Matt Ehret & Cynthia Chung: GeoPuzzle Pros

the Canadian power couple of geopolitics, deep state history, art & the CIA

Matthew Ehret and Cynthia Chung are the co-founders of The Rising Tide Foundation and co-authors of the just-completed trilogy The Clash of the Two Americas. They are also husband and wife or the dynamic duo of deep state politics in the global Gotham City, operating from their book-lined batcave in Montreal.

The Rising Tide Foundation states that it’s “dedicated to the enhancement of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between east and west.” This has included a deeper dive into the history of geopolitics than I’ve found anywhere else. Every time I open a link from one of their Substacks, I learn something new about the secret machinations that have misshaped our world. And as a conspiracy buff, I already knew a lot.

Cynthia has just finished Part 5 of her series on Sleepwalking into Fascism. She writes:

Thus far in this series we have seen a picture that has painted NATO, the CIA, and fascists including outright Nazis all working for the same apparatus and essentially the same goal: to overthrow democratically elected leaders and replace them with dictators and fascist right-wing governments. In Part 4, it was discussed how the profits of the narcotics trade are used in turn to fund right-wing terrorist activity globally, using the model of NATO’s Gladio. The “great heroin coup” by the CIA and co. was about having complete control over the profits of heroin for this very purpose.

In Part 5 she quotes Bertrand Russell on the importance of mass psychology to get people to believe the opposite of their experience and logic, that “snow is black,” in his words. Because “the influence of the home is obstructive,” you should start before age 10, set your propaganda to a catchy tune, and ridicule those who insist snow is white. Cynthia then shows how the CIA/NATO policy of collusion with unequivocal Nazis has been consistent for 77 years and continues to the war in Ukraine today.

The US media will tell you snow is black and self-proclaimed Nazis aren’t real Nazis. But what they can’t argue with are Cynthia and Matthew’s historical records and documents. When they open their mouths, they speak volumes and they have volumes of data and direct quotes to back it up.

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Matt has a series on The Untold History of Canada, which makes him the northern Howard Zinn. He’s a senior fellow at the American University of Moscow and an expert on the China-Russia collaboration of the Belt and Road Initiative. As our direct access to information from Russia and China is being blocked, it’s especially valuable to have a perspective that shows cooperation is possible.

Blogging as Canadian Patriot 1776, much of his research is on the near-misses, the places where history could have gone in a different direction, like when the British and French colonies differentiated into the US and Canada, and could have worked together and with Eastern countries like Russia, China and India rather than sabotaging those relationships.

And Matt Ehret knows how to read. As John Taylor Gatto—author of Dumbing Us Down—would say, he knows how to read for power. He once worked at a university library that was getting rid of their books, on the grounds that everything was now digitized. He took boxes back and forth, hauling home the complete works of Lincoln, Ben Franklin, Erasmus.

While he sees the internet as an unparalleled tool for research and communication, Matt says it’s also a tool for the destruction of the mind because we need the unbroken concentration of being unplugged. His articles quote poets and artists, which is what he went to school for until they told him that if you could understand what a painting was trying to say, it wasn’t art. Art shouldn’t communicate, shouldn’t have meaning, which made no sense to him.

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Like Matt, 911 was also my wake-up call when I realized there wasn’t anything “they” wouldn’t do and that they couldn’t get away with. I think that’s been useful for both us to be able to see the evidence since then. One of those unthinkable rocks that Matt has looked under are the attacks in Buffalo and now in Texas. Amid the calls for greater surveillance, censorship and gun laws, Matt reported on a study on domestic terrorism done in 2012 by The Center on National Security at Fordham Law School:

In this course of its investigation, researchers at Fordham discovered that EVERY SINGLE ONE of the 138 terrorist incidents recorded in the USA between 2001-2012 involved FBI informants who played leading roles in planning out, supplying weapons, instructions and even recruiting Islamic terrorists to carry out terrorist acts on U.S. soil.

One of my first hints that Amy Goodman was not skeptical enough was her reporting of the trial of the “Newburgh Four,” where she said that in the courtroom next door, a real terrorist was being tried. That turned out to be the Times Square bomber, who conveniently left his wallet in the car he abandoned with the bomb. And there was the underwear bomber, who was escorted through security with no coat or luggage and appeared to other passengers to be dazed or drugged. And the bomb addressed to a Jewish temple that required security to go through all packages twice before they could remember where they hid it. Fortunately it had the sender’s real return address.

Once you know there’s nothing they won’t do, you can’t dismiss anything as unthinkable. You can only look at the evidence and keep asking, Cui Bono: who benefits?

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When Matt talked about his experience in art school, it rang bells for me that I’d heard that was intentional, so I contacted fellow conspiracy theorist and artist, Ernest Gusella, to see what he knew. He sent me a wealth of articles. One was from Open Cultures, an educational website, on How the CIA Funded & Supported Literary Magazines Worldwide While Waging Cultural War Against Communism. It states:

… the CIA “developed several guises to throw money at young, burgeoning writers, creating a cultural propaganda strategy with literary outposts around the world, from Lebanon to Uganda, India to Latin America.” … it funded, organized, and curated them, with the full knowledge of editors like Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen, himself a CIA agent.

