Revolutions in Paris, DC, Berlin: Turning, Then Righting

I’m going to talk about turning, then righting. When I use the word righting I mean R-I-G-H-T-I-N-G, not rioting as in France. But I am going to be talking about the rioting in France too. Turning, then righting.

This is a fundamental movement in our mental models, in our lives and in our world. Movement is usually the beginning of philosophy and of religions. And there is a very simple dual movement embedded in our languages. Turning, then righting.

Would you invent one, or surf one?

Imagine you wanted to hack minds today. Would you invent what I call a sound-meaning bundle? Would you then try to hardwire it into humanity? Get an advertising agency, or lots of bots, to communicate it right into the inner minds of everyone?

Or would you notice one that already existed? One that had been embedded in our language, in our concepts and in our minds for six thousand years. Even if you did not really understand what it was, you might just riff off it. You might surf on its surface.

So what I am talking about today is turning. When you see a revolution on the streets of Paris, whether in 1789 or today, that is turning. And then comes the righting of the turning. Think of a wheel. The wheel is turning, with a Tr- in it, the consonantal pair. When it stops turning, it is righted. You have a wheelwright who fixes it. The wheel was turning, then it was broken. There is a riot, perhaps, or an insurrection. Then someone rights it. The wheelwright rights the wheel.

So you create the chaos, which is the turning. Then you purport to save it, to solve it, which is the righting. The riot is the turning. The strong man who says I will lock every rioter up, or indeed the strong woman leader who says it, I will lock the far left up, that is the righting.

And because the hand that offers the righting was behind the turning, the righting is his to offer. Think of a wheelwright who plants stones or nails on the road. Think of running a business that fixes tyres. You guarantee yourself plenty of custom by putting nails on the street. The hand that offers the righting was behind the turning, and he is ready for it, because he planned it.

The damsel in distress

The oldest shape of the trick is the damsel in distress. France is in distress. Europe is in distress. russian Disinfolklorists love the motif, and I have written about it often. The hero needs a damsel. If there is no damsel in distress, well, no bother. You distress one. Then you ride in.

America was great. You say it is not great. You convince people it is not great. In fact you make it ungreat. You degrade America. You distress America, and then you say you are going to save it.

There is an abhorrent cultural meme I have spoken about before, the men who call themselves pick-up artists. They nag their victims. Your nose is a bit too big. Wow, I am surprised you ever had a girlfriend, because you are pretty ugly. Then they use that vulnerability to hook the person. That is the micro level.

On the macro level we are not used to this. We are not used to it in geopolitics. We are not used to it in politics. We are not used to people arranging riots like the January 6th insurrection and then riding in to supposedly fix it. We are not used to countries carpet bombing, let us say, Syria.

Imagine a country like russia, which was having problems in Ukraine in the summer of 2015. It decides to carpet bomb Syria, which it starts doing in September 2015. That provokes millions of migrants, because nobody wants to die. The migrants come into Europe. They cause political chaos. And the people who ride to the rescue are PiS in Poland and Orbán in Hungary. Germany had a lot of problems. Merkel invited them in, legalised a million migrants and more or less absorbed them. Now we have the AfD, supported by russia, riding high in the polls.

You cause the distress, then you purport to solve it. You cause the distress, then you sponsor political movements like the National Rally, you offer them massive loans, and then you purport to solve it. The same trick in Reform. It is a routine.

A mantra for the moment

The movement I want to bring into our minds is turning, then the straightening. I am going to keep saying it. Turning, then righting. I want to embed it, so that when our minds are being turned by someone, in real time, we recall this little mantra. Turning, righting.

I am also going to show you how, in the letters themselves, there is both a sound and a meaning. That is what I mean by a sound-meaning bundle. It can help us understand precisely what is going on when someone in our private life, on the micro scale, is turning us. Or when a thought inside our own minds is turning us. And then we can carry it all the way from the micro to the macro, to the streets of Paris, to US politics, to what is going on between the United States and Iran and Israel and the world. Everything seems to be turning upside down. So who is going to do the righting? And then you have these political right movements, far right movements, which say, oh, we will lock up all the rioters. We will fix it.

