Dear James,

I have a confession: I never really liked the name of your Film, Literature and the New World Order video series.

The recent push by Corbett Report members to rename it The James Corbett Book (and Movie!) Club gets my wholehearted endorsement.

Film, Literature and the New World Order sounds too much like an endorsement for a globalist oligarchy rather than a preventative critique. People already accuse us of working for the CIA enough.

My own association with the CIA was "proven" by an anonymous online heckler named Flat Earth Tom (or something like that). Flat Earth Tom noted that my middle initials are C and A and that I am blind in one eye. Hence John C.I.A. Manley. Hidden in plain sight, eh?

Even odder, I've heard people accuse you of being a CIA operative because you are prolific and can afford to hire a video editor. Also, your guilt was finalized when you publicly denied that an invisible laser beam from a cloaked time-travelling spaceship from the year 2483 caused the Twin Towers to disintegrate on 9/11. Clearly, you are trying to keep the truth from the peons.

So a New World Order club may not be helping us lovers of books, truth and conspiracies avoid these rather entertaining and far-fetched claims (likely made by CIA-hired trolls or time-travelling AI bots from the 28th century).

It reminds me a bit of the confusion caused by Professor Michel Chossudovsky's Montreal-based organization, Centre for Research on Globalization. We've both had content published on his website. And I've had people ask me why I'd associate myself with this communist, globalist organization. The fact that its contributors are critiquing globalization and socialism, rather than promoting either, escapes the trending seven-second attention span.

Lastly, Film, Literature and the New World Order sounds too long and academic for such a witty club. At the same time, the acronym triggers a strange effect in my semi-dyslecix brain: My mind automatically rearranges FLNWO to spell FLOWN. This became so distressing that I was forced to report you to the AAAAA (American Association Against Acronym Abuse).

I have only one other request for the James Corbett Book (and Movie!) Club: Could you line up the books six months in advance? I tend to have large volumes on the go. I also tend to challenge my dyslexia by reading books in parallel in two languages. This slows me down. So I need more warning to have a book completed before its livestream (without suffering sleep deprivation).

Otherwise, I'm playing catch-up. For example, I'll be reading Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and then watching the recording of your episode with Tom-Oliver Regenauer afterward.

In fact, many of my readers did this with the episode we recorded about Harry Turtledove's Powerless.

I'm also eager to get to last month's episode about Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Shamefully, I've yet to read any of Dick's novels, despite people telling me we have a similar storytelling style. (Does this mean Dick worked for the CIA, too?)

Regardless of whether I participate in the livestream or watch the recordings later, I'm glad you've continued with the James Corbett Book (and Movie!) Club. I'll continue to support it through my Corbett Report membership (and I encourage all of my book-loving subscribers to do the same).

It's easy to underestimate the unbelievable power of fiction.

As the Chinese-born British writer Ma Jian once said: "I believe that the power of literature is stronger than the power of tyranny."

Thank you for supporting fiction that aims to make the world more free and life more meaningful.

John C.👁️.A. Manley

P.S. See you at our next clandestine CIA meet-up group in Switzerland on September 11th at 3:33 p.m. Bring your prolific video editor, and I'll bring my time-travelling AI bot.

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.