Norris has spent years inside this story. She has gone undercover as a bogus anti-abortion activist at the Clarkson Academy in London. She has reported from Romania, Ireland, Poland, Bangladesh, Kenya and Ukraine, and followed Russian oligarch money as it flows quietly into European anti-gender activism. The reporting is dogged, precise and personally brave. Seven chapters cover the ideology, the extremist fringe, the networks that move fringe ideas into government, the allies the movement recruits, the money behind it, the politicians who deliver it, and where the whole thing is heading.

The evidence is unimpeachable. The pipeline is real. Norris was correct about Roe years before the commentariat caught up, which is the journalist’s highest validation and which she deserves in full.

Here is the thing the book describes but does not quite name.

The pipeline reproduces itself. Expose Agenda Europe and the pattern reappears through the Political Network for Values. Expose that and it reappears through the next node. Cut off the donors and new donors arrive. Name the phrases and new phrases enter circulation with the same architecture underneath them. Norris documents this reproduction across Romania, Poland, Ireland, Italy, Hungary, Spain, the US and the UK. She notes, correctly, that it is the same rhetoric, the same organisations, the same funders.

Journalism can show that this is happening. It does not yet have the vocabulary for why.

The reason is structural. The anti-abortion movement, the anti-gender movement, the replacement networks, the Christian nationalist projects and the oligarch-funded infrastructure are not the subject of the story. They are what the subject looks like when it surfaces. The subject is an underlying identity “field”, and the field produces similar outputs wherever observers sit inside it. You can dismantle every organisation Norris names and the field will still be there, and a new generation of organisations will form inside it.

Read with this in mind, her chapters begin to look different.

Chapter 1, on the ideology, assembles an argument that appears, with uncanny similarity, across Mussolini’s Italy, Nazi Germany, Putin’s Russia, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Trump’s America and Orbán’s Hungary. Different countries, different languages, different centuries. Same argument: mythic past, natural order, women as reproductive material for the nation. This is neither coincidence nor global coordination. It is a background pattern with enough stability to reproduce independently of local actors.

Chapter 4, on the women who join, reads differently once you notice the same mechanism. Norris borrows Ariel Levy’s loophole-woman framing, and there is a deeper reading underneath it. Movements that extract value from a group and return nothing to that group cannot stabilise on that extraction alone. They must widen the coalition. They must offer a cause to people who would otherwise be their targets. The gender-critical pivot is that coalition-widening move. It is a structural response to instability rather than a strategic decision made in a room.

Chapter 5 is the chapter most useful for anyone trying to extend her work into the cryptocurrency world. It is also the chapter where her accounting is most incomplete, not because the money is wrong but because money is only one of the returns this movement harvests. The movement lives primarily on attention. Every outraged reaction to a six-week abortion ban, every counter-mobilisation, every news cycle, every viral clip feeds the system. The donors supply the capital. The attention economy compounds it. This is why financial exposure, at which Norris is excellent, does not stop the movement: the attention stream continues even when the money is frozen.

Chapter 6, on the politicians, ends at Truss and the Sewell Report. Read it again with one addition. The book would have ended differently if Norris had been writing three years later. Pete Hegseth, now running the American military under the reintroduced title Secretary of War, has the Jerusalem Cross tattooed on his chest and the Latin phrase Deus Vult on his right bicep, and published a book in 2020 titled American Crusade that ends with those same two Latin words. That is not personal aesthetic. It is a thousand-year-old identity signature, last used at anything close to this intensity during the actual Crusades, now inscribed on the body of the man responsible for American lethal force. The pattern Norris has been tracking has become embodied at the highest level of state. In her book’s idiom, the movement has tipped. In structural terms, the cycle has reached its closest approach.

Bodies Under Siege is the most detailed English-language empirical map of this field anyone has published. That is a real achievement. Norris’s instincts have been right longer than most of her critics managed. The shape of her career, battling against complacency for years, then vindicated at a public event that made her framing impossible to deny, then sought out as an authority, follows a predictable arc for correct observers working without institutional backing. Roe was such an event. Hegseth is another. There will be more.

What a reader working in this territory can now add to her book is a mechanism for her observations. Not a correction. Not a replacement. An engine. Something that explains why the pipeline keeps reproducing, why the organisations are replaceable, why exposure of the money does not slow the propagation, why escalation is forced on the movement by its own instability, and why the pattern she caught in Romania in 2017 ended up tattooed on the chest of Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War in 2026.

To Norris’s closing question, which future do we choose, the answer to this is not education, fact-checking or more moderators. The answer is taxing the money that people make from online content, taxing and regulating social media and regulating crypto currencies. That is the only choice.

The good news, if there is any, is that she has already done the work. The book that my framework needed was always going to have to be written by someone brave enough to sit in the rooms and precise enough to document what happened in them. Norris did that. The vocabulary for what she found was always going to come afterwards.

An update to the article on Trump the Divine Saviour

Pete Hegseth stood at the White House podium on Easter Monday and told a story.

A pilot was shot down on Good Friday. He hid in a cave on Saturday. He was rescued as the sun rose on Easter Sunday. Hegseth called him “reborn.”

This is not a coincidence. This is not a metaphor that happened to land well. This is a template.

There are three narrative structures that have shaped political identity for centuries. One of them is the Dispensationalist template. It says history has a script. God wrote it. We are approaching the final act. And certain events in the Middle East are not geopolitics. They are prophecy.

You do not need to believe this for it to work on you. That is the whole point. Templates are not beliefs. They are the architecture inside which beliefs form. You do not choose to stand inside a cathedral and feel small. The building does that.

Hegseth knows exactly what he is doing. The pilot rescue happened to fall across Easter weekend. The facts are the facts. But the framing is a choice. Shot down on Good Friday. Cave on Saturday. Risen on Sunday. He mapped a military operation onto the resurrection of Christ and nobody in the briefing room blinked.

Trump followed up. A reporter asked if God supports the US in this war. “I do, because God is good,” he said. Then he described what happens if Iran does not comply by Tuesday night. Every bridge demolished. Every power plant burning and exploding. Complete demolition by midnight.

Fire and brimstone. Vengeance and glory. All on a Tuesday.

Here is the thing people keep missing about Trump’s deadlines.

They are not for Iran.

Iran cannot reopen the Strait of Hormuz by 8pm Eastern on a Tuesday because that is not how anything works. Diplomacy does not have a primetime slot. The 45-day ceasefire proposal from Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey is still being discussed. Iran has counter-proposed a permanent end to the war. These are serious processes involving serious people and none of them operate on a countdown clock.

But CNN does. And Al Jazeera does. And every live blog on every news site in the world does.

The deadline is for the audience. It creates a cliff-hanger. It holds eyeballs. It turns a war into a serialised drama with weekly episodes and a season finale that keeps getting pushed back. “We will find out tonight,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”

That is a trailer. Not a diplomatic communiqué.

The live ticker is Trump’s lifeline. Without it he is a president with collapsing approval numbers prosecuting a war that most Americans oppose. His strong approval among Republicans has dropped nine points since January. Petrol is at four dollars a gallon. The midterms are seven months away. The cumulative picture is terrible.

But the cumulative picture is never what sits in front of the audience. The ticker resets it. Every BREAKING banner wipes the slate. Every update displaces the previous context. You do not sit with 38 days of cluster munitions on Haifa and airstrikes on residential Tehran. You sit with the latest cliff-hanger instead.

Will he bomb the power plants? Will Iran open the strait? Will there be a deal by midnight?

Tune in to find out.

And this is where the Dispensationalist template earns its rent.

A countdown to infrastructure strikes is compelling television. But a countdown to infrastructure strikes framed as the will of God is something else entirely. It is an identity product. It tells a specific audience that this war is not a geopolitical disaster with no exit strategy. It is scripture being fulfilled. The suffering is part of the plan. The destruction is holy. The president is an instrument of divine purpose.

“Glory be to GOD!” Trump posted, directly after threatening to rain hell on 90 million people.

This is the template doing what templates do. It takes an event and makes it legible through a pre-existing structure. The structure was there before Trump. It was there before Hegseth. Christian Zionism has been shaping American foreign policy in the Middle East for decades. The belief that Israel must be restored, that its enemies must be defeated, that these events herald the return of Christ. Tens of millions of Americans hold some version of this view. They did not get it from Trump. Trump got it from them.

He is not deploying the template. He is inside it.

But he is also extracting rent from it. Every invocation of God, every resurrection metaphor, every fire-and-brimstone social media post is an attention product aimed at the segment of the identity market where the Dispensationalist template is strongest. Hannity. Graham. Huckabee. The evangelical base that sees Iran not as a country full of people but as a prophetic obstacle.

The template provides the audience. The deadline provides the format. The ticker provides the distribution. And somewhere inside all of this, a real war is killing real people who have nothing to do with any of it.

The platforms cannot opt out. This is important.

CNN ran the Hegseth resurrection framing as an analysis piece. They noted the religious overtones. They raised the war crimes question. And they ran it all inside a live blog with a countdown clock to 8pm ET.

They are not choosing to amplify the spectacle. They are built to amplify the spectacle. The live blog format exists to maximise engagement with unfolding events. A deadline to potential civilian infrastructure strikes is the platonic ideal of an unfolding event. The platform is a lens. It sits between the signal and the observer. It distorts what arrives. But it has no editorial function. It just bends light toward intensity.

Every rational Iranian response gets metabolised by the same system. “This is a war crime.” Ticker update. “We reject ultimatums.” Ticker update. “We will respond beyond the region.” Ticker update. Iran’s agency becomes content in someone else’s show. Their counterstrategy is structurally unable to compete with a countdown clock.

Trump posted on Truth Social this morning. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Read it again.

A whole civilisation. Will die. Tonight.

And then: “However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen.”

He is offering the destruction of a civilisation and its resurrection in the same sentence. Death on Friday, rebirth on Sunday. The template is so deeply embedded that he reproduces its structure without even trying.

Or maybe he is trying. It does not matter either way. That is the thing about templates. Intent is irrelevant. The architecture persists whether the architect is conscious of it or not.

The war continues. The ticker runs. The deadline approaches.

Tune in tonight.

All Substack proceeds are donated to Ukrainian causes. If you want to support the work, subscribe. If you want to support Ukraine, subscribe.

This chart is doing the rounds. You have probably seen it. John Burn-Murdoch made it for the Financial Times. It shows that strong Democrats have shifted sharply left on cultural issues since 2012, while Republicans have barely moved. The median voter sits in the middle looking sensible.

The headline says: “Democrats have shifted sharply leftwards on cultural issues in recent years, leaving the median voter behind.”

It is a beautifully made chart. It is also nonsense. Not because the data is wrong. Because the frame is.

Let me show you why.

Layer one: the tails are not the story

The chart measures “strong Democrats” and “strong Republicans.” These are the tails of the distribution. The people who identify most intensely with their party.

Of course the tails diverge from the median. That is what tails do. It is like measuring the fastest runners in a race and concluding that running has become more extreme. No. You just measured the fast ones.

The interesting question is not whether the tails moved. It is why the tails accelerated. The chart has nothing to say about that.

Layer two: the asymmetry hiding in plain sight

Look at the right-hand panel. Immigration. Republicans shifted hard to the right from 2000 onwards. That is a massive move. At least as dramatic as anything on the Democratic side.

But the headline does not say “both parties diverged from the median.” It says Democrats moved left. The Republican shift is right there in the data (and the graph). The framing walks past it.

This is not an accident. It is a lens effect.

Layer three: the FT is not neutral

Nobody is neutral. The Financial Times sells to people who think of themselves as the centre. Its readers are institutionalists. They believe the middle ground is a real place with a fixed address.

A chart that says “the extremes moved away from the sensible middle” confirms the prior its audience already holds. It tells FT readers what they want to hear. Which is that they did not move. Everyone else did.

This is not a conspiracy. It is economics. The FT is extracting value from its readers’ self-image. The product is reassurance. The chart is the delivery mechanism.

Layer four: the survey moved the thing it measured

The data comes from the US General Social Survey. The GSS has been asking the same questions for decades. That sounds rigorous. It is not.

“Do you support affirmative action?” means something completely different in 2020 than it did in 1996. The words are the same. The world is not. The question stayed still. The field it is measuring rotated underneath it.

Some of what looks like movement is real preference shift. Some of it is semantic drift. The chart cannot tell the difference. It does not try.

And it gets worse.

The moment these results are published, they become inputs to the system. A politician sees “Democrats shifted left on immigration” and adjusts their positioning. A voter sees the same chart and feels either vindicated or alarmed. A newspaper writes a headline. The headline changes the field. The next survey captures the change the last headline caused.

The measurement moved the thing it was measuring. And nobody at any point says: we are inside this system, not above it.

The buoy and the lighthouse

The median voter line is the real trick. It sits there in the middle of the chart looking neutral. Looking like solid ground. Looking like a reference point.

It is not.

The median is a rolling average of a population that is itself being pushed around by the same forces pushing the parties. It is a buoy on the sea. It moves when the current moves. It is not a lighthouse.

When Democrats shift left on affirmative action, some voters follow them. The median moves. When Republicans shift right on immigration, some voters follow them. The median moves again. The median is not standing still while the parties walk away from it. The median is being tugged in both directions simultaneously and settling somewhere in between, and that somewhere is different every year.

Using the median as a fixed reference to measure party movement is like measuring how far a ship has drifted by comparing it to another ship. Both moved. You just called one of them the anchor.

What is actually happening

Both parties shifted away from the median at the same time. The inflection point is the same: roughly 2012. The acceleration is the same. The cause is the same.

Social media raised the reward for holding extreme positions and lowered the cost of expressing them. Simultaneously. For everyone. The attention economy does not care whether you are left or right. It cares whether you are loud.

The chart records the symptom. It misdiagnoses the disease. The disease is not that Democrats moved left. The disease is that the entire system started rewarding distance from the centre at the same time, and both parties responded rationally to that incentive.

The real story is not directional. It is structural. And a chart that only points in one direction is not telling you the story. It is telling you a story. The one its audience wants to hear.

The phrase that gives it away

Everyone says it. Left and right. Young and old. In every argument, on every platform, in every country.

“I didn’t move. You did.”

They are all right. And they are all wrong. Because the ground moved. The frame of reference shifted. And nobody has a fixed position from which to measure anyone else.

The FT chart is just the prettiest version of that mistake. A beautifully rendered map of a coastline drawn from a boat that forgot it was also at sea.

Matt Pearce writes The Angry Dogs. All Substack proceeds are donated to Ukrainian causes.

In 1932, a Cambridge psychologist called Frederic Bartlett published a book called Remembering. He showed that people don’t receive information neutrally. They process it through pre-existing mental structures he called schemas. The schema shapes what arrives. Details that fit are kept. Details that don’t are dropped. And the schema is invisible to the person using it.

Ninety-three years later, this is the most profitable insight in the world. It just isn’t called schema theory any more. It’s called the algorithm.

Here are three people. They operate in completely different fields. They have nothing obvious in common. But they are doing exactly the same thing.

The first is Suzanne Mulholland, known as the Batch Lady. She presents a programme on Channel 4 called Batch from Scratch: Cooking for Less. It helps families save money on food. The show is produced in partnership with Lidl. She has five Sunday Times bestselling cookbooks, an Amazon storefront earning affiliate commission on freezer bags and measuring spoons, brand partnerships with Trolley Bags, half a million followers, and a farmhouse in the Scottish Borders. Her co-presenter is a former EastEnders actor married to a woman worth seven million pounds. The programme teaches a single dad in Manchester how to feed his kids on a budget. The content is helpful. Nobody is the villain. But the single dad is watching people whose combined wealth exceeds five million pounds show him how to be poor more efficiently, while being invited to buy the branded spoons.

The second is Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman. She runs one of the most successful food brands in America from a cattle ranch in Oklahoma. Cookbooks, a Food Network show, a magazine, a product line, a restaurant, a general store. The content is warm, generous, family-centred. It says: this is how to live well from the land, the way people used to, before everything went wrong. The ranch is beautiful. The lighting is perfect. The message is that the good life is still possible if you go back to basics. The product line is available at Walmart.

The third is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He is the current US Secretary of Health and Human Services. Before that, he ran an organisation called Children’s Health Defense, from which he promoted anti-vaccine positions, hosted the Indian anti-GMO activist Vandana Shiva, and argued that Bill Gates was engineering a “new feudalism” through control of seeds and farmland. The content says: powerful hidden actors are poisoning your food, your children, and your future. The truth is being suppressed. He is revealing it.

What do these three have in common?

They each operate through a different pre-existing cognitive structure. A different schema. In my academic work I call these templates, because they function like the slits in a double-slit experiment. Information passes through them and arrives shaped by whatever structure it passed through. There are three of these templates, and they are very old.

The Batch Lady passes through the Institutional template. This is the template that says: follow the proper method and things will improve. It’s the template of home economics, the WI, the NHS, the BBC. Procedural legitimacy. Trust the process. It goes back, arguably, to the Sumerian bookkeepers. When information passes through this template, it arrives feeling trustworthy and legitimate.