Keep this in mind while I talk. Turning, then righting. The wheel is turning. That wheel has been the metaphor of Indo-European cultures for four to six thousand years. Then the righting. This is exactly what we see in our political right.

I am not describing this because it is clever to have noticed it. I am describing it because it is a mnemonic. It helps us remember, in the moment when someone is turning us, that we need to be righted. We have to right ourselves. We have to think, how can I right myself in this moment of maybe they are right? Maybe I will just vote for MAGA and it will help. Maybe I will just vote for AfD. They seem to offer a simple solution. They are going to solve the migrant problem. They are negative about the government, and I have plenty to complain about in my own life. So maybe they are just right. Ah sure, I will give them a vote. That is the righting. And then they call themselves the Right. They self-declare. I am right wing. And you think, God, that sounds right.

So what is going on with the sounds? In turning there is Tr-, the consonantal skeleton. Its reversal is in righting, right, Rt-. Tr- and then Rt-. Keep those two words in mind. Turning, right. Say them a few times in that order. The wheel turning, and then righted. By the end of this you will not be able to watch a riot on the evening news without hearing them.

Think of the conservative voter

You think to yourself, I am quite conservative. I am a traditionalist. I do not really like change. I am going to vote for the Right. I feel right wing and I am unashamedly right wing.

These people come along and there is tumult. There is a lot of turning, a bit of a revolution, demonstrations. I do not like that. I just want to do my job and go home from work, and I want the righting of this. The MAGA people come along and say they are going to solve migration. I did not think much about migration before, but I read all these memes. Every time I turn on my computer, or turn on Fox News, I read terrible things. People from Haiti eating pets. My cat went missing. I want it to end. I want to be right. And here are people promising to make it right. This guy Trump turns my mind. He is turning around in my mind. But he promises to make it right. So I fall for it. I fall into it. I do not know what to think. My mind is turning.

Notice the two sounds. Turning, Tr-. Its reversal, Rt-. Turning, right.

What a sound-meaning bundle is

The sound is Tr- and Rt-. But a meaning travels with those sounds. Underneath the words you and I speak there are families of sound that carry a meaning with them. Nobody teaches us these families. We never even notice them. They behave lawfully all the same. And they can now be measured.

The first one I found is the M-N- sound. It is in Mana, mind, moon, month, man, name, which is the reversal, N-M, and meaning. The same two consonants, in language after language, from Ireland to India, on the same cluster of ideas. In all of them is the idea of something shining through something else. The meaning of a word shines through the word. In a human there is something that marks it off from a stone. We call it the life force, or Mana, or energy, qi or ki. In the mind, the same idea. In the moon, the light shining through.

The dictionaries file those words, mind, moon, month, man, name, under four separate ancestors, and call the shared sound shape of M-N an accident. I had a hypothesis that maybe they emanate from one root. So I put it to a test. I used the NorthEuraLex database, a public one of 107 languages, organised by meaning and never by sound. That is what I mean by a sound-meaning bundle.

On it the M-N- sound keeps company with the field of mind, moon, month, name and meaning at a rate of 20.8 per cent. You look at the 107 languages. You look at all the words for mind, moon, measure, month, man, name and meaning. In the Indo-European subset, 20.8 per cent of them carry the M-N- sound. The rate for the language as a whole is 3.46 per cent. Choose any two consonants and any six fields of meaning, and the average is 3.46 per cent. So a word on the field of mind and measure and moon and meaning is eight times more likely to carry the M-N- sound than a word taken at random. The chance of that being a coincidence is one in a number with sixty-six digits after it. The frame came first of 182 frames tested.

That work is the project I call Reversion to the Moon. I use Mana, the idea of energy inside memes, to distinguish positive from negative trolling. So it feeds into this project, and it is where the method was built. The moon, mēnōt, the word the proto-Indo-Europeans used for it, and what I call the moon-based metaphor, light shining through the moon, is my hypothesis about why the first Indo-Europeans embedded the bundle. By chance at first, and thereafter by convention.

