From La Fontaine to Lego: Characters as Ideological Delivery Systems

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cute characters as ideological delivery systems, and how AI accelerated the propaganda playbook.

Kind of crazy that the big propaganda medium to come out of AI wasn't deepfakes but LEGO men and Persian cats https://t.co/PEzEiamwJg
— Tracy Alloway (@tracyalloway) April 9, 2026

Tracy Alloway nailed it: “Kind of crazy that the big propaganda medium to come out of AI wasn’t deepfakes but LEGO men and Persian cats.”

Everyone was bracing for deepfakes. The national security community spent years warning about synthetic video of world leaders saying things they never said, doctored footage designed to deceive at the pixel level. Instead, what showed up was Lego minifigures of Trump and Netanyahu set to AI-generated rap tracks, produced by an Iran-based group calling themselves the “Explosive News Team”. And it wasn’t just Iran. Chinese state media CCTV joined in with its own GenAI animal fable: “The White Eagle and Persian Cat”, a stop-motion style animation where a White Eagle Alliance dominates trade by forcing other animals to use its currency. Not trying to fool anyone into thinking the footage was real. Just trying to be catchy, shareable, and memetically sticky.

Odd Lots: Cyberwar in the Age of AI

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On March 7, 2026, I joined Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast for the second time. The first was in March 2022, during the Russia-Ukraine war, where we discussed what cyberwar actually looks like. Four years later, the same thesis holds – but the stakes have changed dramatically.

Iran on Matt Suiche

From La Fontaine to Lego: Characters as Ideological Delivery Systems

Odd Lots: Cyberwar in the Age of AI