Podcast | I am become meme.

When Elon Musk told a conservative conference in 2025 “I am become meme”, he was not joking. He was telling you what he does for a living.

The Russian state’s own dramaturg has said the same thing in plainer words. Dramaturg carries the T-R-. Vladislav Surkov, once deputy prime minister of the Ruschist Federation, was picked in 1999 to design Vladimir Putin’s political system, like an architect, and directed it for years. He was the actor-director at the centre of managed democracy, that play-act of democracy.

Part 1 of this two-parter is available here (though this is stand-alone and one of my best podcasts.

In an essay in early 2025 he wrote that Russia had gone onto an information counter-offensive against the West by transferring the psychological concepts of the mental matrix and the archetypes of national consciousness into politics. Perhaps by sending two Brighton Beach oligarchs, mafia-adjacent oligarchs, to Kyiv the other day, supposedly representing the greatest country that ever was.

So when I talk about archetypes, I am not trying to be arch or impressive. I am not telling you that I have read Jung. I am helping you understand the enemy of everything that is good about our lives. Surkov serves a regime whose only goal is to evaporate, eviscerate and turn to ashes every city and village it can get within drone or artillery range of. Google him and you will find them all saying he is a great genius. When he says that Russia has gone onto an information counter-offensive by transferring the archetypes of national consciousness into politics, we must listen. In every country where Russia operates, it dons the mask of patriotism. The AfD, Reform, the National Rally, all the so-called patriotic parties the Russians fund wear the costume of patriotism in the country they operate in. That is the mental matrix and the archetypes of national consciousness, in the reality of our lives. How un-American is MAGA? Yet it purports to define what is American. That is Surkov’s reveal.

Continued from Part One:

In March 2025 Surkov told the French magazine L’Express what the system he built was. He called it democracy with a monarchical archetype. We need a tsar, he said. Periods without a tsar always end in disaster for us. And he said that when Donald was first elected, a number of very serious American media had reported that Donald’s team used Surkov’s propaganda methods and some of his political ideas, and that Donald was ideologically closer to Putler than