By sound-meaning bundle, then, I mean not just the sound but the meaning our ordinary language attaches to it today. Right, for instance, is in every Indo-European language, and it goes back some six thousand years to the steppe by the Dnipro, from where all of our languages descend.

What I am talking about is not magical. It may sound a bit magical, a bit weird. It is mechanical. It just has not been noticed before. And it is not only the noticing I am drawing your attention to. It is how useful it can be when you feel your mind turning and you feel the desire to right it. When you are in a state of chaos. Maybe there is chaos in your family. Someone is not happy. Something is going wrong and you want to right it.

Look around at geopolitics, at Ukraine, at Donald, at Netanyahu, at Iran, wherever you live. You feel the turning and you want to right it. What I can offer you is this little mantra. It helps you see how certain people hack certain sound-meaning bundles to make you think they will make things right, when sadly they are the ones causing the problem. We all have met people like that. Chaos merchants. They cause the issues all the time, and one day you wake up and realise, my God, my life was so simple before I met this person. Now it is so complicated. I need to protect myself and get out of this. Perhaps that is how a lot of people feel in the political world. We need a means of seeing, in real time, when someone is doing the turning and when we need to be righting.

So the second sound-meaning bundle is the one for today. Its two halves are the two words I asked you to keep in mind. Turning, and right.

Where I started: the troll

Let us start with Tr-, the Tr- in turning. And let us start with the troll, because that is where I started.

In December 2018 I was a diplomat in eastern Ukraine. Part of my job was reading about russian influence operations and trying to understand them. Were they turning? Were they responsible for the chaos I saw around me, for the demonstrations I was sent to monitor as a peacekeeping monitor in eastern Ukraine? Or were these organic? Is this turning an organic turning, which needs no righting, or is it artificial?

In December 2018 I was reading about a russian influence operation, the social media campaign russia ran to get Donald elected in 2016. The word I kept coming back to was troll. I had not really heard it. It was not on my radar. I did not spend much time in computer culture then. I had cancelled all my social media to work in eastern Ukraine, so I could not be trolled. I became fascinated by this word troll, and trolling, because I kept seeing it everywhere. And then that sound in Donald’s name as well. Trump, troll, troll, Trump.

The received story about trolling, which I have told before, is a fishing metaphor, a baited line trailed behind a boat, crossed with a Norse monster under a bridge. As many of you know, I worked in eastern Ukraine on the Donets River, at Stanytsia Luhanska. Incidentally, there are rumours that Ukraine has gone east of the Donets, around Kreminna. If that turns out to be true, and there is a lot of operational secrecy, it would be amazing, not least because I lived all around there between 2015 and 2018. But I digress.

I went to the press archive instead of the dictionaries, because the dictionaries did not help me understand what troll and trolling were being used to signify. I read 64,000 uses of troll and trolling, in the Dow Jones Factiva database, to see what people actually did with the word. What came back was not a fishing metaphor. It was turning. The troll turns an audience. The troll spins a room. The troll works a crowd around. A nice coincidence. Troll is Tr-. They turn you.

Decoding Trolls, my nom de plume, or nom de guerre, the name I write under, emanates from that moment. I try to do what it says on the tin. And I registered Positive Trolling and Positive Trolls as a trademark in the European Union in February 2020. That gives you an idea of how strongly I believed in it and how much I researched it. Here we are six years later, still talking about it.

The troll turns an audience. The troll spins a room. The troll works a crowd around. Having looked at all those uses, the definition of trolling I carried forward was emotion-moving activity. Three ideas of movement, of turning. Emotion has movement in it. Moving. Activity, of body, speech or mind. Then I use the Code of Positive Trolls, six elements, to determine whether an activity is positive trolling, negative trolling, or neutral. And the clue is in neutral. The Tr- sound means movement. Turning, righting, Tr- and its reversal Rt-. Neutral is no movement. These meanings are embedded in the words we use in ordinary language. That is a good mnemonic, I find.

