In August 2025 a Chinese-Canadian by the name of Jian Xueqin started a Substack with the tagline, “I analyze history to connect the past, explain the present, and predict the future”. Xueqin does not attribute this phrase. He is also not an economist, but an English graduate who is unlikely to have ever read Keynes. That Substack account acquired a staggering 44,000 subscribers in half a year: already becoming the #1 ranked Substack page in the ‘world politics’ category. His YouTube channel has over a million subscribers: almost all of them gained in the last year. His videos on ‘game theory’ have gone viral, even though it’s quite obvious to anyone who knows formal game theory that Xueqin doesn’t. The YouTube channel was started in early 2023 but its first post on geopolitics was only in April 2024. In a previous post, I explained how an important tool for Western intelligence agencies in manipulating elections using social media is amplification and deamplification. Such tools can of course be used for manipulating societies more broadly…

Crosspost from https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10539922