The Pioneer Woman passes through the Dispensationalist template. This is the template that says: the world has a script, the faithful will be provided for, and the good life is available to those who follow the right path. The ranch is the promised land. The cooking is the ritual. When information passes through this template, it arrives feeling hopeful and redemptive.

RFK Jr passes through the Protocols template. This is the template that says: a hidden hand is at work, the truth is being suppressed, and the target rotates but the structure of the conspiracy is conserved. Gates, Monsanto, Big Pharma, the seed banks. The target changes. The architecture doesn’t. When information passes through this template, it arrives feeling urgent and revelatory.

Three templates. Three completely different people. Three different domains. Food, lifestyle, politics. And yet the extraction mechanism underneath all three is identical.

Each of them has a platform. Each of them monetises attention. Each of them extracts rent from the identity of the person watching. The Batch Lady extracts from your anxiety about not coping. The Pioneer Woman extracts from your longing for a life that feels real. RFK Jr extracts from your fear that the system is lying to you. Different emotions. Different templates. Same transaction.

The platform doesn’t care which template you inhabit. Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Amazon, Walmart. The monetisation layer is template-agnostic. It takes its cut from all three equally. The template just determines which emotional channel carries the signal. The platform collects the rent regardless.

And the person being extracted from cannot see the extraction. That is Bartlett’s point. The schema is invisible to the person using it. The Batch Lady’s viewer sees help. The Pioneer Woman’s viewer sees hope. RFK Jr’s audience sees truth. None of them see the affiliate link, the brand partnership, the data harvested from their attention, the commission earned on the spoon.

This is why nobody can agree on what is wrong. The political class thinks the problem is policy. The psychologists think it is mental health. The economists think it is wages. The tech people think it is misinformation. They are all describing the same elephant in the room from different angles. The actual mechanism is simpler than any of them suppose.

The monetised attention economy has industrialised the exploitation of Bartlett’s schemas. It identifies which template you inhabit. It feeds you content shaped to pass through your template with minimum resistance. And attached to that content, underneath it, is a monetisation layer that extracts rent from your identity. From your sense of who you are and who you should be and what your life should look like.

In 1971, Delia Smith published a book called How to Cheat at Cooking. It showed you how to make dinner. You bought the book for a few pounds and that was the end of the transaction. The schema was the same. The Institutional template was the same. But there was no platform underneath it extracting rent. There was no algorithm identifying your template and feeding you optimised content. There was no affiliate link. There was no continuous, intimate, algorithmic exposure to a life you cannot afford.

The transaction ended when you bought the book. Now it never ends. The extraction is continuous. And the distance between the life you are shown and the life you can afford is the rent. It is paid not in money but in adequacy. And when the bill comes due, it arrives not as debt, though there is plenty of that, but as anger. Anger at the government. Anger at the system. Anger at whoever is nearest. Because the actual source of the extraction is invisible. It passed through your schema before you had a chance to see it.

A spoon, a ranch, and a Kennedy. Three templates. One mechanism. And a word nobody has defined.

The word is “living.” As in, cost of. Every official definition says it means the cost of basic needs. Food, shelter, energy. But that is not what people mean when they say they cannot afford to live. They mean they cannot afford the life that now counts as a life. And that definition is being set, continuously, by an industry that did not exist twenty years ago, that operates through cognitive structures identified ninety-three years ago, and that is completely untaxed.

That is the rent. And until someone names it, no one can tax it. And until someone taxes it, the anger will not stop. Because the lever people keep pulling is not connected to the thing that is hurting them.

All proceeds from this Substack are donated to Ukrainian causes.

Two weeks ago I wrote that two eschatological templates were facing each other with no institutional template between them. I said there was no off button.

On March 26th, the off button wrote a letter.

The Letter

Lieutenant General Leonard F. Anderson IV, Commander of Marine Forces Reserve and Marine Forces South, sent a letter to 35,000 reservists. It asked them to check whether their desert camouflage was packed and ready to go or stored in a corner at home. It told them to get their family’s affairs in order. It said mass mobilisation could become reality.

The next day, USS Tripoli arrived in CENTCOM’s area of responsibility carrying 3,500 Marines, F-35Bs, attack helicopters, and amphibious assault assets.

Read the letter carefully. Not the content — the register.

“History demands our readiness today, tomorrow, and every day.” That is not operational language. Operational language says: report to your unit by 0600, confirm your SGLI beneficiary designations, verify your medical readiness. Operational language is boring because operations are procedural.

“Your readiness is not a declaration; it is a daily commitment.” That is a sermon.

“When the call comes, readiness will be assumed, not questioned.” That is prophecy.

And in the corner, handwritten: “Fight’s on!”

Leonard Anderson joined the United States Marine Corps because he watched Top Gun. I am not being cruel. His own biography says so. He was going to be a marine biologist. The film changed his life. He performed opera with Pavarotti as a child. He is, by all available evidence, a man who lives inside a story in which he is a character.

The dispensationalist template does not need everyone inside it to have read Revelation. It needs people who believe history has a script, the righteous have a role, and the decisive moment is always arriving. “History demands our readiness” is that template speaking through a three-star general’s letterhead.

The reservists on Reddit, confused, angry, asking each other what this means, are not inside the same template. They are reading the same letter from a completely different position in the field. From where they stand, it is a bizarre motivational speech attached to a real mobilisation warning. From where Anderson stands, it is the call.

Two information surfaces. One letter. No transmission mechanism between them.

The Analyst

The day Anderson sent his letter, Dean Blundell published a long piece on Substack about Kharg Island. The military analysis was anchored on Malcolm Nance — “former Navy cryptologist and MSNBC national security contributor” — who described the Persian Gulf as a shooting gallery and laid out why an amphibious assault would be catastrophic.

The piece quoted Lindsey Graham calling Kharg “seldom in warfare does an enemy provide you a single target like this.” It quoted retired Admiral Stavridis. It quoted McChrystal. And it quoted Nance, at length, as the primary military voice.

Here is what Blundell’s audience does not know.

In March 2023, the New York Times published “Stolen Valor: The U.S. Volunteers in Ukraine Who Lie, Waste and Bicker.” Nance was at the centre. He had joined the Ukrainian International Legion to much fanfare, leaving MSNBC, appearing on air with a gun, and then, according to the Times, became enmeshed in chaos. He accused a pro-Ukraine fundraising group of fraud without evidence. He labelled a fellow Legion official a potential Russian spy, offering no evidence. He wrote counterintelligence reports to get people fired. He partnered with a man who had lied about being a Marine and had actually been a server at LongHorn Steakhouse.

That was 2023. It got worse.

Nance was a regular featured guest on the Mriya Report, a 24/7 Twitter Spaces broadcast and associated charity run by Canadian Forces Captain Joseph Friedberg. The Mriya Report raised money for Ukraine. In September 2024, all 24 of its volunteers resigned simultaneously, citing “various ethical concerns.” In January 2026, co-founder Ryan Meyer went public with the financial records. Bank statements showed donations meant for Ukrainian frontline troops had been spent on pizza, Best Buy, Home Depot, car rentals in Toronto, and tens of thousands of dollars on storage units in Canada. Board officials had been paid over $50,000 from what was supposed to be a volunteer-only organisation. In 2023, $2,000 of Ukraine donations had been paid to Lev Parnas, a convicted felon, for a speaking segment, over the immediate objections of board members who resigned in protest. Only around 30 per cent of donations reached Ukraine.

A linked entity, KJA Digital Assets, had used its association with the Mriya Report to pitch investors on profiting from Ukraine’s reconstruction, explicitly noting that establishing the charity had helped them build government and military networks in the country.

The Ottawa Citizen investigated. The Canadian Forces investigated. The IRS complaint was filed. The Mriya Report and it’s radio station collapsed.

Every person in the NAFO ecosystem, the volunteer information community that actually supported Ukraine through the invasion, knows this story. It is not obscure. It is not contested. It is documented by the New York Times, the Ottawa Citizen, and the financial records themselves.

But Dean Blundell’s audience does not know it. And so Malcolm Nance appears in their feed as “former Navy cryptologist, MSNBC national security contributor,” and the credential does the work.

Information Is Local

This is not a media criticism point. This is the framework operating in real time.

The rent from a credential persists after the underlying credibility has collapsed. The institutional cost, the L in the payoff function, only arrives where observers have direct measurement capability. In NAFO circles, people have direct experience of Nance and the Mriya ecosystem. The credential has been measured against reality and found empty. In Blundell’s audience, nobody has that measurement surface. The credential is unexamined. It keeps paying rent.

Two completely different observable properties of the same person, depending entirely on the observer’s position in the field.

This is not a conspiracy. Nobody is hiding anything. The New York Times article is public. The Ottawa Citizen investigation is public. The bank statements are public. Information is not being suppressed. It is failing to propagate. Because information in this system is local and asymmetric. It depends on your position. It depends on which information surface you are standing on. And there is no arbitrage mechanism to close the gap.

The credential-as-rent-bearing-asset is one of the most important mechanisms in the framework. It explains why discredited experts keep being platformed, why institutional authority persists after institutional failure, why the same person can be simultaneously a fraud and a trusted voice. Not because anyone is stupid. Because the measurement has not arrived at the second observer’s position.

Nance may be right about Kharg Island. The geography is real. The fortifications are real. The kill zone is real. But his analysis arrives through a supply chain that has already been shown to be compromised, and that fact is invisible to the audience receiving it.

The Template Generates Orders

Two weeks ago I described a system with no off button. Two eschatological templates, dispensationalist and anti-Israel, facing each other with no institutional template between them. No mediating structure. No termination condition. An attention market rewarding both sides for escalation.

The Anderson letter is the update.

Previously, the template was generating content. Trump posts. Cable news segments. Substack analysis. Podcast appearances. The content was alarming but it was still content, words on screens, takes in feeds, identity capital appreciating in the attention market.

The letter crosses a threshold. A three-star general, operating inside the dispensationalist template’s register, has issued a preparatory mobilisation communication to 35,000 reservists. The template is no longer producing takes. It is producing orders.

Not formal mobilisation orders, not yet. But “check your desert gear, sort out your family’s affairs, mass mobilisation could become reality” is the institutional machinery being operated by a template-captured actor. The language is eschatological. The authority is real. The 35,000 people receiving it have actual desert camouflage in actual wardrobes and actual families who need to be told something.

And the information environment surrounding the mobilisation, the analysis, the expert commentary, the military assessment that reaches the public, is running through supply chains whose reliability cannot be verified from inside the audience receiving them. Nance is the worked example, but he is not the only one. The entire information surface is segmented. Each segment receives locally coherent analysis from locally credentialed sources, and no segment has the measurement capability to verify the other segments’ sources.

Graham says Kharg is a gift. Anderson says history demands readiness. Nance says the Gulf is a shooting gallery. Each statement is locally rational inside the template or information surface it originates from. None is visible from the others’ positions.

Meanwhile, the USS Tripoli is in the Gulf. The 82nd Airborne is deploying. Oil is above $100. The Strait is contested. And 35,000 reservists are checking their wardrobes.

The model said there was no off button. The update is simpler and worse.

The off button has been captured by the template. And it is being pressed, not to stop, but to accelerate.

The formal framework underlying this analysis is under peer review at Constitutional Political Economy. The book will be called The Outrage Dividend. All proceeds from The Angry Dogs are donated to Ukrainian causes — because information may be local, but solidarity doesn’t have to be.

Someone created a scientific journal. They are the sole author. They are the sole editor. They are the sole reviewer. The journal has published papers claiming that fungi are secretly jellyfish, that stinkhorn mushrooms are surviving organisms from 600 million years ago, that the author’s personal genome contains “quantum-active” architecture, and that living organisms unchanged for 1.9 billion years were recovered from a ditch in Boston.

Each of these claims would individually be the most significant biological discovery in decades. She’s making all of them at once. In a journal she built on her own website.

It’s called The Journal of Decolonized Ecology and Evolution. The name is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Here’s the problem. She published the papers on Zenodo and OSF — legitimate open-access platforms used by real researchers. They got DOIs. Digital Object Identifiers. The little number that says “this is a real academic thing.” And because they have DOIs and sit on recognised repositories, Google Scholar indexes them. Type “jellyfish genetics” into Scholar and you might land on a paper arguing that humans share neural networks with cnidarians, sitting right next to actual peer-reviewed research.

The system can’t tell the difference. It wasn’t designed to.

Peer review exists for a reason. It’s expensive. It takes months. Reviewers are unpaid. Journals reject most submissions. The whole process is slow, frustrating, and occasionally maddening. I know — I’ve got a paper under review right now and the waiting is killing me.

But the cost is the point. Peer review is a filter. It doesn’t catch everything and it sometimes blocks good work. But it exists to impose a cost on publishing, so that what comes out the other end has at least been checked by someone who didn’t write it. Remove the cost, you remove the filter.

Open-access infrastructure — Zenodo, OSF, DOIs — was built to lower barriers to publication. That’s a good thing. Researchers in under-resourced institutions needed a way to share work without paying thousands in journal fees. The platforms were designed to be open. They were not designed to be quality filters. They’re archives, not publishers. Giving someone a DOI is like giving them a tracking number at the post office. It proves the package was sent. It says nothing about what’s inside.

The self-published journal exploits this gap perfectly. It captures the appearance of scholarship — formatting, citations, DOIs, institutional-sounding name — without paying any of the costs that normally produce that appearance. The rent extracted is credibility and discoverability. Google Scholar does the distribution for free.

And calling it “decolonized” is a neat trick. It reframes every rejection by the scientific community as evidence of colonial gatekeeping rather than evidence that fungi aren’t jellyfish. The name is an unfalsifiability engine. Every “no” becomes proof.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. This isn’t just one person with a microscope and a Squarespace account. The same structural vulnerability — the gap between appearing credible and actually being credible — operates at every scale.

I wrote about this in my Temnik Case piece for the Washington Outsider Centre for Information Warfare. The Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) spent decades building genuine credibility. Real technical expertise. Real litigation. Congressional Research Service cited them. The Government Accountability Office consulted them. They helped stop a multi-billion-dollar nuclear facility through meticulous NEPA challenges. That credibility was earned honestly.

Then, around 2014, something shifted. LASG started framing NATO expansion as the root cause of conflict. Started describing the Ukraine crisis using language that mirrored Russian state media. Started hosting Scott Ritter — a convicted sex offender who became a regular contributor to RT and Sputnik, compared Ukraine to a “rabid dog,” and addressed thousands of Kadyrov’s fighters in Grozny. The event was reported by Executive Intelligence Review, which is the LaRouche publication. The same LaRouche network I wrote about in my first Small Clues piece.

LASG weren’t agents. Nobody gave them instructions. They internalised the narrative through what Russian doctrine calls reflexive control — shaping someone’s decision-making by controlling the information environment around them. The credibility they’d built over decades became the delivery mechanism. Their name still sounded like a nuclear watchdog. Their DOE citations still existed. But the content had changed. And the reputation carried the new content into spaces it could never have reached on its own.

Same structural exploit. Different resources. Earned credibility repurposed as a distribution channel for aligned narratives.

Now scale it up one more time.

Putin’s daughter Maria Vorontsova leads a programme called the “Genome of Russians.” Rosneft is investing up to a billion dollars. The programme aims to collect genetic material from 100,000 Russians to identify “genetic defects” typical of the Russian ethnic group. It operates through Moscow State University. It has institutional affiliation, state funding, and all the apparatus of legitimate science.

It is, to be blunt, eugenics with a lab coat on.

But it doesn’t need to create a fake journal on Zenodo. It doesn’t need DOIs or self-published PDFs. It has captured institutions. The pseudoscience gets published through universities and research centres that still carry the full appearance of peer review, even though the conclusions were decided before the research began. The institutional shell provides cover. The name does the work.

Three points on a single line.

At one end: a lone actor publishing quantum jellyfish papers in a journal she created, reviewed, and edited herself. No earned credibility. Pure exploitation of open infrastructure.

In the middle: a captured organisation — LASG — that built real credibility over decades and then became a vehicle for narratives aligned with Russian strategic interests. Earned credibility repurposed.

At the far end: a state-funded programme with billions of dollars, institutional capture, and the full machinery of a national university system. No need to exploit open infrastructure when you own the institutions.

The structural vulnerability is the same at every point. Peer review is a costly signal. It exists to impose a filter between “someone wrote this” and “someone checked this.” Remove the cost — or capture the institution that imposes it — and the filter disappears. Everything downstream, from Google Scholar to policy debates, inherits the gap.

The door was built to be open. It can’t tell the difference between a marginalised researcher and a quantum jellyfish.

If you’re interested in how credible organisations get captured by aligned narratives, read the full Temnik Case and the rest of the Small Clues series at the Washington Outsider Centre for Information Warfare.

All subscription revenue from The Angry Dogs goes directly to Ukrainian causes.

In 1932, a Cambridge psychologist called Frederic Bartlett published a book called Remembering. It is one of the most important books in the history of psychology, and almost nobody outside academia has heard of it.

