The Sovereign Writes His Enemy a Letter

This week, the President of Ukraine did something a head of state almost never does. He sat down and wrote his enemy a letter — an open letter to Vladimir Putin, published in English on the official website, for the whole world and, more to the point, for all of Russia to read.

Here on Decoding Trolls — I’m Decoding Trolls, I work mainly online at disinfolklore.eu, and also disinfolklore.net, decodingtrolls.net, and powerofmana.net, which are three interwoven projects, but my main body of work is on disinfolklore.eu — I spend most of my time pulling apart the dark folklore the Kremlin pumps into the world. Tonight I want to do something I don’t do that often: I want to hold a piece of Infolklore up to the light. This letter is a near-perfect specimen of Infolklore, and it teaches us more about how the Code of Positive Trolls actually works than a month of theory. Let’s get our eyes in.

The Mocker Takes the Podium

I reference M’ockers on purpose here, because Mockers, like me, decided on her moniker before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and through all of her work each day on Volya Radio she mainstreams the act of the mocker. As I am programming my neural network algorithm, the Mocker and the mocking tone has become actually very engineering-relevant — because if you can detect the mocking tone, which frontier models can do, then you can distinguish Infolklore, from Disinfolklore which is never humorous but does mock, on the basis of the rightness of what it’s mocking. M’ockers on X, for instance, will always be mocking aspects of Russian society which are not right.

President Zelensky — as a lawyer, and as a comedian, and as an actor, as an honest actor. He is the most honest acting head of state there is in the world today, whereas Putler pretends he acts as sovereign on behalf of the siloviki and doesn’t admit that he is an actor — but he is an actor. President Zelensky, as all public figures do — they do act in a dramatic sense, but also in the sense of fulfilling their functions — there’s no hiding the fact that he is at heart an actor, an artist, and a true artist, and a great artist, perhaps one of the greatest artists ever, as we see with his career spanning Servant of the People and now taking care of global security.

The first thing the letter does is mock. Listen to the register. Ukraine’s long-range drones, he said, “paid a visit to the opening of your forum in St Petersburg.” “Paid a visit” — over a thousand kilometres, to crash the showpiece economic forum — and he calls it a social call.

Longtime listeners know the figure I mean: the Mocker, the positive troll who reads the enemy’s spell aloud, names it, and turns it inside out. The Russian propaganda machine spends fortunes staging a forum to project a serene, prosperous, unbothered Russia. One ironic sentence and a drone, and the stage set is punctured — by the artist, by the Comedian.

Mockery Welded to Verifiable Fact

Here’s the discipline, and this is the whole game. Mockery on its own is cheap. Grievance dressed up as wit is exactly what the other side does — that ressentiment-soaked sneering we decoded in Putin’s Astana press conference last week.

What makes this mockery Infolklore and not just noise is that it is welded to a verifiable fact. “We have video confirmation of every one of your losses,” he writes. These are not empty claims. The Mocker who earns his place doesn’t vent. He surfaces, frames, and outflanks — with the receipts.

“This War Is Your Personal Choice”

Then comes the move which I want you, and all of us, to tattoo on our brains. “Whatever you may say about NATO, geopolitics, or the Russian language, this war is your personal choice. A war without a real cause.”

Stop. That is the Counter Disinfolklore in a single breath. For 12 years the apparatus has wrapped this war in costume after costume — denazification, encirclement, protecting Russian speakers, defending traditional values — and President Zelensky declines every costume at once and names the naked act.

The cosy great-power deal cooked up in Alaska — Baked Alaska, anyone? — “Ukrainian and European issues are not decided in Anchorage.” Every time, he strips the mask and names the act.

Picking the Lock on the Tsar’s Channel

Now the part that makes the letter genuinely radical — and here’s a thought I owe to a conversation I had this week. I was on The Eastern Border podcast of Kristaps in Latvia on Saturday.

We did a two-and-a-half-hour session which was really fascinating and a really great conversation — I implore you to listen to it, and also listen to The Eastern Border; I look forward to his episodes every week. He did recently a really interesting one on food quality in Russia — he and his wife dug very deeply into the phytosanitary rules and the quality of food there. As we know from listening to Mockers talk about the butter, and the meat glue in the butter and suchlike — you should really avoid that stuff. But anyway, that’s an aside.

A ruler’s deepest power isn’t tanks. It’s the monopoly on speaking to his own people. The Tsar decides what Russians are told, what they’re allowed to want, who gets to define their interests. That channel — ruler to ruled — is supposed to be his and his alone. Putler’s alone. This letter picks the lock on that channel.

Read who it’s actually talking to. “They do not like our drones. They do not like gasoline shortages. They do not like your endless war.” That’s not addressed to Putler. That’s addressed over his head, to Russians — telling them what they want, what their ruler costs them, and that “the majority of Russians would respond positively to peace. And you know it.” A foreign president standing in the Kremlin’s own living room, talking past the host to the family. That’s why this is more than just a clever letter. It’s a usurpation. Not a march on Moscow — a letter that quietly annexes the one thing a Tsar can’t afford to lose: the trust of the people he claims to speak for.

Wounding the Prideful Sovereign

It’s engineered to wound a very specific target. Think about who Putler has to be. He is cast, by the men who put him there, in the role of the prideful sovereign: serene, eternal, untouchable, the fake strongman who never tires. The whole performance runs on pride. So look where the letter aims. “Age is beginning to take its toll.” The mutiny: “June 23rd will mark another anniversary of Prigozhin’s mutiny, and silence will not erase this fact from history.”

“Your own officials, businessmen, propagandists look at you with obvious fatigue.”

Here he is piercing the heart of Abramovich — who, we subsequently found out, was in Kyiv. So now the Russist siloviki will be thinking Abramovich was moaning to President Zelensky, while they met, about the fatigue. When President Zelensky mentions the businessmen, he is driving a dagger right into the heart of the coalition that keeps this war going.

“The first ruler of Russia ever to go begging to Pyongyang.” President Zelensky mentions North Korea — which the Russists made a joke of until two years ago, when they started importing their men to try and liberate their own territory of Kursk. “Fully dependent, for the first time in Russian history, on Beijing.” These aren’t insults thrown out at random. They are purposive trolls, each one a needle into the armour of the performance, placed by someone who knows exactly how the prideful sovereign is wired. You don’t roil the state with these lines — you roil the actor playing the state.

Refusing Fake Virtue: Mana and Name in Sync

Here’s where a lot of pro-Ukrainian content fails the Code, and this letter doesn’t. It would have been easy to drape the whole thing in halo light. He doesn’t. “It is not as if we in Ukraine are concerned about the fate of Russian soldiers,” President Zelensky writes flatly. “But I do care about Ukrainians.” No pretence of caring about everyone. No fake universal compassion. He even tells you the brutal exchange ratio — one Ukrainian for five or six dead Russians — and says it still matters, because these are my people. That refusal to fake virtue is the tell of the real thing. Mana and name in sync. The letter says what it is: an adversary’s hand extended honestly, with the receipts on the table and concrete offers attached. A full ceasefire. An all-for-all prisoner exchange. The return of the stolen children. That’s not a propaganda artefact. That’s Infolklore.

Because I won’t sell you a fairy tale, one honest flag: this is a weapon. A beautifully made weapon, but a weapon all the same. It’s built to corner a man. The line “we can work towards that fatigue” sails close to the wind. The casualty numbers are Ukraine’s own, and they flatter Ukraine. But here is the difference that the Code of Positive Trolls is built to catch: every one of those claims is falsifiable. You can check a drone strike. You can count losses. You can verify a returned child. That is the opposite of Disinfolklore.

So that’s the lesson. The same tool — mockery — that the Kremlin uses to poison, this letter uses to heal: to surface a lie, name it, and outflank it. Same instrument, opposite hands. The Code is what tells them apart. And the deepest move of all wasn’t a drone or a number. It was a man standing in his enemy’s house, turning to his enemy’s own people and saying: I think you want peace, and I think you know it. And he is the man who can deliver them peace. That’s not just answering propaganda. That’s picking the lock on the throne. Glory to the truth-tellers.

Putler’s Reply: The Man Who Won’t Say the Name

So I wanted to talk then about Putler’s response. Obviously, they found it a bit rude. I find it a bit rude when they plant mines between the dead body of a 21-year-old woman and her child in Bucha, so that the Ukrainian deminers will blow themselves up while burying these poor victims. That’s what I found rude. But Putler and Lavrov found President Zelensky’s letter rude.

I’ve just pulled apart the open letter. Well — the man on the throne’s answer, on Russia’s TV. Putler replied, and his reply is a gift, because it teaches the other half of the lesson. If the letter showed you what Inolklore looks like at the top of the world, the answer shows you how the Disinfolklore comes back at it. And it lets something slip — because by the end of this, I want to convince you of one thing: that letter was never really for Putler. Let’s get our eye in.

The first thing to notice about Putler’s reply is who he refuses to name. Zelensky is never President Zelensky. He’s “the author of the letter,” this so-called “colleague.” At one point — and this is almost too on-the-nose — “the authors of this letter,” “fans of the epistolary genre.” A head of state reduced to a man who writes letters. That’s not pettiness. That’s an archetype going to work — Tool 1. Putler is performing the role he’s been cast in: the Tsar. And the one thing a Tsar cannot do is negotiate with a pretender as an equal. So he doesn’t. He won’t dignify the name.

Then watch him perform the magnanimity — Tool 6, generosity, in its counterfeit form. “I’ve never refused a meeting,” he says. Generous, regal — except he spends the rest of the answer explaining why he won’t actually meet. So we can adjudicate this claim. Performed generosity with the substance withheld. That gap between the gracious words and the closed door is itself a tell.

He turns from the letter to the troops. “It is necessary to address not the authors of this letter, but our fighters on the line of contact. Comrade soldiers and sailors, the whole country is proud of you. Work, brothers.” The father of the nation, turning to his children. Note what just happened. The answer to a peace letter is to address the army. The reply to “let’s stop” is “keep going, lads.”

Tool 7 and the Starobilsk Claim: Accusation in a Mirror

Now Tool 7, the big one — right, ethical discipline. We ask: is it true? Here’s the most delicate moment in the whole episode, and I’m going to handle it carefully. Putler says that on May 22, Ukrainian troops hit a college dormitory in Luhansk, in Starobilsk — which we’ve talked about for the last few weeks — and killed children. With his own words: “not a single military facility nearby.”

I’m not going to tell you what happened. I’m not going to tell you it didn’t. I don’t know, and neither do you, and the honest move is to say so. What I can read is what the claim is for. Look at how he uses it: “They ask for a meeting and commit such horrific crimes as the murder of children.” The atrocity isn’t offered as news. It’s offered as the reason he can’t meet. And the specific shape of it — child-killing, pinned on the other side — is the oldest move in the Kremlin book. We have a name for it on this show: accusation in a mirror. You take the crime your own machine stands credibly accused of — and Russia is the side with international warrants out for taking Ukrainian children out of Ukraine, forcibly transferring them — and you hold it up like a mirror to the enemy. The structure is the tell, whatever the facts of that one night in Starobilsk turn out to be.

And he does the mirror twice. He lectures President Zelensky about elections. “If you hold on to power outside the Constitution, that’s a power grab, a criminal offence. Now, hold elections, rule constitutionally.” Fine principle. I won’t call a true principle a lie. But listen to who’s saying it. A man 25 years in power, who has never been legitimately elected, who murdered a million Chechens in order to secure enough mana to brainwash Russians into believing him to be their sovereign, who has built the entire constitution around himself — lecturing the leader of an invaded country who got 74 percent of the vote. President Zelensky won an unprecedented every district in Ukraine except for one near Lviv. This was thought to be impossible — for a native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainian to win every district in Ukraine. And he’s being lectured to by this autocrat who has never put himself forward for election, and who — I was reminded by Kristaps on The Eastern Border — has never even debated anyone. Not once, in the entire time since he emerged from the KGB, has he debated someone publicly. And he has the chutzpah to lecture the leader of an invaded country whose elections are suspended because of the invasion he launched. The principle is clean. The mirror is the trick.

The Minsk Splice: True Premise, Poisoned Conclusion

One more move before the turn, because it’s a beautiful specimen. Putler says the Minsk agreements — that I spent seven years in eastern Ukraine trying to make work — were really only about buying time to rearm Ukraine. And he’s got the receipts, he says. Western leaders did, after the fact, admit something like that. “So why do we need these agreements anyway?”

Watch the hands. He spends a true thing — a real, embarrassing Western admission — to buy your trust. And then, while you’re nodding, he splices on the part that doesn’t follow. This is the is-versus-ought: something happened, therefore we must kill all these Ukrainians. Which is in that very first foundational tweet that founded the North Atlantic Fella Organization, when that Russian ambassador in Vienna said: “You pronounced this nonsense, not me.” The serpent — the serpent adjudicating on NAFO memes, RIP, always to be remembered — characterising Russia’s excuse for entering Ukraine as: Ukrainians killed a few civilians, so we decided to go into Ukraine and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians. “You pronounce that nonsense, not me,” said the serpent, said the Rushist ambassador.

So while we’re nodding, he splices on the part that doesn’t follow: “therefore, no agreements ever.” The true fact is the mask. “Refuse all diplomacy” is the payload hiding behind it. A true premise carrying a poisoned conclusion. Once you can see the seam between the mask and the payload, you can’t unsee it. The Kremlin runs on that seam.

The Turn: The Letter Is Addressed to the Boardroom

And now the turn, because this is the thing I most want us to take away — it changes how we read both documents. Let’s go back to the letter. We said the letter talks past Putler to the Russist people. That’s true, but it’s not the whole truth, and a sharper read came up this week. Look again at exactly who inside the Russist power structure it is needling. “Your own officials, businessmen, propagandists look at you with obvious fatigue. We can work towards that fatigue,” said President Zelensky. And the cold, cold arithmetic — Ukraine’s own claim, but a checkable claim — of tens of thousands of Russist soldiers lost every month, every one of them photographed in their death.

Put those together, and the letter stops looking like a message to Putler at all. It looks like a message to the people around Putler — to the men who actually hold the strings. And the message is a deal. Your figurehead is an indicted war criminal who is bleeding you of 30,000 men a month, and the future, and the money to buy loyalty. Hand him over to The Hague, then we can talk about stopping that bleeding. That’s the lockpick. Not “Putler, please see reason.” It’s: gentlemen, surrender the patsy and the war can end. The letter is addressed to the boardroom, over the boss’s head.

Every needle aimed at Putler’s pride — the age, the mutiny of Prigozhin, the begging trip to Pyongyang, the dependence on Beijing — every one of those is doing double duty. It wounds the actor, and it advertises to the men behind him that the actor is damaged goods. And here’s why that read is so devastating: Putler’s own reply confirms the target. Listen to who’s actually running things in his answer. “My press secretary, Peskov, showed me the letter, slipped me this letter.” “Some businessman from our business circle gets invited to Kyiv. He goes, comes back.” And Putin’s role in his own diplomacy: “I can’t send you in any official capacity. That’s for specially trained people at the foreign ministry, the defence ministry. I can’t authorise you into anything.”

The Tsar — in the very speech where he insists he’s the Tsar — is a man being handed papers by his spokesperson and briefed by a businessman he can’t authorise to do anything. That’s Tool 12, reading the deep code under the meme. The throne is a costume.

And here’s the foundation defence — the part the apparatus’s own house philosophers won’t tell you. Dig into where these peoples actually come from, the real deep root, and you don’t find a Tsar there. This week, even a pro-war Russian military blogger — one tweet, second-hand, so weigh it as one straw in the wind — said he gets the impression the president is being sidelined, President Putler, with an artificial information bubble created around him. Read that again. They are starting to suspect he’s an actor being managed by the people around him. They’re arriving, from their side, at exactly what President Zelensky’s letter assumed from the other. Putler isn’t the seat of power. He’s the man cast to sit in it.

The Bubble Cracks: Simonyan’s Famine and the Oreshnik “Test”

If you want to watch that bubble crack in real time, here’s the moment from this week that did it for me. At the same St Petersburg Forum at which, in June 2022, Margarita Simonyan said, “oh, they’re saying in the offices that all our hope is in the famine” — and what they meant by that in Moscow is that there will be famine in Africa because we do not deliver grain to them, and millions of migrants will go into the European Union, and then the European Union will stop supporting Ukraine and will lift the sanctions on Russia, “because it’s impossible for us not to be friends.” Switching between the register of a five-year-old banging on about their emotional argument in the playground — because it’s impossible for us not to be friends.

At St Petersburg Forum 2026 — the one President Zelensky mocked, the one Ukraine’s drones paid a visit to — Putler explained the Oreshnik missile strikes. Now, for about a week, Russian channels had been roaring that one of these missiles vaporised a secret NATO command node hidden in some garages in Bila Tserkva. Big story. Huge. This week, Putler’s version: it was a test. “We struck where it was convenient to observe the results,” he said. The drones flew in afterwards so they could examine how the warheads were arranged. A test of how the pieces fell. No NATO node — just research.

Sit with that for a second. Two things. One: he just overwrote his own propaganda machine’s week-long story, to its face, without blinking. The NATO node simply evaporated. That is the artificial information bubble — a story with no author, where last week’s truth is quietly deleted to make room for this week’s. And two, the cold one: one of those test shots of the Oreshnik missile, by Putler’s own account, came down in Russia-occupied Donetsk. The very land he calls Russian, where his own soldiers stand. Remember “Work, brothers”? The father of the nation who turned to his troops and said “the whole country is proud of you” fired a missile into their ground to see how the blocks lay around, and called it a testing range. They were standing on it. That’s not a sovereign. That’s a man reading lines in a play whose script keeps getting rewritten, who doesn’t seem to feel the people beneath him. Either the war bloggers banging on about the NATO command node, or his own Russian soldiers fighting their genocidal war in Donetsk, who get an Oreshnik hit on them just as a test. Putler doesn’t feel the words.

I note that I owe a lot of this interpretation to Will — to Will Thiel’s immediate reaction to it, which was again a very solid performance from Will on Volya.

The Two Documents Through the 12 Tools

Let me do the thing which this show is for, really, and run both documents through the toolkit, quick, side by side, so you can feel the contrast — disinfolklore.eu, where I have the 12-tool way, the Disinfolklore Analytical Method.

Tool 1, the archetype: the letter is the mocker with the receipts. The reply is the cast Tsar with a mirror.

Tool 2, direction: both fired outward, but the letter aims at the man who can end it. The reply aims at the soldiers who’ll keep it going.

Tool 3, the mana, the energy under the words: peace and accountability versus keep fighting, dressed as dignity.

Tool 4, inner and outer realm switching: the letter walks into Russia’s inner room and talks to the family. The reply tries to slam the door and shove the guilt outward to Ukraine.

Tool 5, the trigger chain — the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman’s timeline of emotions: trigger, experience, reaction. It’s that space between experience and reaction, which we all have — the moment before we share the meme, before we rise to get angry or to repeat Russist Disinfolklore. When we experience that emotion, if we can remember that emotional manipulation gives us an opportunity to just hold off before we react. The reply engineers it openly: dead children, outrage, rally to the troops. “The audience will understand me, especially the Russian audience, because they like children.”

Tool 6, generosity: the honest adversary versus fake magnanimity.

Tool 7, is it true? The letter passes: falsifiable, lawful. The reply fails at the mirror, not at the procedure.

Tool 8, the archetypes carried in the energy: the honest extended hand versus the father of the nation, weaponised.

Tool 9, patience: the letter says the front line is where diplomacy begins — now. The reply weaponises patience: “a long-term historical perspective,” “let the experts work.” Patience is a stalling engine to Putler.

Tool 10, mindfulness — should I let this into my mind? The reply’s whole ask is: accept the Tsar frame. And the answer is no.

Tool 11, does it deepen or flatten? Is it insightful? The letter deepens: it names the cause and offers steps to get out of this mess. The reply flattens: one man’s refusal and a projection.

Tool 12, the deep code, the cryptotypic code: one is the mocker healing; the other is the Tsar costume over an empty throne. Twelve tools, one verdict each. The letter: Infolklore. The reply: Disinfolklore. Same instrument.

Holding Myself to the Same Code

And I’ll hold myself to the same Code I’m holding them to. I did not decide whether that dormitory in Starobilsk was hit. The “Putler’s just a costume” reading is a lens, not a proof. He is a sovereign acting inside a machine — a cast role, not a powerless puppet. And the one war blogger’s tweet is a straw in the wind, not a verdict.

So here’s where we land. The letter picks the lock on the throne — and this week we can say it better. The letter wasn’t a plea to the king. It was an offer slid under the door to the men who built the throne and cast the king. Give us the actor, and the killing can stop. And the king answered by insisting on television that he is no actor — in a speech where you can watch his spokesman hand him the script, hand him the papers. The same tool: mockery, a letter, a turn of phrase. Glory to the truth-tellers, and we’ll see them next time.

The Beast from the Abyss: Naming the Beast

So — the beast from the abyss. Naming the beast. This is Larysa Yakubova’s masterpiece. She is one of the greatest scholars of Russist and Russian totalitarianism, from Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences. The artefact under the knife in this episode is not a single meme, but the whole apparatus. Our guide through it is Larysa’s 2023 book, Ruscism: The Beast from the Abyss, published by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and written by the historian Larysa Yakubova while her country is under fire. Every line of hers here is taken from that book.

I want to begin with a small bit of method, because it’s the thing this whole series runs on, and all of my work runs on. There’s this historian in Kyiv called Larysa Yakubova. She’s not a folklorist and not a poet. She’s a professional historian of totalitarianism at her country’s National Academy of Sciences. Footnotes, archives, Hannah Arendt, the careful apparatus of the discipline. And in 2023 she published a 318-page scholarly book about the Russist state, and she gave it the title a folklorist would give it. She called Russia the Beast from the Abyss.

A serious historian reaching past the whole vocabulary of political science — authoritarianism, revanchism, hybrid regime — and taking hold of a monster. That is the scandal, and it’s not a lapse. It’s the most rigorous thing in the book, and tonight I’m going to show you why. Because it’s also the first tool — archetypal literacy — of the method I teach at disinfolklore.eu. The first tool in the 12-tool way is archetypal literacy, not to be confused with cryptotypic literacy, which is the 12th tool. Tonight’s anchor is Tool 1, archetypal literacy: the beast from the abyss. These are archetypes — deep Indo-European archetypes. The discipline of asking, of any piece of folklore that crosses your path: what archetype is being deployed here?

