Good question. That part I’m not so sure about but I think it came later, although I remember that early on they did reach out to some think tank for cross-promotion but (to my knowledge) they weren’t really involved. A significant turning point though came when the original group of mods started talking in their chat about how much they wanted to kill palestinians with drones, and then the head mod, the one who had rebooted the subreddit, sent screenshots of that conversation to the mods of r/chapotraphouse in an attempt to provoke them into some kind of shitposting war. The mods of r/CTH then just publicly posted the screenshots, which caused the mods of r/neoliberal to resign and a lot of the original power users to go back to r/badeconomics. The next wave of mods had joined the subreddit after it had been rebooted and were more like the lanyard type so I think that’s when the think tanks started getting involved.
"The Neoliberal Project" eventually partnered with a thinktank called "The Progressive Policy Institute", but it was already part of something called "The Center for New Liberalism", effectively the parent company.
It is accidentally a great commentary on Neoliberalism how there's this incestuous clusterfuck of psy-op non-profits that make it hard to track who does what.
Good question. That part I’m not so sure about but I think it came later, although I remember that early on they did reach out to some think tank for cross-promotion but (to my knowledge) they weren’t really involved. A significant turning point though came when the original group of mods started talking in their chat about how much they wanted to kill palestinians with drones, and then the head mod, the one who had rebooted the subreddit, sent screenshots of that conversation to the mods of r/chapotraphouse in an attempt to provoke them into some kind of shitposting war. The mods of r/CTH then just publicly posted the screenshots, which caused the mods of r/neoliberal to resign and a lot of the original power users to go back to r/badeconomics. The next wave of mods had joined the subreddit after it had been rebooted and were more like the lanyard type so I think that’s when the think tanks started getting involved.
"The Neoliberal Project" eventually partnered with a thinktank called "The Progressive Policy Institute", but it was already part of something called "The Center for New Liberalism", effectively the parent company.
It is accidentally a great commentary on Neoliberalism how there's this incestuous clusterfuck of psy-op non-profits that make it hard to track who does what.