RUSI has already told us what it is. RUSI – Choreographing Legitimacy traced the institute back to its charter as an imperial war college and forward to its current role as a Crown-sanctioned narrative forge, where ex-generals, intelligence chiefs and legal officers rehearse the lines that turn coercive power
Mindwars
Thesis: QAnon and MINDSPACE are not ideological opposites. They are mirror architectures in the same belief-management system—one captures and demobilises distrust, the other steers compliance—with Conspiracy Theory Theory (CTT) acting as the bridge that harvests fallout from the first to justify expansion of the second. Earlier Mindwars
Mindwars
Thesis: Conspiracy Theory Theorists (CTTs) don’t just “study false beliefs”; they build a repeating logical fallacy pipeline—definition → measurement → intervention—that lets institutions downgrade unapproved narratives without having to adjudicate them. In the evolving Mindwars series, we’ve mapped how Conspiracy Theory Theory (CTT)—the academic field that studies
Many thanks to everyone who has supported my work on Substack this year under Journeys by the Styx and welcome to everyone who has come across to the new weblog Mindwars Ghosted. It has been a journey since I started writing on the topic of Estrangement Ideology only 12 months
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
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
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
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
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