Bartlett wanted to understand how memory works. The answer he found was unsettling. Memory is not a recording. It is a reconstruction. Every time you remember something, your brain rebuilds it from scratch, and the blueprint it uses is not the original event. The blueprint is you.

Bartlett called this blueprint a schema. Your schema is the structure your brain uses to make sense of the world. It is built from your culture, your upbringing, your social environment, and your earliest experiences. It is not a belief system. It is deeper than that. It is the machinery that processes beliefs.

His most famous experiment involved English university students reading a Native American folk tale called “The War of the Ghosts.” The story contained elements that made no sense to Edwardian English people — spirits, canoes, supernatural warfare. When the students retold the story later, the unfamiliar elements had quietly disappeared. Ghosts became people. Canoes became boats. The bits that did not fit the students’ existing schema were not forgotten. They were replaced with things that did fit.

The schema does not store information. It digests it.

This matters because the schema was built first. Everything that arrives afterwards gets processed through it. Information that fits the schema gets reinforced and retained. Information that does not fit gets gradually transformed or dropped. Not deliberately. Not consciously. The reconstruction engine does it automatically, every time you recall.

Your first schema is your deepest one. It was installed before you had the tools to question it.

Now. Tulsi Gabbard.

Gabbard grew up inside a religious community led by a man called Chris Butler, who founded the Science of Identity Foundation. Butler is a self-described guru in the Vaishnava Hindu tradition. The community is eschatological. It has a divine authority structure. The world has a script. The guru knows it. You follow.

This was Gabbard’s first schema. Not her first political opinion. Her first cognitive architecture.

Her father, Mike Gabbard, was the political arm of the same environment. He ran anti-gay activism campaigns across Hawaii, hosted a radio show, led the Alliance for Traditional Marriage, and successfully pushed a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage. He was a Republican. He later switched to Democrat. The party label changed. The underlying structure did not.

Young Tulsi campaigned alongside her father. At twenty-one she won a seat in the Hawaii state legislature, explicitly citing her work on the anti-gay marriage campaign as evidence of her leadership. She was not rebelling. She was inside the schema.

This is the foundation. Everything that follows needs to be read through it.

In 2003, Gabbard joined the Hawaii Army National Guard. She deployed to Iraq in 2004 and Kuwait in 2008.

The US military has a well-documented Dispensationalist template operating at institutional scale inside active command structures. This is not a conspiracy claim. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been cataloguing it for years. Eschatological Christianity is embedded in parts of the American military in ways that would be unrecognisable to most civilians.

Gabbard went from one eschatological environment to another. The schema was not disrupted. It was reinforced.

What changed was the political surface. She came back from deployment as an anti-war Democrat. She opposed interventionism. She talked about the human cost of conflict. This looked like a dramatic shift. It was not.

Anti-interventionism is perfectly compatible with a divine-authority schema. Earthly powers should not play God. Wars of regime change are acts of hubris. The world has a script and Washington is not the author. The content flipped. The structure stayed the same.

Bartlett would predict this. The schema retained the compatible elements of the military experience and transformed the incompatible ones. What came out the other side looked progressive. It was a reconstruction.

From 2013 to 2021, Gabbard served in Congress as a Democrat from Hawaii. She became vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. She endorsed Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in 2016. She ran for president in 2020.

During this period she held positions that looked like they came from three different people.

She was a progressive economic populist. Medicare for All. Anti-corporate. Workers’ rights.

She was a foreign policy isolationist who met with Bashar al-Assad in 2017, questioned whether his regime was behind chemical weapons attacks, and was described by multiple outlets as doing the work of Russian propaganda. She sold “No War With Iran” t-shirts.

She supported Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill and backed legislation to restrict trans women in sport.

Commentators at the time described this as incoherent. Unprincipled. Opportunistic. A woman who would say anything to anyone.

It was none of those things. The schema was doing its job.

The progressive economics was the weakest fit. It required her to adopt positions that had no anchor in the original template. Bartlett predicts these will be the first elements to be dropped or transformed, because they are the hardest for the schema to reconstruct. And they were. By 2022, she was silent on workers’ rights while sitting on a panel with right-wing influencers. The compatible elements — anti-establishment distrust, opposition to institutional overreach — survived. The incompatible ones quietly vanished.

The Assad visit was Protocols-template-adjacent. The hidden hand. Foreign powers manipulating events. The real enemy is not the dictator gassing his own people — it is the shadowy institutional machinery driving regime change. This fits the schema beautifully. Divine authority knows the script. Earthly institutions are the corrupters. The target rotates — sometimes it is the US establishment, sometimes Israel, sometimes NATO — but the structure is conserved.

The social conservatism never left. It was always there, underneath, because it was installed first.

In February 2023, Gabbard appeared at the Rage Against the War Machine rally in Washington. She shared a stage with Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Jill Stein, and Jimmy Dore. The event was organised by forces adjacent to the LaRouche movement. It was explicitly pro-Russia, anti-NATO, and demanded the dissolution of Western alliance structures.

This was deep Protocols territory. The hidden hand is America. The war in Ukraine is a manufactured crisis driven by corrupt elites. Russia is the victim.

Gabbard was not out of place. The schema processed it. Anti-interventionism, distrust of institutional authority, hidden forces driving conflict — all compatible. The specific target (NATO, the US, Ukraine’s Western backers) does not matter. The structure matters.

In October 2024, Gabbard formally joined the Republican Party and endorsed Donald Trump. In February 2025, the Senate confirmed her as Director of National Intelligence.

She went home.

Trump’s political identity sits inside the Dispensationalist template. The world has a divine script. The leader is chosen. The enemy is eschatological. Graham, Hannity, Huckabee, Loomer — the actors closest to Trump are Dispensationalist-resident. Trump shares their template affinity.

Gabbard’s arrival in Trump’s circle was not a conversion. It was a return. The Dispensationalist template was her first schema. Butler’s community. Her father’s activism. The military command structure. Every other position she held was a temporary reconstruction — the schema processing new information, retaining what fit, dropping what did not.

When Trump’s gravitational well opened up in her original template, she fell back. The return was energetically favourable. It was downhill.

This week, during Senate testimony, several senators pointed out that Gabbard had suddenly omitted official statements she had previously made — statements that contradicted Trump’s position on Iran. She was caught in a superposition. She had held the “No War With Iran” position and the “bomb Iran” position simultaneously, in different contexts, for different audiences.

The Senate hearing forced a measurement. One position survived. The other was dropped.

This is not hypocrisy. This is the schema completing its work. The Protocols-compatible “hidden hand driving war” position and the Dispensationalist “divine war” position cannot coexist when someone forces you to pick. The schema picks the one it was built from.

Bartlett’s English students did the same thing. When the story contained elements that did not fit, the reconstruction engine replaced them with elements that did. Gabbard’s “No War With Iran” was a ghost in a canoe. This week, it became a boat.

Here is what Frederic Bartlett understood in 1932, ninety-four years ago, that most political commentary still does not.

People do not hold beliefs and then act on them. People have schemas and then reconstruct beliefs to fit. The schema was built first. Everything else is renovation.

If you want to understand Tulsi Gabbard’s career, stop asking what she believes. Ask what her schema was built from. The answer has not changed since she was a child in Chris Butler’s community, learning that the world has a divine script and that authority flows from above.

Every position she has ever held is a reconstruction filtered through that architecture. The bits that fit survived. The bits that did not were quietly replaced with something more familiar.

The schema always wins.

This is a companion piece to “The O’Brien Paradox” and “The Pekka Principle.” Frederic Bartlett’s Remembering (1932) is referenced extensively in the forthcoming book The Outrage Dividend*. The formal framework behind this analysis is in peer review. All subscription revenue from The Angry Dogs goes to Ukrainian causes.*

This morning Phillips P. O’Brien, one of the sharpest strategic analysts working today, published a piece called “The Two Wars.” His thesis: we are not seeing one war between the US/Israel and Iran. We are seeing two very different wars. Both sides can be winning and losing simultaneously.

He is right.

He is also wrong.

And the reason he is wrong tells you something important about why nobody can agree on what is happening in the world right now.

There is one war. America and Israel are fighting Iran. That is the event. One set of missiles, one set of targets, one set of consequences.

But the war sits inside two completely different stories at the same time.

For Netanyahu, the war is institutional with a conspiracy underneath. Iran is the hidden hand. The infiltrator. The puppet master pulling strings behind every proxy. The war makes sense as self-defence against a concealed existential threat. If you are inside that story, the war is coherent. You know what it is and why it is happening.

For Trump, the war is biblical. Iran is eschatological. The geography is holy. The conflict has a divine script. If you are inside that story, the war is also coherent. Completely different, but equally coherent.

Same bombs. Same ships. Same fire. Two completely different wars.

Not because the strategy differs. Because the story the war lives inside differs. The war has two identities simultaneously. It has not collapsed into one, and it will not, because both stories have millions of people invested in them.

Now here is where it gets interesting.

You probably remember the double-slit experiment from school physics. You fire a beam of light at a barrier with two narrow slits in it. On the other side, instead of two bright lines, you get an interference pattern. Bands of light and dark. The wave passes through both slits at the same time, and the two versions interfere with each other at the detector.

The war is the beam of light.

The two stories are the two slits.

O’Brien is standing at the detector screen.

He is inside neither story. He is an academic strategic analyst. His tools are procedural, institutional, evidence-based. He is looking at the war through the lens of strategic studies. And because that lens does not amplify either story over the other, he receives both versions at full strength.

Both versions arrive at his position. They interfere with each other. And what he sees on his detector screen is banding. Bright patches of coherent narrative alternating with dark patches of incoherence. He cannot make the picture resolve into one thing.

So he does the only honest thing available to him. He reports what he sees: two wars.

Here is the paradox.

If O’Brien were watching through a less rigorous lens, the picture would be clearer.

Someone watching through Truth Social or Telegram gets a lens that amplifies the biblical story and suppresses the other one. The interference is reduced. Not eliminated, but reduced. The picture is mostly coherent. One war. God’s plan.

Someone watching through the Grayzone or Infowars gets a lens that amplifies the hidden-hand story — but the hidden hand is Israel, not Iran. The template is the same. The target rotates. Mostly coherent. One war. Zionist puppet masters dragging America into someone else’s fight.

Both of those observers see a simpler, cleaner picture than O’Brien does. Not because they are smarter. Because their lens changes the interference. A “biased” lens suppresses one of the two slits. One slit, less interference, more coherence.

O’Brien’s lens is the Guardian. Radio 4. Academia. Strategic studies. It is the most even-handed lens available. It does not suppress either slit. And that is exactly why it produces the most confusing picture.

The more rigorous the analysis, the more incoherent the output.

That is the O’Brien Paradox.

This is not a criticism of Phillips O’Brien. The opposite. He is doing the best work possible within the constraints of his instrument. He is honestly reporting what his detector shows. And what it shows is real. The interference pattern exists. The narrative incoherence is not a failure of analysis. It is a structural feature of a war that sits inside two incompatible stories at the same time.

The problem is not O’Brien. The problem is that nobody has told him he is looking at a double-slit experiment. He thinks he is seeing two wars because there are two wars. He is actually seeing one war producing an interference pattern because it passes through two story-structures simultaneously.

The distinction matters. If there are two wars, you need two peace processes. If there is one war with an interference pattern, you need something else entirely. You need to understand the slits.

Every analyst, every journalist, every citizen is standing at a detector screen. Every one of them is seeing an interference pattern, because the war passes through both stories at once. Nobody is exempt (even me - and I wrote the framework)

The difference is the lens.

A “biased” lens gives you a coherent picture at the cost of accuracy. An “honest” lens gives you an accurate picture at the cost of coherence.

You can have clarity or you can have truth. In a world where the same event sits inside two incompatible stories, you cannot have both.

O’Brien chose truth. The paradox is his reward.

This is a companion piece to “The First Attention War” and “The Pekka Principle.” The formal framework behind this analysis is in peer review. If you are new here, the Angry Dogs are powered by righteous anger, ADHD and coffee. All subscription revenue goes to Ukrainian causes.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams invented the Babel fish — a creature so useful it proved the existence of God, which in turn proved the non-existence of God, because proof denies faith and without faith God is nothing. “And God promptly vanished in a puff of logic.”

Reform UK has a Babel fish problem. The proof of what’s wrong with them is so structurally complete that explaining it either confirms they can’t hear it or confirms they can’t fix it. Every attempt to help them vanishes in a puff of political economy.

Let me show you.

On Sunday, a Reform councillor called Joseph Boam posted something quietly devastating on X.

“Sometimes I genuinely wonder what the point is of being an elected councillor.”

The same week, Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice was pressed on his tax arrangements. His response, when you strip away the performance, amounted to telling the interviewer to get lost. “You’re a naughty person if you save money in a pension scheme.”

These two men are experiencing the same thing. They just don’t know it yet.

Here’s the problem.

Reform is an attention business. It exists to produce outrage, convert that outrage into media visibility, and monetise that visibility into political relevance. This is not a criticism. It is a description. The party’s entire value proposition — to voters, to donors, to Nigel Farage personally — is that it generates more attention per pound spent than any competitor in British politics.

Attention is Reform’s product. Everything else is a side effect.

When Boam ran for his council seat, he was generating attention. Anti-establishment energy. Local frustration given a face. He won because the attention engine worked. His voters chose him because he was loud about the things they were angry about.

Then he got elected. And he discovered something that no one had warned him about.

The seat didn’t add to what he already had. It replaced it — at a much lower rate. Before the election, he was an attention entrepreneur. Afterwards, he was a councillor. The council doesn’t generate attention. It generates paperwork. Committee meetings. Compliance obligations. Bin collections. The tedious, grinding, invisible machinery of local government.

His income — in the economic sense, not the financial one — dropped the moment he won.

He was richer as a candidate than he is as a councillor.

Tice has the same problem at higher altitude.

Before Reform had formal positions, before there were frontbenchers and treasurers and deputy leaders, Tice’s financial arrangements were his own business. Nobody audited them because nobody had standing to. He was a businessman backing a political movement. The scrutiny was minimal.

Now he holds a position. The position comes with institutional visibility. And institutional visibility comes with institutional costs. His tax arrangements are suddenly everyone’s business. “Dubai Dick” isn’t a nickname — it’s a liability that attaches to every public appearance, every media interview, every policy announcement he tries to make about the economy.

He can’t shake it because the institution made him visible on a dimension he was previously invisible on. The scrutiny is not an attack. It is a structural consequence of holding a formal role.

And his response — aggression, dismissal, deflection — is the response of a man who priced in the attention and forgot to price in the audit.

Now zoom out.

Farage himself is running the same calculation at national scale. Before he won Clacton, his operation was pure attention. GB News appearances. Trump photo opportunities. Rally speeches. The cost structure was minimal because he had no institutional obligations. No constituency surgeries. No parliamentary attendance expectations. No campaign finance reporting deadlines.

Clacton changed the accounting. The seat imposed costs he’d never had to pay. And the policy influence it theoretically granted was negligible — he’s one MP. He can’t pass legislation. He can’t chair committees. He can’t shape government. The institutional return on the seat is a fraction of the attention return he was already earning without it.

So he keeps doing what he was doing before. The US trips. The media appearances. The rally circuit. Because that’s where the return is. But now the institution is visible in the background, and every day he spends doing attention work instead of constituency work is a day the gap between promise and delivery gets wider.

His polling was at 31% in January. By March, depending on which pollster you believe, it’s somewhere between 26% and 29%. The direction is down. The attention hasn’t decreased. If anything, the Iran war coverage, the Gorton by-election, and the Worcestershire council tax debacle have all generated more media visibility, not less.

More attention. Less support. That divergence is the signal.

The attention isn’t converting any more.

This is the part that’s hard to see from inside. When you’re an outsider, attention is the product. Every eyeball is a vote is a donation is a unit of political relevance. The conversion is automatic. You say something outrageous, people notice, your numbers go up.

But the moment you hold institutional positions, attention splits into two kinds. There’s attention that reinforces your credibility — the kind that makes people think “yes, this lot could actually run things.” And there’s attention that undermines it — the kind that makes people think “this is a circus.”

Reform is generating a lot of the second kind. Farage saying he wished his party “hadn’t bothered” taking control of Worcestershire Council. Tice telling journalists to do one when they ask about his taxes. Frontbenchers contradicting each other on Iran within the same news cycle — Farage saying Britain should support Trump’s operation, Jenrick saying it wasn’t necessary, Farage then reversing himself by the weekend.

Each of these generates attention. None of it generates credibility. The signal is loud but incoherent. Is Reform a serious governing party or a protest movement? A parliamentary operation or a media brand? Pro-intervention or anti-war?

When the signal is incoherent, the attention doesn’t convert. People watch but they don’t buy. The product is still on the shelf but the packaging keeps changing and no one trusts what’s inside.

There’s a deeper trap.

Reform’s voters didn’t sign up for an institution. They signed up for the opposite of an institution. The entire emotional proposition is that the institutions have failed, the establishment is corrupt, the system is rigged, and Reform is the wrecking ball that’s going to smash through it.

