You note in the book in the book as well a very interesting feature of all of this you write that autocracies keep track of one another's defeats and victories timing their own moves to create maximum chaos.

For example, in the autumn of 2023, both the European Union and the US Congress found

themselves unable to send aid to Ukraine because minorities with deep Russia ties, let respectively by

Victor Urbahn and Hungary and by a handful of MAGA Republicans in Congress, many

acting under the instruction of Donald Trump, blocked the majority and delayed the aid.

A narrative promoting Ukraine, fatigue spread across the internet pushed by Russian proxies and Chinese media in multiple languages.

So almost as a reinforcing point to your earlier point about how these narratives are elevated and pushed out and controlled, you then also begin to see the effects of that on important public policy, particularly with respect to the global order of things, the stability within NATO, the efforts to undermine by Trump and others the NATO alliance, and sort of locking in the course chosen by the Victor Orbonds and the Vladimir

Putin's etc. Talk a little bit about how these autocracies kind of play off of each other,

mimic each other to some extent, make a chess move, and the others like,

okay, I'll make a counter move, not so much against that move but to distract and and create another

another area of Angina for the West.

Yeah, no, so so they do something which is relatively new which is they, as you were just

saying they coordinate narrative.

So they didn't use to be the case that the Chinese the China by the way has a massive

international media network TV radio websites content sharing agreements with lots of

newspapers you know and and other media organizations around the world,

they didn't use to share narratives as explicitly as they do now.

So now they, I give an example in the book of a story at the very beginning of the Russian

Ukrainian war, the Russian invasion. The Russians put out this weird story about how the

U.S. was building bio labs, so biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine and that was somehow responsible for the war.

Completely fake story not true at all. Nevertheless, it was repeated, you know, by the Chinese media, by the Russian media, by the Venezuelan media, by the Iranian media,

and also by a part of the American far right, who also, Tucker Carlson picked it up and a few

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