Lewis’s footnote of 1844

I was still trying to grasp what it was. I knew nothing about etymology. So I started looking through other databases at old texts for the words troll and trolling. I found George Cornewall Lewis, a 19th century figure, writing in a magazine with the odd title The Classical Museum, in January 1844. In a footnote on the verb to tirl.

You see, I was looking back, trying to work out what was going on with this Tr- sound. Travel, trans, translate, transport, train, tram. It is involved in movement all the time. These two consonants bundled, Tr-. And Lewis states it flatly in that footnote and goes no further. “To troll means to turn or roll.”

By 2020 I had the chain written out in a notebook. Pierce, trowel, drill, twirl, spiral, turn around, hole, wander, roll, control, baiting, trolling, thrill, enthralled, trill, troll. Words whose meanings were somehow connected, and whose sounds were connected too. Even in drill you have the well-noted change from T to D. It was not clear to me then how thrill and enthralled belonged. But they are about being turned inside your mind. You are thrilled by something. You are turned. You are not straight. You are not neutral. You are turned.

The database answers: turning

In 2026 I was still on this question. But in 2026 I had access to machines I did not have in 2020. I put the question to a machine with no field imposed on it. I took the 1,016 concepts in the NorthEuraLex database and asked which concepts the R sound leans on.

I had tried loads of experiments on that database and no interesting pattern came out. But I had this strong intuition that something was going on with Tr-. Trump, troll, trolling, rolling. I had tried Rt- and Tr- and all of that. Then I pared it down to the R sound alone, the one consonant. And the database answered with one voice. Cross, circle, round, revolve, spin, stir, tremble, stroke, rub, current, door, gate.

It was not about rule. I had started with trolling and then gone to right, and ṛta and truth and order, and the Right, the political right, right wing authoritarian followers, all this work on authoritarianism and territorial integrity. The Rt- sound is in so many of those words. Even in the word order, Rd- is a hard stop after the R which can become a T. The D swaps with the T in sound shifts over time. Donald Trump’s ancestors were Drumpf. So I had assumed the meaning would be about straightness. But no. It was about turning.

Because I had done the work in 2020, I knew at once. Whoa, this is amazing. This man Lewis was writing about uses in old Scots, to tirl, to twirl the door latch. That is what he was really writing about, and he left a footnote. Troll means to turn or roll. And in Shakespeare there is troll the bowl to me. You pass the bowl, you move it on to someone else. It is in quite a few Elizabethan texts. So you have that movement in English as it evolves out of Old English, which is basically German. But do not tell the English that.

The test was built on that answer. Once I had the relationship between Tr- and turning, I had looked at 1,016 concepts to see which had an R sound leaning on them. Notice the R in cross, circle, round, revolve, stir, tremble, stroke, rub, current, door. Then I ran a test to see whether it was a coincidence.

On the turning field, 33.5 per cent of the words carried the sound, against 13.6 per cent everywhere else. Remember the M-N- test. M-N- was on its pre-registered field at 20.8 per cent, and in the language as a whole at 3.46 per cent. Here, on the turning words, the R sound sits in 33.5 per cent against 13.6 per cent. A turning word is more than three times as likely to carry it as an ordinary word. The chance of that by coincidence is one in a thousand million, and I can be precise about that, using the Fisher exact test. Three hundred random fields were drawn to match it, and none of them reached it. Inside Indo-European the turning field resolves into seven roots that the etymologists keep apart, and every one of them has an R in it. One of them is Lewis’s old root, still alive in the French tourner, to turn.

The floor: the turning R is human

Then came the surprise. Run the same test family by family. Indo-European is only one of many language families. And the turning R turns up elsewhere. It is not just ours. Mongolic carries it at eleven times the odds. Uralic, the family of Finnish and Hungarian, at six. Turkic at nearly six. Indo-European is among the weakest of the seven families that carry it. And it is in the Americas, in Amazonian languages no steppe cart could ever have reached. Notice the Rt- in cart. There it runs at about twice the odds, with no Spanish or Portuguese loan among the carriers. Tacana kere-kere, to stir. Waurá weri-weri, to circle.

