In my Mindwars article “Are System-Trusting Beliefs Harmless?”, I posed a thought experiment—a parody of a serious psychological study on conspiracy theories, in which academics use the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire (CMQ) to argue that significant harms stem from those who believe in conspiracy theories. I reverse the question: what
This post marks a deliberate shift in direction. For the past year, my weblog (at Substack and now at Ghost) has moved through distinct phases: beginning with an exploration of “estrangement ideology,” then transitioning into the Mindwars and Geopolitika series. This work extended to recount my understanding how global societies
The object on the table—Understanding and improving sanctions today—isn’t from a random journal. It comes out of Chatham House—heir to the old imperial Round Table networks (mapped by historians like John Kendle in his work on British federalism) and still one of the main switchboards where
In global politics, few obsessions have proven as enduring—or seemingly as bizarre—as Donald Trump’s fixation on Greenland. As of January 2026, the former president, now back in the White House, has escalated his campaign with a “framework” deal announced at Davos, aiming to secure U.S. access
If you’ve been following the headlines in early 2026—from Hong Kong’s national security trial against former vigil organisers, to Beijing brushing off UN concerns over forced labour in Xinjiang, to rescue ops near Scarborough Shoal and fresh U.S.–China friction over TikTok’s joint-venture workaround—you
Narratives are the scaffolding in the architecture of information warfare. They don't just report events—they script consent, naturalise alliances, and divert attention from material flows. To dismantle them, we need tools that cut through the spectacle to the power functions beneath. Enter the UNDP-FHA Fusion Protocol v1.
Mindwars
A decade of papers from one conspiracy theory theorist’s circle doesn’t just “explain” why people believe conspiracies—it builds a psychometric machine that traps political suspicion inside personality scores, ready for platforms, policymakers and “resilience” programmes. Over the last ten years, if you’ve seen a sober explainer
Thoughts, stories and ideas.
The raid that took Nicolás Maduro and his wife out of Caracas was over in hours. There were explosions, statements, grainy footage and angry press conferences. Depending on who you ask, it was either a precision rescue of Venezuelan democracy, a naked act of imperial violence, or something in between.
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 into “rules-based
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 pieces
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 realities
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
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
“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