The claim of everything this evening, stated up front the way I try to state everything: you cannot fight a thing you will not name. Nama — you need to name it. You name the mana. Nama: you name the mana. And the Russian apparatus has spent 30 years making sure you cannot name it. They deliver the mana, then they misname it, so you get confused over what is the substance of this and what is the surface moniker of it. Yakubova names it: the beast from the abyss. That act of naming is where the counterattack begins, and it’s the act that this particular episode is about. I will proof every movement in her book against the Code of Positive Trolls — is it generous? is it true? is it patient? — and I will name the archetypes, because once you can see an archetype operating you cannot unsee it, and recognition halves the mana.

The Masks Have Been Thrown Off: The Elder Brother

Yakubova’s second chapter has a title that is itself a diagnosis: “The Masks Have Been Thrown Off.” The mask she means is the one this apparatus wears better than any other. It’s the mask of the elder brother — the archetypal elder brother from folklore, from The Brothers Karamazov, where one of the brothers kills the father, and Alyosha, the holy spiritual brother, goes off to the church and then is debauched by his other brother Ivan Karamazov with the great, great Grand Inquisitor episode. The elder brother archetype.

For 30 years the Ruscist state addressed Ukraine in the register of family. The Russkiy Mir, the Russian world, was sold as a warm thing: shared faith, shared history, brotherly peoples, one big tent. Russia was the patient elder brother, the regional peacemaker, the intercessor of the despised. When the tanks crossed the border in 2022, the official word for it was not invasion. The name — the official name — wasn’t invasion, but the mana was invasion, and we can adjudicate that according to the laws of war, the UN Charter. It was a “special military operation” to protect Russian speakers and liberate Ukraine from a “junta of Russophobes.”

Here is what the apparatus wants you to think. This is a family quarrel. Russia is the reasonable elder relative, reluctantly restoring order in a household that has lost its way. Whatever is happening, it’s being done out of love — or at worst out of necessity, and certainly not out of hatred. It’s an intervention.

Register the Mana first, the feeling before the thought. The charge here is fraternal reassurance — a big, calm, patient presence. This is the merciful sovereign. Proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it true? The “protection” was launched against a sovereign neighbour that had attacked no one. Is it generous? It cast a whole nation, Ukrainians, as a fiction to be corrected out of existence. The mask says brother. The conduct — the substance, the mana — says something else entirely. The moment you can see the merciful sovereign costume on the elder brother, the warmth stops disarming you, because you can see what it’s delivering.

Yakubova’s whole opening move is to refuse the costume. She will not say conflict. She will not say family quarrel. She lifts the mask, and underneath it she finds not a brother but a beast.

Why the Monster? Rigor Refusing the Euphemism

Why does a careful scholar abandon the careful words? Because — and this is the heart of Tool 1 — the careful words were the apparatus’s idea. For more than a century, Yakubova argues, and in her devastating phrase, the discipline “missed the birth and the formation of its own ontological enemy.” The mild vocabulary — the regional conflict, the post-Soviet space, the Russia question — these are not neutral. These are the elder brother’s own vocabulary, and to use it is to keep seeing through his eyes. The antidote is to name the thing in your own tongue.

Here Yakubova is not alone and not eccentric. The word she anatomises — Ruscism — is not an insult she invented. Ukrainians spontaneously coined it within days of the full-scale invasion. I was in Ukraine for seven years before the full-scale invasion. I didn’t hear the word once. Yet in the first week of the invasion it was everywhere, in all of the Telegram posts, and I was wondering: what is this Ruscism? Ukrainians — 42 million of them — spontaneously, within days of the full-scale invasion, fused Russia and fascism into a single moniker, a single name. They named what they were seeing. They named what they were meeting — not fraternal love — on the battlefield and under occupation.

On the 2nd of May 2023, Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, formally ratified and formally defined it, naming Ruscism’s signatures: systematic human rights violations, the cult of the leader, the “Russian world” as a tool of expansion, the use of prohibited methods of war. And in early 2025 the European Parliament responded, condemning the same ideology of Ruscism and policy as incompatible with international law and European values. Two parliaments, an entire continent, naming the enemy by its name. That is Tool 1 performed at the scale of a continent.

That’s why the book reaches for the beast. The monster is not a loss of rigor. It’s rigor refusing the euphemism. This is why I created a term to describe something new. In our own terms: the most dangerous archetype is the one that has trained you not to call it an archetype at all. The elder brother’s deepest defence is that “brother” doesn’t sound like a weaponised story. Naming it as one is the whole fight. He’s not a brother. He’s a beast. And he’s risen from the abyss to kill every single Ukrainian — not out of love, but out of ressentiment.

Ruscism: The Highest Stage of the Russkiy Mir

Yakubova’s third chapter sets out the thesis the rest of the book proves: Ruscism is the highest stage of the Russkiy Mir. Not a betrayal of the Russian world, but its fulfilment. The warm tent and the beast are the same structure seen in two moments, and the warmth was always the delivery system for the thing inside. The warmth was the delivery system. The brother — that is the moniker, the name. But the mana is the beast.

What is inside, in her account, is not ideology in the ordinary sense at all. It’s something near a death drive, wearing the clothes of a civilisation. She describes a state that had dreamed of stretching Ukraine — these are her words — on the cross: defamed, humiliated, deprived of the right to its very existence. That is the project the elder brother mask was covering. Not the correction of a wayward sibling, but the erasure of a subject. And of the apparatus that does it, she writes the line that gives the book its spine: it is the beast that in the end thirsts for blood, and will drown in its own blood.

Hear what that sentence does, because it is itself a piece of Tool 1. It refuses the merciful sovereign’s two great alibis at once. It refuses reasonableness: a beast that thirsts for blood is not balancing books. And it refuses invincibility: a beast that drowns in its own blood is not eternal. She has, in nine words, dispossessed the costume.

The verdict writes itself. Is the Russian world generous? It is generous the way a tent is generous to the people it is being lowered onto. Is it true? Its central claim — “one fraternal people” — exists to deny that Ukrainians are a people at all. Is it patient? It’s been waiting a century, and it’s in a hurry now. The Russkiy Mir proofs at every one of the Code’s tests as Disinfolklore: folklore turned against the people it pretends to embrace. It’s the one that arrives dressed as your friend, or your brother. The Russkiy Mir worked for 30 years precisely because “brother” does not set off alarms. Warmth is the one charge we are built not to defend against.

Larysa Yakubova’s act — the scholar’s act of refusing the warm word and naming the beast — is Tool 1 in its purest form. And it’s available to you tonight, with any story that crosses your feed. When something addresses you as family while it takes from you as an enemy: lift the mask, name what is underneath it. The naming will not stop the beast — whether that beast is your spouse, or someone in your life who’s bullying you or being unkind to you or operating a coercive control operation on you, or your country, or your community, or your children. But it ends the spell that kept you from seeing it, when you name it. And everything else in this method begins there.

I’ll finish off on one more element from this, because it’s such an amazing book. If anyone wants it, I’ve translated it into English, so let me know — we can work out some way; I’ll post it on Substack or something.

The Deep Folk: Surkov’s Manufactured People

When I started this work, I believed the most comfortable thing that everyone in the West still believes. I believed there was a Kremlin and then there was a people — a vast, suffering, hostage population held down by a small clique of cynics — so that if you peeled the clique away, the people underneath would be more or less like us. It is a kind belief, and it lets you hate the regime and pity the nation with the same breath. Yakubova’s second move holds that belief up to the light and very quietly breaks it, because her hardest chapter is not about the men in the Kremlin at all. It’s about the millions who said yes.

Here is my claim up front, the way I always do it. The so-called deep folk — that’s Surkov’s archetyping of Russia’s people; he calls them the deep folk — and Yakubova addresses this. She says the so-called deep folk of Russia are not the regime’s hostage. They are its co-author and its accomplice. That is the most uncomfortable sentence in her book, and I think the most important, so I’ll earn it slowly.

Tonight’s anchor here is Tool 4: inner realm / outer realm switching — Tool 4 of the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, disinfolklore.eu. What Donald does every time he talks about the outer-realm migrants coming to steal our children, to steal your daughters, to eat your dogs, eat your pets. That’s inner/outer realm switching. It’s the cognitive division Disinfolklore exists to exploit. Every one of us carries an inner map: an us, a circle of the trusted, an arya — A-R-Y-A — a centre, the centre of our community. That’s what arya means. The Aryans were simply the people in the centre of our community, the inner realm, and the real. In outer darkness, the enemies and monsters lived. So they were the ones that the Russians in Russia-occupied Ukraine were archetyping Ukraine as, across the Donets River. They were saying that is outer darkness, through a million different memes and stories every day, which I was trying to parse and understand.

And the apparatus — the apparatus doesn’t invade that map. It redraws it. I’ll show you the most ambitious thing that has ever been drawn there: an entire manufactured people, a manufactured us, conjured into being by the manufacture of an enemy. And we proof every move against the Code of Positive Trolls — is it generous? is it true? is it patient? — and we name the archetype, because recognition halves the mana.

So: the people that was made. There’s a phrase Yakubova works with that we all need to know, and it’s one of the most chilling pieces of political branding of our century. The deep folk — from Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s own stage manager, ex-deputy prime minister of Russia, reputedly on the Maidan, if not directly directing the snipers then overseeing the snipers’ work, when the Heavenly Hundred were massacred. He coined it in a 2019 essay, and he meant it as praise: a mystical, bottomless reservoir of ordinary Russians who always rescue the state in its hour of need by simply being there. Deep, loyal, inexhaustible. The regime gave itself a folk. It named its own foundation.

Yakubova turns that phrase over to show us the rot on the underside. Because a deep folk in the Surkov sense is not a people who grew. It’s a people who were drained. She describes a mass from which the load-bearing human values have been, in her account, surgically removed — conscience, the capacity for guilt, the sense of the other person as real — so that what remains can be pointed at anything and will not flinch. A mass she calls, in a word I’ll quote exactly, boundless — bezmernyi — measureless, without an edge or bottom. Not deep like a well that holds something. Deep like an abyss that holds nothing.

Here is what the apparatus wants you to think. We are eternal. We are the people. We are the folk — vast and humble and true — and our enemies are a thin foreign film on the surface. To stand with the deep folk is to stand with something older and realer than any law you could cite against it.

Register the mana first, the feeling, before any thought. It is belonging — warm, total, dissolving. The relief of being part of something measureless, never having to stand alone or answer alone again. That feeling is the product. That is what was manufactured by Surkov. The moment you can feel the engineering in it, you can name what is underneath.

The archetype is the outer realm monster, and it runs backwards from how you expect. You think the monster is the thing in the outer dark — but here the monster in the outer dark is the device. These are not beliefs the deep folk hold. They are the walls of the room the deep folk lives in. Tool 4 in its purest form: the inner-realm us is conjured by the manufacturing of an outer-realm them.

Proof it against the Code. Is it true? No. A folk defined entirely by the enemies it has been given is a fiction. The enemies are painted, and so therefore is the people. Is it generous? No. It’s built by the wholesale denial of everyone outside the war. This is Disinfolklore at industrial scale, because the unit of manufacture here is not a meme or a slogan. It’s a nation’s sense of itself.

Closing

Next week I’ll continue with that series, because I’m quite excited by it. She’s just amazing, and I think everyone in the West needs to read this book. If they don’t, I’m going to do my best to ensure at least all of us become aware of it. I’ll leave it at that for this week.

I’ve called this the Reasonable Man. This is about Putler’s Astana press conference on the 29th of May 2026.

I watched it, and I was amazed by Putler’s reasonableness. I noticed this faintly weary man who really only wants the facts established and the books balanced, who lends money rather than gifting it, who speaks openly and honestly, who keeps saying “I say this without irony.” I caught myself, somewhere about the 20-minute mark, beginning to relax — and that is the moment to name.

https://www.powerofmana.net/p/the-moon-the-menses-and-the-maternal

Tonight’s anchor is Tool One of the 12-tool analytical method called the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, at disinfolklore.eu, which I, Decoding Trolls, am elaborating on over these podcasts and over all of my life for the past three years.

The single hardest archetype to see is the one that arrives dressed as your friend. All of us will have experience of this, especially in conversations about Ukraine.

Shaw’s Test: Reasonable vs Unreasonable

There is an irony in my title that an erudite colleague of mine in eastern Ukraine would savour. He once called me, only half-mockingly, an unreasonable man — in Bernard Shaw’s sense: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to herself, and therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable person.” My sin, in his telling, was a habit of asking my superiors the questions that undermined their authority. Totally innocent questions on my part. Hold on to that, because it turns out to be the whole method.

The tyrant performs the reasonable man — adapted, accommodating, asking only for facts. The antidote is the unreasonable person: the troll radar that refuses to adapt to the costume and keeps asking the question the calm was built to stop.

Here is the claim of this piece, stated up front the way I state everything. The performance of the reasonable man is the costume the merciless sovereign wears to the press conference. The wolf in sheep’s clothing — the sheep’s clothing of the reasonable man. The calm is not the opposite of the threat. The calm is the delivery system for the threat.

By the end, I’m going to show you that Duncey Putler obligingly names his own method out loud, in his own words, and then dares us not to notice.

In everything I do as Decoding Trolls, everything is proofed against the Code of Positive Trolls. Is it generous? Is it true? Is it right? Is it patient? I name the archetype, because once you can see the archetype operating, you cannot unsee it. Recognition halves the mana.

The Drone in Galați: Accusation in a Mirror

Let me begin. The drone he had only heard about. A journalist from TASS opens with the news of the hour. A drone has come down on a residential building in Galați, in Romania, a NATO member. Europe says it’s Russia. Why didn’t they shoot it down?

Watch what Putin does. He does not answer. He performs not knowing. This is a trick many of us who watch Donald closely have noticed him also perform. Putler said: “I only just learned, before walking into this hall, that some event occurred with a supposedly ours drone. If you’d be so kind as to repeat it for me, I say this without jokes, without irony.”

Then he demands proof and dismisses the accuser: “Frau von der Leyen wasn’t in Romania. She didn’t examine the wreckage.” Then the pivot, the real move: “We know Ukrainian drones have flown into Finland, into Poland, into the Baltics. The first reaction was always, oh, the Russians are coming. Then it turned out they were Ukrainian. Blown off course.”

Here’s what the apparatus — the Russian apparatus, which has cast Putin in the role of sovereign — wants us to think. Putin is the only calm adult in the room. The Europeans are hysterics, shouting before the forensics are in. It was probably a stray Ukrainian drone anyway.

Register the mana first: the feeling before the thought, the energy, the disarming calm. A man so unbothered, so reasonable, asking only for evidence. That feeling is the costume. Name the archetype underneath it and the voltage halves.

This is accusation in a mirror — the oldest move in the combat propaganda playbook, where you perform the violation and then, before anyone can prove it, hand the violation to your victim.

Proof it against the Code. Is it true? The honest answer, “we don’t yet know,” would survive. Putler doesn’t stay there. He says no one can name the origin until an examination is done, and in the very same breath he supplies the answer. Is it generous? No. It calls the bereaved hysterical. This is Disinfolklore. It violates the Code of Positive Trolls.

Standing on the Ground: Romania’s 28 Breaches

The counter is the ground that the apparatus needs us not to stand on. Romania says Russian drones have breached its airspace 28 times since Moscow began bombing Ukraine’s Danube ports. The Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, did not reach for forensics. He said Russia’s reckless behaviour is a danger to us all, and that the Alliance stands ready to defend every inch of allied territory.

I noticed both the United States and NATO archetyped it as reckless behaviour — which I know from criminal law is: either you were reckless, or you did the act intentionally. By archetyping the act as reckless, they are giving Russia a get-out. No matter. The keeper of the open account does not need an autopsy on every single drone when the pattern is 28 breaches deep. The question is never “can you prove this one?” It is: who has been flying into NATO airspace for three years?

The Bridge Troll Dressed as Friendship: Armenia

Some of you will remember the bridge troll, the archetype from the beginning of my work on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska between 2015 and 2017. He went on with this press conference to talk about what I now see is the archetype of a tollgate. The tollgate dressed as friendship — the obstacle to be overcome, the exchange between you and he. This is where you have to keep your guard highest, because the next move is delivered as love.

He went on at length about Armenia, giving Armenia advice about the cost of moving towards the European Union. I won’t dwell on it, but I will dwell on its meaning. The mana here, the energy, is not fear. It’s something warmer and more dangerous. It’s gratitude. You’re positioned to thank Moscow for its honesty. Name the archetype and the warmth curdles.

This is the bridge troll, the keeper of the threshold who sets the toll for passage, fused with coercive control. I’ve stood on the literal version of that bridge at Stanytsia and watched armed men decide who crosses. The toll schedule is the threat — and note the tell Putin volunteers unprompted: “the crisis in Ukraine began with attempts to join the EU.” That is not analysis. That is: look what happened to the last neighbour who tried the other road. It’s a threat.

I’ve written before about how we — not we, because we are — we must get better at recognising Russian threats, because they are masked through reasonable men acting as the toll keeper.

Proof it. Is it patient? No — he’s demanding Armenia makes a choice “as early as possible,” before the bill can be weighed. It’s manufactured urgency. It’s inevitability farming. Urgency — whether it’s someone socially engineering your ID or your data, or in geopolitics — is always the red flag the Code is built to catch. Is it generous? No. The entire world’s weight is loaded onto a small economy and dependency is dressed as benevolence. Is it true? The 14 percent of GDP reduction is real, because Russia controls every lever in it. This is Disinfolklore, again delivered by the reasonable man.

The Mother and the Maiden: Starobilsk Converted to Kyiv

Some of you will also remember the mother and the maiden archetype, which I look at as being the base for most Disinfolklore. The centre of gravity of the whole performance of Putin in this press conference in Kazakhstan, the most engineered to switch off your judgement by switching on your grief.

Asked about his strikes on Kyiv, Putler turns the question into an indictment of Ukraine and of the journalists in front of him. Again, another trick we see Donald do. “Our strike too was in response for their crimes against children in Starobilsk. Our strike on the Kyiv region. They deliberately killed our children.”

Is this mass media? No. It’s the means of mass dumbing-down. It’s brilliant — a terrible, stupid little pun. Mass media becomes the means of mass stupefaction. It does three things at once: it grieves, it accuses, and it pre-discredits anyone who might check.

What the apparatus wants us to think: Ukraine murders Russian children, Russia’s strikes on Kyiv are righteous revenge, and any outlet that doesn’t lead with the dead children is a lie machine. Feel the mana, because it’s overwhelming by design. Protective fury — the oldest and most weaponisable charge in the whole folk store. This is the mother-and-the-maiden’s grief and the martyred commanders. It must be avenged. Fused and loaded.

I will name the archetype precisely. It is the merciless sovereign performing the grief of the very people he targets, laid over an accusation in a mirror: the documented mass killer of civilians performing mourning in order to license the next strike.

I’m going to be more careful here about what the apparatus is, not less, because the method has to work the same no matter who is pointing it — or it’s worth nothing. So here is exactly what I claim. We’ve all seen the TV programmes from Russian TV demonstrating the Rubicon unit were operating out of this facility. Ukraine denies hitting the dormitory, calling the Russian account manipulation. A local resident told Reuters the site was a former base hit first by rockets. Reuters was not able independently to verify anything. The United Nations has no access to the territory, as we discussed last week, because it is occupied Luhansk, and could only confirm that reportedly six dead — even though TASS eventually drove the children’s count to 18, and, as we saw two days ago, Putler was banging on about Starobilsk again.

The Disinfolklore is not in the grief. The Disinfolklore is in the conversion of the contested grief into a warrant — into roughly 600 drones and 90 missiles against the civilian capital, one of them an Oreshnik, a nuclear-capable missile that the EU’s Kaja Kallas rightly called “reckless nuclear brinkmanship.” It is in the inversion that brands the only outlets reporting an occupied-territory strike as the liars.

Proof it against the Code and the verdict writes itself. Is it patient? It demands immediate vengeance. Is it generous? It uses dead children as the load-bearing beam of a justification for killing more children. The UN’s own count is 337. I’m a huge critic of the methodology that the United Nations uses, and I participate in some of these fact-checking exercises myself, going into the morgues to visually ID the dead bodies of people in order to help these statistics. We understand that up to 80, or maybe as many as 100,000 people in Mariupol were killed, and many of them were children, whose numbers will never be counted in these UN statistics — because they need someone like me to see, they need two or three people like me to triangulate and to see the body, before it can be counted in the statistics.

This is Disinfolklore at its apex. The Code’s counter-move on the martyred commander is the subtlest one I know and the only honest one. Mourn the dead, refuse the liturgy. Do not dismiss the children. Do not let them be turned into the key that unlocks Kyiv. The UN said the only thing that survives the fog: civilians must be protected wherever they are. “Wherever” — that little word refuses to hold retaliation arithmetic.

The Goebbels Inversion

Asked whether Russia is preparing for the war that Europe says it is preparing for, Putler said: “It’s nonsense. It’s a lie. A crude, brazen lie. As Goebbels said in his time, the more incredible the lie, the faster they believe it. These are exactly the standards Western politicians and media implant.”

Sit with that. The president of the Rushist Federation invokes Goebbels in order to accuse the West of being Goebbelsian. Then he runs the full exculpation. “The 2014 coup in Kyiv forced Russia to protect the Crimeans” — here he’s playing merciful sovereign. Then the Donbas so-called republics: “We did everything absolutely transparently, legally, step by step.”

This is accusation in a mirror in its purest, laboratory form, fused with the merciful sovereign’s self-exculpation and the NATO-expansion bogeyperson.

The proof that it is the mirror is that he names the mechanism himself. A few answers earlier, on the drone, he had said: “The West tries to shift the blame from the sick head to the healthy one.” He told you the trick. He told you its name. The work of counter-Disinfolklore is simply to refuse the transfer. The work of Disinfolklore is to point out that these kinds of phrases — “to shift the blame from the sick head to the healthy” — are the way Russia communicates its threats from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy. That’s what I bring to the table with Disinfolklore, because as far as I’m aware, nobody else has seen that pattern and looked at it so closely as I have.