This works brilliantly in opposition. It works brilliantly when you have no power. The anger is the product and the product sells.

But the moment Reform starts being an institution — setting council tax rates, managing budgets, coordinating frontbench positions, disciplining candidates — it starts behaving like the thing its voters hate. Every act of institutional competence is, for the core base, evidence of betrayal.

Worcestershire is the proof. Reform took control. They had to raise council tax by nearly 9%. That’s institutional reality — the council was bankrupt, the money has to come from somewhere. But for Reform voters, the party that was supposed to smash the system just sent them a bigger bill. The system won. Reform became it.

Farage knows this. That’s why he said he wished they hadn’t bothered. He can feel the trap closing.

And now there’s Rupert Lowe.

Lowe has announced he’s turning Restore Britain into a political party. He doesn’t have councillors. He doesn’t have a frontbench. He doesn’t have a shadow cabinet or a council tax problem or a deputy leader with awkward tax arrangements. He has zero institutional baggage.

He is Farage circa 2019. Pure attention. No obligations. Clean signal.

For Reform voters who are starting to feel that their party smells a bit... institutional, Lowe is right there. He doesn’t need to be better than Farage. He just needs to be purer. He just needs to not have a Worcestershire.

This is exactly the dynamic that Farage used against the Conservatives for twenty years. He was always the cleaner option. Every time the Tories did something institutional — compromised on Europe, failed to cut immigration, raised taxes — a slice of their base looked at Farage and saw the uncontaminated alternative.

Now Farage is the Tory. And Lowe is him.

The sequence is visible over decades if you care to look. Conservative → UKIP → Brexit Party → Reform → Restore Britain. Five containers. One direction. Each one purer than the last. Each one shedding the institutional residue of its predecessor. Each transition happening faster than the one before, because each new container acquires institutional contamination more quickly under modern media scrutiny.

The interval between “fresh outsider” and “compromised institution” is compressing. It took decades for the eurosceptics to leave the Tories. It took years for UKIP to become the Brexit Party. Reform to Restore Britain is happening before Reform has even fought a general election as a serious contender.

So here’s the paradox.

I could explain all of this to Reform. I could sit down with Boam, or Tice, or Farage, and walk through the mechanics. The attention trap. The institutional cost spike. The coordination failure. The template purity problem. The Lowe escape valve. All of it.

And one of three things would happen.

They wouldn’t listen. Because the explanation contradicts the template they’re operating inside, and people absorb new information into existing templates rather than updating their mental models. The framework says “your movement is structurally incapable of governing.” The template says “we’re the ones who are going to fix everything.” The template wins. It always wins. That’s what templates do.

Or they’d listen but couldn’t act. Because the trap is structural, not informational. Knowing the equation doesn’t change the coefficients. Boam would still face the same pointless committee meetings. Tice would still face the same tax scrutiny. Farage would still face the same choice between attention and governance. Understanding why you’re trapped doesn’t open the door. It just lets you see the lock more clearly.

Or — and this is the beautiful one — they’d listen, understand, and act on it. They’d professionalise. Build institutional infrastructure. Discipline their frontbench. Coordinate their messaging. Develop actual policy. Become, in other words, a proper political party.

At which point their base would leave for Lowe. Because building institutional infrastructure is the betrayal. Becoming competent is the signal that confirms you’ve become the establishment. The voters who came for the wrecking ball don’t stay for the construction project.

Every branch of the decision tree confirms the same prediction. There is no path that leads to Reform becoming a successful governing party without losing the voters who made it a successful protest movement.

I could explain your problem. If I did, you wouldn’t listen. If you wanted to listen, I can’t tell you.

QED.

The Angry Dogs is a Substack about the hidden mechanics of political attention. All revenue is donated to Ukrainian causes.

In my previous piece, Spot the Template, I identified four template families operating in modern political communication. Protocols. Institutional. Dispensationalist. And Frankenstein — the thing we created that turns on its creator. 207 years of conserved momentum since Shelley. AI panic, nuclear fear, genetic engineering horror. I was very pleased with this. It was neat. It was clean. It explained a lot.

It was wrong.

Not wrong in the way you might think. The observations were correct. AI panic is real. Nuclear fear is real. The pattern of “we made a thing and now we’re terrified of the thing” is genuinely recurring across centuries of human history. I wasn’t hallucinating the data. I was misidentifying the structure.

Here is what happened, and I need to explain it carefully because the way I got it wrong is more interesting than the fact that I got it wrong.

The Progress Wave

After writing Spot the Template, I kept working on the formal framework. One of the things that emerged — and I mean genuinely emerged, I did not plan this — was the Progress wave. This is not a template. It is a property of the field itself. A dimension of the continuum. Think of it as the background frequency of communication technology transitions: stone to bronze to iron to writing to printing to radio to television to internet to whatever comes next. Each transition compresses the wavelength. The wave has been running since humans have been human. It is not an event. It is the field. I even discussed it here in the bread series:

The wave does something specific. It modulates every template it passes through. When a new compression event hits — a new technology, a new perturbation — each template produces its own response:

The Protocols template says: “They built this thing to control us.” Hidden hand. Coordinated threat. Named individuals behind the curtain. Big Tech oligarchs suppressing discussion of the dangers. You have seen this response to AI. You are seeing it right now.

The Dispensationalist template says: “This is the end.” The singularity. Superintelligence. The last invention humanity will ever need to make. p(doom). The timeline is running out. Secular eschatology with the serial numbers filed off.

The Institutional template says: “This needs a governance framework.” Safety boards. The EU AI Act. Alignment protocols. Senate hearings. Responsible AI charters. Procedural order converting the perturbation into a process problem.

Three different outputs. Structurally unrelated. Produced by three different templates in response to the same wave perturbation.

And from my position on the wave, looking at these three outputs, I did exactly what my own framework says every observer does.

I pattern-matched them into a single thing and called it a template.

The Error

I was sitting in a positive position on the Progress wave. From that position, all three negative modulations — all three fear responses to the new technology — looked like they were pointing the same direction. Away from me. Toward fear. I saw the apparent unity and I named it “Frankenstein.”

This is precisely the observer-position error that the Pekka Principle starts to discuss. The observer’s position determines what they see. An observer sitting at a positive position on the progress wave sees all negative modulations as convergent. They look like one thing. They are not one thing. They are three separate things that happen to produce similar-looking outputs from the observer’s vantage point.

I made the error. My own framework predicts the error. I did not see it until I formalised the Progress Wave as a field property, at which point the false template dissolved like morning fog.

I would like to emphasise that I wrote the framework. I wrote the section about observer effects. I wrote the bit about how your position determines your measurement. And then I went and made the exact error I had just described, because information is local and I am inside the field just like everyone else.

What Frankenstein Actually Is

“Frankenstein” is not a template. It is a wave artefact. It is what happens when the Progress wave hits all three templates simultaneously and an observer who cannot see the wave pattern-matches the three outputs into a false unity.

Every technology panic in history is this same dissolution. The printing press terrified the Church (Dispensationalist: heresy will spread, the end times), terrified the state (Protocols: seditious material, coordinated rebellion), and generated regulatory responses (Institutional: licensing, censorship, the Stationers’ Company). Three responses. Not one. The observer in 1500 saw “fear of printing” as a single phenomenon. It was not. It was the Progress wave modulating three templates.

Nuclear fear. Same structure. Protocols: “They have the bomb and they’re going to use it on us.” Dispensationalist: “This is Armageddon.” Institutional: “We need arms control treaties.” Three outputs. One apparent phenomenon. Wave artefact.

AI. Same structure. Same wave. Shorter wavelength. I listed the three responses above. They are not a debate. They are three monologues happening in the same room, and observers without the framework think they are hearing one conversation.

The Happisburgh Hand Axe

So what is AI, if it is not Frankenstein’s monster?

It is a tool. It sits inside the Progress wave compression sequence alongside every previous tool. Flint knapping at Happisburgh, 950,000 years ago. Bronze. Iron. Writing. Printing. Radio. Television. The internet. Each one compressed the wavelength. Each one generated the same three-template panic response. Each time, observers experienced the new tool as categorically different from all previous tools. Each time, they were wrong.

The equations do not need modification. The regime changes. The dynamics are the same. The only variable that changes is the wavelength.

A large language model is a Happisburgh hand axe. Just a bit more complicated.

And yes, I used one to help me work this out. I am aware of the irony. The hand axe helped the toolmaker see that it was a hand axe. The framework applies to the tool that helped build the framework. Information is local. Even for AI systems. Even for frameworks about AI systems. Even for authors of frameworks about AI systems who got their own framework wrong and are now correcting themselves in public.

The Apology

I owe the framework an apology for not trusting it. The framework said: there are three template families, and they derive from three cognitive primitives (Bartlett, 1932 — agency detection, temporal narrative, procedural order). The framework said: a fourth template would require a fourth cognitively fundamental schema. The framework said: apparent unities that span multiple templates are probably wave artefacts.

I heard all of this. I wrote all of this. And then I saw AI panic, nuclear fear, and genetic engineering horror all pointing the same direction and I said “ah yes, a fourth template.”

The framework was right. I was wrong. The framework caught me. It took a while, but it caught me.

I also owe Frankenstein an apology. Mary Shelley’s novel is not a template. It is a work of art produced by someone sitting on the Progress wave in 1818, observing the industrial revolution’s modulation of her own template position, and writing the output. The novel is the wave artefact, crystallised in prose. It is beautiful. It is not a political communication structure. I was wrong to classify it as one. Sorry, Mary.

The Dual Use Note

Here is the uncomfortable bit. This correction is itself a demonstration of the dual use problem I’ve now added to the framework’s introduction.

By publishing this correction, I am performing a measurement event. My position in the field changes. Your position changes (you now know the framework self-corrects, which changes how you evaluate it). The correction generates its own gravitational effects — it is, right now, attracting or repelling readers based on their template position. Someone in the Institutional template is thinking “good, he follows proper methodology.” Someone in the Protocols template is thinking “he’s covering his tracks.” Someone in the Dispensationalist template has already stopped reading.

I can see this happening because I understand the framework. But understanding the framework is what caused the problem in the first place — I saw the wave artefact and named it because I had the vocabulary to name things. The vocabulary is a tool. The tool can build or destroy. The dual use problem is irreducible.

All I can do is be honest about the errors and publish the corrections. The framework does not leave the observer unchanged. It did not leave me unchanged. I am not the same person who wrote Spot the Template. That person had four templates. I have three, and a Progress wave, and a much better understanding of why I keep getting things wrong from exactly the position the framework says I will get things wrong from.

Information is local. Even for the person who wrote the equation.

The framework described here is developed formally in The Rent Theory of Political Identity, currently under peer review, and in working papers on field-theoretic models for political identity capital. The book will be called The Outrage Dividend.

All proceeds from The Angry Dogs are donated to Ukrainian causes.

I want to do something uncomfortable. I want to apply the same analytical framework I’ve been using on Trump, Iran, and the MAGA ecosystem to someone most of my readers probably agree with.

Bernie Sanders posted a thread this week about billionaire control of media and social platforms. Musk owns X. Page and Brin control YouTube. Bezos owns Twitch. Zuckerberg owns Facebook and Instagram. Ellison will soon control TikTok and CNN. All of them sat behind Trump at his inauguration. All of them bankrolled him. Hegseth said the sooner Ellison takes over CNN, the better.

I am not going to argue with any of that. The facts are accurate. Ellison is close to Netanyahu. The billionaires do own those platforms. The concentration of media ownership is real and worth discussing.

But I’m not interested in whether he’s right. I’m interested in the structure.

My framework identifies recurring template families in modern political communication. They are not ideologies. They are narrative structures — pre-built frameworks through which information is organised, transmitted, and received. The same template can carry left-wing or right-wing content. The template determines the shape of the message, not its direction. Intent is irrelevant to the analysis.

I have identified at least four families so far. There may be more.

The Institutional template. Procedural. Boring. Built on rules, processes, and legitimate authority. This is the template that produces legislation, regulation, diplomacy, and policy papers. Its termination conditions are built in — it contains its own off-ramps because the institutions need to keep operating.

The Protocols template. Named after the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), the oldest and most successful open-source narrative template in modern politics. Its structure: a hidden elite controls society from behind the scenes. The threat is existential. The conspiracy is coordinated. The enemy is named. It can be forked to target any convenient out-group. QAnon is a Protocols fork. So is “the billionaires control everything.” Same template, different names in the slots.

The Dispensationalist template. Premillennialist, eschatological. The world is heading toward apocalyptic fulfilment. A particular 3rd party (mainly Israel) is the instrument of prophecy. The war is sacred. This is the template currently running the Iran conflict.

The Frankenstein template. The thing we created that turns on its creator. 207 years of conserved momentum since Shelley (1818). AI panic, nuclear fear, genetic engineering horror — all forks of the same template. The creation is the enemy.

Now read Sanders again.

“It’s not just that Oligarchs control our economy. It’s not just that they control our political system. Increasingly, they control what we see, hear and read.”

Hidden elite. Coordinated control. Named individuals. Existential scope — not a policy problem but a system-level takeover. This is the Protocols template.

“Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, owns X. Larry Page and Sergey Brin — the second- and third-richest men — control YouTube. Jeff Bezos owns Twitch. Mark Zuckerberg owns Facebook and Instagram.”

The named roster. The cabal identified. Classic Protocols structure — the enemy has names and addresses.

“Almost all of them sat right behind Donald Trump at his inauguration. All of them bankrolled him.”

Coordination. The hidden elite acting as a unit. Not independent billionaires making separate decisions. A group. Together. Behind him.

“This is a startling example of the kind of state control you see in authoritarian states, not a democracy.”

Civilisational framing. Not “this is a problem.” This is the end of democracy. The threat is existential. The template requires existential stakes.

“Democracy cannot survive a system where a handful of billionaires control our media and social media platforms.”

Cannot survive. Terminal. Eschatological endpoint — not “democracy is under strain” but “democracy cannot survive.” The Protocols template demands totality.

“Larry Ellison has made billions of dollars from AI. Will you hear much serious discussion about the economic, social and existential threats of AI?”

And there, nested inside the Protocols template, is a second template: Frankenstein. The thing we created that threatens to destroy us. And the hidden elite who created it are suppressing discussion of the threat. Two templates, layered. The hidden elite made the monster and are hiding it from you.

Then, right at the end: “We need a media system that serves the public, not just the Oligarchs who own them.”

One sentence. Institutional template. A procedural solution to a structural problem. It’s vestigial — bolted onto the end of a message whose entire structure is Protocols and Frankenstein. The institutional template is the delivery mechanism, not the content.

Three templates in one post. Protocols (hidden elite, coordinated control, named cabal, existential threat). Frankenstein (AI as the dangerous creation they won’t let you discuss). Institutional (one sentence of policy solution at the end).

Here is the part that makes this interesting rather than merely analytical.

Bernie Sanders is factually correct about the media ownership. He is factually correct about Ellison and Netanyahu. He is probably factually correct that AI coverage will be suppressed on platforms owned by AI billionaires. None of that changes the template analysis. Because the template is not about truth or falsehood. It is about structure. True information can be structured through the Protocols template just as easily as false information. The template determines how the message is received, how it propagates, who it mobilises, and what it excludes — regardless of whether the underlying claims are accurate.

And here is the part that is genuinely uncomfortable.

From a template perspective, Sanders is closer to the people he is fighting than to the people he is serving.

Sanders and the tech billionaires are running the same template family. Protocols. Hidden elite. Existential threat. Civilisational framing. They have filled in different names. Musk’s version: the deep state, the mainstream media, the woke establishment. Sanders’s version: the oligarchs, the billionaires, the corporate elite. Same structure. Different names in the slots. Opposite charge — Sanders points left, the tech-right points right — but the same template family.

His constituents — ordinary voters who want healthcare, lower costs, functioning infrastructure — are not in the Protocols template. They are in the institutional template. They want boring procedural outcomes. Policy. Legislation. They want their roads fixed. Sanders thinks he is serving them. But the structure of his message is closer to Musk’s “deep state” framing than it is to “I’d like my prescription costs reduced, please.”

He reaches his institutional-template constituents by broadcasting a Protocols-template signal through an institutional channel — his Senate platform, his verified account, his political authority. They receive it and hear “someone is fighting for us.” They don’t hear the template. They hear the charge. The direction. The left-ness of it. They can see the charge vector. They cannot see the template family. Because information is local, and from their position in the institutional well, the template is invisible. They see a senator fighting oligarchs. The framework sees a Protocols-template actor with negative charge pointed at Protocols-template actors with positive charge, while institutional-template constituents observe from a different well entirely and cheer because they can only see the charge, not the structure.

I want to be very clear about what I am not saying.

I am not saying Sanders is wrong. I am not saying his concerns about media ownership are invalid. I am not saying he is equivalent to Musk or Trump or QAnon. Charge matters. Direction matters. Content matters. The framework does not collapse these distinctions — it operates on a different axis entirely. Template analysis identifies structure. It does not evaluate content, assign moral weight, or rank actors. Two actors can occupy the same template family and differ on every other dimension that matters in the real world.