This is what I call the Floor. The turning R is human. It belongs to all of us. A few languages do not have the relationship, but most do. Human mouths, again and again and independently, put the rolling sound on the rolling things. It sits under almost every language family at twice the odds of chance. Some families decline it altogether. I keep a standing record of every test I have run, registered on Zenodo. That is not really the point today.

Above this floor, where R is tied to turning in almost every family at about twice chance, there is a second layer. This one has a date and a place. It belongs to us Indo-Europeans. If you can listen to this in an Indo-European language, even if it is not your first, I am including you in the us.

The cart, the chariot and the Yamna

Mongolic at eleven and Uralic at six are not floor values. They tower over it. And the geography of the towering is the range of the cart.

It is worth adding this here. All living Indo-European languages emanate from one small community. The latest archaeogenetic evidence, the Nikitin paper in Nature of February 2025, establishes that they came from one small community of Yamna, based around Mykhailivka village in Kherson Oblast, on the right bank of the Dnipro. Search my Substack for Nikitin and you will find the references. Those languages spread from there to Ireland and to India. That is an empirical fact. We all speak Indo-European languages, traditionally, in the area I call, in my other project, Manuland.

One of the models of how this empirically verifiable fact arose is this. The Yamna were not necessarily the first humans to invent the wheel and put it on a cart. Notice the Rt- in cart. They evolved the cart into a chariot. Rt- again. And they used the chariot to wage war, very efficiently. One of the greats of Indo-European archaeology, Kristian Kristiansen, talks about chiefly services. If you led a clan somewhere between Ireland and India, and above all on the steppe, and you could get your hands on a cart, you could move further than your neighbour. When the chariot was invented, you could go much further, widen your kingdom and beat others.

To do that you needed a whole bundle of chiefly services. People who could make wheels and spokes, wheelwrights. Blacksmiths. Weapons, at first stone, then copper, then bronze. Techniques. Just as today Ukraine is innovating in drone warfare, with something like 180 or 190 modalities of drone for different purposes. Ukraine’s recent advances in the Vivaldi operation, now just finished, used what they call Baba Yaga drones to drop land drones carrying weaponry behind russian lines, so that when Ukrainian soldiers arrived they were not exhausted from carrying thirty kilos of ammunition. Everything was already there, and they had transport, dropped by drone. That is the same kind of innovation in warfare as the chariot was. For the Romans, for the Mitanni, in India, where people were buried with them.

So you see how important the wheel is in the spread of Indo-European languages. When I try to establish in your mind how important this bundle of turning and right is, I am not picking it out by accident. It did not arise by accident. It is deeply embedded in the language. The wheel-word itself is Rt-. Sanskrit ratha, the chariot. Latin rota. Lithuanian ratas. Old Irish roth. I went to school in Rathgar, near Rathmines, near Rathfarnham. There are thousands of place names with rath in Ireland, meaning a circle, a circular fort. German Rad. The Verkhovna Rada, the parliament of Ukraine. Rada, round.

Our ancestors spread the Indo-European languages from Kherson to India and to Ireland on carts and chariots. The technology carried the turning sound in its own mouth. They were not talking about revolutions or movement politique. They were talking about wheels turning, very practically. Notice the Rt- in cart and in chariot. And what do their wheels do? They turn. Tr-. Rt- is straight, and its reversal Tr- turns.

The steppe took a humble human bias and institutionalised it. It hitched the turning sound to the wheel, to the office of the charioteer who became the king, and to the rite of inauguration of kings. We have records of it in the Irish mythological record and in India. The inauguration rite for the monarch was to ride a horse straight along a racecourse, bounded by what became the stupa in Buddhism. That drove the whole of northern Eurasia far above the floor of twice the global rate. That is the amplification of what is a floor for humanity.

