Global mis-representations of the drivers and nature of youth protest, political culture, and "alienation" drive a wide array of poor analysis and misconceived interventions, but with discernable patterns. One common theme of these mischaracterizations in the Maghreb is analysis by way of asserting ideological absence or confusion or impurity, strategic lacunae and immaturity, and grafting projections of outside realities both from other MENA countries and from other faraway spaces of conflict onto unfamiliar or unintelligible terrain. This analysis by projection onto perceived absence, or lack, this production of intellectual simulacrum, has led since the Arab spring to a vast output of disciplined and academic-disciplinarily-responsive scholarship that filters and distorts youth protest and political cultural production in predictable ways that render the unfamiliar falsely familiar and the familiar falsely unfamiliar. So, for example, unfamiliar complex, historically grounded political and cultural grievances are routinely distorted, mischaracterized, and reduced to present-focused socio-economic demands. Conversely, familiar citizen- and justice-oriented democratic and inclusive discourses are routinely distorted and mischaracterized as the intellectual meanderings of the marginalized unemployed or Weberianally alienated youth. Or worse, youth movements and demands dangerous by association with Islamis content or Islamism, or, conversely dangerous by association with secularism and the hegemonic West. Or dangerous by association with socialism, or neoliberalism, or other imposed interpretive frames. Observers, analysts, and project designers of youth interventions then project from their own national and institutional experiences, ideologies, and orientations onto local realities, that then are often pressured to contort themselves to fit these misguided and misplaced interventions. These might include unnecessary or illconceived vocational training or rights or civics education, or misplaced efforts categroized as preventing violent extremism or normative mainstreaming that produce youth trained for a local realities that do not exist as imagined. Based on structured and semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with over 8000 young Libyans, Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans and Mauritanians over 11 years spent in the five countries and another 24 years visiting them for shorter analytical and programmatic trips-- data analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively, as well as a large literature review of post-Arab spring analysis--this paper will reveal interconnected patterns of misinterpretation and failed youth intervention. The objective of such analysis is to overhaul and reinvent youth analysis and interventions in ways much better grounded in local self-representation, rigorous youth-informed and -guided needs analysis, and incorporation of the actual life narratives and lived experience of Maghreb youth.