But the framework is content-neutral by design. It has to be. A model that only works on one side of the political spectrum is not a model. It is commentary. The same incentive structure generates the same dynamics regardless of which positions, movements, or political poles are involved. If I only applied this to Trump and MAGA, I would be doing template analysis with a template of my own — and I wouldn’t be able to see it. Just like Sanders can’t.

Information is local. Even for senators. Even for me.

Postscript: A challenge from a friend

A friend challenged me to apply the template analysis to AOC, i extended the challenge to five American political figures. I took recent public statements on the Iran war from AOC, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Jake Sullivan (speaking for the Biden framework), and Donald Trump. No political information was used. Just the template structure of what they said.

Jake Sullivan. Pure institutional template. “A war of choice.” “No clear objectives and no clear endgame.” Objectives, endgame, choice — the vocabulary of the institutional well. He is a former National Security Advisor. The institutional template is his professional identity.

Kamala Harris. Institutional template dominant. “Recklessness dressed up as resolve.” “Under the Constitution, the President must receive authorization from Congress.” “Congress must use all available power.” Institutional vocabulary throughout, layered with personal-brand attention extraction — the book tour, the cheese curds, “Doug and I will be praying.” She is framing opposition through institutional process while extracting mA from the war through her personal narrative.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Institutional template with Protocols threading. “Unlawful. Unnecessary. Catastrophic.” Constitutional war powers. Congressional authorisation. Impeachable offence. That is institutional. But: “dragged into a war they did not want by a president who does not care” — one man, acting alone, against the will of the people. And the Epstein connection: “if the Epstein files have such a hold on President Trump that they are willing to plunge us and risk world war” — that is full Protocols. Hidden leverage. “They” have a concealed motive. The real reason is hidden from view.

Bernie Sanders. Protocols template dominant. Hidden elite controlling everything. Named cabal of billionaires. Existential threat to democracy. Frankenstein template nested inside — AI as the dangerous creation they will not let you discuss. Vestigial institutional template bolted on at the end — one sentence of policy solution. As analysed in the main piece.

Donald Trump. “When I feel it in my bones.” “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough.” “We go forward more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory that will end this long running danger once and for all.” Scalar attention production with dispensationalist template undertow. No objectives. No termination conditions. “Ultimate victory” and “once and for all” — eschatological language. Four different timelines to four different outlets. The contradictions are the product.

Now look at what the template analysis produced without using any political information.

Sullivan and Harris share the institutional template. They are allied. AOC and Sanders share the institutional-plus-Protocols blend. They are allied. Trump is alone — scalar actor, dispensationalist template, no institutional vocabulary at all. No one else in the American political landscape is producing the same template signal.

The template analysis mapped the actual alliance structure of American politics from the structure of their language alone.

And here is the uncomfortable finding. The voters of all four Democratic-aligned figures overwhelmingly want the same thing: healthcare, lower costs, functioning infrastructure. Boring procedural outcomes. Those voters are in the institutional well. But their representatives are not all in the same template. Sullivan and Harris are institutional. Sanders and AOC are running Protocols-threaded messaging through institutional channels. The representatives are further apart from each other in template space than their voters are.

The alliance structure follows the template structure. Not the voter structure. The model mapped it without knowing it.

The framework described here is developed formally in The Rent Theory of Political Identity, currently under peer review, and in working papers on field-theoretic models for political identity capital. The book will be called The Outrage Dividend.

All proceeds from The Angry Dogs are donated to Ukrainian causes.

I am not an OSINT analyst. I’m an economist and researcher developing a formal framework for how political identity functions as an economic asset — how it generates income, how it’s invested in, how it breaks. Parts of that framework are currently under peer review. The book will be called The Outrage Dividend.

In the course of that work, the framework produced a result I wasn’t expecting. It concerns observation and measurement in political systems — specifically, what happens when you publicly identify an individual’s position inside a political identity network. The result has immediate practical implications for the open source research community, and I don’t think anyone has explained it to them.

This piece is about that result. I’m writing it because the people who need to hear it are people I know and respect, and they deserve to have the risks explained before they pay for them.

If you work in open source intelligence — OSINT — you probably know Bellingcat’s mental health guides. They’re good. They tell you to blur graphic images before viewing them. Mute videos. Take breaks. Seek counselling if the content gets to you. The Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma offers similar resources. The MHS4OSINT project is building a crowdsourced database of coping strategies for analysts exposed to distressing material.

All of this addresses a real problem: vicarious trauma from viewing graphic content. Analysts who spend their days watching conflict footage, trawling dark web forums, and documenting atrocities are at genuine risk of psychological harm from what they see.

But this is not the only harm. And it may not be the worst one.

There is a different kind of OSINT work that the mental health guides do not address at all. It’s the work of identifying specific individuals within disinformation networks, extremist movements, or state-aligned propaganda operations — and publishing those identifications.

Pekka Kallioniemi’s Vatnik Soup project is the best-known example. Pekka, a Finnish researcher and one of the most respected people in the NAFO community, spent years profiling individual pro-Russian propagandists. He documented their positions, their connections, their roles in the disinformation ecosystem. The profiles were accurate. The work was important. And the costs were enormous.

Legal threats. Coordinated harassment campaigns. Sustained personal attacks. The cumulative weight of these costs eventually forced Pekka to step back from the work.

A similar pattern hit the researchers around Jim Stewartson who documented Michael Flynn’s position within the QAnon ecosystem. Accurate identification. Important work. Devastating personal consequences.

Carol Cadwalladr, who identified individuals within the Brexit campaign financing networks, faced years of legal action from Arron Banks. She survived — partly by converting some of the attack energy into attention in a new identity market — but the costs were real, sustained, and predictable.

These are not isolated cases of bad luck. They are the same mechanism operating every time.

I’ve spent two years developing an economic framework for political identity — the same one I’ve been applying to the Iran war in recent posts. The framework has something to say about why this keeps happening, and it isn’t what you’d expect.

The harm doesn’t come from what the analyst sees. It comes from what the analyst publishes.

When you publicly identify an individual’s position inside an identity network — when you name them, document their connections, fix their location in the ecosystem — you are making a measurement. That measurement changes the system. The person you’ve identified has to respond: reposition, go dark, change tactics, lawyer up. Their associates have to adjust. The internal structure of the network shifts.

That shift releases energy. And energy is conserved. It has to go somewhere.

It comes back along the path you just created. You identified yourself by publishing. You are the most visible return path. The legal threats, the harassment campaigns, the coordinated trolling, the mass reporting to get you deplatformed — these aren’t retaliation in the conventional sense. They’re the system’s conserved response to being measured. Every individual-level identification you publish generates a return energy transfer proportional to the significance of the person you identified.

Identify a peripheral account with 200 followers — small return. Identify a senior figure in a state-aligned propaganda operation — massive return. The costs scale with the mass of the target because the energy released by changing a high-mass actor’s state is greater than the energy released by changing a low-mass actor’s state.

This is predictable. It is calculable. And nobody is telling analysts about it before they start.

The Bellingcat guides address vicarious trauma — harm from exposure to distressing content. The mechanism I’m describing is measurement blowback — harm from the act of publication itself. These are completely different hazards.

An analyst who never watches a single graphic video but publishes a detailed profile identifying an individual node inside a disinformation network will still be harmed. Not by what they saw. By what they published. The mental health guides don’t cover this because they’re built around a content-exposure model of harm. The structural harm comes from the methodology, not the content.

And there’s a further problem the guides don’t touch. When an OSINT analyst publishes an individual identification, the internal restructuring of the network doesn’t just affect the analyst. It affects everyone inside the network — including people the analyst doesn’t know about.

Intelligence agencies may have covert assets inside the same network. Those assets depend on the network’s internal structure remaining stable. When a public OSINT publication forces the network to reorganise, covert assets face three simultaneous problems: their prior observations are now stale, the increased internal security scrutiny raises their personal risk, and they cannot see outside the network to understand why the reorganisation happened. From their position, they experience a sudden internal perturbation with no visible cause.

The OSINT analyst and the intelligence asset cannot see each other. They are on opposite sides of an information boundary. The public measurement harms both of them, and neither knows the other exists.

I am not saying this to criticise anyone. I’m saying it because the people doing this work deserve to know the full structure of the risks before they start.

So what should change?

First, the mental health and safety guidance for OSINT analysts needs to expand beyond content exposure. The measurement blowback mechanism should be explained to every analyst before they begin individual-level identification work. Not as a deterrent — as informed consent.

Second, the distinction between aggregate-level analysis and individual-level identification needs to be made explicit. You can study the structure, dynamics, and trajectory of a disinformation network without naming individual nodes. You can measure aggregate properties — the network’s direction of drift, its template alignment, its radiation rate, its institutional coupling — and produce analytically superior results with dramatically lower personal risk. The individual-level identification feels more concrete, more actionable, more satisfying. It is also more dangerous — to the analyst, to potential defectors within the network, and to assets the analyst cannot know about.

Third, the organisations that commission, publish, and platform individual-level OSINT identifications need to understand that they are externalising structural costs onto their analysts. The methodology generates conserved harms. Those harms land on the person who published, not the organisation that asked them to. That is an ethical issue that no amount of post-hoc counselling resolves.

Fourth, anti-SLAPP legislation is necessary but insufficient. It closes one return channel. The conserved energy routes through others — threats, stalking, coordinated harassment, deplatforming. The total cost transfer is unchanged. Only the channel changes. Legal protections help. They don’t solve the underlying problem.

The people who do the naming — Pekka, Jim, Carol, and hundreds of less visible analysts — are brave, principled, and doing work that matters. They deserve to know, before they start, what the work will cost them. Not after. Before.

That’s informed consent. That’s the minimum.

The framework described here is developed formally in The Rent Theory of Political Identity, currently under peer review, and in working papers on field-theoretic models for political identity capital. The book will be called The Outrage Dividend.

All proceeds from The Angry Dogs are donated to Ukrainian causes.

Twelve days ago I wrote that the escalator had gone vertical. I was right - but underestimated the outputs of my own model.

On March 2nd, three leaders held three enormous stocks of political identity capital that were structurally incompatible with resolution. That was bad enough. But the framework I described, attention as product, war as content, identity capital as the thing being minted rather than spent, made a prediction I did not fully follow through.

I said there was no off button. I should have said there is no off button and the institutional template that previously contained Middle Eastern conflicts has been ejected from the system.

That has now happened. And the consequences are visible this morning in three headlines.

Iran has shed Hamas.

Hamas released a statement on Saturday affirming Iran’s right to retaliate while calling on Iran to avoid targeting neighbouring countries. Read that carefully. A client organisation is publicly telling its patron what to do. That is not alliance management. That is the sound of a body that already left, looking back at its former patron and saying: don’t take us with you.

The shedding did not begin with the strikes on Iran. It began in Gaza.

Iran’s identity clarity is maximally simple now: no Israel. Everything in the Iranian state identity template derives from that proposition. But Hamas’s destruction in Gaza produced an irreconcilable divergence. Gaza needs Israel to survive — to open borders, to allow reconstruction, to permit the material conditions of continued existence. Hamas has been migrating towards the institutional template, where Israel’s existence is not the enemy but the prerequisite for statehood, recognition, and survival.

That migration broke the template binding. You cannot hold “destroy Israel” as your identity clarity when your population’s survival depends on Israel’s cooperation. Hamas did not choose to leave Iran’s orbit. The template and the material conditions pulled apart, and Hamas moved towards the only well where its people can live.

How do we know the shedding is complete? Because Hamas called on Iran to avoid targeting neighbouring countries, and Iran struck Saudi Arabia.

Five US Air Force KC-135 refuelling tankers were hit on the ground at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia by an Iranian missile strike, according to the Wall Street Journal. The tankers were damaged but not destroyed.

That is Iran ignoring its last remaining client’s only public request and violating the sovereignty of a third country in the same action. The patron-client relationship is not strained. It is over. Iran has decided that the cost of dragging Saudi Arabia into the war is lower than the cost of letting the American tanker fleet operate unmolested. That is a calculation that only makes sense if Iran has already concluded that regional escalation is inevitable. They are not trying to contain this. They are spreading it. Because their template does not have containment either.

Saudi Arabia has now been pulled into the conflict whether it wanted to be or not. An Iranian strike on Saudi soil forces the Kingdom to either respond — entering the war — or absorb the hit, which destroys its own identity capital as a sovereign state that controls its territory. Either way, the field is widening.

The United States has shed the United Kingdom.

Starmer’s allies are briefing that his stance on Trump and Iran “could be the making of him.” They are misreading the field completely. They think they are choosing a position. They are not. They have been ejected.

Trump is a scalar identity actor. He extracts attention returns from anything regardless of direction. The UK’s directional commitments — alliance coherence, the rules-based order, the NATO framework — are precisely the vector components that get centrifugally ejected when the central body accelerates its rotation. The praise from Starmer’s allies is the sound of a shed body trying to pretend that ejection was a choice.

But the shedding is not just happening between countries. It is happening inside them.

Nigel Farage demanded on day one that Starmer “change his mind on the use of our military bases and back the Americans in this vital fight against Iran.” He called for regime change. He said “we should do all we can to support the operation.” Kemi Badenoch declared that the strikes were “absolutely right” and told Parliament: “We are in this war whether they like it or not — what is the prime minister waiting for?”

Within ten days, both had reversed completely. Farage said Britain should “not get ourselves involved in another foreign war.” Badenoch told the BBC she had never said the UK should have joined. Starmer accused them at PMQs of “the mother of all U-turns” and said that had either been leading the country, Britain would be at war.

Seventy-four per cent of UK voters now say British forces should either have no involvement or respond only defensively. Farage was snubbed by Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Only 24 per cent of Reform’s own voters back active participation. Both leaders were orbiting the scalar actor, were accelerated beyond the binding energy their domestic identity capital could sustain, and were flung off. The U-turn is not cowardice. It is physics. They were shed.

And then there is Rupert Lowe, who was never in the same orbit at all. Lowe — who split from Reform to launch Restore Britain, backed by Elon Musk, with an ecosystem that Matt Goodwin himself described as “riddled with white supremacists, antisemites, racists and conspiracy theorists” — came out against involvement from the start. Not because he opposes war. Because this is an American-Israeli war, and Lowe’s constituency sits inside the Protocols template. He was never aligned with the dispensationalist well. He occupies the other eschatological position — the one where this is the wrong war. Same mechanism as the dispensationalists opposing Iraq. Not anti-war. Anti this war.

Three British political actors. Three different ejection trajectories. All predicted by the same field dynamics.

Trump continues to escalate towards a dispensationalist template.

This is the development that changes the structural category of the conflict.

In the original piece, I described three regimes of attention value operating simultaneously: Trump in the second regime (attention is the product), Putin in the third (attention carries negative value), and Zelenskyy occupying a unique position where genuine existential resistance generates identity capital.

That framework still holds. But I need to make the underlying landscape more explicit.

Iraq and Afghanistan were institutional-template wars. State department process, NATO alliance structure, UN resolutions or the pretence of them, coalition building, defined objectives. The institutional template has its own internal logic and — critically — it contains its own termination conditions. Mission accomplished. Troop drawdown. Handover to local forces. Status of forces agreements. The template includes off-ramps because the template was designed by institutions that need to continue operating after the war ends.

The Protocols-derived groups and the dispensationalist groups both opposed those wars. Not because they are anti-war. Because those were the wrong wars. The institutional template was the wrong template. It would end before reaching the eschatological endpoint that their templates require.

This war is different. This war is running on their template.

Kharg Island. Iran. The geography is eschatologically correct. The rhetoric is eschatologically correct. The shedding of institutional allies is not a bug — it is confirmation that the institutional template has been displaced. Every NATO ally ejected, every state department professional marginalised, every institutional off-ramp destroyed as content — these are all signals to the template-invested audience that this time it is real.

What we now have is an anti-Israel template facing a pro-rapture template with no institutional template between them.

The anti-Israel template — Protocols-derived, Iranian state identity, the resistance axis — requires the conflict because the template runs to the destruction of Israel. The dispensationalist template — premillennialist, rapture theology, Second Coming — requires the conflict because the template runs to apocalyptic fulfilment through Israel. Israel is not the object of support. It is the instrument of prophecy. The template needs Israel to exist in order for the prophecy to complete — which ends not with Israeli security but with the apocalypse.

Both templates require the war. Neither has a termination condition short of its eschatological endpoint.

The war is the point. For both sides. Simultaneously.

The institutional template that previously sat between them — the one that produced Oslo, Camp David, the JCPOA, the boring procedural machinery of diplomacy — has been shed. There is no third body in the system whose identity capital is invested in stopping. The mediating structure has been ejected by the rotation.

And both audiences are receiving increasing attention returns from escalation. The attention market is rewarding both sides for continuing. The rent structure is symmetric in its incentive to escalate and symmetric in its inability to stop.

On Friday, the United States ordered 2,500 Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit and the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli to the Middle East. They are currently in the Pacific, more than a week from the waters off Iran. Military commentators immediately noted the obvious target: Kharg Island, Iran’s primary oil export terminal, which Trump claimed to have “obliterated” military targets on earlier that day. An amphibious seizure of Kharg would cross a threshold that no previous Middle Eastern conflict has approached.