Why Rt- and not something else? I still subscribe to de Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics. At the moment of foundation the sign and the signified are arbitrary. Right could have been Br- or Bt- or Bf-, and then we would be talking about the political Bt- and not the political right. But once a bundle is established arbitrarily, then by convention it holds. I have spotted only a few of these, and researched a few. There are probably others I have not spotted. There may not be that many. We can reconstruct only about a thousand words of the first Indo-European language, spoken by the Yamna in Kherson Oblast.

The Hittites left before the wheel

The Hittites are the earliest attested Indo-Europeans, and they do not come from Kherson. They left the Indo-European community around 4000 BCE, before the wheel was properly invented and before it was mainstreamed into the economy. That is the big thing the Yamna did. They were not necessarily the first to domesticate the horse. They were the first to mainstream it, with the cart and the wheel, as the main means of transport. Which you need if you are going to spread a language between Ireland and India. And you get first mover advantage. Notice how movement is embedded in our language. Turning is fundamental, and if two consonants become associated with movement, it is natural that they are amplified.

The Hittites left before the wheel, which arrives around 3500 BCE, and long before the first chariots we have, around 2100 BCE in the Sintashta culture in today’s Kazakhstan, where the Yamna’s descendants ended up. By then the Hittites were in Anatolia. I visited the site at Kaneš where they emanate from. At the same time the descendants of the Yamna of Mykhailivka were in Kazakhstan, in the Sintashta culture, cooking up what would become Vedic, Sanskrit, the Vedic religion and the Rig Veda. By 2100 BCE the Hittites had been in Anatolia for almost two thousand years. Their word for wheel is hurki. It has the R, and it comes from a root meaning to turn. It has no trace of ratha, rota, the Rt- wheel-word. The amplification was born on the steppe after the Anatolians had gone.

That is the turning word, and where it comes from.

Right: not rule but straightness

Now the other word. Right. Your mind is turned by strange goings-on in politics, by a revolution, by an insurrection, and you want someone to right it, like the wheelwright. You want someone to make it straight. Note the Rt- in straight. You want the truth to reign. Note the Rt- in truth.

For years I had assumed the R sound meant rule, or straightness. It so obviously does in right, rule, reign, royal, regime, Reich, rich and writ. That is all governance vocabulary. It does in the Vedic ṛta, the cosmic order of things in the oldest Indian hymns. When I was in India I looked through vocabulary texts for Vedic, which is earlier than Sanskrit, to see whether I could find any ṛta sounds, and I found it, ṛta, the cosmic order. Order, right. It does in ancient Iranian Avestan too, arta, the same word in the oldest Iranian scriptures.

And every test I built on that assumption, on everyday words, failed. On ordinary vocabulary the sound carries rightness at a third of the odds of a random word. Rank 26 of 34. The field lived somewhere else. It meant something else. The idea of Rt- as rightness was itself built on some other meaning system, and I almost despaired of finding it. But right and rightness and the far right are so present in our vocabulary, almost everywhere, that it kept reminding me something was going on, and I wanted to find out what.

I realised that it lived in a layer on top of the floor. The floor is the rest of the world, where R goes with movement at twice the odds. The layer is ours, Indo-European. Run the straight, right, correct, true and rule field through the same cross-family test on the 107 languages, and the picture turns over. Indo-European carries it at 2.5 times the odds. Uralic comes in below chance. Mongolic comes in below chance. A second worldwide database I found holds 320 languages. On it the straight-and-crooked field loads on the R sound in Indo-European at four times the odds. The chance of that by coincidence is one in a hundred thousand million. It loads on no other language group on earth.

That was a big disappointment to me, until I realised, wow, that is actually a pretty amazing discovery. Here is the whole bundle in two sentences. The turning R is human. The straightness R is ours. Tr- is human. Rt- is ours.