Proof it. Is it true? “Transparent, legal, step by step” is contradicted by a new 9th-grade Russian schoolbook edited by Medvedev, now Deputy Chair of Russia’s Security Council, that prints unoccupied Zaporizhzhia and Mala Tokmachka among it as the Rushist Federation. Annexation taught to children as geography — unoccupied land under UN Charter Article 2(4), which forbids exactly that.

The Goebbels projection has an evidential counter too. There is a serious Atlantic Council study, written before this press conference, entitled “Putler’s Next Move: Five Russian Attack Scenarios Europe Must Prepare For.” European defence is not paranoia invented to fleece taxpayers. It’s a threat assessment that predates the man calling it nonsense.

This is Disinfolklore. The one who quotes Goebbels to call you the liar has handed you the mirror. Let’s hold it up to him.

The Paper Conquest and ISW’s Verdict

A lighter move, but a revealing one. Putler says: “The situation is nearing completion. Our troops advance on all fronts. You see it every blessed day.”

What the apparatus wants you to think: the war is all but won, resistance is futile, better to settle on Moscow’s terms now. Name the archetype. This is the paper conquest — the claim that runs miles ahead of the territory. It has a real-world theatre attached to it: the move the apparatus reaches for whenever a city has to be declared taken. In late 2025, Russia invited foreign journalists, as I talked about last week, and even Ukrainian ones, to come and film the encircled Ukrainian force in Kupyansk.

Proof it against the ground, because here the ground answers with the numbers. The Institute for the Study of War, reading the same battlefield, found that Russian forces seized 104 square kilometres in the first five months of 2026, against 1,619 in 2025 — a 15-fold collapse. ISW’s verdict on the man himself is devastating: “Putler has likely developed a false perception of Russian military successes based on heavily exaggerated maps from the Russian High Military Command.”

The counter wrote itself in the most literal way imaginable. When Russia invited the cameras, President Zelensky was there, demonstrating the conquest Russia didn’t make. The Jamestown Foundation documents that Russia’s draft budget cuts military spending while raising state media funding by 54 percent. They’re buying the story because they cannot buy the ground.

What I Will Not Call Disinfolklore

The neural network that I’m creating has to be capable of dividing memes, or elements in memes, into Disinfolklore, in-folklore, and neutral. This is a neutral part.

When he explained the Russian export credit financing Kazakhstan’s nuclear plant, he talked about standard international practice: “we lend rather than gift.” That is ordinary statecraft self-portraiture. Not necessarily Disinfolklore.

Now, those of us who are aware that Rosatom is brutally occupying Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, and bombing Chernobyl nuclear power plant, understand the idea of Russia being involved in building a nuclear power plant anywhere is to create the potential for nuclear catastrophe as leverage.

When he claimed Russia is one of three nations with sovereign artificial intelligence “that some firms build on, and Sberbank builds its own” — that is a national-champion sales pitch, and it could be argued with on the merits. Neither of those is really Disinfolklore, and I won’t code them as such. The whole method dies the day it becomes a machine that stamps Disinfolklore on everything a Russian president said. The discipline of refusing to overname it is exactly what earns the verdict when the real thing appears.

The Costume Slips: Kaliningrad and Latvia

Twice near the end, the costume slipped, and you see the thing the reasonableness was wrapped around. On the Baltic states’ talk of striking Kaliningrad: “Russia has every means to raze to the ground all who try.” On a claim that Ukraine had moved drone operators to Latvia: “All places from which to direct — I want to stress, direct — military threat to Russia emanates, our legitimate targets.”

What the apparatus wants you to think: don’t poke the bear. Any move near Russia, and the response is total and lawful. This is provocation logic, “don’t poke the bear,” in its naked deterrent form. It pre-licences strikes on the soil of UN Charter members by making the bogeyperson’s threat elastic enough to mean anything Moscow decides.

Here’s the contradiction we must hold up against the light. Four answers after calling the idea of Russian aggression towards Europe “nonsense, a crude, brazen lie,” he threatens to level NATO members. Set the two sentences side by side and the performance collapses on its own.

The Schröder Wedge and the Minsk Inversion

Then the door he pretends is open. He floats Schröder as a trustworthy European partner — the Nord Stream Chancellor — “yes, we are friends, what’s wrong with that?” That is the wedge: elevate the captured insider, delegitimise everything else, split the European public from its own governments.

In the same breath, he poisons the very idea of agreement. He now says the Minsk Accords were signed only to buy time and arm Ukraine. The independent fact-checkers at Myth Detector went back to what Merkel actually said: that Minsk gave Ukraine time to strengthen because the threat came from Russia. Putler takes her defence of admission and inverts it into proof of Western treachery. The same inversion one more time. This is Disinfolklore.

I’ll add the one thing I can say that he cannot, because I was there from 2015 to 2018: the man telling you Minsk was a Western trick is the man who broke it every morning before breakfast.

The Architecture: 18 Answers as One Engineered Arc

Let’s look at the machine behind the man — the whole architecture — because the 18 answers he gave are not 18 answers. They are one engineered arc.

The candour frame lowers your guard: “I’m only being honest, gov.” The merciful sovereign governs the middle: the generous creditor, the caring neighbour. The grievance engine loads the avenging mana: “they killed our children.” The exculpation discharges it at the scale of history: “you are the Goebbels liars; 2014 forced us.” And then the teeth: the legitimate targets, the wedge, the poisoned door.

The Propagation Apparatus: The Pravda Mirror Sites

It does not stay in Astana. Within 24 hours the same lines were splashed, near-identical, across a whole network of mirror sites — Pravda in English, German, Lithuanian, Polish, Turkish — each re-skinning the Kremlin transcript for a local audience, so that the same claims appear to come from everywhere at once, manufacturing the feel of independent corroboration. That is the propagation apparatus the questions never mention. That is the mana being mass-produced.

The Unreasonable Human

Here’s the single thing I want us to carry out of this episode. When a sovereign sits before the cameras and is patient and candid and reasonable and grieved, that is not evidence that he is none of those things. Reasonableness is a register. It can be worn. The merciless sovereign wears it best of all, because he learned a long time ago you will lower your guard for the calm man faster than you ever would for the shouting one.

He told us his own method: from the sick head onto the healthy one. Our whole task, yours and mine, is simply, every single time, to refuse the transfer from the sick head unto the healthy one — from the accusation in the mirror blaming Ukraine for Russia’s own murders.

That refusal has a name — the one a colleague pinned on me, half-mockingly, in Severodonetsk one afternoon on the ground in eastern Ukraine. It is the work of the unreasonable human. The one who will not adapt themselves to a tyrant’s reasonable world, who keeps asking the questions that undermine the authority performing it. If George Bernard Shaw was right that all progress depends on the unreasonable person, then so, every single time, does all counter-Disinfolklore.

That’s his press conference. That’s what I have to say about that.

The Counter Pole: The Arabat Spit Strike

Going back to the Starobilsk episode, which I talked about last week — I didn’t get to the positive bit, so I just wanted to go back to that a bit, which is what I call the counter pole, the Arabat Spit, and what I call the substrate truth.

I want to put against the Kyiv strikes that Wendy witnessed a counter-example from a few days before then, because the asymmetry is the substance of the case.

The 17th of May. The Arabat Spit — the long, narrow barrier island that runs north-south along the western edge of the Sea of Azov, near occupied Henichesk in Kherson Oblast. Ukraine Security Service Special Operations Centre A (Alpha unit, who many of us have helped) strikes a Rushist FSB headquarters complex. Nine buildings. A Pantsir-S1 self-propelled air defence system parked at the site destroyed in the same operation. Around 100 Russian personnel killed or injured. NASA satellite thermal data confirms the fires. President Zelensky publicly confirms the strike on the 21st of May. He released the footage on Twitter. He named the unit that did it: “Thanks to this single operation, Russian losses amount to about 100 invaders killed and wounded. The Russists must feel that they have to end this war of theirs. Ukrainian medium- and long-range strikes will continue.”

The Asymmetry: Open Ukraine, Closed Apparatus

Now apply the comparison. Ukraine’s Arabat Spit strike: named military target, in FSB headquarters, named air defence asset alongside it, named perpetrator on the Ukrainian side, public release of the footage, open attribution, international humanitarian law observed in the targeting, transparent in the announcement. This is what striking a legitimate military target looks like.

Russia’s Kyiv strike six days later targets the National Art Museum, the Chernobyl Museum, the Opera Theatre where Ukraine’s first parliament of the 21st century met, residential blocks, a water supply facility, a market. Casualties overwhelmingly civilian. Munitions including the Oreshnik nuclear-capable hypersonic. Attribution: the apparatus framing of retaliation for a contested stage-one event the apparatus itself probably had manufactured.

This is the asymmetry: Ukraine striking Rushist military apparatus openly. When the Western press treats these two operations as morally symmetric instances of “the war continuing,” the Western press is failing the Code of Positive Trolls. When the Western press’s headlines use Ukraine’s strike as the cause and Russia’s strike as the response, the Western press is doing the apparatus’ work for it.

The Pantheon of Heroes: Real Walls, Real Names

Against the apparatus’ annual mass memorial fabrication on the 9th of May — the Immortal Regiment photos of strangers — stand the genuine Ukraine memorials. The wall at St Michael’s Monastery, which I’m sure Wendy saw, and which I found at the beginning of the war. The Google Street View footage of St Michael’s, of the wall empty — and then gradually we’ve just seen it, this massive, massive long wall being filled with the photographs of the people who have died defending Ukraine. Those photographs of tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers who died fighting Russism since 2014.

The new National Military Memorial Complex, the Pantheon of Heroes, inaugurated this month, where Colonel Andriy Melnyk and his wife Sofiya were reburied. Statues throughout Ukraine: to murdered starosta Olha Sukhenko of Motyzhyn; to the forcibly disappeared Serhiy Tsyhipa from Kherson; to the named fallen or disappeared at the village scale. Real wall, real cemetery, real statues, named individuals with real biographies attached to real towns — not these fake Immortal Regiment photos that are tossed away at the end of the parade.

Foundation Defence and Right Mana

The framework’s name for this asymmetry is the Foundation Defence, where the apparatus tries to install Disinfolklore mana at the foundation pole — the cognitive substrate of the post-war Indo-European linguistic order. The in-folklore counter installs right mana at the same pole. Same surface, opposite Code adjudication, opposite substrate. Mana effect: the mana truly held, the energy truly held, is the substrate. The mana counterfeited collapses on the substrate it cannot back.

Running the Case Through the 12 Tools

Let me run this quickly through the 12 tools, because the toolkit — which I talk about a lot on disinfolklore.eu — is what turns the case from an outrage we shout about into an instrument we can hand to other people.

Tool 1, archetypal literacy: what archetype is being deployed? The provocation logic cycle — A accuses B of provoking A. Putler accuses Ukraine of forcing him to kill Ukrainians. Twelfth year of continuous deployment. The Starobilsk–Kyiv cycle of last week is the most recent instance of an archetype the apparatus has run since at least 2014.

Tool 2, troll radars: is this incoming or outgoing? Both. Incoming to me: the apparatus would like me to argue about the Starobilsk casualty figures, to litigate the Rubicon headquarters claim, to be drawn into the apparatus’ chosen terrain. Outgoing from me: what am I broadcasting? Am I retransmitting the apparatus’s framing by quoting it? Am I distributing that picture of the black-haired French woman that so many people seem to be posting without realising that they are keeping the troll going? They may be writing in text “oh, this person is horrible” — I don’t even read the things, but I do mentally note anyone who shares a picture of this person is doing what the Russians want them to do. They’re putting a pretty, a beautiful, a sophisticated face on Rushism, on the filthiness of Rushism. Even if you criticise it in text, the image goes into people’s brains before they do it. Am I retransmitting the apparatus’s framing by quoting it, by sharing the photos without naming it? The discipline is to gatekeep in both directions.

Tool 3, mana in the meme: the energy is moral inversion — the aggressor dressed as victim, the witch switch — executed in headline grammar at scale. The mana is the apparatus’ signature.

Tool 4, inner/outer realm: the outer realm — the public, collective conversation, the headlines, what we do on Volya, the institutional record, the stage-two echo — is the apparatus colonising the outer realm of democracies.

Tool 5, trigger-experience-reaction — the Dalai Lama / Ekman timeline of emotions, the cognitive model which is a core module in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method. Trigger, experience, reaction. The trigger is the picture of this black-haired French person. The experience is, “gosh, she looks sophisticated and nice.” Then your reaction: “oh no, she’s awful, I’m going to share it.” The trigger is the Starobilsk story arriving in my feed. The experience is moral arousal. The reaction the apparatus wants is engagement on the apparatus’s terms: “oh, beautiful people like Russia — oh, I will like Russia then.” Tool 5 tells us to interrupt the chain, to notice “I’m being moved on cue.”

Tool 6, generosity: is it generous? No. The meme treats 21 dead adolescents as ammunition for justifying mass strikes on Kyiv. The meme is the opposite of generous.

Tool 7, right: is it right? No. The meme inverts the moral character of aggression. It is unethical at the root.

Tool 8, mana energy, implicit archetypes — the Vritra archetype. Vritra, who fought against Indra to keep the waters blocked up and stop the land being fertile. The Vritra archetype: the force weaponising substrate. The apparatus weaponises international humanitarian law, which underlies our entire civilisation — the moral substrate of how democracies talk about civilian casualties — and turns that substrate against itself, against its own purposes. International humanitarian law was built precisely to prevent the apparatus’s framing. The apparatus uses the language of the laws of war to invert the laws of war, against the UN, to publish their version of what happened.

Tool 9, patience: the apparatus needs us to respond now, before the framing is examined, before the contradiction surfaces, before the asymmetry becomes visible. Tool 9 tells us: slow down. The cycle is 12 years old.

Tool 10, mindfulness, focus. This is the operative tool of the whole case. Mindfulness as gatekeeping. The apparatus delivers you a payload. You have a choice about whether to accept it. Trigger, experience, reaction. Most of the audience capture the apparatus achieves happens because audiences do not exercise the choice — because the framing arrives at speed, dressed in the visual grammar of grief, and the gatekeeping muscle is not trained.

Tool 11, insight, wisdom. The apparatus’s framing flattens who is the aggressor and who is the victim into a fog of “both sides strike things sometimes.” Insight requires restoring the substrate truth.

Tool 12, cryptotypic literacy: the RT cryptotype, the “right” substrate that underlies all of our civilisation. The apparatus is claiming “right” in international humanitarian law — protection of children, condemnation of strikes on civilian infrastructure — while operating as the backward pole of the same cryptotype. There are the cryptotype markers of the inversion: the Mariupol-boat artefact, where Darya Dugina explained to a Western journalist on camera that Ukrainians hide their weapons in schools to provoke Russia to attack the schools; the Amnesty report, which was spun by Amnesty’s tweets accusing Ukraine of exactly the same; the Pokrovsk invitation that we talked about last week; the Kupyansk encirclement claim; the Starobilsk announcement. Same cryptotypic deployment, different deployer class, 12-year plan. The deployer is incidental. They’re invoking “right” for something which is not right. It’s wrong, and it’s verifiably wrong.

The DN and ND Cryptotypes

One new observation as a closing note. The apparatus’s paper conquests — the Pokrovsk encirclement, the Kupyansk surrounding, the maps that claim territory 30 kilometres west of Kupyansk — these are operations on what I call the DN cryptotype, on the river substrate: the Don, Dnipro, Donets, Dniester, the flow-threshold, water as substrate, as dividing land from other land.

On the other side, this ND sound, which is in our English word “land,” is the opposite of the DN. It’s the static counterpart — ground, territory, anchor substrate. England, Ireland, the Russian Heimat equivalent, Russian land. The apparatus claims land it does not hold. The Ukrainian counter installs “our land,” nasha zemlya — we always hear President Zelensky say that. Substrate truth, naming at the same pole: real soil, real towns, real soldiers buried in real ground. Cryptotype at full force on both sides of the line.

The Counter Move: Outflank, Not Rebut

What is the counter-move? Because I’m not going to leave you with an analytical instrument and no instruction on what to do with it.

The counter-move is not to rebut. Rebuttal is the apparatus’s chosen terrain. When we rebut the Starobilsk dormitory framing, we’re already arguing about the dormitory, and the apparatus has already won, because the dormitory is now the subject of the conversation.

The apparatus wants the conversation to be about stage one. Stage three — the Kyiv strikes, the destruction of the Chernobyl Museum, the nuclear-capable hypersonic — that’s what the apparatus wants us to look away from. Rebuttal looks away.

The counter-move is to outflank. Name the deployment for what it is: the apparatus’s multi-month campaign elevation doctrine, Pokrovsk to Kupyansk to Starobilsk, $458 million per year of state-funded information warfare, Vodolatsky’s self-incrimination on the Voin telegram showing the Starobilsk facility, Vatnik Soup and Tankerfeller forensics within 72 hours, the provocation logic cycle in its 12th year of continuous deployment. Name it, then refuse to litigate the apparatus’s chosen terrain. Do not share these pictures of people.

Then put back on the table what the apparatus wants you to ignore — the substrate truth. The substrate truth is the Arabat Spit strike, Ukraine three days before the apparatus-manufactured Starobilsk framing, striking FSB headquarters, with public attribution, with named targets, with footage released, in compliance with the laws of war. The substrate truth is President Zelensky’s selfie in Kupyansk in December — the sovereign. The substrate truth is the wall at St Michael’s Monastery, the Pantheon of Heroes, the village statues to the named fallen. The substrate truth is that the apparatus’ grammar of retaliation is itself a Disinfolklore payload, and the right response to a Disinfolklore payload is to refuse to retransmit it.

President Zelensky, July 2022: “No Logic in Terrorists”

President Zelensky named the substrate truth in July 2022, and the line still cuts. He said, quoting verbatim: “You should not look for logic in the actions of terrorists. The Russian army does not take any pauses. She has one task — to take people’s lives, to intimidate people, so that even a few days without an air alarm already feels like part of the terror.”

That’s the refusal of the revenge cycle historian’s framing in one sentence. The apparatus is executing the operation it was always going to execute. The framing of retaliation is what the operation wears. It’s a costume. The operation is what the apparatus does. You should not look for logic in the actions of terrorists. No provocation logic. The retreat from logic is the apparatus’s instrument. The framework is our way back to it.

That refusal is Tool 10. Should I allow this into my mind? No. Should I allow this into my conversation? No. Should I allow this into the framings I put into the world through my own speech or tweets? No. Mindfulness applied with discipline at scale across millions of audiences who’ve read this far in the work — that is what would eventually deny the apparatus its product. The apparatus’s product is the framing’s circulation. The counter-move is to deny the circulation, to name the deployment, to refuse the engagement, to move on with the work.

The work in this case is Ukraine’s: the Arabat Spit strike, the Kupyansk–Khartiya counter-offensive, President Zelensky’s selfie 1.15 km from Russia’s positions. That is what winning looks like. That is what right looks like — the RT cryptotype, where the action is aligned with the assertion of right, whereas the Russians’ assertion “we control this land” is unaligned with reality or right. The Kyiv strikes are what the apparatus’s response to winning looks like. The doctrine is a textbook deployment, and the toolkit catches it, which is why I focused on it.

Closing

If you’re encountering these 12 tools for the first time, the place to start is the disinfolklore.eu website. I’ll leave it at that.

Discussion: Strelkov, Akhmetov, and the Flywheel of Death

I’ve been waiting to see milbloggers talk or face the fact that the war will end when they lose Crimea and when they withdraw from 100 percent of Ukraine. Today I was speaking with Iona and Will and Ming, and a few others, and Lexicon. I hadn’t read the text of this post, which I then, re-listening to Mockers, re-heard. I focused on it because it was talking about the flywheel of death — a Russian blogger talking about this flywheel of death which the Russians are involved in in Ukraine.

I’ve been excavating archetypes from ancient Buddhist texts all week, so I’ve been very connected to this idea of the wheel of life and the Universal Sovereign. When I saw that phrase, I was like — wow, that’s amazing. It’s really interesting to hear. The real meat in that was — this is the first time I’ve heard anyone with a significant following, anyone anywhere in Russia, realise that the end of the war is when they leave Crimea. I’ve been looking for this indicator since early March 2022, and today it landed.

As I was saying before — I had read this properly to Will on the show — I see the same pattern in what Strelkov is saying now as what he was saying in early March: “oh, we need a mobilisation, things are terrible, awful, awful, awful, we need a mobilisation, we need a nuclear bomb, we need this, we need that.” They never vocalise this realisation, which I want to see take hold.

I’m very happy about that. I’m on record as saying that is the indicator I was looking for: when the Russians start realising that they’re not going to get away with stabilising the front lines in Donetsk.

Now I know the Russian official state position is still — I saw it again this week — didn’t we see that Russia says, if Ukraine just gives us Donetsk and Luhansk, then we promise we’re not going to conquer the rest of Ukraine. Which is just the most bizarre logic I’ve ever heard in my life. Basically: these villages in eastern Ukraine, which we can’t conquer militarily — if you give them to us, fine; if you don’t give them to us, then we’re going to conquer every city and village in Ukraine. It’s absolutely nuts, and it’s embarrassing, as previously discussed, that Witkoff and Co fell for that troll.

Very interesting to see that. I’m very happy for that. We’ve all been through — not, obviously, as bad a winter as the Ukrainians. How about you? What do you feel? What’s the mood? Wendy, did you encounter many people?

Today I’m going to talk a bit about the Starobilsk incident, using the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, and I’m also going to talk about some examples from what I call the Luhansk Corpus, which I’ve been talking about for the last few weeks. We’re in the midst — not even one hundredth of a way through — what I have to talk about. This corpus is 10,000 propaganda items that I collected while I worked in Russia-occupied Ukraine, and between Russia-occupied Ukraine and government-controlled Ukraine, between 2015 and 2018 in Luhansk, and then afterwards in Dnipro.

Today’s Topic: The Starobilsk Incident

The first thing I’m going to talk about is the Starobilsk incident. Some of you probably didn’t hear about it, but it was a really interesting example for me to apply the Disinfolklore Analytical Method to. The moment I heard the President of the Rushist Federation mention a school in Starobilsk — which is a town I know very well, I used to go through it a lot when I lived in Severodonetsk, so it has that personal connection to me as well — and the moment I heard President Putin talk about it and talk about this, what I call the manufactured wound archetype, basically, it reeked of this, and I recognised the pattern. I thought, as the English might say, there was something rum about this. I tuned in.

