that were actively lobbying for governments to censor people online, like The Corbett Report and other outlets that were trying to tell the truth about what was going on during those lockdowns, etc. And of course, very, very, very, very little, if any, pushback from the intellectual circles and the think tank circuit on those destructive policies.

But I think as a result of that, what we have seen is a massive tidal shift in general public opinion about the expert class in general. I would posit that people are much less likely to go along with something because “experts say,” or “the doctors told us,” or “this think tank has pronounced such and such a thing.” I think that is the type of statement that would have gotten a pass several years ago that probably would not get a pass with a lot of people today precisely because of the COVID era. Do you agree or disagree with that?

BOVARD: Well, I think you’re right, unless there’s an emergency.

No, seriously, I hope you’re right. I don’t have a good perspective because I’ve lived in the D.C. area for too long and it makes me jaded. And I’ve seen so many rascals get away with so much BS for so long. I certainly hope that the leash can be pulled back on some of the outrages and that if we do get another pandemic-type threat, that there is not a stampede to censor and suppress and put hundreds of millions of people under house arrest. I mean, that was such a travesty.

I guess I’m frustrated or I’m disappointed that there has been so few people held liable for the positions they took or the actions that they did. And Washington think tanks were at the top of that list because so many of them had horrible policies, recommendations during COVID.

And, you know, the money’s still rolling in. Big Pharma is still generous.

CORBETT: Unfortunately, so… Yes. Well, it’s hard not to be cynical and jaded once you have seen this taking place for long enough. But at any rate, we persist in ringing the alarm for those of you who have ears to hear it.

Any other sort of general thoughts you have on the think tank-industrial complex?

BOVARD: Well, it’s you know, there was a lot of potential for think tanks early on because, it was it was it was think tanks early on raised the possibility that you would have alternative sources for ideas and truth compared to the federal government. So much of the nation’s media is utterly hooked on federal handouts for media, news and information and truth.

It’s a huge problem that the federal government has been allowed to define truth for its own policies and its own mandates. And think tanks raise the possibility of vigorous pushback. We’ve seen some of that on Trump’s trade policy. There have been a number of think tanks that have done very good work bashing that…. It hasn’t stopped it. It’s still going on. And I don’t know if the lessons of Trump’s debacles have gotten that’s connected or if the next politician that comes along…

But, you know, Trump’s trade policy is a great example of how ideas work in Washington, because the failure of protectionism was obvious from the late 1920s, 1930s. After World War Two, you had this worldwide era of prosperity thanks to much more open markets. And yet you’ve had a bunch of think tanks come in and a conservative (mostly) movement that was basically turning economics inside out. And they’ve had credibility.

I mean, The New York Times showcases some of those most innovative, shall we say, commentators on why trade barriers will make us rich or that they’re a triumph for the national interest. It doesn’t matter what the evidence is. If there is a course, if there is enough donors and if there is enough nitwit editors or, as far as US foreign policy, if there is enough people who have been bought or silently paid off or given fellowships or positions here, I mean, there is so much more dark money than what people suspect.

CORBETT: There is. There is. I always like to end on something of a positive note. So what’s your solution to all this, Jim? How do we defeat this problem?

BOVARD: I don’t know that it’s possible to defeat it, but it may be possible to decrease the damage. And vigorous skepticism is one of the first steps. And the other thing is to recognize that Washington institutions are going to be pro-Washington, which means being pro-government. There are some exceptions and there are some individuals have done some fine work. There is a systemic non-recognition of the collateral damage that the federal government inflicts on America and the world. And you can’t count on the Washington think tanks to tell you how much damage Uncle Sam is doing.

CORBETT: That is the always lovably irascible, but always corrigible Jim Bovard of Jimbovard.com, talking about his recent article on Intellectuals Paved the Road to Serfdom, which I will once again commend to your attention. I think it’s worth a read.

Bbut I hope that the point there is taken, that these are not just intellectuals playing their intellectual games. These aren’t even just the court jesters who are flattering the egos of the political puppets. No, these are the mouthpieces for the people who are really controlling and pulling strings in Washington and elsewhere. This is how their agenda is laundered into mainstream discourse and eventually, of course, reality. And that is why we should take it very seriously.

But as Bovard interestingly also points out, it’s not like the idea of think tanks is inherently evil or wrong. “No, you must not think or plan about the future!” No, of course not. The idea itself is potentially even a valuable one if it was used and treated in good faith by good actors with good intentions who also keep in mind that they are just limited, flawed human beings who can make mistakes. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Unfortunately, the system we live in is the one in which he who pays the piper, picks the tune, and the people who pay the piper are the ones that are literally creating the fiat money out of thin air. So that doesn’t tend to work out for us.

But still, it is at least the type of thing that might be worthy of consideration for a future #SolutionsWatch exploration. Is there such a thing? Could we at least envisage or even create a good think tank that is working on how can we create the future we actually want? Not the military-industrial complex future, not the pharmaceutical-biosecurity lockdown grid future, not the technocratic-enslavement grid, AI, digital-tracking-of-everyone grid. No, how about the free and open future for humanity—free humanity—that we want? Is there a way to envision that, lay out plans for it, work towards it in a coordinated and concentrated way with organized effort?

It’s at least worthy of consideration, isn’t it? And I suppose there have been efforts at countering the think tank consensus of the oligarchs with good think tanks in the past.

We could point, for example, to the recently created Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Remember when that came along? “Don’t worry, guys. We’re the anti-neocons. And now we have our own think tank that’s going to be providing policy reports.”

Well, firstly, as good as some of those reports may be and as good as some of that analysis may be, has it shifted the needle at all? Or, for example, I don’t know, prevented the Iran war/World War III? Well, no. No, it has not.

And, of course, we might want to take into account the considerations of people like Daniel McAdams, who I interviewed a few years ago about the Quincy Institute—the Koch/Soro-funded Quincy Institute—and how it may be, it just might be a type of phony opposition.

At any rate, if you trust them or don’t, this question still remains on the table. Is it possible for us to fund and help and organize and participate in our own type of think tank organization planning for the future?

Is that what an organization like the Independent Media Alliance is, or could be? That type of talking about and talking through and planning for issues? Well, not at this point, but I suppose there could be that type of organization in the future. What would that look like?

I’d be interested to hear your feedback on that question specifically. So if you’re a Corbett Report member, please do log into corbettreport.com. Go to corbettreport.com/thinktanks and leave your feedback there. I’d be interested to hear it.

And regardless of whether or not you are interested in leaving such feedback or whether or not you are a corporate report member, you can go to the aforesaid corbettreport.com/thinktanks for all of the show notes, all of the references to everything I’ve talked about today.

I hope at the very least you understand now why I might refer to think tanks as “stink tanks.” And hopefully you will share my concern with the think tank-industrial complex.

But that’s going to do it for today. I thank you for joining me for today’s exploration. I’m looking forward to talking to you again in the near future.