The straight became the right

What our family did, in a particular window after the Anatolians left to become the Hittites, was take the turn-and-straight axis and moralise it. The straight, which is the unturned, became the right, the true and the lawful. Droit in French, Dr-. Latin rectus. Gothic raihts. Avestan rāsta. Ṛta, the order that fits together. The rex, the king. Old Irish rí.

In the reading of the great French linguist Émile Benveniste, the rex is less the sovereign than the one who traces the straight line. The line he traces is also what is right. Think of a straight rod. Think of the pictures of President Zelenskyy at his inauguration in the Verkhovna Rada. He bears a mace, a long rod, in his right hand. When the king of England was inaugurated a year or two ago, he too held a rod in his right hand. This is very deep Indo-European governance symbolism, vocabulary, meaning and sound. Think of a furrow traced in a straight line across a field. A border. Notice the Rd-, the hard D instead of the T by sound shift, in border.

That is what right meant to the people who gave us the word. And the turned became the crooked, the twisted, the deceiver. The druj.

Hittite is the oldest attested Indo-European language. We have about 21,000 documents from between 1900 and 1800 BCE, the earliest attestation of Indo-European. Three or four hundred years later the descendants of the people who wrote them became the first Indo-European empire, one of the three great empires of antiquity alongside Egypt and Babylon. We were there. We Indo-Europeans were there.

And the Hittites prove the rule by doing without it. This was before the wheel, before the chariot. They had no metaphor to associate with the sounds and the idea of rightness. The Hittite words for rightness, āra, proper, and handant-, just, come from a root meaning to fit. Appropriate, fit. A different thing from turning and straightness. If you have read Jane Austen’s great novel Mansfield Park, that is about appropriateness, propriety, what is fit and proper, which is still part of a test in English law. In the Hittite mind right was fittingness. It had nothing to do with straightness at all. Two branches of one Indo-European family, two different ideas of what right is. In Hittite it is fitness. In the ancestor of all living Indo-European languages, and in all of them, right is straightness. Hittite moralised the fit. The rest of us moralised the straight. No other language family does this.

An inherited prejudice

This is the thing to hold onto. Straight equals right is not a fact about the world. It is an inherited prejudice. An inherited sound-meaning bundle, between the sound Rt- and straightness and rightness and truth, and ṛta, the cosmic order. Six thousand years old, carried in the language you and I speak and hear and think through. A prejudice that old does its persuading by itself.

It is everywhere around us, just as the wheel, its turning and the straightness of the wheelwright’s work were everywhere in the lives of the first Indo-Europeans. For us the association of straightness and rightness is everywhere. And until I had the instruments to run these tests, it was very hard, perhaps impossible, to see it.

So whoever speaks the straight words, right, rule, law, droit, order, and notice the Rd- again, is heard as the lawful one before anyone thinks to check. I am right. I am conservative. I am a traditionalist. I believe in the law. Trust me. I will make things straight.

This is hardwired, not just into our language but into meanings at a level deeper than almost anything else in it, and into the very reason there are so many Indo-European speakers. Over half the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language as their first language. There have probably been thousands of languages in human history. One family has risen above all the rest, as we can empirically adjudicate, and we have a few theories about why. The cart, the wheel, the chariot, the chiefly services, the raths, the round forts, roundness, are a core part of it. So it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that when we notice the Tr- and Rt- sounds and test them statistically, and find them three times more likely to be tied to the same meanings than other consonantal bundles, it is because of the mechanism by which ours spread.

As I keep saying, this is not magic. I am elucidating something that will help us understand, and right, what is going on in our communities now.

The two halves: the reversal principle

The two halves belong to each other. With the M-N- sound I found that a consonant order, M-N, and its mirror, N-M, carry two halves of one meaning between them. M-N holds the mind, the vessel of thought. N-M, as in nāma in India and nomen in Latin, a name, is the act that fixes it. The signifier is the name. What is signified is the mind. I call it the reversal principle.