Russia’s defence ministry announces in Putin’s name that international journalists are invited to come and see for themselves that Ukrainian forces are surrounded in Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, and Kupyansk. The apparatus — which is how I refer to the entire collection of actors operating the Russian Federation — offers a five-to-six-hour ceasefire to enable the tour.

12th of December 2025: Putin claims at a press conference, based on a briefing from Gerasimov, that 15 Ukrainian Armed Forces battalions are blocked inside Kupyansk. Fifteen battalions. He invites journalists again to come and verify. On the same day, Volodymyr Zelensky turns up in Kupyansk himself, records a video address on his iPhone at the entrance stele, 1.15 kilometres from Russian positions, 500 metres from the grey zone. DeepState map confirms the coordinates.

22nd of May 2026: the apparatus elevates a strike on occupied Starobilsk to a campaign. Putin calls it a terrorist strike. Peskov calls it a monstrous crime. Six Russian official spokespersons issue coordinated naming within 12 hours. Russia requests a UN Security Council emergency session. Within 36 hours, 90 missiles and 600 drones land on Kyiv and Bila Tserkva, as all of us will know — where the Oreshnik fell, and some garages. The Chernobyl Museum was hit. We had an interesting discussion about this on Ming and Joanna’s show earlier in the week. I think Lexicon and I were convinced — and indeed I think Ming as well — that this was a hit on purpose. The Oreshnik, the nut tree or the walnut tree, the nuclear-capable hypersonic missile, is fired for the third time in this war.

What we’re looking at is not three discrete events — which many people will see them as, but not us, and not me through the Disinfolklore Analytical Method. We’re looking at one eight-month campaign elevation doctrine that has been running in continuous deployment since at least last October. The Starobilsk strike of last Thursday is the latest instance. It’s not the first, and it will not be the last. This is Disinfolklore in real time.

The Apparatus Does Not Improvise Its Archetypes

The thing about the apparatus is that it does not improvise its archetypes. It deploys them again and again on the same template. What looks like news in your morning headlines, or on my evening television, or in our social media feeds, is on closer inspection the apparatus running the same play it ran last quarter, and the quarter before that, and the quarter before that. The play I want to walk you through tonight is what I’m going to call, for the rest of this episode, the Apparatus Campaign Elevation Doctrine.

It is one specific kind of Disinfolklore deployment — the kind that begins with an apparatus invitation to international journalists and ends with a hypersonic missile in Kyiv. The doctrine has a name and a shape and a budget line.

When I talk about Disinfolklore being a narrative form, what I’m talking about is the actor who is the acting president of the Rushist Federation. He’s an actor. He’s deployed on certain stages at certain times, and he speaks fluent Disinfolklore. His Disinfolklore is then ventriloquised, puppeted through the voices of other members of the apparatus until it becomes like a cacophony, like a chorus, like a vibration in our brain, until it meets the ears of a child in Kyiv who’s suddenly very frightened. That’s why I call it Disinfolklore, and the whole operation is a Disinfolklore operation.

The Budget Line: $458 Million for Information Warfare

The budget line is documented. In November of last year, the Jamestown Foundation — a serious-grade Western think tank that most of us will be aware of and respect, not a partisan source — published a piece by Yuri Lapayev showing Russia’s draft 2026 budget cuts military spending by $2.4 billion compared to 2025, while raising the state-funded media budget by 54 percent, $458 million additional. The apparatus is, in plain print, defunding its army to fund its information warfare. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha put the same funding on the public record. This is not a hidden doctrinal shift. This is the apparatus that has openly chosen to substitute information warfare for kinetic capability. The campaign elevation doctrine I’m about to walk through is what those $458 million are for.

The Three Moves of the Doctrine

The shape of the doctrine is three moves.

Move one: the apparatus invites international journalists to verify an apparatus claim about a Ukrainian territory the apparatus does not actually hold — Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, Kupyansk, Krasnoarmiysk, Starobilsk. The invitation is the deployment. The apparatus does not need the journalists actually to arrive. The apparatus needs the invitation to circulate in Western media as evidence that Russia has nothing to hide.

Move two: the apparatus produces its own evidence substrate. Telegram-distributed photographs from occupier-installed regional leaders; casualty figures from the apparatus’ human rights commissioners; all-actors framing statements from the apparatus’ foreign ministers; official namings from the Kremlin press secretary; and, at the apex, a head-of-state — an acting head of state, an actor, a stage actor, an acting head of state — personal statement from Putler himself. The evidence substrate is the apparatus’ product. Western media absorbs the substrate as if it were independent reporting.

Move three: with moral cover now installed, the apparatus executes the actual operation — the strike, the barrage, the mass attack on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. The Western press’s headlines treat the execution as retaliation for whatever the stage-one invitation and evidence substrate had named. The cycle closes.

This is the doctrine. Eight months of it now in public view. Let me walk you through how it ran in dates before we get to last Thursday.

October 2025: Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, and the Encirclement Archetype

13th of October 2025: Russia’s Defence Ministry announces that Putler has ordered international journalists, including from Ukraine, to be allowed into Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, and Kupyansk. Note the counter-move when President Zelensky, who has the right to do this, ordered his army not to attack a small square kilometre inside Moscow for over a period of two hours.

Russia, the announcement says, will halt hostilities for five to six hours so journalists can confirm the encirclement of Ukrainian forces. Notice this archetype of encirclement: of Ukrainian forces, cauldron, kettle. For Ukrainians these are sacred terms, because anyone who was in Ukraine in September 2014, just after the first Minsk agreement was signed, will remember the Ilovaisk kotyol, where Ukrainians had surrendered and then they were slaughtered and taken prisoner. The same troll happened again in Debaltseve, just after I arrived in Ukraine — after Minsk 2 was signed — Debaltseve, which is or was an important railway junction, was inside Ukrainian-controlled territory. After signing this agreement, the Russians went on the advance, and once again they killed a lot of Ukrainian soldiers in a cauldron or a kettle. Even the use of these terms — to people who don’t pay attention to these things — they won’t understand their archetypal content and their historical content.

Ukraine’s Response: Tykhyi, Syrskyi, and the Centre for Countering Disinformation

Ukraine’s response is immediate and on the record. Heorhii Tykhyi — please forgive my pronunciation, I’m in the same category as Mockers, although I know she’s better than me at this point — spokesperson for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, warns journalists not to participate. Russia broke the same promise during the battles for Ilovaisk in 2014, a ceasefire offered to allow Ukrainian troops to retreat, which Russia then violated, killing several hundred Ukrainian soldiers in what would become known as the Ilovaisk Massacre. One of my friends lost his lovely restaurateur chef brother, Andrei, in that. The Foreign Ministry is reminding journalists that this is what Russia’s humanitarian offers look like.

Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, states publicly that there is no blockade of Ukrainian forces in Pokrovsk or Kupyansk. The encirclement claim is false. The invitation is propaganda.

Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation publishes the structural analysis. The Centre surfaces a detail worth dwelling on: the invitations to German journalists come from a man named Vladimir Sergienko, former assistant to Jürgen Schmidt, an AFD member of the German Bundestag. According to public data, Sergienko may have been recruited by the FSB and may be carrying out — in my opinion — assignments for Russian intelligence under the guise of journalistic activity. The Centre is naming the channel through which the apparatus is staffing its own substitute substrate of international journalists.

Roman Svitan: The Operational Read

Roman Svitan, a retired colonel of the Ukrainian Air Force, gives the operational read in early November. His diagnosis, paraphrasing, is that the apparatus’s invitation has nothing to do with allowing journalists in. It has to do with the apparatus needing an operational pause. The apparatus is stuck in Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad. It needs a pause to bring in fresh reserves and form new tactical groups. The journalist invitation is the cover for the pause. Svitan: “The main request is a pause. That means the enemy has got itself into trouble.”

This is something all of us who are caught up in the micro and the granular quotidian activities on the battlefield — insofar as we can, as most of us are not in Ukraine or on the front — but by comparison to normal people that we know who don’t spend all their time thinking about Ukraine and the war and how we can try and help, we know a lot. We understand what’s happening on this road, which I drove along a lot, between Berdyansk and Melitopol now. It’s kind of breaking through a little bit, but perhaps not.

We can see a pattern between Russia having its proverbial handed to it by Ukraine at the moment, and these information operations — given a pattern of respectability by all these different actors translating the same script into head-of-state discourse, into diplomatic discourse, as Lavrov does. Simonyan gives lines to all their other propagandists in public so they don’t have to send the email. They know exactly what the official line is to say. We can see that relationship. We are journalists, we would hope — our newsrooms should be able to see that relationship, but don’t always see that relationship.

Svitan — and this is why we have so much to learn from Ukrainians who have been dealing with these structures since 2014 — says the main request is a pause. That means the enemy has got itself into trouble. We’re trying to look at the substrate. Putler is inviting journalists in. He’s ordering a pause so journalists, international journalists, can come in. Actually, what’s really going on underneath it — this kind of literacy helps us understand structures and data, what’s imminent in them and the archetypes running underneath them. At the moment I’m programming a neural network to also recognise these in this particular area of Disinfolklore, which is an interesting process.

Now follow the thread. The apparatus’ October-to-November 2025 deployment is a propaganda cover for operational weakness deployment. This is what we’re seeing at the moment. The apparatus needs the pause more than the apparatus needs the journalists. The apparatus is staged powerful in the framing and operationally stuck in the field. Disinfolklore here is performing the work the apparatus’s military cannot perform.

December 2025: Kupyansk and Zelensky’s Selfie Counter

Five weeks later, 12th of December 2025, same play, different city. Putin claims, on the basis of a briefing from Gerasimov which of course is filmed, that Russian forces have managed to block around 15 Ukrainian Armed Forces battalions in the Kupyansk-Vuzlovyi area. He invites journalists again to come and see the surrounded Ukrainian army units.

Same day, President Zelensky turns up in Kupyansk. I’m on record as saying this from early in the war: President Zelensky understands this on an instinctual level because he is an entertainer, because he was part of the entertainment industry. He understands how you control emotions, how you use certain triggers to perform certain emotions, and therefore he sees Putler — he sees what they’re doing — in a way that perhaps other world leaders need really smart advisors to help them see, and not many of them are seeing it. I suspect President Macron, who famously did his PhD with Paul Ricoeur, one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century — he’s a very clever man, and I was so frustrated with him at the beginning, but now he seems to get it, absolutely gets it, as we see with the nuclear announcements today.

I want to dwell on this. The president of Ukraine walks to the entrance stele of the city. DeepState map places him 1.15 kilometres from Russia’s positions, 500 metres from the grey zone. He records a video address. Ukrainian Ground Forces Day is being marked. He thanks the soldiers. He says, quoting verbatim: “Today it is extremely important to achieve results on the front lines so that Ukraine can achieve results in diplomacy.” Do you remember that? We achieve results on the front lines so that Ukraine can achieve results in diplomacy. That’s how it works. “All our strong positions within the country are strong positions in the talks on ending the war.” He closes: “Today is your day. Thank you, guys.”

The same day, the Khartiya commander Igor Obolensky confirms to Ukrainska Pravda that the 2nd Corps of the Ukrainian National Guard’s Khartiya formation has conducted a successful counter-offensive inside Kupyansk and is itself encircling a Russian force inside the city. “The task was to enter the city and clear it of Russians. We operated simultaneously along two or three axes, cutting off their logistics.”

Let’s read what just happened in the cycle vocabulary. Putler’s stage-one move on Kupyansk — “Russia controls Kupyansk, Ukrainian forces are surrounded, come and see” — is falsified by the sovereign physically standing in Kupyansk, by the OSINT-verified geolocation of his footage, and by the actual operational reality of Ukrainian forces actively retaking the city.

The Counter-Disinfolklore Move

The forward counter-Disinfolklore move installs right mana at the same right pole — the pole we use to determine what is true and what is not — which is the pole the apparatus is trying to capture. The apparatus is trying to capture the right pole. It’s trying to say A is true when it’s not true, and it’s trying to use the media Disinfolklore to persuade us that A is true when A is false. The counter-move is for President Zelensky to go there and demonstrate with his physical presence that actually B is true. The lawful authority is in place, and the apparatus claim to control is wrong.

The Code passes for Ukraine, but it fails the Code of Positive Trolls — the second element of which is ethical discipline. It passes for Ukraine: the sovereign is there. It fails for Russia: the sovereign isn’t anywhere near Kupyansk, nor are his forces. The apparatus’ substrate fabrication collapses on its own terms. This is what an ace counter looks like.

The Mechanism of Paper Conquests

Before we move to Starobilsk, here is the wider mechanism President Zelensky’s selfie exposes. The one I want to name and put on the record is the mechanism of paper conquests. The apparatus’s stage-one claims about which Ukrainian territory the apparatus controls are recorded in its own maps. Russia’s general staff’s maps, presented at official briefings, claim — and the Institute for the Study of War has been documenting this in detail in the past week — that Russia controls not just Kupyansk, but territory 30 km west of Kupyansk. I’m indebted to, I think it was Will on Volya who alerted me to this. It could have been Firefella, I’m not sure who — I can’t remember. Territory Ukrainian forces clearly hold.

This is taking on credit. The apparatus claims more than it holds because the claim is a propaganda asset. The claim becomes an operational liability. The apparatus’s own commanders cannot call in artillery or air bombs to defend territory the apparatus has officially claimed to control, because defending with artillery a position you say you control looks like friendly fire. Calling in air bombs exposes the lie. The right-pole hack — “we control X” — creates a liability: we cannot defend X. The apparatus pays for its Disinfolklore in its own degraded operational capacity. The apparatus self-defeats.

The Flagpole Tactic

The Jamestown piece names a sub-pattern of this: the flagpole tactic. Russian soldiers enter a Ukrainian-held position, sometimes in civilian clothes, raise the Russian flag, take a photo as evidence of complete control, and are then destroyed by Ukrainian fire within an hour. RIP. 29th of October last year in Pokrovsk: a Russian flag lasted less than an hour.

The same week, 15th of October — even more telling — Russian media announced a mass landing of Russian soldiers on Karantynnyi Island in the Ostrov district of Kherson. Federal-level Russian media disseminated the announcement. The Ukrainian military filmed the area in question. There was no enemy. Russian media simply cancelled the news. TASS, October 22nd, 2025.

The flagpole tactic, map-claim conquest, journalist invitation tours — all three are different expressions of the same operational logic. The apparatus is producing propaganda substrate for territory it does not actually hold. The propaganda substrate is the substitute for the territorial control, and the substitution carries its own self-defeating cost. This is the doctrine of Pokrovsk in October, Kupyansk in December, the same play scaled and repeated. Starobilsk in May is the latest deployment.

Starobilsk: 21–22 May 2026

Starobilsk, 21st of May 2026, the night of the 21st into the 22nd. Starobilsk in occupied Luhansk. I know it well, as I said, from my OSCE years on the contact line — half an hour’s drive from Stanytsia Luhanska bridge, where it all happened for me, where I discovered Disinfolklore, where I worked through the war from 2015 onwards. A drone strike — multiple drones, three waves — 16 one-way attack drones by Russia’s own count — hits a five-storey building inside the Starobilsk Pedagogical College complex.

I’m aware of the reports about Russians bombing themselves and Ryan Sugar. My method: we don’t have to go into that. We don’t need to know the facts. It would be very interesting if out of proof came of that.

The Chronology and First-Mover Advantage

The read was about the pattern of the apparatus’ deployments, not about anything to do with the temporal order of incident reporting. When I commissioned a careful hour-by-hour chronology of the case to test my temporal hypothesis, the chronology disproved one specific framing I had been considering, and confirmed the deeper point.

Here’s what the chronology found. The strike landed in the small hours of the 22nd of May. By the morning, Russia’s Human Rights Commissioner — again, an actor, so they’re acting the role of a Human Rights Commissioner — Yana Lantratova was already making the civilian casualty claim. 35 children. Remember: I discovered Disinfolklore when Russia planted the mother-and-the-maiden archetype in a story that just seemed not true.

Pasechnik, the Moscow-installed fake regional governor — again acting as a governor, he’s an actor, as in a stage play on a television programme — of occupied Luhansk, posted the Telegram photos of the damaged building. The regional state TV channels of occupied Luhansk, the apparatus-aligned GTRK Lugansk feed, the Lugansk 24 channel, were already running incident coverage. 24/7 incident coverage.

By the morning of the 22nd, the apparatus had been first to the incident framing. Ukraine’s general staff statement claiming the Rubicon headquarters target came later in the day — at 16:02 Kyiv time per UNN. Initially I had assumed Ukraine claimed it and the Rushists were responding to it. That was my hypothesis. When I looked in detail at the chronology, that hypothesis was wrong. It was explicitly reactive to the Russian-side incident framing already in circulation.

For this specific case, the apparatus had a structural first-mover advantage on incident reporting. The strike happened on apparatus-controlled territory. Regional apparatus-aligned Telegram channels are on-the-ground first reporters. Ukraine’s general staff publishes target lists on its own schedule, typically morning-after batches, not racing-to-the-news mode. The apparatus’ first arrival on the incident is not a sign of what I call a Class L deployment. It’s a sign of who happens to be in the room when the strike lands on apparatus-controlled territory.

The Campaign Elevation Step

What is the sign of a Class L deployment? That’s a coding I’m using in the neural network. It is the campaign elevation step.

The campaign elevation step, in this case, lands at approximately 15:15 Kyiv time on the 22nd of May. At that moment, at a meeting of his Vremya Geroev (”Time of the Heroes”) programme graduates, Putler issued the campaign elevation framing, verbatim per Meduza: “Tonight the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv carried out a terrorist attack on the student dormitory of Starobilsk Pedagogical Institute.” He added: “This strike was not an accident. It just once again confirms the terrorist nature of the Kyiv regime.” He ordered the defence ministry to draw up response options.

Now watch what happens in the next nine hours. Peskov, the Kremlin’s press secretary, issues the “monstrous crime” framing. Verbatim: “This is a monstrous crime — an attack on an education institution where children and young people are present.” The mother-and-the-maiden archetype: the fertility of the realm depends on children.

Zakharova at the foreign ministry issues the “deliberate against children” framing. Lvova-Belova — for whom a warrant is currently issued for her arrest — Lvova-Belova, the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, another actor, the same operator who oversees the forcible deportation of Ukrainian children and kidnapped one herself from occupied territories — that the International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for her and Putin for — claims up to 18 children could be trapped.

Russia’s foreign ministry calls for an emergency UN Security Council meeting. Pasechnik’s Telegram-distributed photo of the damaged building reaches Western media via the Associated Press, and is used by CBC News and Reuters as the article’s lead framing image. Six Rushist apparatus operators issue coordinated naming claims within 12 hours: state television, state media, MFA, Presidency, occupied regional — all in chorus. Pasechnik’s photo carries the framing into Western mainstream media. Within 36 hours, the UN Security Council has met. The kinetic retaliation has been ordered. The framing has been preceded into the Western press headlines. The cycle is closing for execution.

This is the campaign elevation bundle. It’s the apparatus signature. It’s recognisable as a pattern. When I saw Putler talking about a school in Russia-occupied Starobilsk, I immediately recognised something — some pattern was being set off.

This is not as a temporal first arrival on incident reporting, but as a coordinated bundle of operations within a time-narrow window. Six operators, same framing, 12 hours, Western media imagery absorption, cross-channel synchronicity. The bundle is the Class L deployment. I’ve programmed my algorithm to look for these kinds of patterns in data.

The Cycle in Textbook Form

Overnight on the 23rd into the 24th: 90 missiles, 600 drones, including the Oreshnik nuclear-capable hypersonic, for the third time in this war. Targets included the Chernobyl Museum, the National Art Museum, the Kyiv Opera Theatre — where, as we know, the first Ukrainian parliament of the modern era met — Dynamo Stadium where I once saw Depeche Mode, amazing concert, around 30 residential buildings, a water supply facility, two killed in Kyiv, 80 wounded, including three children. The Chernobyl Museum struck in a barrage framed as retaliation for the Starobilsk dormitory. The cycle in textbook form.

The doctrine I described in section one — move one: apparatus invites journalists, manufactures evidence substrate. Move two: Western media absorbs the framing through the imagery absorption mechanism. Move three: apparatus executes the operation under moral cover.

The Substrate Truth: Vodolatsky and Voin

There’s one more substrate truth about Starobilsk specifically that the apparatus’s framing tries hardest to hide. The substrate truth is the apparatus self-incriminating in its own evidence. The apparatus’s load-bearing assertion on Starobilsk is “no military facilities nearby.” Without that assertion, the war-crime framing collapses. With that assertion, the war-crime framing holds together long enough for stage three execution to land — which is the justification of the fake revenge attack, which was always planned anyway.

When you see Putler beginning this campaign elevation pattern, you understand an attack is on the way, as Ukrainians do.

The assertion is falsified by the apparatus’ own named operator, on the apparatus’ own social media channel, on the same day as the apparatus framing chorus. The operator’s name is Vodolatsky, Member of the Duma since 2008, on the European Union sanctions list, founder and head of VOIN, the apparatus’ Military-Patriotic Centre network, founded in 2022 on Putler’s direct instruction. Kremlin funding to the tune of 50 billion rubles over the past five years, which translates into about $100 million. 21 branches, two of them in occupied Ukrainian territories — one in occupied Donetsk, one in occupied Luhansk.

The Luhansk branch’s own materials list the curriculum: drone control, shooting, tactical training, electronic warfare systems, parachute jumps from training towers — presumably after you’re trying to put up a Wi-Fi link. Three-month basic courses producing drone pilots and electronic warfare operators for the Rushist Armed Forces. 400 instructors, many trained at the Rushist University of Special Forces. Per the apparatus’ own materials, graduates direct to special UAV pilot units such as Rubicon. The Rubicon Centre, which is what Ukraine’s general staff said it had struck.

The apparatus’ Military-Patriotic Centre network’s own published doctrine names Rubicon as the destination unit for the drone pilot recruits their network produces.

Here’s the move. On the Voin Centre’s own Telegram channel — Vodolatsky’s own social media surface — on the morning of the 22nd of May, as part of this cacophony, in the same statement window as Putler’s campaign elevation, Vodolatsky signs a statement claiming the Starobilsk strike as an attack on (quoting): “students of the Starobilsk College of OUR Pedagogical University.” The capital letters on OUR are in the original.

