Tartaria: A Russian Psyop For People Who Hate Drywall

Have you ever looked at a beautiful old train station and felt something had been lost? Good news: the something is "labour protections." Bad news: a Russian topologist from the 1980s has a different theory, and it's currently eating TikTok.

This week, Tristan is joined by Mia Mulder, who happens to have made the definitive YouTube video on this exact topic two years ago and then forgot she'd been on the podcast before. Together, they take on Tartaria, also known as the mud flood theory, also known as (per Bloomberg) the QAnon of architecture. We trace it from Anatoly Fomenko's "new chronology" through Nikolai Levashov's Aryan space-giants, into Putin-adjacent nationalist rhetoric, then watch it break containment around 2016 and metastasize on western social media into a modular conspiracy that bolts onto Q, the great reset, and great replacement theory. Plus: Chicago raised its entire street level by four to six feet using 6,000 screw jacks and one guy with a whistle; the 1893 World's Fair was held in a city made of fancy papier-mache; and a horse and buggy is actually a sophisticated piece of equipment that you, specifically, could not build.

The bigger argument is a double erasure: capitalism already wrote the Irish and Italian masons out of the record of who built Grand Central, and Tartaria does it again by claiming humans couldn't have built it at all. Walter Benjamin called this aestheticization of politics, and warned us about it in 1935. We didn't really listen.

Guest plug: Mia Mulder makes excellent video essays at youtube.com/MiaMulder and is launching the Paul Lafargue Institute, a big-tent left-wing think tank named after the author of The Right to Be Lazy.

Get new episodes early and support the show on Patreon and Nebula!

Subscribe to It's Probably (not) Aliens for weekly episodes about cool ancient history! And give us a 5-star review if you have the time. It really helps us out!

Tristan Johnson Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube

Scott Niswander Bluesky | Twitter | YouTube

Follow the show on Bluesky or Twitter for more updates!

Ask us questions and send us topics to talk about at ProbsNotAliens.com

Music by Rod Kim | Cover art by Skutch | Edited by Max

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(161)

Walking Amogus

David Jacobs spent his retirement from teaching history at Temple University convinced that alien-human hybrids he calls hubrids are quietly moving into apartments in Philadelphia, taking jobs, and wa...

16 Juni 1h 9min

The Real Mantis Was The Exploitation We Made Along The Way

Somewhere in the deep lore of alien abduction, past the gray guys who run the equipment, sits a manager. Six to nine feet of praying mantis, purple robe for rank, telepathic, standing at the head of t...

9 Juni 1h 20min

Rosicrucianism Was Just A 1614 S***post

In 1980, a mysterious stranger named R.C. Christian spent the equivalent of $200,000 to erect 19-foot-tall, 119-ton granite monuments in rural Georgia. Ancient Aliens wants you to believe the "Georgia...

2 Juni 1h 11min

Nikola Tesla Was Never Forgotten, He Was Just Sad

Ancient Aliens wants you to believe Nikola Tesla was an alien conduit whose secret death ray was buried by the FBI. The actual story: the "vault" they seized in 1943 contained a Wheatstone bridge, whi...

26 Maj 1h 39min

Leonardo da Vinci Was Just A Guy With ADHD

Ancient Aliens claims Leonardo da Vinci was contacted by extraterrestrials, in person or telepathically, and given blueprints for tanks, helicopters, and parachutes centuries ahead of his time. Trista...

12 Maj 1h 11min

Anarchist praxis in the 17th century (a love story)

Tristan flies solo without Scott (now on baby duty) and brings in Phil and Kevin from the Pixelit podcast to crack open Nan Madol, the stone complex sitting on a coral reef in Pohnpei. Ancient Aliens ...

5 Maj 1h 34min

We Should've Had Shovels For Hands

Ancient Aliens wants you to believe the Toba super-eruption 74,000 years ago was an alien population cull, a "cosmic reset button" to wipe out noisy, rebellious humanity 1.0 and replace us with a gene...

28 Apr 2h 4min