The same day, thirteen American service members were dead. Over 1,200 Iranian civilians had been killed. The new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, was reportedly wounded and in hiding. Iran’s navy was at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. The Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed.

Asked when the war would end, Trump said: “When I feel it in my bones.”

That sentence is the framework made visible.

An institutional-template war has termination conditions. Objectives met. Territory secured. Treaty signed. The language of ending is procedural: benchmarks, drawdown schedules, status of forces agreements. Iraq had “mission accomplished.” Afghanistan had the Doha agreement. The institutional template contains the vocabulary for stopping because the institutions need to continue operating after the war ends.

“When I feel it in my bones” contains no objective, no condition, no benchmark. It is a scalar statement from a scalar actor. It means: the war ends when the attention returns from ending it exceed the attention returns from continuing it. Not when a goal is achieved — because there is no goal. Not when the costs become too high — because the costs are borne by other people. When the feeling changes. When the content cycle moves on.

But the content cycle cannot move on, because the dispensationalist template does not have a content cycle. It has a prophecy. And the prophecy does not end when someone feels it in their bones. It ends at Armageddon.

The 2,500 Marines heading for the Gulf are not a strategic deployment in the institutional sense. They are the next scene in the content. And the template-invested audience is watching, and their identity capital is appreciating with every escalation, and there is nobody left in the system with the authority or the incentive to say stop.

Meanwhile, the template is rewriting the global strategic map and nobody in charge appears to have noticed.

Iran has struck not just Israel but Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. Six sovereign states hit by Iranian drones and missiles. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Oil prices have spiked to their highest since 2022.

In response, Ukraine — the country that has spent four years learning how to kill Shahed drones on a budget — has deployed interceptor drone teams and specialists to Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Zelenskyy has spoken to the leaders of every affected Gulf state. Ukraine is now simultaneously defending itself against Russian-launched Shaheds and defending American bases against Iranian-launched Shaheds. The country Trump told “you don’t have the cards” is holding the only card that works.

And here is where it becomes a closed loop.

To manage the oil price chaos caused by closing the Strait of Hormuz, Trump temporarily lifted sanctions on Russian oil. Around 130 million barrels of Russian crude stranded at sea can now be sold. The Kremlin’s envoy posted a Russian flag on X with the caption: “Buy Russian oil and gas.” Putin’s spokesperson said their interests “coincide.”

Follow the money. Trump’s war on Iran closes the Strait. The closed Strait spikes oil prices. The spiked prices force Trump to lift Russian sanctions. The lifted sanctions fund Russia’s war machine. Russia’s war machine fires Iranian-designed Shaheds at Ukraine. Ukraine, the world’s leading expert in killing those Shaheds, is asked by the United States to deploy that expertise to the Gulf — to defend against the same drones, made by the same country, in the war that created the price spike that funded the drones in the first place.

It is a perfect circle. And it is invisible from inside the dispensationalist identity well.

This is not a filtering problem. The template is not blocking information. Information in this system is asymmetric and local. It depends on your position in the field. If you are inside the dispensationalist identity well, the Ukraine-Russia-Iran-oil loop is on the other side of an event horizon. You cannot see it. Not because you are choosing not to look. Not because someone is hiding it. Because from your position in the field, the information does not arrive. Iran is visible. Israel is visible. The prophecy is visible. Ukraine, Russia, the oil price, the closed loop — these are beyond the horizon.

And it works in the other direction. From inside the institutional template — the Guardian editorial desk, the European Council, the retired state department officials writing op-eds — you cannot see into the dispensationalist well. That is why they keep writing “no clear goal” and “escalation trap.” They are observing the same events from outside the event horizon and the behaviour appears irrational, because the information that makes it internally coherent is on the other side. It is not irrational. It is locally rational. The goals are clear. You just cannot see them from where you are standing.

Nobody is stupid. Nobody is irrational. Information is local.

This is what it means when I say the institutional template has been shed. An institutional framework would look at the closed loop and say: we are funding our adversary’s ally while asking our adversary’s victim to defend us against our adversary’s weapons. That is incoherent. Stop.

From inside the dispensationalist well, that sentence does not parse. The loop is not incoherent. It is not visible.

People are assuming this will stop. They are mapping Iraq and Afghanistan onto the situation and concluding that at some point the costs will exceed the benefits and a rational actor will choose to de-escalate.

This is the wrong model. Iraq and Afghanistan were institutional-template wars where costs were measured in policy terms. This conflict’s costs are denominated in faith.

Faith-denominated identity capital has the highest binding energy of any template class. It is not discounted by evidence. Military setbacks become tests of faith. Civilian casualties become martyrdom. Economic collapse becomes tribulation. Every cost that would break a rational-strategic actor or an institutional-template actor gets absorbed and reprocessed as confirmation by an eschatological template.

The template has an immune system against disconfirmation.

When both sides are on a mission from God, the conflict does not end because someone decides it should. It ends when the costs become existential for one or both sides — not existential in the diplomatic sense, but existential in the sense that the population carrying the template can no longer physically sustain it.

The historical precedent is the Thirty Years’ War. Two eschatological templates, both on a mission from God, no institutional mediating structure, thirty years, a third of Central Europe dead. It stopped when there was nothing left to burn.

I am not predicting that scale of destruction. I am pointing out that the current field configuration has the same structural signature. No off-ramp. No friction. No institutional mediation. Two self-reinforcing eschatological templates. An attention market that rewards both for escalating.

In the original piece, I said that for Iran, no bigger market was being offered. That remains the structural absence that is doing the killing. Without an alternative market to switch into — the mechanism that ended the Troubles, the mechanism that could end the Ukraine war — the only dynamics available are the ones already in motion.

And the dispensationalist template does not have a market-switching event in its internal logic. It has Armageddon.

See also my article from August 2025 - discussing exactly this scenario

The model has been generating correct predictions for two years. The formal academic paper is under review. The book will be called The Outrage Dividend.

Three identity wells. No institutional template. No off button. No friction.

And twelve days later, the machine is running exactly as predicted.

Postscript: The Vice President and the Wrong War

As this piece was being written, Politico reported that Vice President JD Vance was “skeptical,” “worried about success,” and “just opposes” the war on Iran, according to senior Trump administration officials.

Vance has publicly defended the operation. He has not echoed Trump’s triumphant language. He has never said “we won.” When asked, he draws lines to Iraq and Afghanistan and insists this will be different — that Trump has “clearly defined what he wants to accomplish.” Two days before the strikes began, he told the Washington Post he views himself as a “skeptic of foreign military interventions.”

The commentary frames this as a personality clash or a policy disagreement. It is neither. It is the framework operating inside the White House.

Vance was not selected as a non-intervention institutionalist. He was selected as a Protocols-template vice president — aligned with Musk, Thiel, the tech-right ecosystem, the anti-institutional orientation. His constituency invested in dismantling the domestic “deep state,” not in a Middle Eastern war. His non-interventionism is not diplomatic. It is template-derived. The wars are distractions. The real enemy is at home. Fight the cathedral, not Iran.

This is the same mechanism operating on Vance that operated on Farage, Badenoch, and Lowe — and the same mechanism that operated on the dispensationalists who opposed Iraq. It is the wrong war. Not wrong because war is wrong. Wrong because this war serves the dispensationalist premillennialist template, not the Protocols template. Every marine deployed to the Gulf, every news cycle consumed by Iran, every dollar spent on Kharg Island is a resource diverted from the project his identity capital is built on.

The dispensationalist template captured the container. Vance is a Protocols-template actor trapped inside it. His identity capital is depreciating — not because he is failing, but because the container changed template underneath him.

But he cannot leave. Trump is a container, not a cluster. Containers do not shed members through gradual attrition. They hold or they collapse. There is no graceful exit from inside a container. Vance’s only available strategy is the one the model predicts: minimise additional identity capital destruction while remaining inside. Defend publicly. Withhold the triumphant language. Let senior officials leak your scepticism to Politico. File the dissent on the public record. Preserve the residual for 2028.

The leaks are not indiscipline. They are investment. Vance is banking identity capital against the day the container either collapses or the template rotation stops. His bet is that the Protocols-template constituency — Musk’s audience, the tech-right, the America First non-interventionists — will still be there afterwards, and will remember that he was the one who was sceptical.

He may be right. But the model also predicts this: the dispensationalist template does not have a pause button. And the longer the war runs, the more identity capital Vance has to write down to remain inside the container. His surplus is running. The claims are accumulating. The question is whether his reserves hold until the template changes — or whether the template runs until there is nothing left to hold.

“When I feel it in my bones,” said the President.

The Vice President is feeling it in his.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/13/jd-vance-skeptical-iran-operation-00826780

Seldon model:
elite mathematicians → predict society

Real internet:
10,000 brain damaged cartoon dogs with memes → change society

A friend on mine compared my framework to psychohistory this week.

I’ve never actually read Foundation. I tried. Like Dune, I found it tedious and pretentious. So everything I know about Hari Seldon comes from people telling me I’m him, which is an odd way to learn about a fictional character.

From what I can gather, the comparison is meant as a compliment wrapped in a dismissal. Sounds cool. Can’t work. It’s science fiction.

Here’s the thing. They’re right that my model is deterministic. They’re wrong about everything else. And Seldon? He was doing it the hard way.

Hari Seldon’s psychohistory works like this: gather enough data on enough people, apply statistical mechanics to human populations, and predict aggregate behaviour. It’s probability at scale. It needs trillions of humans to work. It breaks when you zoom in to individuals. It’s a top-down model that observes patterns and hopes they hold.

My framework does none of that.

I don’t model people. I model markets.

Specifically, I model the cost structure of the market in which political identity is produced and consumed. If polarised content is cheaper to produce than nuanced content, and generates more revenue, the market produces more of it. That’s not a prediction about what humans will do. It’s a price signal. It’s Ricardo, not Asimov.

David Ricardo didn’t need to know what any individual farmer was thinking to show that trade follows comparative advantage. He mapped the gradient. The gradient determines the flow.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Seldon built his model top-down. Observe aggregates, derive laws, predict downward. The individual is noise. The population is the signal.

I built mine bottom-up. I started with the individual. What does it cost a single person to adopt, maintain, or switch a political identity? What’s the return? What’s the penalty for getting it wrong? Those are the micro equations. They’re deterministic. Plug in someone’s local parameters — their cost structure, their existing identity capital, their position in the attention market — and their behaviour follows cleanly.

The macro behaviour emerges from aggregation. It isn’t assumed. It’s derived.

This matters because Seldon’s model genuinely breaks at the individual level. Mine was built there.

“But at the individual level, behaviour looks random.”

No. It looks random from a distance because you can’t see the local parameters. Information is local and access to it is asymmetric — it depends where you are in the continuum. From the top, you see aggregate flows and the individual cases look stochastic. Zoom in with the right instruments and the individual is just as predictable as the crowd.

Different equations. Same determinism.

Think of it like a river. From a satellite, you see the river flowing to the sea. You can’t track individual water molecules. Doesn’t mean they’re moving randomly. They’re responding to local forces you can’t resolve from orbit. Get close enough and every molecule’s path is determined by the local gradient, the local pressure, the local temperature.

My model works the same way. The macro flow is visible from anywhere. The individual case requires local data. Neither is random. The constraint is information access, not theoretical limits.

So when someone says “that’s a bit Hari Seldon,” the correct response is not to back away from determinism. It’s to walk towards it.

Yes. It’s deterministic. That’s the whole point.

Seldon needed probabilities because he was modelling people. I model prices. Prices are deterministic. If the incentive gradient points downhill, the market flows downhill. You don’t need to survey every molecule to predict which way the river runs.

Seldon needed millions of people because his model broke at the individual level. Mine doesn’t. It works at every scale. You just need the local parameters.

Asimov imagined the hardest possible version of this problem — predicting human behaviour from the top down using statistics. It made for brilliant science fiction. But the actual economics is much simpler than that. You don’t predict behaviour. You map incentives. The behaviour follows.

The real twist is this: Seldon’s fictional critics said psychohistory couldn’t work because human behaviour is too complex. My actual critics say the same thing. Both are wrong for the same reason. They think the model is about humans. It’s about markets. Markets are simple. Humans just live in them.

The framework described here is the Rent Theory of Political Identity, currently under peer review at Cambridge Political Economy. The Outrage Dividend, the book that applies this framework to everything from the British monarchy to jihadi recruitment to planning permission delays, is with literary agents. If you want the equations, they exist. They’re just not in the book, because the argument doesn’t need them.

All revenue from The Angry Dogs is donated to Ukrainian causes.

In 1816, a teenage girl on holiday in Switzerland wrote a story about a new technology that created something vaguely human, and what happened when it escaped its creator’s control.

Two centuries later, we are still telling Mary Shelley’s story. Every generation gets a new version. The creature changes. The fear doesn’t.

AI is the latest Frankenstein’s monster. It looks human but isn’t. It generates text, images, video, content that passes for real. And the fear writes itself: if machines can produce misinformation at scale, for pennies, then misinformation will explode. Democracy is in trouble. We need regulation, watermarks, detection tools, and a lot of worried conferences in Geneva.

The fear is easy to feel because the template is two hundred years old. The narrative architecture is pre-installed. You don’t have to think about it. You just have to be scared.

Here is the problem. The fear is pointed at the wrong thing.

The argument assumes that the bottleneck on misinformation is production cost. That if only it were cheaper to produce false content, there would be more of it, and more people would believe it.

But social media already solved that problem. A decade ago.

The market is already efficient

Think about what happened when platforms introduced direct monetisation. Subscriptions, tipping, ad revenue sharing, affiliate links, merch. For the first time in history, anyone with a phone could extract income from attention without holding office, without owning a printing press, without getting past an editor.

The operating cost of producing political content dropped to approximately zero. Not approximately low. Approximately zero. You need a phone, an opinion, and a willingness to say something loud. The infrastructure is free. The distribution is free. The audience finds you if you’re angry enough.

The result was an attention market that rewards polarisation, punishes nuance, and generates conflict as a revenue stream. This is not a bug. It is what markets do when the product is attention and the production costs vanish.

That market is now mature. It has been running for years. The incentive structures are locked in. The actors are optimising. The content is as extreme, as frequent, and as cheap as the current penalty structures allow.

This is an efficient market. Not efficient in the sense that it produces good outcomes — it produces terrible outcomes — but efficient in the economist’s sense: the available rents are being extracted. The marginal return on making content slightly cheaper, slightly faster, or slightly more convincing is small, because the current cost is already near zero and the current content is already effective enough.

What AI actually changes

AI does reduce production costs further. A deepfake is cheaper than hiring an actor. A generated article is cheaper than writing one. A synthetic voice clip is cheaper than finding a real quote.

But cheaper than what? Cheaper than a screenshot with text on it? Cheaper than a thirty-second rant filmed in a car park? Cheaper than a misattributed quote on a picture of someone looking sinister?

The content that drives political polarisation is not sophisticated. It does not need to be. It rides existing templates — pre-built narrative structures that audiences already recognise. The schema is already installed. The enemy construction is already done. The identity markets are already built.

AI makes the production marginally cheaper for content that was already nearly free to produce. That is not nothing. But it is not the revolution that the worried conferences suggest.

The constraint that matters

The binding constraint on misinformation has never been production cost. It is distribution and audience receptivity. And both of those were blown wide open by social media, not by AI.

Distribution costs collapsed when platforms gave everyone a broadcast channel. Audience receptivity was shaped by years of identity-conditioned engagement — people consuming content that confirms what they already believe, delivered by algorithms optimised for engagement rather than accuracy.

AI doesn’t change the distribution infrastructure. It doesn’t change the audience’s cognitive templates. It doesn’t change the incentive structures that reward polarisation. It makes the supply side marginally more efficient in a market where supply was already essentially unlimited.

When supply is already infinite and free, making it more infinite and more free doesn’t move the needle much.

The analogy

Imagine a river that has already burst its banks. The fields are flooded. The crops are ruined. Someone turns up with an extra bucket of water and everyone panics about the bucket.

AI is the bucket. Social media was the flood.

Why this matters

The obsession with AI-generated misinformation is not just wrong. It is actively unhelpful. It redirects attention and resources toward the wrong problem.

If you are worried about misinformation, the question is not “how do we detect deepfakes?” The question is “why does the attention market reward false content more than true content, and what would it take to change the incentive structure?”

That is a harder question. It doesn’t have a technical fix. It requires understanding the economics of attention, identity, and political rent extraction — the machinery underneath the outrage.

The answer is not better AI detection. The answer is changing the market.

But “the incentive structure of attention markets rewards lying for money on X” is harder to process than “Frankenstein is coming.” Shelley’s template is cheaper. It always has been.

That is why we keep telling her story instead of fixing the actual problem.

All revenue from The Angry Dogs is donated to Ukrainian causes.

Something funny happened this week.