The R band works the same way. Rt- is the straight line, Rt- in line. Tr- is its reversal, the turn. A wheel moving, then stopping, buckled, then straightened. You can see the two halves fastened together inside single words. Say truth slowly. Truth Social. The Tr- at the front is a mask. Read from the second letter inward and there it is, R-U-T, the straight line sitting inside the word the whole time. Say straight. Inside it is the same Rt- skeleton. The word for the unturned carries the sound of the turn at its front and the sound of the right at its heart. Notice Rt- in heart too.

There is a well documented shift between Tr- and Dr- between English and German, and it runs both ways. German Traum is our dream. German trinken is our drink. So the Tr- family and the Dr- family are one family wearing two spellings. Dream, drama, drug, trauma, trick, treason, betray. Donald’s own ancestors carried the surname Drumpf, as his biographers record, before it settled on Trump.

Trauma, dream, trick, Trump

Follow one of those words down. Trauma is the Greek word for a wound. The dictionaries file it under a root that Pokorny, the standard dictionary of our family’s roots, glosses as rubbing, boring, turning. Pierce, drill, bore, turn. That is Lewis’s chain of 1844, and it is one of the seven turning roots my test of July 2026 counted. Dream, by the derivation Kluge’s German etymological dictionary prefers, is Trugbild, a deceiving picture, from the root of trügen, to deceive. Trick the dictionaries send to the Old French trichier, to cheat, and stop there. It sits on the same sound as true all the same.

These past few weeks people have been sending around the word trumpery, which means deception. When I saw that, I thought, wow, maybe people are interested in all this. It did not surprise me. This is not magic. It is cause and effect and convention, very deep, and related to the wheel, the turning and the righting. In the mind of a living speaker nobody sorts trick, trauma, dream and treason into four etymologies. The sound holds them together whether we notice or not.

Darius at Behistun: the lie

The ancients did notice. I am not the first human to notice these patterns. In the oldest Iranian scriptures arta, the order and the truth, has one named enemy. Druj, the lie. Darius the Great, who founded the Achaemenid Empire, M-N in Achaemenid, cut an inscription into the cliff at Behistun around 520 BCE. He explains every rebellion in his empire with one word. The Lie, drauga, made them rebellious. He would have explained January 6th the same way.

Donald tells lies. He provokes the rebellion. Then he purports to solve it. The National Rally in France pretend to be right while they argue that the left is sinister. The left provoke the riot, which the right then exploit. Some people call it the horseshoe. And russia supports both sides, because they want the riot, so that the right can claim the centre by saying, I am going to right this tyranny.

The lie, in Darius’s inscription, is the attitude of rebels and usurpers. Rt- against Dr-, the straight against the turned. See how important it is. Look at Jack Smith’s indictment, approved by a grand jury, which sets out the lies Donald told about January 6th, from the claim in November 2020 that the election was stolen, right up to and past the tweet that said, be there, it will be wild. And then, once he was back in power, the January 6th insurrectionists pardoned and brought into ICE. The usurpers tried to make the liars, the people who rebelled on the strength of a lie, the Right.

These are the modern costume of a very old struggle, carved in rock at Behistun. The Lie made them rebellious. The lie is the attitude of rebels and usurpers. That is Donald. He is a rebel and a usurper, he speaks druj, and the clue is in his name. Tr-. Rt- against Dr-. Then he usurps the Right, gets elected rightfully or wrongfully, and drives home the idea that the January 6ers were the ones who were right, and that we who opposed the insurrection are the lie.

That is the turning and the righting, the movement these two words describe, and they are part of our everyday political vocabulary. Understanding it helps us understand, in real time, exactly what is going on. When, for instance, the head of the FBI visits Moscow. He came to Donald’s notice, as I understand it, through the production of the January 6th Choir, the insurrectionists who were rightfully imprisoned for sedition and other crimes against the United States, which Donald then played a part in. And Donald was convinced. This is the man I need, to turn the FBI. Not to make it the instrument of straightness in our culture. To turn it into a turning instrument, which turns the lie into rightness.

That is what Donald is doing. In the second part, the riots in France, the russian hand, and the usurpation of Right.

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