The apparatus’ named operator of the apparatus’ drone pilot recruitment network, on the network’s own social media channel, has claimed the Starobilsk institution as Voin’s own — in the same window as the apparatus’ naming of the Ukraine strike as a war crime against civilians.

A separate Vodolatsky statement on the same Telegram channel — this one from before the strike — documents that the Luhansk Voin branch has signed network agreements with all universities of the fake republics. University students become Voin candidates, training in UAV operation, fire training, engineering tactics. The entire higher education apparatus of the occupied Luhansk region has been integrated into the apparatus’s drone pilot recruitment pipeline. Vodolatsky personally signed off on it.

The Apparatus Self-Falsifies

Now apply this to Russia’s “no military facilities nearby” assertion. The apparatus’s named operator has, on his own channel, claimed the Starobilsk institution as Voin’s own, and documented that Voin-integrated universities are drone pilot recruitment substrates for Rubicon-class units. Ukraine’s general staff statement that it struck a Rubicon-class drone warfare unit headquarters is no longer Ukraine’s contested claim against Russia’s denial.

We’re at the right pole here. We have two assertions of truth. Putler says it’s a monstrous war crime, or Peskov does. Ukraine says: no, we struck a Rubicon-class drone warfare unit. How do we adjudicate between both sides? Ukraine’s named target claim is corroborated by the apparatus’ own named operator’s own self-documenting Telegram channel. This is not a borderline case.

My Code of Positive Trolls adjudication on “which is the right” — Russia’s “no military facilities nearby” assertion fails, not because of Ukrainian counter-evidence, but because of the apparatus’s own evidence. The both-sidesism in Western coverage collapses in the apparatus’s own materials. Even in Alice in Wonderland, there has to be some sort of logic.

The campaign elevation bundle has a hole in it. The apparatus deployed its named operator to claim the substrate the apparatus’ official naming simultaneously denied existed. The deployment self-falsifies.

If it turns out that the Russians bombed the place themselves, none of this changes. That’s why I give this analysis: to enable us to find patterns in cases where Russia doesn’t bomb its own facilities. It doesn’t matter to me whether or not it bombed the facility itself with this analysis.

The Namer Class

I want to pause and name something structural about the operators we’ve just walked through. The operators in the Starobilsk campaign elevation chorus are not random. They are a class.

Peskov is the Kremlin press secretary. He’s been the apparatus’s official naming voice since 2008. Zakharova is the foreign ministry’s spokesperson, in that role since 2015. Lvova-Belova is the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, the operator the International Criminal Court indicted — or, strictly speaking, issued warrants for — alongside Putler himself, for forcible deportation of Ukrainian children. Lantratova is the Russian Federation’s Human Rights Commissioner. Pasechnik is the occupier-installed head of the fake Lugansk Folks’ Republic — the man who was, before 2014, a Ukrainian security service officer, and who is now the regional namer for the occupier-installed administration of an occupied Ukrainian oblast. Konashenkov and his successors at the defence ministry. Lavrov at the foreign ministry. Medvedev on the security council. Kirill at the orthodox patriarchate.

These operators are a class. The institutional function of the class is to perform what I’m going to call, for the rest of this and going forward, the Namer Class Function. The Namer Class Function is the institutionalised performance of naming on behalf of the apparatus: naming what the apparatus needs named, in the framing the apparatus needs, on the schedule the apparatus needs.

The NM Pole and the MN Pole

In the framework’s vocabulary, the Namer Class operates at what I call an NM pole — the foundation pole of naming what is. It’s the opposite of MN, mana. Mana is the spirit, it’s the element, it’s the energy inside a meme. The naming pole is what you call it.

When the naming attaches to the substrate that actually exists in the way the naming says — when the wall really did contain that many fallen soldiers, when the pantheon of heroes really does enter the name of Ukrainian war dead — that’s right mana, that’s right mana. Disinfolklore mana is installed on the NM pole.

Code Tool 7 adjudication — which is ethical discipline or “right” — fails. Against what standard? Against the post-World War II legal-factual standard: the Geneva Conventions, the Genocide Convention, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, the Budapest Memorandum, Additional Protocol I on the Protection of Civilians. Every official naming by the Namer Class — on Starobilsk, on Mariupol, on Bucha, on Izyum and Kakhovka, on the deportation of children to Crimea, on the annexation decrees of September 2022 — every single one of these official namings fails the second element in the Code of Positive Trolls. It fails against the post-World War II legal standard.

This is what I mean by Peskov as namer, adjudicated as falsely naming mana, not right. All Russia’s official spokespersons. The class itself is structurally a sustained NM-pole Disinfolklore mana installation machine. The chorus we saw in Starobilsk is not a one-off — it’s the daily output of this class. The class is the deployment, the deployment is the class.

For the framework’s detection model — the local large language model I’m building — the Namer Class is a role-tag class. The model is being trained to recognise the institutional roles, the chorus pattern, chorus density per time window, the imagery substrate absorption pattern from operator Telegram channels into Western media, and the Code Tool 7 against named-legal-instrument adjudication. The class is detectable, the class is trainable, and the detection of the chorus is the leading indicator of the Class L campaign elevation that the apparatus is about to land.

Western Media Stage 2 Absorption

How did the Western media carry the stage-one framing into stage two on Starobilsk?

CNN, 23rd of May. The URL of the article — and you don’t even need to read the article, but of course I did — the URL is the framing: “Putin-Ukraine-strike-Starobilsk-international.” The headline reads: “Massive Russian Missile Barrage Hits Kyiv After Putler Orders Retaliation for a Deadly Ukrainian Attack.” The grammatical subject is Russia. Yes, Russia hit transitively. But the predicate carries the cycle’s grammar perfectly intact: “after Putler orders retaliation for deadly Ukrainian attack.” The word “retaliation” is doing the work. “Deadly Ukrainian attack.”

Same day: “Putler vows revenge after a Ukraine attack kills at least six, wounds dozens at student dorm.” Same grammar. “Ukraine attacks” established as fact predicate. “Putler” established as the responding moral agent — the merciful sovereign.

The lead photograph, the article’s authority-position imagery, is from Pasechnik’s Telegram channel, distributed by Associated Press. The caption to CBC’s editorial content identifies Pasechnik as the Moscow-appointed head of the Russian-controlled Luhansk region. Let’s be grateful for small mercies. But the photograph occupies the article’s authority position. Most readers do not know who Pasechnik is, or even where this is in Ukraine, or even what’s going on in Ukraine. Most readers will not internalise that the Luhansk Folk’s Republic is an occupier-installed structure with no legitimate authority over the territory it claims. The photograph reads, to a non-specialist eye, as the authoritative image of the event. The Class L absorption is happening at the visual substrate layer where most readers’ impressions form, while the propositional layer of the article maintains plausible balance.

Even Al Jazeera, which used the more critical attribution verb “labels” — “Russia labels Ukraine attack in occupier monstrous crime” — even Al Jazeera leads with the Rushist framing verb in the headline.

The UN — and I want to be fair, the UN was the most cautious of the surveyed sources. The UN headline reads: “UN alarmed by reports of deadly strike on dormitory in occupied Luhansk.” They have the word “reports” — good. They have the verb “alarmed” — less good. Alarm is itself an apparatus-induced state. Inside the article, the UN’s own caveat is explicit: “The UN does not have access to the area, which is under temporary Russian occupation, cannot verify the details of the reported strike.” So why is it commenting on it? The UN is telling you that it does not know whether the Russian framing is true, but the headline does not say “unverified.” The headline says “alarmed.”

Two days after the strike, Zakharova publicly accused the BBC of officially refusing to visit Starobilsk — I’m sure they can get that guy Rosenberg in Moscow to go — and accuses CNN of being on vacation. The apparatus extracts mileage from Western coverage. The apparatus also extracts mileage from Western non-coverage. The framing wins either way. The framing is the apparatus’ product. The framing is what the apparatus is for.

The Right Stage-Two Response: Ethical Discipline

What is the right stage-two response from the Western press? It’s not balance. Balance in this asymmetric situation is the apparatus’ victory.

The right response is what Tool Seven — the ethical discipline, or right tool, in the Code of Positive Trolls, which is a core module in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method — would tell you to do. Apply the question: is the meme’s mana right or ethical? Russia is the occupying power. Russia is striking Kyiv with hypersonic missiles as we speak. These claims do not deserve parity in a Western newspaper headline. To give them parity is itself an ethical failure.

Revenge Cycle Historians

I have a name for the journalists and commentators who do this, and I have patience and sympathy and empathy for them, but not for the ones who have been watching this war for as long as I have and who still cannot see this pattern. I have called them, since March 2024, revenge cycle historians.

The revenge cycle historian treats the most recent apparatus-announced trigger as the starting point of analysis. The cycle is presented as if it began on the 22nd of May 2026, and everything before that — Pokrovsk, Kupyansk, the 12-year apparatus pattern that I first noticed in Stanytsia Luhanska on the ground, on the micro and then on the macro, the Mariupol-boat–Dugina artefact in 2022 when she, in her very lovely English, performed the Amnesty August 2022 report (which had the same framing that Dugina had) — all of it is excluded from the frame as background.

The revenge cycle historian is the most powerful instrument the apparatus has in the Western press. The apparatus does not need the Western press to believe its framing. It needs the Western press to treat the framing’s starting point as the cycle’s starting point. “Ukraine attacks Starobilsk and Russia avenges this.” That is the only stage-two move the cycle requires.

Vatnik Soup and Tankerfeller: Independent Convergence

One more piece from the Starobilsk case before I get to the end. As I was assembling this material, a Finnish anti-disinformation practitioner, Pekka — I’m not great with non-Indo-European names either — who publishes as Vatnik Soup, published a 13-panel thread on the case that converged on near-identical analysis as mine, using independent methodology and largely distinct primary source evidence. He quotes the NAFO photo-forensic researcher Tankerfeller extensively — not to be confused with my fellow Irishmen.

Six categories of evidence beyond what I’ve walked through in this episode. Tankerfeller traced the apparatus’ victim photos — the photos the relatives were holding at the staged memorial scene — to Pinterest selfies, casting platform stock, a 2000 viral Mars Boys Russian internet meme, the Ukrainian Plast Scouting Organisation, and a Ukrainian blogger named Katerina Yurievna. The photographs the relatives were holding were not photographs of the dead.

The apparatus has a documented history of doing this. Vatnik Soup notes they once used a photo of a gay porn star, Billy Harrington, on one of their memorial planks — probably without paying him the just fee. Random and recycled photo deployment on apparatus memorials is meta-pattern, not accident. We see the same thing every 9th of May, the annual Immortal Regiment March, where many marchers carry portraits of people who are not their ancestors — portraits distributed at staging points and discarded near rubbish bins after the procession — documented since the Red Square incident of 2015, which some of us will remember.

RT Ireland and the Pre-Strike Coverage

Vatnik Soup catalogued the named international journalists the apparatus brought to the Starobilsk fake coverage tour: Chay Bowes from R.T. Ireland — I hate saying those two words together, R.T. Ireland — again, “writ,” “right.” Saeed Khalaf from Al Arabiya Moscow. Eldar Aydar from Türkiye. Giovanni Pigni, who writes for La Stampa but has lived in St Petersburg since 2015. And Lu Yuguang from Phoenix TV, China. The apparatus pre-builds its own international amplification substrate rather than waiting for Western media to organically echo.

The Starobilsk tour is one deployment. The Pokrovsk–Kupyansk October–December series is the precursor. The pattern goes back to the Mariupol-boat–Dugina tour of August 2022 — how did that work out for you, Daria, RIP — and the earlier Donbas tours of 2014 onwards.

The load-bearing falsification of the entire apparatus framing is the apparatus’s own pre-strike state-TV coverage of the Starobilsk facility. Rossiya 1, GTRK Lugansk regional state TV, the Luhansk 24 channel — all three had filmed the facility before Ukraine struck it. You don’t need to hire Palantir to get their targeting — you just watch RT Today. Their footage shows all-male drone pilot trainees (because of course women couldn’t possibly drive a drone in the Rushist imagination) at laptops with target-locking micro-drone hardware. No women in sight. The watermarks of three state broadcasters are visible on the footage. The apparatus has falsified its own post-strike claim on its own most authoritative surfaces. Girls aged 14 to 17 killed — again, the maiden archetype, to trigger emotions.

Closing

When two independent practitioners — me and Pekka — reach the same verdict within 72 hours of the strike, the verdict is the verdict. The framework’s job is to do this work systematically at machine scale on every Disinfolklore deployment that lands. Vatnik Soup is showing what Disinfolklore-grade Code discipline analysis looks like in real time. The local large language model I’m training is being trained to do exactly this in volume, on the apparatus’ whole output every day.

I’ll leave it at that for tonight.

Continued from:

First in series:

What I’m trying to do is also communicate a form of literacy. I learned to see archetypes in data and in stories in 2016, in Russia-occupied eastern Ukraine, in a story I’ve told before. I’ve spent the last 10 years unpacking that insight into what I call the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, whose main exposition is on the disinfolklore.eu website, where we have the 12-tool way. For people who want a bit more detail, they’ll look in there, they’ll see all the origins — it’s about a million and a half words, divided into about two and a half thousand short passages, purposefully like that so that it’s very accessible. I also publish on disinfolklore.net, decodingtrolls.net, and powerofmana.net. Those three projects’ Substacks you can subscribe to, and they all meld into one.

I’m currently building — well, I’ve completed this week — the building of the architecture of a training set to fine-tune an open-weights LLM, large language model, locally. That’s very exciting. The architecture is based on the 12-tool way, and based on the contents of disinfolklore.eu.

The Don’t Poke the Bear Meme: AFD and Russian Information Projection

The first thing I wanted to talk about today was really because it’s kind of in the news. Many of you have heard me talk about the most successful Disinfolklore meme ever, which is “don’t poke the bear.” It’s probably obvious to people, when I get your eye in, that this is Disinfolklore, because it’s about the bear, it’s from fairy tales, it’s from folk tales.

This week we saw Russia projecting that meme, that piece of Disinfolklore, into our information space, through the mainstream of the German information space, through a political party which has been funded by the Russians. The AFD may have been founded in a virtuous way, although it was founded to deal with migrants — and the entire Syrian migrant crisis was on purpose provoked by Russia accelerating its carpet bombing in Syria in September 2015, when it wanted a bit more leverage at the so-called mythical negotiation table.

That had a lot of concatenating effects, including Law and Justice being elected on an anti-migrant Polish nationalist agenda in Poland, Orbán consolidating his position, Brexit being done, and Merkel famously allowing in one million Syrian migrants to give them a path to citizenship. I’m sure they’re contributing greatly to German society and the German economy now, so it’s not all bad, and amazing lives have been changed by it. However, AFD consolidated its power out of this, out of this othering, and we see it projecting this “don’t poke the bear” troll.

On its surface, it’s a piece of folk wisdom. It sounds reasonable. It sounds cautious. It sounds like the kind of thing a thoughtful person might say to counsel restraint: don’t provoke Russia, don’t escalate.

The Mana in the Meme: Russia as Bear

Don’t poke the bear — attend to the mana. In my understanding, the mana is the energy, the charge in the meme. What is the energy imminent in this meme? First, the mantra: look for the mana in the meme, which is one of the 12 tools.

First, the bear. Russia is a bear — not a government, not a collection of decision-makers, not a bureaucracy with budgets, logistics and internal politics. A bear: a force of nature, unchallengeable, primordial, amoral in the way that nature is amoral. You do not blame the bear for mauling you. You blame yourself for getting too close. The archetype is the wild, the untameable, the power that cannot be reasoned with but only accommodated. This is not analysis — it’s mythology. Its function is to strip Russia of agency and responsibility simultaneously. The bear does not choose to attack; it is provoked. The causality is reversed. The victim is the author of their own destruction.

The Poke: Infinitely Elastic Provocation

Second, the poke. What constitutes poking? In practice, everything Ukraine does to assert its sovereignty is poking. Joining NATO? Poking. Joining the EU? Poking. Speaking Ukrainian? Poking. Existing? Poking.

The concept is infinitely elastic. It expands to encompass any action by any party that Russia finds inconvenient. Because the bear is a force of nature, the pokee has no legitimate grievance. You do not file a complaint against a thunderstorm. You take shelter. The implicit instruction of “don’t poke the bear” is: submit.

The Don’t: A Command

Third, the “don’t.” This is a command. Not a suggestion. Not an analysis. Not an invitation to consider multiple perspectives. A command addressed to a potential victim, instructing them to modify their behaviour to avoid provoking their own destruction. The entire moral weight of the meme rests on the victim. The aggressor, the bear, has no moral weight at all. It simply is.

The Charge: Pure Mana

This is pure mana. The factual content of the phrase is zero. There’s no claim to fact-check. There’s no argument to rebut. There’s only a charge. Notice the RG in “charge,” the same RG in “energy.” It’s the same RG in “reign” and in “right” — this is the second most important cryptotype, which I write about.

There’s only a charge. A dense package of archetypal energy — again, the RGE in “energy,” “right,” “reign,” “regency,” “regiment” — that, once received, restructures the recipient’s perception of the conflict. Russia becomes nature. Ukraine becomes the provocateur. The West becomes the foolish hiker who ignored the warning signs. All of this happens below the threshold of conscious evaluation, in the half-second between hearing the phrase and feeling its truth in your gut.

Naming as Disarmament

The mana tool — look for the mana in the meme — asks you to notice this, to slow down, to feel the charge, and then to name it. Naming is the beginning of disarmament, real disarmament. Once you can say “this meme encodes the archetype of the untameable wild, and deploys it to invert the moral relationship between aggressor and victim,” the mana loses its grip. Not entirely, not permanently — mana is resilient. Naming it creates a gap, a space between the charge and your response. In that gap, adjudication becomes possible. You can decide whether or not to share the meme. You can decide whether or not to support AFD. You can make a decision to step back and stop yourself becoming emotionally moved by this, or scared.

847 Instances in the Luhansk Archive

I found 847 instances of bear-related metaphors in the 10,000-item foundational corpus of the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, which is what I call the Luhansk Archive — this collection of propaganda items that I collected while in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, and hand-labelled according to the archetypal imminences within it. Not all of these 847 instances were “don’t poke the bear” specifically, but they all drew on the same archetypal reservoir: Russia as elemental force, Ukraine as irritant, the West as naive interloper in a drama it does not understand.

The consistency was remarkable. It was not the consistency of a coordinated campaign — though coordination was certainly part of it — but the consistency of a deep cultural archetype being activated and amplified across thousands of individual acts of communication, which reached over a million ears almost every day.

This is what makes Disinfolklore so difficult to counter, or even to perceive if you’re caught up in fact-checking. It’s not imposed from the outside. It resonates with something already present in the cultural substratum. The mana was already there. The propagandist merely increases the volume. The mana has been collecting its energy and its charge for 6,000 years, from the first Indo-Europeans who stood on the edge of forests on the steppe in ancient Ukraine, to those who returned to tell stories of the elemental bear. That is the mana charge. That’s when the mana charge in this particular meme began collecting. This week we saw AFD activating it inside the minds of all of us, unbeknownst to us. Perhaps they don’t even know what they’re doing, but they received their orders and they followed them.

Unpacking the AFD Statement: The Twelve Signatures

Let’s look at what it means when AFD said that, by helping Ukraine with its attack on Russia, Germany was provoking Russia and making an attack on Germany more likely. That was communicated through this meme of “don’t poke the bear.”

1. Inner / Outer Realm Sleight of Hand

The first aspect of it is inner/outer realm sleight of hand. As many of you will know, inner/outer realm switching, othering — what Donald does when he others migrants, or women, or Iranians, or trans, or whatever. This is in-realm and out-realm switching. I call it the witch switch — switching scapegoats. It had this geographical positioning for me on the bridge in eastern Ukraine, on Stanytsia Luhanska, where, depending on where you stood, the inner realm of Russia-occupied Luhansk was being protected from people like me and outsiders and Ukrainians by the Russians, by the merciful sovereign.

Inner realm equals the Germans — that’s her constituency, even though she lives in Switzerland. Outer realm: the bear, Russia, framed as predator. Ukraine, the actor actually defending itself, has disappeared from the analytical frame entirely.

This deletion of the victim from the analytical space is itself a recurring signature. Some of you will remember I wrote a piece a few weeks ago on Palantir and Maven — all of this hand-wringing by certain people in the American chain of command about the advent of automated targeting — and Ukraine was completely absent from this. It turned out the only AI involved in this was a decision about which targets to take; humans were involved in pressing the button. Whereas Ukraine is dealing with this issue on a technical level hundreds, if not over a thousand, times a day, deciding when to let the human take over in the descent of a drone.

We see this signature, this mana signature. It’s actually in absence — when Ukraine is not part of the conversation. This week we saw Russia again trying to promote the troll that Europe doesn’t have a chief negotiator already, but they don’t like Kaja Kallas because she was born in the Soviet Union, she understands them. They suggest all these bizarre, other bizarro suggestions. The mana, the energy in there is: Ukraine doesn’t matter. Ukraine is an empty vessel. This is a deal to be done by the adults at the table. That’s the essential meaning of it. That deletion of the victim, we see so much of the time. Most of us are very hyper-aware to that.

2. Agency Inversion

Second thing: agency inversion. Germany helping Ukraine drone-bomb Russia makes Germany the active party. Ukraine becomes the receiver of help rather than the attacked party defending itself. The original aggressor, Russia, is reframed as the passive recipient of aggression. A three-step agency reversal. It’s very powerful — just in five words, that’s basically the effect of what they’re doing.

3. War Magic Operation

Third, it’s a war magic operation. I did that series of talks before Christmas on sympathetic magic — how the law of contagion (which are mental aspects of the mentality of, well, anthropologists claim all humans — I’ll go as far as saying all Indo-European humans) — the law of contagion, the law of similarity, and the law of difference. The war magic is: when Alice Weidel, whatever her name is, talks about “don’t poke the bear,” then millions of minds suddenly get this fear that they’re going to be annihilated, and that they should stop helping Ukraine. It moves them.