In JSTOR Daily, Lucie Levine published Was Modern Art a CIA Psy-Ops? She concludes that it was, but seems to applaud it:

… it was precisely because Modern art was not universally popular, and was created by artists who openly disdained orthodoxy, that it was such an effective tool in showcasing the fruits of American cultural freedom to anyone looking in from abroad. President Truman personally considered Modern art, “merely the vaporings of half-baked lazy people.” But he did not declare it degenerate and expel its practitioners to gulags in Siberia. Not only that, abstract expressionism in particular was a direct repudiation of Soviet Socialist Realism. Nelson Rockefeller liked to call it “Free Enterprise Painting.”

In contrast to the Soviet Union’s “Popular Front,” the New Yorker magazine wonderfully, and perfectly, referred to the political role of American Modernism as “The Unpopular Front.” The very existence of American Modern Art proved to the world that its creators were free to create, whether you liked their work or not.

Ernest, who comments on my YouTube posts as the electric mule, sent me a very funny story about being in a Paris restaurant in the ‘70s with other video artists and the video curator of a prestigious Amsterdam museum. Rabble-rouser that he is, Ernest brought up a 1967 article in the NY Review of Books called The CIA and the Intellectuals and how they promoted American art as brainwashing and propaganda.

The Director of the American Cultural Center in Paris was at the dinner and affirmed that it was true when the curator began to sputter and say her museum had examples of all of the latest abstract expressionism and pop art BECAUSE IT WAS QUALITY!!! So the rest had a lot of fun toying with her and saying “THE WORK ISN'T GREAT NECESSARILY... IT'S GREAT BECAUSE YOU’VE BEEN BRAINWASHED AND WE—THE US GOVERNMENT—TOLD YOU IT WAS GREAT... AND YOU EURO-PEONS SWALLOWED IT HOOK, LINE, AND SINKER!!!” She was in a total state of shock and beside herself, which he told me In Dead Ernest, as an unrepentant punster.

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But the story I was really looking for I found in Matt’s own article on the topic, called Why Must Aesthetics Govern a Society Worthy of Political Freedom? Ask the CIA. Matt writes:

Many were startled by the revelation that the entire evolution of 20th century modern art was directed in large measure by the CIA! This not only included the direct financing of abstract painters like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, whose works now regularly sell for over $100 million apiece, but also powerful literary magazines like Salon and Encounter, interpretive dance schools, and the remarkably ugly a-tonal music of Arnold Schoenberg.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), funded in 1950 by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, was headed by Bertrand Russell, who continued his thoughts on mass psychology by saying:

Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called ‘education.’ Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part…. It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.

So pointlessness is the point. There is no meaning—to family, to community, to art, to life itself. With the Rising Tide Foundation, Matthew and Cynthia are restoring meaning, not just by separating truth from lies in history but also by looking to ancient philosophers and poets like Shelley, whose Hymn to Intellectual Beauty they’ve studied indepth. In her essay, Why the Poetic Principle is Imperative for Statecraft, Cynthia quotes Shelley that:

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Hierophant is a word I first encountered in my Crow Tarot deck as an interpreter of sacred mysteries, the one who dives into the subconscious and brings back ideas and images that belong to everyone. The word comes from ta hiera ('the holy') and phainein ('to show'). I think of holy as Oneness, the state of being whole, as the root of the word ‘to heal’ also means ‘to make whole.’

Because of Matthew and Cynthia, my understanding of what is, the reality in the world, is more whole, is more holy. And that can only lead in the end to a world that is more healed. I’m glad to be on this journey with them.

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If you would like to delve more into the sacred mysteries, here’s In the Context of All Being ONE on Daniel Pinchbeck:

I respond to Russell Brand's interview of Daniel, How Do We Invent a New Future? I use the Ten Terrains of Consciousness to describe a future based on unity, and examines superiority as blocking the revelation that "everyone is just us." Looks at Chris Ellingworth's application of the Ten Terrains to Luke Skywalker and what it would mean to trust in the force rather than feeling we need to make it all happen. I quote A Course in Miracles to confirm Russell's statement that reality is happening in your head. I give a radical view of the zealots and end with Rebecca Solnit's view of how the revolution will come about.

And this is Spiritual Optimism & Political Radicalism on Marianne Williamson:

Explains A Course in Miracles, which Marianne has studied for 45 years and I have for nearly 20. Looks at the rules for discerning whether any scripture, aka channeled text, could be considered as the word of God. Reads Caitlin Johnstone's poem, Sources Say, and the introduction to my book, A House for the Soul in the Land Beyond Faith. Asks what spiritual optimism is and why it's so important.