Did the CIA make Ibram X. Kendi a genius?

It was recently explained to me that the popularity of Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and Ta-Nehisi Coates was part of a long term plot by the CIA to concoct the zeitgeist necessary for 2020, a conspiracy that had to be carefully laid out years ahead of time.

That strikes me as, to say, the least unlikely, largely because nobody is that smart, especially not civil servants working for the CIA. The highest salary I can find listed on the Internet for a CIA executive is $225,000. If you can come up with a plan to successfully manipulate the culture years in advance and then implement it, well, Nike or Red Bull would pay you a lot more than the CIA could.

Further, working for yourself can pay even more. Steve Jobs changed the culture with his iPhone and Elon Musk with his Tesla. But it required a huge amount of effort to deliver culture-changing products that people actually liked.

This is not to say that there aren’t cultural conspiracies. For example, it appears to me that the promotion of transgenderism in 2013 involved people working at pro-gay marriage organizations worrying that they were about to put themselves out of their jobs by winning World War G, so they launched World War T in collaboration with some major media institutions like the New York Times and some rich and/or influential ex-men.

(Yet, keep in mind that junk mail genius Morris Dees of the SPLC had tried to launch World War T a decade earlier, but even a genuine force of nature like Morris couldn’t make transgenderism happen a decade ahead of its time. Ripeness is all.)

And was the key event in taking this esoteric conspiracy to the Keeping Up With the Kardashians-watching teen masses — the Caitlyn Jenner whoop-tee-doo — plotted out in New York NGO conference rooms from the get-go?

Probably not.

I don’t know much about CIA officers these days, but in the good old days, they actually had pretty good taste. For example, CIA officer Peter Matthiessen founded the fine literary magazine Paris Review in 1953, along with bon vivant George Plimpton, to provide himself with cover for what he was doing hanging around Paris going to parties. Another CIA project was Encounter magazine, edited by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol. Presumably, CIA officers aren’t what they used to be literarily in the days when James Jesus Angleton would publish Eliot ad Pound, but still … Kendi, DiAngelo, and Coates?

Really?