War magic operation: making Germans insecure. Declaring Germans insecure performatively. This manufactures the insecurity, like “Make America Great Again.” America was great. It didn’t need people going around with “Make America” on their hat — which was actually promoting the troll that America is not great, and was not great. Basically, these are tricks.

It’s like so-called pickup artists. Their opener is to neg their potential victim, to make them insecure and vulnerable, so that they can fill their emotionally charged mind with ideas and memes which aren’t in their interests. This is the same substrate-summoning mechanism that Buchanan’s Cultural War speech enacted in 1992 at the Republican National Convention. Pat Buchanan declared there was a cultural war between transnational elites, cosmopolitan elites, and traditionalist values. A generation of academics parsed that and looked into it, and discovered and determined beyond all reasonable doubt that there was no such division. However, by declaring there was a cultural war, the statement became the act. This is the same with this German person — or rather, the Swiss politician modelling herself as a German politician. She is basically inferring to Germans that they’re going to be attacked by Russia for helping Ukraine defend itself.

4. The Axis of Misogyny Coalition Tell

AFD is documented by me as being part of what I call the Axis of Misogyny. I don’t talk about the axis of authoritarianism — I don’t think that’s very insightful. I talk about the Axis of Misogyny. When have you ever seen China have a female leader? How many female leaders are there in Iran? I think one minister is a female leader. How many proper professional kinds of women do you see around the new Prime Minister of Hungary? Zillions. He’s surrounded by effective people, competent-looking people — as indeed was President Biden, and all good leaders today. You never see real women with real power around Donald, or around authoritarians, and the same thing with Putler around them.

AFD is a documented Axis of Misogyny Coalition member. Authoritarian groups now model themselves in the modern way by getting women into positions of power, but those women are promoting authoritarian rhetoric. There’s no difference in their rhetoric or in their modes of decision-making between them and authoritarian males — essentially the Putin–Buchanan trans-civilisational adoption pattern, which is the Cultural War Declaration.

In December 2013, Pat Buchanan wrote a piece. For those who don’t know, Pat Buchanan advises Donald Trump to this day. He was caught up in Watergate for his famous Dividing Democrats memo. Then in 1992 he declared this cultural war. Whenever you hear the term “culture war,” he is the originator of this strategy — the strategy of dividing societies and communities by declaring what are, in fact, human rights to be merely matters of choice or culture. This is all part of the strategy to destroy the post-World War II legal and social order. You say that human rights, protected by law, are just a cultural norm of the West rather than universal.

That was Hersch Lauterpacht, the Ukrainian international lawyer, and his book The Rights of Man, 1945, who taught in my law school as well. He managed to convince everyone that human rights should be protected as a matter of law, universally — not a cultural issue. This was the really clever strategy that is copied, a model copied by the so-called far right — because they are usually sinister, they are usually left — around the world. This predicts that AFD will deploy “don’t poke the bear” specifically because their coalition partner’s continued ability to wage war benefits from Western non-intervention. The Disinfolklore framework can flag this as a coalition signature, not just an individual statement.

Basically, you excuse the sexual crimes by blaming the victim. On a personal level, we’ve seen many authoritarians do that. That extends to geopolitics — you can make predictions about the kinds of victim-blaming, blaming Ukraine for wearing a short skirt, for just existing, that will carry through into policies.

5. Stealth Genocide Enabler and the Doubly Inverted Merciful Sovereign

I’ve talked before about Stealth Genocide — this idea of changing the identities of Ukrainians from the inside out using Disinfolklore, unbeknownst to them and not in the open. By doing that, you eradicate their culture and make them susceptible to being sent off on meat assaults. Refusing Ukraine self-defence enables continued Russian atrocity production.

AFD positions itself as the Merciful Sovereign for Germans, while structurally enabling the Merciless Sovereign act against Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians. You’ll remember I’ve spoken the last two weeks — you won’t remember last week because you didn’t hear it, but I did post it on my Substack, disinfolklore.net, if you’re interested to hear last week’s talk.

Last week I talked about the drone attack on the mother and the maiden — her daughter — with the mother trying to protect her as they hid in a park in Kramatorsk by a tree, evading a Russian drone. Putler modelled himself as the merciful sovereign by invading Ukraine to save native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians from what he was characterising as the merciless sovereign based in Kiev. In the moment we see the drone hunting this mother and the maiden — the mother being someone who probably was a native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainian in Kramatorsk, maybe even an IDP there from further east — in that moment you see this is the supposed merciful sovereign, who came and sent his forces into Ukraine to save them, and his drone is now hunting the very people he sent to save. In that very moment, he transformed, transmogrified in our minds, if we are attentive enough, into the merciless sovereign.

That is the doubly inverted merciful sovereign nesting. It is the deepest detection signal here, because AFD is “protecting” German people by creating more Mariupol drama theatres.

6. The World War II Restart Signature

The sixth element is the World War II restart signature. Germany ratified the UN Charter precisely because the previous regime initiated World War II alongside the Russians. AFD’s framing argues against the very legal apparatus Germany committed itself to upholding after 1945. When we see senior American officials meeting AFD officials, or Elmo promoting AFD — we know their project is to destroy the post-World War II legal and social order, not least because they are guilty of the war crimes. Certainly the commander-in-chief is, and the defence secretary, and those below him in the chain of command, involved in multiple extrajudicial murders in the Caribbean, and also in Iran, and who knows — actually it seems in Mexico as well.

AFD is joined with all of them. The Axis of Misogyny is also united in their wanting to destroy the International Criminal Court, for instance. I don’t know if it’s confirmed, but we heard that Donald attempted to form a coalition with China, with Xi — or with Eleven — the other day, to destroy the International Criminal Court. AFD and Russian state framing are convergent on dismantling Article 51 of the UN Charter — the inherent right to self-defence as one of the factors of sovereignty, which Ukraine has.

7. Drone-Bomb Verbal Conversion

Seven: drone-bomb verbal conversion. “Bombing” — rather than “targeting military infrastructure, refineries, supply lines” — verbally converts Ukrainian lawful self-defence into something morally indistinguishable from aggression. Article 51’s inherent right of self-defence is rhetorically erased.

8. The Outer Realm Mask Signature

Eight: the outer realm mask signature. Germany is Indo-European Germanic substratum, Indo-European culture. Russia is Indo-European Slavic substratum — sister branches. AFD is reactivating Germanic-versus-Slavic othering. This reactivates exactly the deep cultural template Germany formally committed to never reactivating after 1945.

The mask is performing distance from a substratum Germany is in fact cognate to. It’s claiming that Russia is a bear, is an alien. Then it is invoking these rivalries deep in the psyches of Germans and Slavs, not least from the Second World War, where the Germans treated Slavs as slaves — inverting this and drawing into people’s consciousness, as they go to look through their timeline, all of these ancient rivalries and worries about going into the forest or crossing the river.

9. Reflexive Control: Conditioned Response

Nine: reflexive control — which was the subject of that series of five talks I gave. Reflexive control: conditioned response. Russia has spent years training Western publics to internalise the “we should not be Russia’s enemy” logic. The AFD leader is performing the reflexively conditioned response. I say this is a very generous interpretation on my part, if I don’t mind saying so myself. She is performing the reflexively conditioned response the training was designed to produce. She is the operation’s output, not its independent originator. She should be lecturing her community into not poking the bear, because that’s what she — who is particularly receptive to this messaging — has been conditioned to say.

10. The Bear Retaliates If Poked

Ten: the bear retaliates if poked. Sustained by fear, not by demonstrated retaliation. Russia has not actually retaliated proportionally against Germany for past arms supplies. The archetype’s life depends on continued fear, not continued evidence.

I share Iona’s pain, which she expressed today, just hearing Putler threatening us again with nuclear annihilation, Tomahawks — which seems to be, which I presume now means it’s on the cards. It means somehow Russia knows that, as part of these drone deals which probably will never come, because they’re such rubbish negotiators now in Washington, Tomahawks might be on the menu. I do share Iona’s pain, because — God — it still goes on. They haven’t retaliated proportionately to the Kursk invasion, or to these attacks in Moscow. They’re trying to pretend it hasn’t happened, which is very funny for most of us watching it.

The archetype’s life depends on continued fear, not continued evidence. The AFD leader’s statement sustains the fear archetype. She’s transmitting the fear archetype under the guise of this folksy wisdom. That makes future Russian aggression rhetorically permissible and more likely.

11. The Temporal Stratification Check

Eleven. The antidote is basically the temporal — what I call the temporal — the time-related stratification check. The framing of the bear requires forgetting Mariupol, Bucha, Izyum, Kharkiv. The framing’s coherence depends on amnesia. That’s also what she’s doing. She’s putting a spell on us to forget Mariupol, Bucha, Izyum, Irpin — all of these places which will haunt us, and haunt the Russians, and haunt Ukrainians, and haunt humanity until the end of time. The framework’s insight tool — my tool, in my framework — surfaces what’s been disappeared from the temporal record by reminding us of this.

12. Bear Archetype Reinforcement

Twelve: the bear archetype reinforcement. The AFD leader is reinforcing Russia’s preferred self-archetype. It’s a raid on cryptotypes — the meanings, the semantic signalling systems which I have identified as operating imminent in folklore, obviously, but also in Disinfolklore. “Don’t poke the bear” is so mana-rich with all of these aspects that I’ve mentioned.

Finally, anyone amplifying this AFD framing is transmitting Disinfolklore. Anyone sharing the speech without careful framing is at risk of transmitting Disinfolklore. Certainly those who report it straight are just one person removed from being an information warfare operative.

The Provocation Mirror: Reflexive Control in the Luhansk Corpus

I was going to go back to — because it’s so important — this reflexive control, which I spoke about over those five speeches, and what I call the provocation logic cycle. “Don’t poke the bear” is imminent in that. It is this really complicated idea, which is so common in our information space from the Russians — that’s why I go on about it so much.

There’s a recurring sentence machine in Russia’s propaganda from occupied Luhansk that I want to take apart for you now. It’s one of the deepest structures in the Russian Disinfolklore apparatus. I call it the provocation mirror. In my corpus of 10,000 propaganda items, 184 items are tagged with the bare formula — not “the bear,” the bare formula, i.e. the naked formula — “provocation.” The underlying logic is in hundreds more.

Zolote Checkpoint and the Four-Step Sentence Machine

Here’s the core. 31st of March 2016, lug-info.com: “Kiev has opened Zolote Checkpoint in order to blame LPR in violating the Minsk Agreement. Kiev’s opening of Zolote Crossing Point in the area of Pervomaisk has a provocative aim and could be used to accuse LPR of breaking the Minsk Agreements.”

For those who don’t know, Zolote was at the contact line closest to the area where I lived for three years, from 2015 to 2018, in Severodonetsk. Our teams used to go there, and there was a whole thing about “let’s get the checkpoint open,” and it’s opened. It’s basically a mirror image of what Russian borders specialise in everywhere — all across the former Soviet Union — what they specialise in, I’ve come to realise: whether it’s in Georgia or in Ukraine, different parts of Ukraine, is creating obstacles at these intermission points, interaction points, on rivers.

Let me read it again: Kiev has opened Zolote Checkpoint in order to blame the Luhansk Folk’s Republic for violating the Minsk Agreement.

One of the signatures I noticed early on of Disinfolklore — and of Russian information warfare — is this: in the absence of everything else, if you just don’t have the brainpower in a particular moment to work out what’s going on with this kind of thing, when you see the complexity of it and your brain starts going “what are they saying?” — that in itself is the signature. You’re being trolled. I just say that, but I am going to unpack it.

I’ll read it again. Kiev — they’re saying “Kiev,” not “Kyiv” — Kiev has opened Zolote Checkpoint. Remember, this is an interaction zone, where on one side you have a community, on the other side you have a community, and those communities were able to interact freely before February 2014. Which reminds me, actually — James — the Little Green Men. The European Court of Human Rights determined that the occupation began in February 2014, which was the moment the Little Green Men, the polite people — the folkloric characters who were very important to my detection of Disinfolklore as an analytical method, as Russia’s means of brainwashing us. Of course: Little Green Men, green, Robin Hood, the polite people, like little fairies — these very disarming descriptions of these genocidal invaders by Putler and all around him, turning them into a bit of a joke. That began in February 2014. I’m sure today is an anniversary of something as well.

“Kiev has opened Zolote Checkpoint in order to blame LFR” — I call them Luhansk Folks Republic — “in violating the Minsk Agreement.” A checkpoint is a civilian facility. It lets pensioners cross. It saves lives. Ukraine, grammatically, opened a humanitarian crossing — which the Russians had closed — and Morochko’s statement frames the opening as a provocation. This is the provocation mirror. It’s a four-step sentence machine.

Step 1: The victim, Ukraine, takes a defensive or humanitarian action.

Step 2: Russia labels the action a provocation.

Step 3: Russia warns that if anything bad happens, it will be Ukraine’s fault because of the provocation.

Step 4: When Russia itself subsequently attacks, Russia claims it was responding to the provocation.

I’ve catalogued hundreds of these in my corpus. A Ukrainian checkpoint opens? Provocation. A Ukrainian pension paid? Provocation. An OSCE monitor like me visits? Provocation. A NATO exercise happens 600 km away? Provocation. A Ukrainian election campaign advertises? Provocation. A Minsk negotiator speaks? Provocation. Every act by Ukraine, no matter how benign, can be folded into the sentence machine as provocation.

The Word “Provocation” as Signal

Often the signal for this is this term “provocation,” which I noticed so frequently on the bridge speaking to the occupiers and to Ukrainian soldiers. I’ve spent 10 years unpacking, examining this, and collecting examples. I’ve got hundreds of them from the normal media as well, where provocations are asserted. Usually, the word “provocation” will be involved in it.

You, now becoming more literate in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method: whenever you hear that word, you can search for this little module in your brain and remember this mantra. The person accusing the other of the provocation — that accusation is the attack. When you don’t have the wavelength or the energy to think it through in the moment, just think: this person is talking about a provocation — i.e. Germany helping Ukraine, and Ukraine defending itself by sending drones into Russia. The person trolling about the provocation, they are the attacker. That’s hard to see. They’re operating in stealth, and they’re operating as if they have this great concern for the German people. Of course, if they had great concern for the German people, they would ensure that Germany arms Ukraine properly to go and take Crimea back and expel the Russians, so the Russians can’t do this again. It’s designed to disguise the fact that they are actually attacking us, and injecting this meme into our information space.

That’s just a little saw to help you cut through it in the moment. These are really complicated things, and in the complexity they can smuggle all sorts of trolls in. Pick 100 people in a room and each of us is going to focus on different phrases. This three-sentence news item from 2016 is so complex that, if you had a room of 100 people, you would have almost 50 different ways of confusion and interpretation of it. That’s why it’s so clever, and why it in itself constitutes an attack.

The Abusive Spouse Logic

It’s the same logic used by the abusive spouse: “Look what you made me do. If you had not burned the dinner, I’d not have to hit you.” The dinner was the provocation. Russian military doctrine calls this reflexive control: creating conditions in which the enemy’s only available actions are all framed in advance as aggression. The victim loses the ability to act innocently or lawfully. Every movement is already marked. That is also the function of AFD. They’re marking that movement. They’re closing it off. They’re saying: if you help Ukraine, that will lead to an attack on Russia. Some people will be moved by that.

Why does it work? Because it parasitises a genuine human capacity — the capacity to recognise provocations. Real provocations do exist. Bar fights start with them. My cat provokes me into feeding them. Duels start with them. Wars start with them. We’re all trained to watch for the first move. Russian Disinfolklore hijacks this training by defining the first move as whatever Ukraine does next.

The provocation cycle always begins with Ukraine’s actions, or the West’s actions. If they were proper historians, they would go back to actually who invaded Ukraine. You’re so confused and immobilised mentally by someone accusing Ukraine of provoking them, when all you are doing is just trying to look nice for yourself or for your friends. Russia has pre-claimed the position of responder, no matter what happens.

The Counter: Refusing the Mirror

The counter is to refuse the mirror. When you see the word “provocation” — you don’t always see it, but it’s a start — you can sense its energy. I’m trying to train a computer, a neural network, to detect these archetypes in data, these imminences. Obviously the keyword “provocation” is very easy to spot, but thankfully the large language models now are so powerful that they can spot archetypes and imminences in data. It’s a really interesting process I’m going through at the moment, to train them to see it.

When you do — let’s just stick with keywords — when you see the word “provocation” in a Russian-sourced report or from AFD, ask: who is the actual first mover in the causal chain that produced the moment of alleged provocation? In Luhansk, Russia invaded in February 2014. Every Ukrainian “provocation” since is a branch of that tree. Any genuine provocation analysis must begin at the root of that tree, not at one of its late leaves. Name the root. Keep naming it. Each naming breaks the mirror.

I’ll leave it at that for this week. Out.

Lexicon’s Question: Trito and the Indo-European Myth

The Trito myth, which I’ve spoken about before, is the most attested story in Indo-European culture — attested in Celtic, Iranian, Vedic, early Indian, Germanic — in practically every tradition. Usually, often, using the name Trito. In that archetypal story, the Trito loses his cattle, he restores his cattle with the intercession of Sky Father, and then makes the first sacrifice. Trito is the third man, after Manu and Yama — the third man who establishes the right of sacrifice as a contract with Sky Father, and then our cultures live in that way. That’s the archetypal imminence in the story.

You were just saying, Lexicon, that the hero is Trita. One of my insights, which I write about, is that both the serpent (or the dragon — sometimes it’s the dragon but usually it’s the serpent) and Trita claim that they’re restoring rightful sovereignty, or rightful control over the community’s capital or cattle. The word “capital” emanates etymologically from “cattle,” as does “chapter” — I was interested to know — as does “captain.” Both sides model as Trita.

Donald and Putler model as Trita: the heroes on the bridge, saving the community, restoring, “making America great again,” restoring to Russia its rightful new territories. We have the post-World War II legal order to determine who is truly Trita. In the case of Ukraine, President Zelensky is Trita, and Ukrainians are. They are fighting to restore their sovereignty, security, and control.

Trita Always Wins

The good news for Ukraine is — and we all have this kind of idea in our heads as well, and it doesn’t just come from Bollywood or Disney, the happy ending — Trita always wins, the rightful Trita always wins. The sound “right,” “writ,” is in Trita. It’s in the middle, as it is in “territorial integrity” and “right,” and both “integrity” and “territory.” These are deep codes encoded into us, and Trita always wins.

That is what differentiates most of us, apart from the data. We have been sure since day one that Ukraine will win. It will be victorious. There’s no way the serpent is going to succeed here. We have been clear that Ukraine is Trita. Others have been trying to promote the troll that Putler is rescuing Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians from the monster, or from the serpent — or that Donald is saving America from these outer realm migrants, the Mexicans, and all of that malarkey.

I’m pretty clear they will end up — they will have to account for their crimes in the end anyway. I’m even more sure of that. That story’s in there.

The Bully and His Lunch Money

I feel your pain, Lexicon, because when I first worked this out I thought all I had to say to a friend of mine — who would say to me that if we help Ukraine they’re going to nuke us — I thought all I had to do is explain to him: if the bully asks you — I love the way Chuck Pfarrer is always going on about the bully and his school money, or his lunch money — that’s it. If you give him his lunch money one day, he’s going to keep on coming back for it. If you allow the bully to —

As I also learned once when I was on a board of directors, in this nightmare situation, I was trying to defend what was right, against one person who was trying to promote what was not right, what was sinister, what was left. No one else really supported me. I remember one wise counsellor telling me afterwards: in a group of people, most people will just keep their heads down. They won’t put their heads above the parapet. That’s the kind of realpolitik, the kind of knowledge about psychology, that AFD and others are relying on when they say this.

The Eurobarometer and Solidarity for Ukraine

The good news is, I saw this polling — the Eurobarometer polling — you may have seen it. Support for Ukraine across the European Union is solid as a rock. I think the figure in Ireland I looked at was something like only nine percent of people thought that Russia was right, was Trita. That is despite all of the propaganda for years.

As we see — and it pains all of us, particularly because of the kinds of personalities we have — they’re not doing everything they could do. I’ll be humble and say: I’m not doing everything I could do. I’m trying to do work in the information space. Most people won’t help. They’ll cheer Trita on, but they’ll basically be doing deals with the serpent on the side until — as Will always assures us, and I think hopefully it’s coming true at the moment — when people see that Ukraine’s a winner, then they’ll all pile on.

That’s how I would parse what you said, Lexicon. I remember you were learning about the Ukrainian folkloric monsters and stuff when you were in Lviv, so that resonance is there as well. Out.

Continued from:

First in series:

Zelensky’s Red Square Coordinates: Sovereign Trolling

I was happy to see this week when President Zelensky posted the executive order, for want of a better term, talking about how the coordinates — the very accurate, I think it was eight-digit grid coordinates, or maybe even ten — of Red Square in Moscow would be safe from Ukrainian missiles. I noted with great pleasure how everyone recognised that as trolling, and that interested me. There was no argument that this was what this was about. It was about trolling using the threat of force, or the non-threat of force, but in the sense of weapons. Here is a sovereign with the capacity to direct an army, missiles to kill people, using Twitter. I noted the Prime Minister of Ukraine and many ministers tweeted out the executive order, as did President Zelensky himself. That’s the online aspect of it. It was a very specific message within a complicated concatenation of negotiations that most of us are following on a day-by-day basis, but which most normal people wouldn’t follow.

The venue was online in some senses, but everyone recognised it as trolling, not only because it was online. It had real-world aspects to it, and that pleased me enormously, because that was what I noticed about trolling in eastern Ukraine: it is a multi-arena activity that we have a sense of understanding what it is. It’s mainly encountered online, but when something happens like President Zelensky signing that executive order as part of a strategy to get 1,000 Ukrainian hostages back from Russia, we recognise that as trolling. That is in the context of the trolling series, which we’ll go into.

Archetypal Literacy and the Luhansk Corpus

The second element is this archetypal literacy. On disinfolklore.eu, the website, the main expression of my work, there’s what I archetype: the Disinfolklore Analytical Method as the 12-tool way. The first tool is archetypal literacy.

As part of my learning — I’m still learning — to be archetypally literate, to see archetypes immanent in data, I hand-labelled this massive corpus of over 10,000 propaganda items that I collected while working in eastern Ukraine from inside the Russia-occupying media space inside Luhansk. I refer to this as the Luhansk Corpus. These are hand-labelled as the archetypal imminences inside these stories.

