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 Tr-. 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 to Macron. The operator named the operation, in print, in the year the ballroom was begun, the folklore-like ballroom that installs an archetype where the East Wing stood.

Democracy with a monarchical archetype. In Washington it is being architectured, by a ballroom bolted onto the White House. The phrase belongs on the roundabout at Arlington.

The nursery

Gold. There is no East Wing any longer. Imagine that. Imagine I had told you two years ago that he would demolish the East Wing, that he would take the architectural symbolism of destroying the First Republic by knocking it down and installing a folklore-like monarchical archetype in its place, a ballroom. The East Room has gold drapes. The Oval Office is gilded, with a cabinetmaker flown up from Florida to do the trimmings and the President adding bits himself with Krazy Glue, Krazy with a K. The two equestrian statues by the Lincoln Memorial have been coated in gold leaf. When I was a diplomat in Kosovo, everyone said that when you went to Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, you would see their gauche equestrian statues dedicated to Alexander the Great. Now the two by the Lincoln Memorial are gold. “Wear sunglasses if you’re passing by them,” a Washington theatre director told Hitchens. The West Wing has its name in gold lettering. The ballroom will carry gold seals on its outside before the courts have finished with it. The arch is to be topped by a gold Liberty, the liberty of the eparchy, the enslavement of the people and the liberty of the oligarchy, and by gold eagles. The President addresses his donors from a lectern shaped like a golden eagle. And a 22-billion-dollar gilded redesign of Dulles Airport was presented in the Oval Office one afternoon.

The ballroom. Ninety thousand square feet, which doubles the footprint of the White House. Two hundred and fifty workers, twenty hours a day, seven days a week. Three thousand cubic yards of concrete. A million pounds of rebar. The lead architect parted ways with him over how big was big enough. To make room for it the East Wing was demolished in three days in October 2025, and the rubble dumped on a historic golf course in East Potomac Park. “Sorry, darling, that’s progress,” he says he told his wife. Pure Disinfolklore. Does he ever talk to her? The latest drawings, Hitchens reports, add decorative lion heads, more gold and an ornamental staircase. “Where the heck are these lions coming from?” a former commissioner asked her. I can tell them. I spend a good part of my life touring the Neo-Hittite and Syro-Hittite monuments of Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia, and you see a great many lions there, from millennia ago. “You could imagine a symbol of American democracy, like a bald eagle or a bison or something. The lion is associated with the British monarchy.”

The garden. The Rose Garden was torn up and paved over for striped umbrellas and lawn chairs, so that it now resembles the patio at Mar-a-Lago. He wants Lafayette Park to have forty-seven maple trees, in homage to himself. Dozens of trees, including historic cherry-blossom trees, were ordered out of East Potomac Park to make way for his golf course.

The pool. He had the Reflecting Pool, the mirror of the Republic, drained and repainted in what he called American-flag blue.

The house. The South Lawn became a helipad, rebuilt flatter so that guests can, in his words, go there for cocktails and then walk to the ballroom. A court asked the Administration’s lawyer whether, if the government decided very quickly to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty, nothing could be done. “I think that’s right, yes,” the lawyer said. One enabler among thousands. They are cursed for what they are doing to our republic. Preservationists, he insists, are treasonists with bad taste. The usurper accuses those defending what is truly right under the law of treason. The chutzpah of it. And his own legal brief, which he edited personally, as if he had nothing more important to do, says the ballroom is a gift to our country from President Donald, and asks who could ever object to that.

The arch. It began in April 2025 as an architecture critic’s proposal for a temporary 60-foot arch for the country’s 250th birthday. The President more than quadrupled the height, made it permanent, and put the gold Liberty on top. He considered topping it with a giant fist, Hitchens reports from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book, in homage to his own raised fist after the attempt on his life. His architect said the arch would frame the view of Arlington as Raphael framed the heavens. Talk about delusions of grandeur. Excavation has been announced without the planning commission’s approval. Small, medium and large, he told the donors, holding the three models. I happen to think the large looks by far the best.

What a child reads

A child reads that list differently. Gold. A ballroom. Lions on the palace. A rose garden destroyed. Trees cut down. A mirror-pool. The king’s own name on everything. An arch for a conqueror to ride through, who has conquered nothing but the inner minds of too many people. Every one of these is a story that every child in our civil…

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