Chatham House’s Winter 2025 report “The world in 2026” reads like a neutral dashboard: a compact, public-facing outlook that moves briskly from theatre to theatre and domain to domain. What makes it influential isn’t a single prediction. It’s the format discipline—a way of turning complex realities
Mindwars
In earlier Mindwars articles, the main antagonist was clear: the social-psychology academics who turn “conspiracy theories” into a freestanding risk category, bolt it onto misinfo infrastructure and hand it to the managerial state as a governance tool. The generalist cluster around Douglas, Hornsey, Lewandowsky and Imhoff builds scales, harms catalogues
A very specific story about the war in Ukraine now circulates through European ministries, NATO headquarters, think-tank events and big media panels: Russia is Losing—Time for Putin's 2026 Hybrid Escalation. In that story, Russia is on a structural slide: * Sanctions are biting * The economy is distorted by
Mindwars
There’s a moment that captures the whole problem in one shot. In one room: senior politicians and asset managers sit down for “strategy discussions” about the economy. They are not elected, they don’t publish minutes, but they talk through what is “credible,” what “the markets” will tolerate, and
Mindwars
“You lose the person, they’re still there but you don’t recognise them.” That line sits at the emotional centre of an article in the British Journal of Social Psychology released 12 Dec 2025 about what it’s like to be romantically involved with someone who believes in conspiracy
On 17 December, Donald Trump stood in the Diplomatic Reception Room and did what presidents are supposed to do in moments of “national importance”: speak solemnly to the nation from the Oval Office. The script was familiar: * “I inherited a mess” * “Our border is secure” * “Inflation has stopped, wages are
From Fentanyl-as-WMD to Naval Blockade – How US Think Tanks, Sanctions Guilds and Neocon Operators Scripted a War Zone. Donald Trump’s December announcements about Venezuela sound, on the surface, like wild improvisation: first declaring illicit fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction” and then ordering a “total and complete blockade” of
The master script: Carnegie’s EU as adolescent power that must “act strong” Before we take this new text machine apart, recall where we left off. In “Carnegie—A Legacy for Peace, or Something Else?” we treated the Carnegie Endowment not as a neutral think tank, but as a narrative
Mindwars
How a “neutral” psychology study quietly turns climate distrust into a mental problem instead of a political one. In the last series of Mindwars instalments, we parked on the ERC project CONSPIRACY_FX as one of Europe’s central command nodes for “conspiracy-theory management”: a five-year Advanced Grant whose job
Dear readers, It’s been a busy couple of weeks since Ursula Edgington and I wrapped the “George and the Philanthropath” series. Since then, apart from moving to Ghost.io, I’ve been rebuilding the Ai based narrative deconstruction engine that powers the analysis underlying many of my articles. This