What I started here about five weeks ago was talking you through these stories and the different archetypes within them. Some of you might remember I was talking about the merciful sovereign. Inside the entire structure of the situation, Putler plays the merciful sovereign by saying that he is rescuing Ukrainians from the drug-addicted leaders and all of that nonsense, and the Nazis and all of that nonsense. When Putler is talking like that, he is archetyping himself as a merciful sovereign.

The Mother and the Maiden

Some of you might remember from a long time ago — it is a year, over a year now, that we’ve been doing these weekly, and I’ve only missed, I think, one or two weeks — that one of the very first ones I talked about was The Mother and the Maiden. This was an incident in eastern Ukraine where, in a blinding flash, I realised that there was something artificial about the use of this term: underage mother and her underage daughter who were about to be cut into tiny pieces by a Ukrainian Nazi. Again, this is a form of trolling, and it’s a very typical situation in some respects, but it also has real-world effects. It begins in the information space. It passed into my chain of command and down to me as a patrol group leader of a team of international diplomats on the border with Russia-occupied Ukraine. We were dispatched to go into a forest to look for this mother and her underage daughter who were about to be chopped into tiny pieces.

As I recounted, what that was doing was trying to archetype, was trying to trigger us — me and my team, and those in my chain of command who ordered us on this ridiculous task — which, even before I even had the word archetype, only me and one other colleague who were sent on this task realised: this is ridiculous, this is not true, this is an artificial situation that we’re being sent on.

I subsequently found out that the mother and the maiden are what Carl Jung calls primordial archetypes. As spoken about before, I disagree with Carl Jung on the universality of archetypes. My other work in Power of Mana establishes that all of the different traditions from which Jung was gathering evidence of the universality of archetypes were Indo-European traditions.

The Kramatorsk Video: The Switch from Merciful to Merciless

This last week we saw this picture, this video — some of us will have seen this — of a mother sheltering her daughter, her young daughter, by a tree in a park that I’ve been to in Kramatorsk, while drones hunted them in the sky. The video lasts for about two and a half minutes. What we have there, for me, was a very significant video, quite apart from the human aspect of it and the barbarity of it. I did my best to share it because it hopefully will bring home to people one of the reasons why the mother and the maiden is a primordial archetype: it moves us. It should move us. It should move people in our lives who don’t really know about the drone safaris.

The person filming that in the park may well have had no awareness of Carl Jung or why this particular scene — while that film was being filmed, while the person was standing there (I don’t know if it was a man or a woman who came across this scene while the drone was going overhead) — they themselves had to shelter from it, as we saw in the rest of the video. They themselves, while their life was in danger, were so drawn to the picture of this mother and the maiden, and because they had their phone they were able to film them. There’s a great beauty about these two and a half minutes. It’s kind of like an intermission in reality, where it goes into archetypal Disinfolklore in the sense of that video was capturing the horror of what the Russians are doing.

The merciful sovereign Putler is — I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that mother and her daughter, certainly the mother, was probably a native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainian. That is the person like the mother and the daughter that I wrote about in one of my first Disinfolklore pieces, who brought their child to shelter in the drama theatre in Mariupol and then was annihilated. In the moment of their annihilation, they were turned from the person the merciful sovereign was going to rescue — because they were being ruled by a crowd of drug-addicted Nazis from Kiev, according to the Disinfolklore — and in the moment of their annihilation, of being turned into biological dust, they were transformed into Nazis.

Now, thankfully, I’ve made the link that in that very moment, the merciful sovereign turns into the merciless sovereign, and that switch is a reciprocal process. Immanent in that video we saw of the mother and the maiden in Kramatorsk last Friday was the transformation in the eyes of people viewing it of the merciful sovereign Putler as he was playing himself into the merciless sovereign, and the further entrenchment of President Zelensky as the merciful sovereign, who, as all of us know, is doing everything in his power to ensure the protection of his people.

These are very, very old categories. Apart from that, this is a method to analyse particular situations that I find personally quite useful, and also very rich.

Training the Neural Network on the Disinfolklore Analytical Method

The point of me hand-labelling these and speaking and doing podcasts is — what I’m also doing is training an artificial neural network algorithm to think like I think. This week I finished creating the architecture and the inputs, the dataset which I input into the neural net, into the large language model to train it. The architecture itself of the neural network which I designed is based on the 12-tool way. The process of doing this is absolutely fascinating.

As I’ve mentioned before, I think this is the future for all of us. We will have our own little neural nets running all the time. Some people will never have the ability to train their particular personal neural net. My vision for the Disinfolklore Analytical Method is a module that we can add on to our cognitive system, our cognitive structures.

At the moment it’s available on the website. It’s available listening to me and gaining some sense of archetypal literacy, so that we can parse the data and the data streams coming through us into structural elements that help us understand what’s going on when Russia, for instance, is playing the merciful sovereign by saying it’s trying to rescue Ukrainians from something. We know the only harm in Ukraine is being caused by Russia. Equally, in the American example, this method translates perfectly to Donald and what Donald is doing.

I talked before about the archetyping of himself as a sovereign through the use of the ballroom from Cinderella, from Louis XIV’s, and also this triumphal arch — again, the RCH, the right — archetyping himself as an emperor. The method should translate into all those things.

In order to train the neural network algorithm, and in order to get the architecture, it is necessary to label, hand-label algorithms. This is what I’m going to talk to you right now about, which is the walk-in.

Stephanie Baker’s Bloomberg Article on the Walk-In

There was a great article in Bloomberg published this week — very, very detailed article — and it was featured on the Daily Telegraph podcast, which I listen to every now and again these days, reluctantly. I do see this story of them kind of becoming more human and more European. Hearing the Daily Telegraph kind of eulogise Kaja Kallas and other people in Europe is a great joy to me, having gone through the whole Brexit malarkey. That’s a side point.

One of the things in this Bloomberg article — her name is Stephanie Baker, well worth following on Twitter — one of the things she mentioned about analysing this particular Russian information operation, Disinfolklore operation, Combat 1614 or something like that, which I’ve talked about before in the context of the piece I did about five weeks ago on the European Union’s External Action Service Report, Fourth Report on FIMI Threats, which you’ll find on my Disinfolklore.net Substack from about five weeks ago. In it I analysed the Fourth Threat Report and joined it with the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, and made some very gentle and humbly offered suggestions about how they can improve their FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference) report in the light of the Disinfolklore Analytical Method. I offered a few ways we could work together. I mentioned these particular operations. One of them, I think, was called Combat 1614 or something like that.

Stephanie Baker in this Bloomberg report has really done the definitive study of it. Basically, the modus operandi is to pay somebody in an African country — probably highly educated, someone in Senegal or somewhere else, or maybe somewhere where Wagner is operating — get some university PhD student or whatever, or actors in an African country or in Western countries as well. You get these actors to say: “I worked in Chloé and Olena Zelenska came in and she bought a yacht,” or “I’m an estate agent in Abu Dhabi and President Zelensky has just bought 50 mansions.” They make massive amounts of these videos, and the credibility in people’s minds is established by the testimony, the first-hand testimony of a real person. Millions of views happen.

The Walk-In in Eastern Ukraine

This is exactly what I experienced in the first Disinfolklore story, which was in eastern Ukraine, where the MGB — the security service, the Russian occupier security service in occupied Luhansk — was called the MGB, which is the precursor to the KGB. The Russian occupiers decided to archetype their internal security service with the predecessor to the KGB. This was back in 2014.

The MGB had gone to the people ahead of me in the chain of command — two or three people above me — and said: we’ve just had this walk-in, and this walk-in has given this testimony. The testimony is: he received a phone call from a Ukrainian Nazi in a government-controlled area, and that Ukrainian Nazi says he’s going to chop my wife, my common-law wife, and her underage daughter into tiny pieces if I don’t cross the River Donets — cross from the inner realm, the protective inner realm where the sovereign protector, the merciful sovereign Russia, is protecting us.

I didn’t know any of this about archetypes then, but I did know this was a really odd operation for me then to be sent on, in two armoured vehicles, with my team of outsiders, of Westerners, of diplomats including Eastern and Central European, former senior NATO officers and the like. What I did notice also was how the idea of a mother and her underage daughter being chopped into tiny pieces really motivated some of my colleagues who weren’t that motivated by much of our work. Suddenly they were mobilised and they just wanted to go to this cottage in the woods and save them.

Stephanie Baker in the Bloomberg article noticed how one of the tropes — one of the main indicators that you’re dealing with a Russian operation — is these first-hand testimonies from whistleblowers. I made the conceptual link between these whistleblowers and the walk-ins.

The Walk-In: Stage Defectors and the MGB

The first little story I’m going to tell you is about a walk-in, called The Walk-In: Stage Defectors and the MGB.

One of the most carefully architected characters in Russian Disinfolklore apparatus is the walk-in. He appears in my corpus 189 times. He has many faces, many aspects, but a single structure. I call him the walk-in. Stephanie Baker called him the whistleblower, but they’re the same archetype, they’re the same character.

The walk-in is the Ukrainian — sometimes a soldier, sometimes a civilian, sometimes a doctor, sometimes a defector, sometimes the former spokesperson for President Zelensky — who, according to Russian-backed outlets, voluntarily walks into an interview with some pro-Russian American preppy guy who thinks he’s going to be the next President of the United States of America. Who voluntarily walks into a Luhansk Folks Republic or a Donetsk Folks Republic — so-called, I’m air-quoting here — Ministry of State Security office, and confesses. The confession always serves one of two purposes: to incriminate Ukraine, or to justify an occupation security action.

Let me read one of them. 10th of March 2017, lug-info.com: “NATO instructors trained the DRG involved in the murder of Anishenko — MGB Luhansk Folk’s Republic. NATO instructors carried out special training of Ukrainian saboteurs from the 8th Regiment of the Special Operations Forces of the Ukrainian Armed Forces operating in the territory of the Luhansk Folk Republic. This was announced today by the Minister of State Security of the Luhansk Folk Republic, Leonid Pashnik.”

Pause on that. In a single sentence, the occupation security minister tells us a Ukrainian sabotage group trained by NATO assassinated Oleg Anishenko, a Luhansk Folk’s Republic military officer, inside the territory of Luhansk Folk’s Republic. How does he know? A walk-in. Somewhere, someone has walked into the MGB office and told the story. The story is then released to lug-info.com, then to dninews.com — another Russian occupying media — then laundered through a couple of lateral outlets to Russian state TV, and finally looped back into Western coverage as “sources in the self-proclaimed republic say.”

The Walk-In as Folkloric Lure

The walk-in is a narrative device with deep folkloric roots. In the folktale tradition, the character who arrives at the cottage from outside with an urgent message. Did anyone else note the background, the kind of Aspen background, wooden shed that Carlson was interviewing the walk-in Yulia Mendel in yesterday?

This is the character who arrives at the cottage from outside with an urgent message, and that urgent message changes the plot: the messenger wolf, the ragged pilgrim, the old woman who knocks at the door asking for bread. In every tradition, the walk-in is a device for introducing information that the audience could not have discovered on their own.

Russian Disinfolklore repurposes this device industrially. Every walk-in confirms exactly what the occupation administration needs confirmed on that particular day. We don’t know when the walk-in Yulia Mendel interview was filmed. It could have been filmed a long time ago.

Notice the convenient temporality. The MGB does not release the walk-in’s confession weeks later after verification. It releases it the same day, packaged, scripted, media-ready. This is not how genuine intelligence works. This is how theatre works.

One of the premises of all of my work from the very beginning has been that what I saw on this micro scale in Russia-occupied Luhansk — working there between 2015 and 2018, and then between 2018 and 2022, being based in Dnipro but constantly, very closely watching the media in Russia-occupied Luhansk and Donetsk — one of the premises of my work is that what I saw there on a micro scale, we are now familiar with on a macro scale through Donald’s antics. There we see Tucker Carlson in what for me is a transparent Russian operation with Yulia Mendel.

These different dimensions, these different Disinfolklore galaxies, these different methods — the walk-in troll, for instance, the walk-in character here — is the same in each, with Brexit, with all of this nonsense about the ballroom and the reflecting pool and Iran and all of these things.

On the one hand, this is an area of the world which doesn’t matter to most people in our normal lives. It obviously matters to us because we’re interested in Ukraine. For me, from the very first moment I was there, I thought: well, this is really curious what’s going on here. When Donald got elected the first time, when Brexit happened — really unusual happenings — I realised that what I was witnessing in Russia-occupied Ukraine was being rolled out across the world. That’s why it’s relevant.

Quite apart from the archetypal literacy element, or understanding the news, or creating an architecture for a neural network algorithm and then creating the model itself: you need data, a lot of data, which is archetypally rich data like this, hand-labelled, because I have to teach a computer to automatically recognise archetypes in any generated data.

The Walk-In Story Recounted

The walk-in I described from my own experience in The Mother and the Maiden tale: a doctor walks into the MGB. I’m air-quoting “doctor,” because sometimes he was an ambulance, he was a healer, he was an archetype, he was a caricature. A doctor walks into the MGB, says his common-law wife and her underage daughter are being cut into pieces by a Ukrainian Nazi across the river — across the Donets River, across this interzone, across this dividing line between the inner and the outer realm. An outer realm creature, a monster, across the river, outside the jurisdiction of the merciful sovereign, from the perspective of the Russian occupiers.

Within hours, Western diplomats are being dispatched to the cottage in the woods, and I was one of those Western diplomats. This is the walk-in as folkloric lure. The narrative forward motion, the urgency, the drama, the rescue quest — that is the weapon. Some of my colleagues, when they heard this — when I got the phone call from my boss to say, “oh, could you just swing by this cottage in the woods? There’s a woman and her daughter about to be chopped into tiny pieces. Could you just swing by there and then go to the bridge on your normal patrol?”

I was like: hold your horses here. This was being told to me straight by the head of operations. I had to press them and eventually get a copy of the handwritten letter. At each moment I was trying to wake them from their dream, because this was a ridiculous operation.

While this was going on, some of my colleagues were champing at the bit, because we were supposed to just be leaving our base and going to Stanytsia Luhanska. They were listening to this. I was hoping they would hear this crazy operation, which we were about to be sent on, on the basis of a walk-in to the Russian occupiers’ state security apparatus. I expected them to have the same impression I had, which is: I don’t really understand this, but this is nuts. Only one of my colleagues had that reaction.

The rescue quest involving this rescue of a woman, a defenceless woman and her vulnerable daughter, the urgency — that is the weapon. It pulls the target deep into the forest. It separates the target from the safety of their normal critical faculties.

Naming the Walk-In: The Counter

The counter is to name the walk-in as a genre. When you hear that someone came forward to security services and confirmed a politically convenient story, your first question should not be: what did they say? What did Yulia Mendel say? Your first question should be: does this have the structural signature of a walk-in? If the confession arrived pre-packaged, same day, with media-ready quotation marks, that’s not intelligence, it’s theatre.

I fell for a walk-in myself, or I nearly did, in 2016. I walked into a forest on the strength of one — or more correctly, I drove in an armoured vehicle into a forest on the strength of one — until I managed to come up with a formula of words that would wake someone up high in the chain of command, without violating the chain of command.

The formula of words I used was the precise formula of words that was used in the text of the walk-in. I hoped — even though that didn’t wake the head of operations or their boss when I repeated it to them, it didn’t wake most of my colleagues from their dream-like ecstasy of envisioning going into this cottage and somehow rescuing this mother and her child from being chopped, unarmed (I may add), chopped into tiny pieces.

Intuitively I composed the text to the head of security for the mission and I said: “Please confirm order to go into cottage in the woods where a mother and her underage daughter are about to be chopped into tiny pieces.” He rang me immediately and said: “I’m not authorised to stop operations, but I’m telling you to stop this, and I will go around my chain of command and ensure this operation stopped.” He had the same reaction that I had to it — which I kind of hoped he would — which was: this is so inauthentic, and it’s such a crazy operation to be sent on, it cannot be true.

Even though I at the time didn’t have any idea about the walk-in as a genre, or archetypal Disinfolklore, or Jung’s archetypes, it was such a strange operation it woke me from my slumber. I only escaped because my head of security parsed the folktale structure that I had texted him.

The folktale structure is the escape route. Name the walk-in, name the genre, and stay out of the forest.

The Minsk Coyote Lawyer: Dinego and Juridical Theatre

The second story I wanted to tell you tonight was about the character which I call the Minsk Coyote Lawyer. Many of you will know I’m very interested in the M-N- sound and the cryptotype, so Minsk is very interesting to me. I’m also interested in this other cryptotype, which is represented by the Don, the Donetsk, the Dnipro, the Dniester, and the Danube — the D-N- — which basically emanates from the idea of Danu, which is the embodiment of a river in early Indo-European culture. A river as a boundary zone, as an interaction zone. I’m fascinated by that area that divides Enerhodar from Nikopol, that divides where we see these islands which, as I understand, Ukraine has reconquered all along the Dnieper River, right in the area of Zaporizhzhia where Indo-European languages — all living Indo-European languages — emanate from.

Dinego, this coyote, Minsk Coyote Lawyer, was the main negotiator — so-called negotiator — appointed by the Russians. I had to shake his hand once for the Luhansk Folk’s Republic in Minsk. Let’s call this The Minsk Coyote Lawyer: Dinego and Juridical Theatre.

I’ve spoken before in my previous archetypal Disinfolklore stories about Morochko, who’s the folksy colonel of the Russian occupation of Luhansk. Vladislav Dinego is his Coyote Lawyer. In my corpus he appears 345 times. His title: LFR Envoy to the Trilateral Contact Group. His stage: the Minsk Peace Negotiations.

The Trilateral Contact Group was the OSCE, the Russians, and the Ukrainians. The Russians, of course, were pretending that they’re not a party to the conflict; they’re merely helping to represent the organic revolutions of the Luhansk Volksrepublik. Obviously the Russians have appointed all of the structures and all of the people in the structures. His stage is the Minsk peace negotiations; his function, to perform legitimacy through the motions of juridical argument.

In every folk tradition, there’s a trickster who argues his way past the guardians of the threshold: the coyote in the Pueblo tales, Anansi in the Akan, Renard the Fox in medieval France, Till Eulenspiegel in Low German. The coyote lawyer argues with a straight face that he has the right to the chicken, the corn, the seller, the bride, the Ukraine. His argument is not meant to be believed on its merits. It’s meant to consume the time of the guardian, to multiply the complexity of the refusal, and to plant the seed of doubt in the audience.

Dinego’s function in the Minsk process was exactly this. Let me read from my well of 10,000 propaganda pieces.

Reading from the Corpus

7th of August 2015, lug-info.com: Dinego stages a press conference from Heroes of the Great Patriotic War Square. Remember last week we talked about how this is the Soviet revenant plus juridical theatre, one venue: the heroes of the great patriotic square. Every word in the press release, every word in the journal article, is an example of what I call Disinfolklore. It’s brain hacking. We get focused on perhaps the substance of it — what’s said at the press conference — without realising that we’re actually being brainwashed by the article talking about where the press conference actually is.

5th of November 2015: Dinego hosts a group of — I’m air-quoting here — “European experts” to inspect the water supply facilities in Luhansk Folk’s Republic. Remember, I mentioned this last week. He meets them, he mediates with the management of Luhansk Voda Company, which I did all the time as well. Notice: the envoy of an armed proxy group is performing this role of hydraulic minister, looking after the fertility of the inner realm. The coyote is wearing the waterworks inspector’s hat today.

11th of April 2017, lug-info: Dinego and Denis Pushilin jointly insist on ecological inspection of mines of Kiev-controlled Donbass area. The coyote lawyer is arguing that his chicken-coop inspection must extend to the Ukrainian side of the fence. The argument is absurd, but the absurdity is the point. Every hour spent discussing it is an hour Ukraine does not spend reinforcing a lie.

7th of March 2017, lug-info.com: “SMM representatives leave Stanytsia area 30 minutes before disengagement — envoy.” Here, Dinego accuses the OSCE monitors — that’s me — of leaving on purpose to sabotage disengagement. The coyote lawyer now trolls the impartial guardian. The impartial guardian becomes an accomplice of the outer realm. That was me.

We went through this — I think it lasted about two and a half years. Every day there was supposed to be disengagement. Every day, there was something that came from stage left to prevent the Russians from disengaging — that they couldn’t disengage if we weren’t there, and if we were there they wouldn’t disengage because of some other excuse, but if we left, then we were archetyped as the reason why they didn’t disengage, and therefore it’s our fault. We, the impartial guardian. The impartial guardian becomes an accomplice of the outer realm.

Putler, no doubt, has some excuse for why Russia hasn’t released these 1,000 hostages that it was agreed to release. Donald himself will come up with some reason why it’s not Putler’s fault — it’s Ukraine’s fault for doing something. It’s the same kind of blame game. It’s all an act. It’s theatre. The people executing it know it’s theatre. We, as the viewers, should treat it as theatre, not as sacrosanct news.

The Invariant Shape

Every appearance follows the same shape. Dinego arrives. Dinego makes a plausible-sounding legal or administrative argument. Dinego demands a procedural concession. Dinego accuses the other party of violating a procedural norm. The content is fungible — water, mines, elections, disengagement, monitoring, humanitarian corridors. The shape is invariant.

Why does it work? Because the legal process itself carries archetypal authority. This is the meaning, I believe, of Donald and his peace talks, and of Putler and his peace talks and ceasefire. They’re talking about concepts which have archetypal authority.

In Indo-European folk memory, the figure who knows the law — the Druid, the Brehon in Ireland, the Senator, the Qadi — is one of the legitimate heirs of sovereignty. By dressing as a lawyer envoy, Dinego colonises some of that archetypal authority for his stateless armed group. Every time Western diplomats sit across from him, photograph him, quote him, his archetypal authority accrues a tiny bit of interest. Over three years, the interest compounds enormously.

The Counter to the Coyote Lawyer

The counter to the coyote lawyer is to refuse the procedural invitation. Do not argue his merits. Name the coyote. This is not a juridical envoy. This is a costume. Every minute spent rebutting his specific arguments is a minute he has won. Every minute spent naming his role is a minute he has lost.

I’ll leave it at that for tonight. I won’t get on to trolling because I don’t want to take up too much of your time. I’ll leave it at that. Out.