I had a conversation with someone from RAND’s Forecasting Initiative. A Superforecaster, one of the top-ranked forecasters in the world. She wanted to talk about my model and how it might plug into a forecasting platform.

So I did what any reasonable person would do. I went and looked at what forecasting platforms actually do.

Sliders. They use sliders.

I need you to sit with that for a moment. The cutting edge of geopolitical prediction, the methodology that beat intelligence analysts with access to classified information, is smart people moving a slider between 0% and 100%.

That’s it. That’s the product.

The greatest guessing game ever played

Philip Tetlock’s insight was genuinely brilliant, and I don’t want to undersell it. In 2011, IARPA — the intelligence community’s version of DARPA — launched a massive forecasting tournament. Thousands of volunteers were asked to predict geopolitical events. Would Assad still be in power in six months? Would the EU impose new sanctions on Iran?

Most people were terrible at it. This surprised nobody.

But some people were consistently, measurably better than everyone else. Better than the crowd average. Better than prediction markets. Better than professional intelligence analysts sitting in Langley with access to classified briefings. Tetlock called them Superforecasters, and the name stuck.

The methodology that made them good is well-documented. Think probabilistically. Update your estimates when new information arrives. Work in teams to challenge each other’s reasoning. Keep score relentlessly. Stay calibrated, when you say 70%, it should happen about 70% of the time.

This is valuable. This works. It produces measurably better predictions than virtually any alternative.

But here’s the thing nobody says out loud.

There’s no model underneath.

Pattern recognition all the way down

When a Superforecaster assigns 73% probability to an event, they’re not running a calculation. They’re not deriving the probability from a structural model of how political systems work. They’re synthesising information, cross-referencing analogies, adjusting for base rates, and arriving at a number that feels right to their well-calibrated judgment.

It’s expert intuition with exceptionally good hygiene.

The calibration training is real. The bias reduction is real. The team deliberation process genuinely improves accuracy. But the underlying mechanism is still: smart humans processing information and producing a probability estimate based on pattern recognition and experience.

Sound familiar?

It should. Because that’s exactly how a neural network works.

The biological neural network

Think about what Tetlock actually built.

You take a large pool of human nodes, thousands of volunteers. Each one has different training data (life experience, domain knowledge, reading habits). Each one has different weightings (political priors, analytical style, risk tolerance). You put information into the network and each node produces an output.

Then you score the outputs. Ruthlessly. The nodes with the lowest error rates get promoted. The best ones get clustered into teams — layers, if you like — where they can process information through deliberation before producing a refined output.

The scoring system is the loss function.
The team structure is the network architecture.
The calibration training is gradient descent.

And the Superforecasters themselves are the nodes that survived pruning because they consistently minimised prediction error.

Tetlock built a neural network. He just built it out of people instead of silicon.

We’ve seen this architecture before

Once you start looking for it, the pattern shows up elsewhere.

During Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a loose online community known as NAFO (you may have heard about them), emerged on social media. On the surface it looked like memes and cartoon dogs.

Underneath, it behaved like something much more interesting.

Thousands of participants were constantly scanning open-source information, sharing links, flagging propaganda, and rapidly distributing corrections. Claims would be stress-tested in public threads. Good information propagated. Bad information was mocked, challenged, or discarded.

There was no central command. No formal hierarchy. No institutional funding.

Just a distributed network of humans processing information in parallel.

Sound familiar?

Tetlock’s forecasting tournaments built a formalised human neural network.
NAFO functioned as a spontaneous one.

Different purpose. Same architecture.

Nodes with different training data.
Rapid information exchange.
Feedback through social scoring.
Outputs that converge toward a collective judgement.

In machine learning terms, NAFO looked less like a carefully engineered model and more like a chaotic but highly effective swarm system.

The Ceiling

And just like a silicon neural network, these systems share the same fundamental limitation.

They work.

But they can’t tell you why they work.

When a Superforecaster assigns 73% probability to an event, they’re not running a structural model. They’re synthesising information, adjusting for base rates, comparing historical analogies, and arriving at a number that feels right to their trained judgement.

It’s expert intuition with exceptionally good hygiene.

Which is exactly what neural networks do.

They detect patterns.

They minimise error.

But they don’t explain the causal mechanisms generating the patterns.

The missing engine

The Superforecasters know this, by the way. The smartest ones have been writing about it.

The RAND Forecasting Initiative has published work acknowledging that AI struggles with causal reasoning and counterfactual thinking, the “what would happen if...” questions that require understanding *mechanisms*, not just patterns. And they’re right. AI is excellent at correlation. It’s poor at causation.

But here’s what’s strange: the Superforecaster methodology has exactly the same limitation. It can tell you *that* something will probably happen. It can’t tell you *why* the incentive structures make it likely. It can produce a well-calibrated probability. It can’t derive that probability from a formal model of how political actors respond to incentive changes.

The forecasting industry has spent a decade optimising the driver. Nobody’s built the car.

What would an engine look like?

A structural model of political behaviour would change the game completely. Instead of asking “what do the smart people reckon?”, you’d ask “what do the incentive structures predict?”

Not replacing the Superforecasters, complementing them. Giving them a causal framework to anchor their probabilistic judgments. A model that says: here’s why actors in this kind of institutional environment, facing these incentive structures, are likely to behave this way. Now calibrate your probability around that structural prediction instead of around your gut.

That’s the difference between weather forecasting before and after we understood atmospheric physics. Before the physics, we had experienced sailors looking at the sky and saying “I reckon it’ll rain.” Some of them were remarkably good at it. But the forecasts got dramatically better once we understood the causal mechanisms driving weather systems.

The sailors didn’t become obsolete. They became better, because they had a model underneath their intuition.

Pro slider movers

I don’t say any of this to denigrate the Superforecasters. Tetlock’s work is genuine science and the people who’ve risen to the top of the forecasting tournaments are extraordinarily talented. Being consistently well-calibrated across hundreds of diverse geopolitical questions is a rare and valuable cognitive skill.

But let’s be honest about what it is. It’s professional slider-moving. Extremely well-calibrated, rigorously scored, team-refined slider-moving. The best guessing game ever designed.

The next step isn’t better guessing. It’s building the structural models that can tell us *why* the slider should be where it is.

And that’s a conversation I’m looking forward to having.

---

*Matthew Pearce is an economist whose framework, “The Rent Theory of Political Identity,” models political identity as a rent-bearing asset under contemporary attention markets. The paper is currently in peer review at Constitutional Political Economy.*

*All proceeds from this Substack are donated to Ukrainian causes.*

On Saturday, Donald Trump linked a military strike on Iran to the 2020 election.

Not subtly. Not through implication. In a social media post, he stated that Iran had tried to stop him and now faced war with the United States. The grievance and the bombs were presented as the same thing.

On the same day, he called every major journalist in his phone to workshop timelines and objectives for the war he had just started. Two or three days, he told one outlet. Four to five weeks, he told another. Freedom for the Iranian people, he told a third. We identified three potential successors but killed them in the initial strikes, he told a fourth.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, Vladimir Putin said nothing.

Farida Rustamova, one of the best reporters on Kremlin dynamics, explained the silence. A source close to the Kremlin told her that Putin is avoiding criticism of Trump because he still hopes Trump will help him conclude a favourable deal in Ukraine. Commenting on Iran would be pointless. It would only draw attention to his weakness.

“He has his own war.”

Three leaders. Three wars. Three enormous stocks of political identity capital that are structurally incompatible with resolution.

This is the first attention war.

I need to explain what I mean by that.

Every previous war had a propaganda dimension. States have always managed information during conflict. But the strategic objectives existed independently of the media strategy. You bombed the factory because you wanted to destroy the factory. The propaganda told your people why the factory needed destroying.

What is happening with Iran is different.

Trump is not workshopping strategy with journalists. He is workshopping narrative. Four outlets, four timelines, four objectives. The policy contradictions are not errors. They are features. Each version generates content. Each contradiction generates debate. Each debate generates attention.

The attention is the product.

The bombs are serving the content, not the other way round.

I have spent the last two years developing an economic framework that explains this. The short version: political identity has become a rent-bearing asset. It generates income through attention, audience loyalty, and conflict maintenance, independently of whether anyone wins an election, passes a law, or achieves a strategic objective.

Economic rent is the oldest concept in the discipline. David Ricardo described it in 1817 by looking at farmland. Some land is more fertile. The people who own it extract income not because they work harder but because they control a scarce resource.

Political identity works the same way. Some identities are more fertile — they generate more attention, more engagement, more revenue. The people who control them extract rents from that fertility. The shouting is not irrational. It is the business model.

The framework identifies three regimes. In the first, attention serves electoral survival — politicians use media to win office. In the second, attention itself becomes the primary payoff — the office is a bonus, the content is the product. In the third, attention carries negative value — civil servants, administrators, and cautious leaders avoid visibility because scrutiny means career risk.

All three regimes are operating simultaneously this weekend.

Trump is in the second regime. Attention is the product. The Iran strike is not serving a foreign policy objective — the contradictory timelines and goals make that clear. It is serving the attention production function. The 2020 election grievance has been fused to the military operation because the grievance is identity capital that appreciates through repetition. Every time it is reactivated, it reinforces the narrative his market rewards. He is not spending political capital on Iran. He is minting new identity capital by attaching the strike to his most resonant identity product.

De-escalation would require abandoning the grievance frame. Abandoning the frame would mean writing down identity capital. The incentive structure points one way.

Putin is in the third regime. Attention carries negative value. His ally’s supreme leader has been assassinated and he cannot respond, cannot comment, cannot acknowledge the event without activating dynamics he cannot control. Silence is not weakness concealed. It is the rational strategy when visibility exposes the gap between your identity product (”Russia is a great power that protects its allies”) and reality (”Russia could not prevent the assassination of its most important Middle Eastern partner”). The identity well is deep but the water level is dropping. Everyone watching can see it.

Zelenskyy occupies a unique position that makes the three-body problem insoluble. His identity capital is built on genuine existential resistance — not performance, not content generation, but survival under bombardment. Every day Putin is distracted or weakened, Zelenskyy’s relative position strengthens. But his identity capital as the wartime president requires the war. Any peace that concedes territory destroys the asset on which his domestic and international position rests.

Three actors. Three enormous stocks of domestic identity capital. Each degraded or destroyed by genuine resolution.

The model predicts not just stalemate but structural irresolvability — not because the geopolitics are complex, but because the domestic rent economics of all three parties require continuation.

The Telegram channels are already aggregating Trump’s NYT interview. He told the paper that the US had identified potential successors in Iran but killed them in the initial strikes.

Read that again.

He is narrating the destruction of his own stated exit strategy as content. The incoherence is not a failure of planning. It is the plan. Coherent policy produces a single outcome. Incoherent policy produces continuous content — debate, contradiction, clarification, escalation, each feeding the next.

Gregg Carlstrom, a Middle East correspondent whose thread was reposted by the military analyst Michael Kofman, put it plainly: Trump is throwing spaghetti at the wall. He just wants to say he solved a problem that has vexed every president since Carter. But there is no clear idea of what “solved” looks like and no plan for getting there.

Carlstrom is right about the observation. The framework explains the mechanism. Trump does not need to solve it. He needs to say he solved it. The identity product is “I solved Iran.” The actual outcome is secondary. Resolution does not need to be real. It needs to be narratively sufficient to generate the content.

Northern Ireland is the proof that this can end.

For decades, the island operated as a closed identity market. Two communities, geographically bounded, no exit, escalation spiralling. The Troubles were the model’s prediction made real under zero-penalty conditions.

But in the 1990s, something changed — not beliefs, not exhaustion, not moral awakening. The market structure changed. EU membership, the Celtic Tiger, free movement, and access to a vastly larger identity and economic market meant that the actors suddenly had access to higher-rent opportunities outside the closed violent market.

Mo Mowlam, Gerry Adams, and Ian Paisley did not make peace because they were persuaded. They made peace because the EU offered a bigger market. The rational move was to leave the violent closed identity market and enter the larger one, where the rents were higher and the costs were lower.

The Good Friday Agreement was not diplomacy triumphing over hatred. It was a market-switching event. Peace was the entry price.

The question today is whether anyone is offering a bigger market.

For Ukraine, the answer exists: EU and NATO membership would flip all three principals’ incentive structures simultaneously. Putin’s identity product collapses because you cannot claim a country is a fascist threat when the entire Western security architecture has formally accepted it. Trump can claim the deal of the century. Zelenskyy’s identity capital transforms from wartime resistance to the leader who won — who brought his country into Europe.

For Iran, no such market is being offered. And so the escalator keeps running.

This Substack will apply this framework to events as they happen. Not partisan commentary. Not vibes. Just the incentive structure, the prediction, and the outcome.

The model has been generating correct predictions for two years. The formal academic paper is under review. The book will be called The Outrage Dividend.

But the events are not waiting for the publishing schedule.

So here we are. The first attention war. Three identity wells. No off button.

And the escalator just went vertical.

He’s right. But he can’t explain why it’s happening, and the solution he reaches for — proportional representation, via Andy Burnham — would make the problem worse.

Let me explain.

The bit Harris gets right

Something structural has changed in British politics, and it isn’t that voters got stupider or angrier. Harris spent three days in Gorton and heard the same thing everywhere: people want something radically different. A thirtysomething resident put it simply: “Politics needs to change in some huge way, doesn’t it?”

Harris identifies the symptoms with precision. Labour’s “landslide” in 2024 came with barely one in five of the total electorate. Its bond with old industrial heartlands has been fraying for years. Now it’s losing the urban base that was supposed to be the replacement coalition. The party, he says, looks “dangerously like an archaic legacy party.”

All of this is correct. Where it gets interesting is why.

The bit economics explains

Here’s what happened to politics, and it has nothing to do with ideology.

Until roughly the end of the twentieth century, political attention was an input. You got noticed in order to win office. Office was the prize. Attention was the means. Under those conditions, broadening your appeal, moderating your message, and building coalitions all made sense — because that’s how you won the thing that paid.

Then the economics changed. Direct monetisation of attention — through media platforms, subscription models, audience-funded distribution, and the vast infrastructure of digital engagement — turned attention from an input into an output. You no longer need to win office to extract value from politics. You just need to be visible, polarising, and consistent.

This is the structural break Harris is describing without having the mechanism. When attention itself pays, the old party system — designed around the assumption that office is the only prize worth chasing — stops working. Not because people are disillusioned (though they are), but because the economic logic that sustained two-party dominance no longer holds.

Labour and the Conservatives are legacy parties in the same way that Kodak was a legacy company. They’re not failing because they make a bad product. They’re failing because the market moved and their entire business model was optimised for conditions that no longer exist.

Starmer’s response is the model working

Harris is outraged by Starmer’s reaction — the arrogance, the dismissal of Green voters, the asymmetry of chasing Reform defectors while scolding leftward ones. But from an incentive perspective, Starmer’s behaviour is entirely predictable.

Labour treats rightward defectors to Reform as “hero voters” to be won back, while leftward defectors to the Greens are scolded as dupes of “divisive, sectarian politics.” Why the double standard?

Because Labour’s leadership instinctively understands — without ever framing it this way — that Reform operates in a different economic regime. Reform extracts value from attention directly. It doesn’t need office to thrive. Competing with Reform for voters means competing with an actor whose business model doesn’t require winning. Labour can’t outbid that.

The Greens, by contrast, still look like they’re playing the old game — building coalitions, winning council seats, taking parliamentary seats. So Labour treats them as a conventional electoral threat to be fought with conventional electoral weapons: attack their policies, question their credibility, dismiss their voters.

The problem is that Green voters in Gorton didn’t leave Labour because the Greens had better policies. They left because Labour’s identity container — the thing that used to make people feel like Labour was their party — has emptied out. You can’t attack people back into a container they’ve already decided doesn’t represent them.

Why PR won’t fix it

Harris ends by reaching for Andy Burnham’s 2022 call for proportional representation, elected regional senates, and maximum devolution. This is framed as the route to “a more honest and collaborative way of doing politics.”

It sounds lovely. Here’s why it doesn’t work.

Look at Germany. The German system is the poster child for proportional representation. It’s designed to ensure that the Bundestag reflects the electorate, that coalition-building enforces moderation, and that fringe parties face meaningful barriers to entry through the 5% threshold.

And what has it produced? A permanent centrist coalition that pays a continuous moderation tax — because every compromise, every difficult negotiation, every messy deal is visible, narratable, and monetisable by actors outside the coalition. The AfD doesn’t need to win. It just needs to clear 5%, gain institutional legitimacy, and then use every coalition muddle as content.

The cordon sanitaire — the agreement by mainstream parties not to coalition with the AfD — is supposed to be a penalty. It’s actually a subsidy. “They won’t let us in” is the most profitable political narrative in Germany. Every exclusion is content. Every refusal is proof that the system is rigged. The penalty has become the product.

And the AfD’s strongest support is in the former East Germany, where it activates pre-existing identity capital — decades of perceived second-class citizenship, economic underperformance, and cultural alienation from the reunification settlement — by positioning itself as pro-Russia. This isn’t ideology. It’s market positioning. Russia is the identity signifier that activates a specific, undervalued capital stock. Both the AfD and Russia extract value from this arrangement at negligible cost to either.

