I was listening to the NPR podcast Planet Money the other day and thought of you guys and your exams. The episode concerns the way ISIS funds itself (it’s #667) and how it runs its budget. Basically, they spend a ton of cash on what Althusser calls RSAs: soldiers, weapons, “direct domination.” And as brutal as this practice is, it would give one hope that they have no pathway to shift from repressive to ideological apparatuses as the central mode of reproducing their movement: as Althusser says in a nutshell (and Gramsci says more subtly for my money), winning hearts and minds is in the long run much cheaper and more scalable!