Now look at France. Somehow, worse.

Macron built En Marche as a pure identity startup — a political vehicle designed around a single person, bypassing the legacy parties entirely. He destroyed the Parti Socialiste, hollowed out Les Républicains, and proved that you could build a new political identity container from scratch if the old ones were sufficiently degraded.

Then the French system broke him. The two-round electoral system is designed to enforce moderation: you need broad second-round support to win. But in practice, every time the “republican front” activates to block the Rassemblement National in round two, it confirms the RN’s identity narrative. “The system is rigged against us” is the content. The penalty is the product. Again.

The result? A hung parliament, a government that lasted three months, and a president who — constitutionally barred from running again — has rationally pivoted from trying to win office to building post-presidential identity capital through international positioning and attention-generating domestic interventions. Macron is now optimising for visibility, not governance, because the economics of his situation have changed.

France, Germany, and the UK: three different electoral systems, three different institutional designs, all converging on exactly the same outcome. Legacy party decline. Retail-political insurgency. The structural failure of moderation. Coalition paralysis.

The institutional furniture is different. The economic gradient is identical.

The moderation tax, institutionalised

This is the core point, and it deserves saying plainly.

Proportional representation doesn’t eliminate the moderation tax — the economic penalty that moderate politics pays under current attention market conditions. It institutionalises it.

Under first-past-the-post, the moderation tax is paid at elections. Governments at least get periods of relatively unchallenged implementation between votes. Under PR, the moderation tax is levied continuously, in real time, because coalition dynamics are permanently visible, permanently contested, and permanently available as raw material for actors whose business model is attention rather than governance.

Every coalition is a compromise. Every compromise is a moderation event. Every moderation event is an opportunity for someone outside the coalition to generate attention by attacking it. PR doesn’t change the underlying incentive structure. It just ensures the tax is collected daily instead of every five years.

What Harris is actually describing

Harris calls it “the belated end of the political 20th century.” That’s a good line. But it’s a description, not an explanation.

The explanation is economic. Something changed about how political attention converts into value, and that change made the old party system — the one designed around two big coalitions competing for the prize of office — structurally unsustainable. Not because people stopped caring about politics. Because the economics of caring changed.

The residents of Gorton and Denton who told Harris they wanted “seismic political change” aren’t wrong. They’re responding rationally to a system that no longer serves them. But the change they need isn’t a new voting system or a new party leader or a better candidate. It’s a change in the incentive structure that makes polarisation profitable and moderation economically irrational.

That’s a harder problem. But at least it’s the right one.

The Rent Theory of Political Identity, the formal framework behind this analysis, is currently under review at Constitutional Political Economy. A book-length treatment, The Outrage Dividend: How Political Identity Became a Business Model, is in development. None of the equations were harmed in the writing of this article.

In *Independence Day*, President Thomas J. Whitmore stands on a makeshift platform in the Nevada desert and delivers a speech so rousing that it unites the entire human race. Fighter pilots from every nation scramble their jets. Differences are set aside. Humanity fights as one.

The film made $817 million.

Now add Fox News.

"PRESIDENT USES ALIEN INVASION TO DISTRACT FROM BORDER CRISIS." Tucker Carlson interviews a retired Air Force general who says the whole thing is a false flag. A Substack emerges arguing the aliens are a globalist psyop. Someone on X posts that the aliens haven't actually *attacked* anyone and maybe we should hear their side. An MSNBC panel debates whether Whitmore's speech was exclusionary because he said "mankind." A GoFundMe appears for the aliens.

Meanwhile, the mothership destroys Washington.

The film works — the speech works, the unity works, the whole thing works — because the attention market doesn't exist inside the movie. Nobody in that universe is extracting rents from opposing the president during an alien invasion. Nobody has a Patreon that depends on calling the response a conspiracy. Nobody's podcast needs the invasion to last six seasons.

Remove the attention market and America looks like *Independence Day*.

Add it back and America looks like America.

The Stored Capital Trick

Here's what's actually happening. Hollywood isn't depicting present-day America. It's borrowing identity capital that was accumulated decades ago, before the attention market existed to contest it.

When you watch a film where the American president is wise and decisive, where NASA solves the impossible problem, where the Marines arrive just in time — you're not watching a portrait of modern governance. You're watching a withdrawal from an identity bank account that was filled up between roughly 1941 and 1969.

The Second World War. The Marshall Plan. The Moon landing. The Berlin Airlift. All of it accumulated before cable news, before social media, before anyone could extract rents from opposing it in real time

This is *exactly* the same mechanism that protects the NHS in Britain. The NHS was established at the single moment of maximum national unity — the aftermath of a war that required total mobilisation. It accumulated identity capital before the attention market arrived. Nobody can polarise it because the identity is too deep, too abstract, and too universally held.

American institutional competence — the idea of it — works the same way in cinema. The schema is pre-installed. The audience already has it. The operating cost of telling that story is near zero because the identity market was built before anyone could extract rents from dismantling it.

Hollywood isn't lying to you. It's showing you the version of America that existed before the attention market ate everything.

The Apollo Problem

The Apollo programme is the cleanest proof case.

Twelve men walked on the Moon. They did it with less computing power than your toaster. It was, by any reasonable measure, the single most extraordinary engineering achievement in human history, and it was accomplished by a government bureaucracy.

It worked because it operated inside the administrative regime — but before the attention market could punish it.

NASA in the 1960s had visibility, but that visibility was universally positive. There was no cable news channel running segments about cost overruns. There was no congressional subcommittee livestreaming hearings for engagement. There was no X account with 400,000 followers posting "EXPOSED: What NASA doesn't want you to know about the Van Allen Belt."

The attention carried no negative value. Visibility didn't activate scrutiny in the way it does now. So the engineers could engineer, the managers could manage, and the whole thing could work.

Now look at what happens when space becomes attention-market content. Elon Musk turns rocket launches into personal brand events. Space Force becomes a culture war football. NASA funding debates get polarised along identity lines that have nothing to do with rocketry. The engineers are exactly as good as they were in 1969. Probably better. But the institutional environment they work in has been colonised by the attention market, and the attention market rewards conflict, not competence.

The Apollo programme couldn't happen today. Not because America forgot how to build things. Because building things requires the administrative regime to function, and the administrative regime requires invisibility. The moment you make governance visible, it enters the attention market. And the attention market doesn't reward getting things right. It rewards getting attention.

Aaron Sorkin's Beautiful Lie

*The West Wing* ran for seven seasons and won more Emmys than any drama in history. Its entire premise was: what if the American government was staffed by brilliant, principled people who argued passionately but governed competently?

Twenty-six million people watched the first season because they wanted it to be true. The schema was installed. American audiences had decades of stored identity capital telling them that this is what their government should look like — and they were willing to pay HBO prices to see it depicted on screen.

But here's the thing Sorkin could never write: “The West Wing” set in the retail-centric regime. President Bartlet cares about winning elections, yes — but attention is an input to governance, not the product itself. His staff argues about policy because policy matters. They seek media coverage because it helps them pass legislation. Attention serves the work.

That regime no longer exists.

Modern American politics operates in the retail political regime. Attention is the product. You don't get noticed in order to govern — you govern (or refuse to govern) in order to get noticed. The rational endpoint isn't Bartlet's measured eloquence. It's whatever generates the most engagement in the next sixty seconds.

Sorkin can't write a realistic version of modern Washington because realistic modern Washington wouldn't be a drama. It would be a horror film about rational people optimising for the wrong objective function, and the twist ending is that there's no twist — they just keep doing it forever because the incentives never change.

Why British Films Don't Bother

Notice something odd: British cinema almost never depicts British government as competent. The default British political film is *The Thick of It*, *Yes Minister*, *In the Loop* — bumbling, venal, absurd.

This isn't because Britain has worse politicians. It's because British pre-communications identity capital isn't stored in governance. It's stored in the monarchy and the NHS. Those are the identity containers that were established before the attention market could polarise them.

Parliament was always visible, always contested, always inside the political attention market. There was never a moment when British governance accumulated the kind of universally-held identity capital that American governance did between 1941 and 1969. Britain's "competent government" identity capital is thin. Its monarchy and healthcare identity capital is enormous.

So Hollywood makes films about competent American presidents because the stored capital exists to support the fiction. British filmmakers make *The Thick of It* because they don't have equivalent capital to draw on. Both are telling the truth about their respective identity banks. One just has a larger balance in a different account.

The Real Joke

The funniest thing about all of this is that Hollywood's depiction of competent America is itself operating under the same economics as everything else in the book.

A film about a competent American president is a “sequel”. Not literally — but economically. It's borrowing pre-built identity capital, plugging into an existing schema, reducing the operating cost of audience acquisition to near zero. The audience already believes in competent America. You just have to activate the template.

A film about America as it actually operates — a vast, brilliant, well-resourced nation that cannot build a high-speed railway, cannot agree on healthcare, cannot stop its own citizens from shooting each other, and cannot have a presidential debate without both candidates lying on national television — would be an *original*. You'd have to build the identity, the world, the audience attachment, and the emotional architecture from nothing.

Originality is the problem. In a global attention market where budgets validate risk and a single failure is existential, the rational strategy is to extract rents from identity capital that already exists.

The economics that explains why every summer produces another Spider-Man also explains why every year produces another film where America saves the world.

It's the same model. Same equations. Different screen.

The Angry Dogs spoke to the members and volunteers about the phenomenon that is Toonie Tuesday. This week they reached $1m in micro-donations. An astonishing feat for a purely volunteer driven team. No NGO, no government backing - just brain damaged cartoon dogs.

Angry Dog:
You are running a decentralised global funded micro grant system with volunteers and memes.
Do you realise how ground breaking this is?

Toonie Tuesday:
We’re are proud and amazed with the support that we have received, but that is only possible thanks to this incredible community.

Angry Dog:
You have “closed applications” showing on your website sometimes and switched to your European branch to relieve load?

Toonie Tuesday:
Not exactly switched to another branch, I’ll go into more detail about that later.

Angry Dog:
Can you explain how Toonie Tuesday and Fiver Friday relate to each other?

Toonie Tuesday:
Toonie Tuesday team was always an international team, and it’s the same team as Fiver Friday. The same founding members @CanadianKobzar and @FellaSam79 have been consistent from the beginning. However, Toonie Tuesday and Fiver Friday serve different purposes.

Angry Dog:
This is insanely complex and also amazing 👏 🤩

Toonie Tuesday:
Thank you very much, it’s quite complex to manage week after week, but we’ve an amazing community always answering the call, and the team is amazing. Toonie Tuesday is crowdfunding at it’s core. It demonstrates that the more people that help, the more we can raise, with little burden on the individual.

Angry Dog:
If you’ve spent any time around NAFO, you already know the surface layer:

• cartoon dogs

• feral humour

• ruthless replies

• zero patience for authoritarians

What’s less obvious — especially to people outside the movement — is that beneath the shitposting sits something far more serious.

Toonie Tuesday:
A decentralised, international fundraising system that has been quietly moving money, vehicles, drones, and equipment to Ukrainian frontline units for more than three years.

Angry Dog:
You often describe this as decentralised. What does that mean in practice?

Toonie Tuesday:
About being decentralised, over time, although the initiatives are supervised by the same team, they have been developed a little further, as we are now not only present on Twitter, but also on Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

Most of Toonie Tuesday’s communication on YouTube is done on the Bösar/Segi channel, (@20gimsack). Segi presents weekly video updates on the upcoming Toonie Tuesday and he also interviews former Toonie Tuesday recipients and other fellas in the community that he feels are doing great work to support Ukraine.

Angry Dog:
Two of the clearest examples of this decentralised fundraising model are you: Toonie Tuesday and Fiver Friday. They look like jokes. They are not.

Angry Dog:
At face value, Toonie Tuesday looks simple.

Toonie Tuesday:

• Donate a small amount.

• Usually €2 £2 $2 (“a toonie is $2 CAD”).

• On a predictable weekly rhythm.

• To vetted Ukrainian units and causes.

Angry Dog:
But structurally, this looks like more than that. It looks like an NGO, it is similar to larger NGOs like Oxfam - who receive huge plaudits for something you do day in day out with a spreadsheet.

Toonie Tuesday:
Structurally, it functions like a micro-granting institution.

Angry Dog:
Your banner says: “Applications are closed at this time. Please share your requests on our Fiver Friday.”

Toonie Tuesday:
That single sentence tells you everything.

This is no longer an informal donation jar.

It’s a system with:

• intake windows

• capacity limits

• queue management

• cross-programme load balancing

When demand exceeds what one group can process, it’s routed elsewhere — not ignored.

That is institutional behaviour, even if it’s wrapped in sunflowers, coins, and cartoon dogs.

Angry Dog:
Why does the weekly rhythm matter so much?

Toonie Tuesday:
Toonie Tuesday and Fiver Friday work because they are ritualised, not reactive.

• Same day every week.

• Same expectations.

• Same community rhythm.

We’re indeed seeing the value of the ritual, because despite a certain lack of visibility due to the way X is working, supporters thankfully come looking for us on Tuesday.

Angry Dog:
What does that change?

Toonie Tuesday:
That removes friction. Nobody has to decide whether to donate — the calendar does it for you.

Angry Dog:
Why does that matter in a war context?

Toonie Tuesday:
This matters because wars are not won by one-off virality.

They’re won by sustained, boring, reliable support.

People who can’t give £100 can give £5.
People who can’t give £5 every day can give it once a week.
Can’t give they ask you to like, share, leave a comment.

Over time, that adds up to vehicles, drones, optics, med kits, fuel, and repairs.

Angry Dog:
Even the visuals seem deliberate.

Toonie Tuesday:
The visual language matters too. The banner’s bright colours, absurd fellas, and gold-coin eyes aren’t decoration — they lower emotional barriers and make participation feel normal rather than heavy.

Donation becomes belonging, not obligation.

That’s why these drives don’t burn out.

Angry Dog:
Outsiders often ask why there are multiple NAFO fundraisers.

Toonie Tuesday:
The answer is simple: redundancy is resilience.

• There is no single NAFO treasury.

• There is no central authority.

• There is no single point of failure.

Instead, there are:

• regional donation rituals (Canada, UK, EU, US)

• overlapping communities backing the same units

• some groups raising £2 at a time

• others raising £100,000 in a few days

This isn’t inefficiency.

It’s how decentralised systems survive pressure, burnout, smears, and platform collapse.

If one group slows, another accelerates.
If one organiser steps back, nothing stops.

That’s why this has lasted.

Angry Dog:
Why do the same units appear again and again?

Toonie Tuesday:
NAFO fundraising doesn’t feel abstract because it isn’t.

Most drives are tied to:

• specific brigades

• named soldiers or NCOs

• units that post updates and photos

• people donors recognise over time

This creates relationship-based trust, not brand loyalty.

You’re not donating to an institution.

You’re helping your guys.

That’s why the same units appear again and again — trust compounds faster than novelty.

Angry Dog:
You often hear Ukrainians and NAFO groups say they move faster than western institutions.

Toonie Tuesday:
We can fundraise and deliver in days. Institutions work in months or years.

That’s not bravado. It’s structural reality.

Toonie Tuesday and Fiver Friday don’t replace governments or NATO.

They fill the gaps — fast, flexible, and with minimal overhead.

They operate where bureaucracy struggles.
(As we say — They Talk, We Do.)

• Rapid response.

• Niche equipment.

• Last-mile delivery.

• Urgent battlefield needs.

And they do it with spreadsheets, memes, and volunteers who still show up every week.

Angry Dog:
Politicians often dismiss NAFO as bots or trolls.

Toonie Tuesday:
When politicians dismiss NAFO as “bots” or complain about “cruel replies,” they are missing the point entirely.

The same people posting memes are also:

• coordinating weekly fundraising rituals

• processing requests

• routing demand across regions

• moving real money to real units

• doing it consistently, for years

This isn’t slacktivism.

It’s a distributed civil support network — one that just happens to speak fluent internet.

Angry Dog:
If you have never donated to Ukraine via NAFO before, where should people start?

Toonie Tuesday:
Start small.

Toonie Tuesday if you’re in Canada.
Fiver Friday if you’re in the UK or Europe.

The origin of the name “Toonie” is Canadian and “Fiver” British, but the fundraisers are intended to be for everyone, regardless of where you come from. You can donate on Toonie Tuesday or Fiver Friday from anywhere, it’s the same team, community and goal with both efforts. The distinction is how the two fundraisers operate - Toonie Tuesday is a focused effort to maximizing efficiency, while raising as much as possible to complete a goal for a single beneficiary, Fiver Friday is sharing networks and visibility to promote fundraisers in the community and provide an opportunity for them to shine.

Give what you can, donate, like, sharing posts, all are appreciated.

Give when the community does.

• No pressure.

• No guilt.

• No heroics.

Just rhythm, trust, and persistence.

That’s how this works.

And that’s why it’s still working.

The meme brigade didn’t just learn how to mock authoritarians.
It learned how to out-organise them.