Previous Episode

Here, today in Kramatorsk Russia’s attempt to play Merciful Sovereign (save Ukrainians from yada, yada,..) is most obviously exposed:

Russia plays Merciless Sovereign and tortures Mother-and-the-Maiden.

Mother shelters her child in a public park in Kramatorsk on an ordinary Thursday afternoon, while Russian first person operated drones hunt them. During a week in which an evening Russian airstrike using three FAB-250 bombs hit a residential area, killing a man (born 1980) and injuring a woman (born 1979). A high-rise building and three cars were damaged. A week when three FAB-250s hit central Kramatorsk around 17:00 on Tuesday — that strike eventually rose to five killed and 12 injured per Filashkin, with later reports putting it at 6 killed and 13 injured.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Russia plays Merciful Sovereign by purporting to save the native Russian language speaking Ukrainians by murdering them: thereby, becoming, if we adjudicate using the second element in the Code of Positive Trolls (Right/Ethical discipline), the Merciless Sovereign. The content of Right is defined by the post World War Two legal order, including the laws of war, genocide convention and international as well as European Human Rights law. You don’t need to be a Cambridge University trained lawyer to make a call on this one: hunting down a mother and a maiden in a Kramatorsk park is unlawful. It’s not Right.

This Archetyping of reality today demonstrates the power of the Disinfolklore analytical method.

Note how the method was born when I spotted the awkwardness and evident artificial Mother-and-the-Maidem primordial archetypes in a Russian operation in eastern Ukraine that almost lured my colleagues and me to a cabin in the woods.

I recount the story here:

Today 10 years on I have turned that moment of insight into an entirely new way to archetype reality.

Bloomberg published an excellent account of contemporary Russian information warfare recently: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-russia-disinformation-storm-1516-videos/

I note how the piece identifies this cutting edge modus operandi of Russia paying actors to play Whistleblowers revealing, say, how they served Olena Zelenskyy one day in the Prada store where she bought billions worth of clothes or yachts or whatever.

Here the fake Whistleblower can be analysed in the same way Disinfolklore analyses the Walk-In in the archetypal Disinfolklore founding myth.

One of the most sophisticated War Magic operations in my foundational Luhansk Corpus of 10,000 now labelled propaganda items from Russia occupied Luhansk (2015-2018) is the Walk-In/Whistleblower — 189 items documenting staged defectors who “voluntarily” entered the occupation’s “MGB” with politically convenient confessions.

The Folkloric Structure

The Walk-In’s War Magic operates through a precise folkloric structure: a character arriving from outside with an urgent message that changes the plot.

The ragged pilgrim.

The messenger wolf.

The old woman knocking at the door for bread.

In every Indo-European folk tradition, the stranger who crosses the threshold with news from the Other World commands attention — because the information could not be obtained otherwise.

Russian Disinfolklore industrialises this folk-logic.

The fake defector arrives with a story too useful to ignore. The story is set in the unreachable zone (occupied territory). The story positions the listener (Western diplomat, journalist, OSCE monitor) as the only one who can act. The story specifies a precise act. The story is fabricated, but its folkloric grammar makes it irresistible.

In March 2016, the author encountered a Walk-In operation firsthand. A “doctor” walked into the MGB and produced a story involving “my common-law spouse and her underage daughter” being harmed by Ukrainian forces across the river. Within hours, Western diplomats were dispatched to a cottage in the forest to investigate.

The story was fabricated — part of a Russian FSB operation masquerading as local intelligence. But the folkloric lure worked: the Mother-and-Maiden archetype activated; the “doctor” archetype lent the story the Mana of healing-authority; the rescue-mission frame produced action before deliberation. The Walk-In is the Mother-and-Maiden archetype delivered through a stranger-from-the-Other-World vehicle.

Two of the most ancient folk patterns in IE storytelling, fused into one operational instrument.

How to Spot a Walk-In

When a “spontaneous” testimony appears in your inbox or news feed and:

has urgent action-implication comes from inaccessible territory centres a fertility-function archetype (Mother, Maiden, Child, vulnerable elder) positions you as the only available actor arrives at exactly the moment that the action would help one side— you are looking at a Walk-In, regardless of whether it is in 2016 Luhansk or 2026 anywhere else. The form is the diagnostic.

“I address You as a guarantor of security for Donbass population. On 15.04.2016 I received a phone call from a phone of my dear people, namely my common law spouse [X], who lives with her under aged daughter at the address: [Address]. Military men of Pravy Sektor of Ukraine phoned me, and demanded from me to have to come to Stanitsa Luhanska settlement on 16.04.2016, otherwise (their exact wording) they will cut my common law spouse into pieces.”

This was one of the first stories I told when I began to write publicly about Disinfolklore in February 2023:

Russia’s intelligence service in occupied Luhansk had sent a hand-written letter from a supposed walk-in to the MGB (the Russian occupiers’ internal security service — so-named to conjure up the folk memory of the Stalin-era forerunner of the KGB). The Walk-In said his “common law wife and her underage daughter” were about to be “cut into pieces” by a Ukrainian “Nazi.” He asked the OSCE — as “guarantor of security” — to intervene.

Something, intuitively, sounded artificial about the linguistic formula “common law wife and her underage daughter.” The author had already realised that he perceived part of reality through cognitive lenses (archetypes) that had entered his mind as a small child from folktale-inspired stories. Here, Russian Disinfolklorists were leaning into this aspect of Indo-Europeans’ cognition and riffing off what Karl Jung suggested are the primordial archetypal identities of the Mother and the Maiden.

This is the founding document of Disinfolklore.

Now, the method has its ultimate expression and articulation on Disinfolklore.eu website: https://disinfolklore.eu/Disinfolklore/Mechanisms/Archetypes/Mother-and-the-Maiden/01-The-Walk-In-Story/

Yet, as I train a neural network to itself train a large language model that will parse the Mana in Memes in data into Disinfolklore/Infolklore I ran that Bloomberg through my partially trained artificial neural network algorithm. It responded thus:

“Bloomberg article confirms the analogy precisely. Storm-1516 / Neva Flood is the industrialised AI-enabled Walk-In template: the its_The_Dr “casting agency emails Epstein 13-y.o.” video is the canonical 2016 Walk-In structure — Mother-Maiden activation + stranger-from-inaccessible-territory + story-too-useful-to-ignore + specific-action-urgency (election windows). Plus crucial architectural finding: Folk-Network is direction-neutral; Watchful Grandmother is Forward Tr-; Walk-In / Storm-1516 is Backward Dr-. Same archetypal slot, opposite directions across the Dr↔Rt axis.

And the deeper architectural insight: the Code of Positive Trolls is not just an adjudicator — it is a Counter-Archetype generator. Each Code-failing detected-archetype produces, by adjudication, the Counter-Archetype that names what is actually happening. Merciless Sovereign IS the naming-output when Code fails Merciful Sovereign’s protect-claim. Naming wakes the dreamer.”

I mention this proof of concept for the NN-based Disinfolklore interpretation architecture I am designing and building for two reasons.

First, as my dedicated readers (and some of you fund my/this frontier work through your generous paid subscriptions), I wanted to keep you posted on what’s going on, under the hood as it were. Beneath the public posting.

I also though wanted to connect the origins of the Mother and the Maiden archetype before I even had a word - archetype- for the way I see immanence’s in data and particularly in Disinfolklore.

We first met another Mother-and-Maiden Russia’s Merciless Sovereign attempted to save by turning them into biological dust in this post on Russia’s bombing and destruction of Mariupol’s Drama Theatre in March 2022. And the killing of 600 sheltering native Russian language speaking Ukrainian women and children there:

So we who remain alive, we move on. We continue to innovate. We continue to try to find new effective retail-friendly ways to help our civilisation see through Disinfolklore in real time.

But we always bear in mind those Russia has sacrificed so we might see.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s first homegrown 300km range pinpointed ballistic missile strike successfully annihilated an entire electronics factory in Rostov-on-Don on Thursday. Many more of those to come. Russia has no defence that works against these missiles.

Trolling as Emotion-Moving Activity

Just to remind everyone how I conceive of trolling: it is an emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind. I arrived at that definition through the story I am telling you tonight, and that I told you last time — that trolling is about movement, and what binds the use of artillery in eastern Ukraine, which I witnessed a lot, with Donald’s trolling about Iran, or anything else on the internet, with indeed President Zelenskyy’s trolling about his ceasefire offer this week and Ukraine’s great response to that. What binds all of these uses of the term trolling — which do describe the phenomena I have described — is movement, and the movement of emotions.

What unites an artillery barrage with a tweet, or with the kind of way you might communicate with your pet cat, or the way someone you love communicates with you when they are trying to persuade you to do something that initially you did not want to do, but it is in your interests — this is all about a movement of emotions, and there is an activity which moves the emotions. I just wanted to fix you on that as we go through this.

The Journey from Factiva to Eastern Ukraine

What I am doing is bringing you on the journey I went on, which is: how do you link that aspect with the use of trolling as a term — trolls and trolling — for a phenomenon that most of us did not have any awareness of before, say, 2010? I did not have any awareness of trolling before about 2018 as a signifier. I remember the moment I received an email from a friend who just mentioned, oh, they were on YouTube trolling some people. I did not know what he was talking about at the time. I do remember that.

What that signifier describes has been around forever, and I can say that with certainty because I have looked into what it means. The meaning which I deduce from the Dow Jones Factiva database of the uses of the term trolling and trolls — 65,000 uses of those terms in the world’s largest database of media, 33,000 media sources — that was my starting point. My friend used this term, it intrigued me, and I did not know what he was talking about, but I was seeing it a lot around. I wanted to see how this term has been used over time.

That led me on this journey. It was my insight in eastern Ukraine that actually the meaning of this phenomenon — that has a meaning in early computer culture from California, and also with the advent particularly of Facebook and Twitter around 2008, this explosion of the use of trolls and trolling in the media around the world — what united those uses with what I was seeing in eastern Ukraine was the fact that there was a troll: as a person, as a metaphor to describe a person, or as a metaphor to describe a tweet, or what I now understand as any emotion-moving activity. The activity could be a flick of your eyebrow. It could be a tweet by the President of the United States. It could be a piece of legislation. All of these phenomena are united by the fact that they are emotion-moving activity, and they do move others’ emotions.

Two Springs: Fishing and Folklore

Last time I spoke about this, I was talking about looking at the term, how it arose in the Oxford English Dictionary, and how it went from fishing — from the discourse of fishing. It was used as a metaphor to talk about how you troll for souls. That was some of the earliest uses. Then in 2006, the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive account of the English language, used the term from computer culture for the first time — trolling for bait, in the sense that my friend used it. That was a proposed amendment in 2006.

There are these two springs from which this idea of trolling and trolls comes. One is fishing, and that goes back to the 13th century. The other is folklore. Today I am going to talk about folklore, and the connection there obviously with what I was doing in Ukraine: I was on a bridge with bridge trolls. The troll’s tale described the structural situation that I was in in eastern Ukraine. There were all these colliding meanings and associations which I have spent years trying to work out and work through.

First spring, fishing. Second spring, folklore — the creature under the bridge. On the older of the two streams that fed the word troll, the Scandinavian folk creature: the bridge, the billy goats, the Moomins, and the long moral ambivalence of the figure in the folk imagination, before it met the English verb at the bottom of the hill.

I took you on the first of the two streams that fed the word troll. I took you on the angler on the river in 1606, the clergyman who wrote that God trolls for souls. Tonight I will take you on the second stream. This one is older, it is colder, and considerably stranger.

The Creature of Moral Ambivalence

The creature is not unambiguously malign. The creature is not unambiguously benign. The creature has a long, murky career as a figure of moral ambivalence.

To understand what happened to the word in the last 30 years — because this is really what I am doing, telling you about the development of this word in most of our lifetimes, and the development of the practice of trolling from early computer culture in California, to the use of trolling as a weapon of war by Iran, by Russia, indeed by Ukraine, and by the United States of America — you have to see what happened to the figure across the last thousand years.

When I say that the troll is ambiguous: we do associate trolls with negative connotations, but the literary history we have also has them as positive creatures. Why is this significant to the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska, where on one side you had the Russian bridge trolls protecting their inner realm, Russia-occupied Ukraine?

From the perspective of the inner realm, they were using their Disinfolklore to convince the people inside Russia-occupied Ukraine that those imprisoning them were actually protecting them from Ukrainian bogeymen, from Ukrainian Nazis. From that side, from the inner realm of Russia-occupied Luhansk, you look at the bridge troll and you are being brainwashed into thinking that is a positive creature.

If you are MAGA, you look at Donald as someone who is going to protect America. He is standing on the bridge. He is protecting the inner realm of white-dominated America from the marauding migrants who are coming in over the bridge. From the perspective of MAGA adherents, or those who fall for the Donald troll, he is a positive creature. Obviously, from all of our perspectives — I am making assumptions here, but I think it is a good assumption to make — from our perspectives, he is a troll in a negative sense, and he is destroying the inner realm of America.

That ambiguity depends on where you stand. Understanding that helps us understand the complexity of the act of trolling, where you can very gently troll someone into doing something that is in their best interests, and vice versa. Yet it is the same activity you are really doing. It is persuasion, it is courting, it is expressing love. It is like if your child or your pet is trying to get you to do something.

Old Norse: A Category, Not a Creature

The Old Norse word trolls — spelt troll, without the S, in the sagas — does not, in the oldest attestations, name a single specific creature. It names a category. In Indo-European culture, we have this category with different monikers everywhere. The category is something like: a supernatural being, larger and stronger than a human, not clearly divine, usually hostile, sometimes intermarriageable with humans, often associated with remote places — mountains, forests, caves, the underside of bridges, the far side of rivers.

Every one of those elements can be found in the Prose Edda, which is one of the earliest texts in a Germanic language, and in the Heimskringla, and in the Icelandic family sagas of the 13th century. The creature is pre-Christian in origin, and most of the surviving texts were written down after the Christianisation of Iceland in 1000 AD, and the Christian scribes have already imposed a layer of demonisation.

You find trolls who are pitiable or even noble. One of the oldest story types in the corpus that I collected is the story of a human hero who is trapped in the wilderness — on a mountain pass, in a cave during a storm at night, on a lonely road — and is rescued from the wilderness by a troll woman, who turns out, under hideous exterior, to be a supernatural figure of rescue.

Here we have, in the other series I am doing, where we talk a lot about the merciful sovereign — when Donald or Putler create the crisis and then act as the merciful sovereign to get the Hormuz Strait open. This is an essential aspect of the early use of the troll. The troll woman gives the hero food, shelter, a magical object, crucial knowledge. The hero goes on to do his great deed because of the troll woman’s gift.

This is not the story the Grimm brothers would later tell about ogres. It is a story that acknowledges that the creature outside the human community has gifts the community cannot provide, and that the hero who needs those gifts must be willing to accept them from the figure the community fears.

Three Billy Goats Gruff: Moral Simplification

Three Billy Goats Gruff — which is the foundational story for me on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska, because I realised that not only was it a structural description of what I was going through there, but it is a structural description of all encounters with the other world and all encounters in interaction zones — in airports, on the Hormuz Straits, wherever you have one community defining itself against an outer realm community.

The Three Billy Goats Gruff is really a moral simplification in the classic Norwegian telling of it. As some of you might remember, I have innovated in the interpretation of it. It was first written down in the 1840s and published in English by George Webbe Dasent in 1859, and it immediately became a success. I know that because I looked at this archive, and you could see references to how important it was. It rose above all the other troll tales by a degree.

The troll under the bridge is purely an obstacle, and the Three Billy Goats Gruff outwit him by scale. The smallest comes first and promises a bigger one is on his way — so deception. The middle one comes next. This is the version of the troll that most English-speaking readers first encounter. It is not the only version.

The Moomins: Recovering the Older Troll

Consider the Moomins. In 1945, Tove Jansson published The Moomins and the Great Flood, the first of the Moomin novels. The Moomins are trolls. This is not a marketing decoration.

When you look at the archive, trolls as an entity in our culture really start taking off in the 1950s. A guy in Oakland in California registered the trademark of troll dolls, and trademark disputes over people using troll dolls appear in this Factiva database regularly. Every few years there would be explosions in interest in trolls, usually through troll movies. There would be lots of lawsuits all related to these troll dolls.

In 1945, when Tove Jansson was writing about them, people were aware of trolls and most children would have been read stories about them, but they were not a huge part of our movie culture or popular culture as we call it today.

Jansson is explicit that her round, hippopotamus-shaped protagonists belong to the Scandinavian troll family. They live in a valley. They are gentle, curious, philosophically inclined, and slightly anxious. This is NAFO. This describes many of us who are either NAFO-adjacent or NAFO. Their visitors include the Snufkin, who plays a mouth organ and leaves every autumn; the Hemulen, who is rigid and rule-bound; the Snork; the Snork Maiden; and a variety of other morally ambiguous creatures.

Nothing about the Moomins is frightening. They are 20th-century Finnish-Swedish rewritings — so Indo-European and Finno-Ugric, two different of the great language families alive today — rewriting the folk figure into the tradition of quiet, reflective, slightly melancholy kindness. Tove Jansson is, in effect, recovering the older version of the troll, the troll woman in the cave who gives the traveller shelter, from the moral simplification of Billy Goats Gruff.

The Icelandic Tradition: Trolls in the Landscape

Consider too the trolls of the Icelandic tradition, another great Indo-European culture. In the 20th century, Guðmundur Finnbogason, Sven Lundgren, the folklorists who preserved the Icelandic material, collected stories in which trolls turn to stone at sunrise; in which trolls are tricked by the hero, but sometimes bless the hero; in which trolls are the ancestors of specific mountain formations and rock arches; in which the troll is explicitly connected to the earth itself.

The trolls of this tradition are features of the Icelandic landscape, physical manifestations in the landscape, because the Icelandic folk imagination read the landscape as the petrified bodies of trolls. The figure is not a simple villain. The figure is in the theology of a place. Iceland’s most famous natural monuments are its trolls. This is not a culture that thinks that the troll is merely wicked.

Why Did the Billy Goats Gruff Version Win in English?

Why, in the English language imagination, has the Billy Goats Gruff version won? I have three answers.

The first is the Grimm effect. When the English translator rendered the Norwegian tales into English, he imported them into a Victorian children’s literature framework that already expected moral clarity. Grimm’s Tales had been translated into English in 1823, and the Grimm pattern — I have talked before about the relationship of the Grimm brothers to Herder, and Herder’s call in 1777, where he wanted to find a means of uniting the ten historic mythological German tribes that Tacitus, the Roman historian, had written about 40 years after the Common Era. He wanted a means of uniting them around a common culture. Herder, I have spoken about before, asked: where is our Shakespeare? In 1777. Out of this call emanated this great pouring of German culture, which 90 years later led to the first unified German state. The Grimm brothers answered this call, as did Goethe and later Wagner. It was their work — collecting folklore, putting to music these ancient legends — which led to the unification of the German state.

The connection with Disinfolklore here, and with what the Russians were doing in eastern Ukraine, was that the Russians were doing the reverse of this. They were manufacturing a culture through these stories they were generating in this situation on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska, where I was for three years, and inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, where they were creating this prison, brainwashing everyone in it and saying that they were the merciful sovereign, saving them from the wicked West of freedom and human rights and LGBTIQ equality and justice, all the rest of it. This is Disinfolklore, and the use of Disinfolklore — which Donald obviously uses as well to brainwash people — is the inorganic use of the same methods that Herder and the Grimm brothers used to unite the ten German tribes. That model of creating a national culture out of literature, the literature collected from songs from the folk and stories from the folk — that model was copied all over Europe: Ireland, Ukraine, Greece, almost every European nation state owes its existence to its own use of this model, creating a national culture and then claiming statehood and becoming states from the late 19th century on.

The second answer is the 19th-century folklore collectors’ project, which I will give its own talk on. Men like MacRitchie and Kennedy, an anonymous correspondent of The London Magazine — I read many of these from the 19th century, who travelled to Scandinavia, to Ireland, to Greece, to the Orkneys, collecting folktales and writing them up for a metropolitan Victorian audience. Their interest was explicitly archaeological. They wanted the creature at its most pagan, the troll that most resembled a pre-Christian demon, so it could be analysed as a relic. The ambivalent troll woman of the older sagas was not interesting to them. The frightening underground creature that had to be defeated by Christianity was interesting to them. The collectors filtered the figure through their own theological needs, and the figure that emerged was darker than the folk had ever painted it.

The third answer is the one I have been circling in this series and in all of my work: the English verb troll already had a pejorative hook inside it. The 1567 Fenton “trolls and corrupters of youth” reference that I talked about two weeks ago; the 1575 Awdeley Orders of Knaves, which I will take up in the next talk. When English readers encountered the Scandinavian folk creature, they had a verb waiting — a verb that had already named a category of bad person. The creature and the verb fused in the English imagination in a way that they had not fused in the Norse imagination. In Scandinavia, the troll was a class of supernatural being with a complex moral life, whereas in England, a troll was a kind of knave, and the folk creature arrived to be slotted into the knave category. This is why the popular English-language troll is the Billy Goats Gruff troll. It is not because the Scandinavian original was unambiguously evil; it is because the English reception system wanted a simple villain and had a category to put them in.

My Innovation on the Three Billy Goats Gruff

The interpretation I add to The Three Billy Goats Gruff is the one I have hinted at earlier: whether the troll is the hero, or the three goats crossing are the heroes, depends on your perspective. If you are in the inner realm and you do not want people to come in and adulterate your culture with their different aspect — you do not want them to adulterate the sovereignty or the security or the fertility of your inner realm. You do not want them to come in and steal your sons or your daughters in marriage and adulterate the bloodline. Then the troll is a hero.

It is interesting to me that it is the troll most people, most children focus on, and yet the troll loses in this interaction. For the average MAGA voter or an England Reform voter, where the migrant goat coming over the bridge is the enemy, the troll should be the hero. It is quite a complex tale in that sense, where you have the goats as economic migrants just wanting to get some food on the other side of the bridge. Of course, when you tell that to your child it sounds so innocent — but that is the precise tale that Donald spoke at the bottom of the gold escalator in Trump Tower in 2016. That is the tale we hear a thousand times a day. That is the archetypal troll tale we hear among politicians.

Politicians who, in many cases with good justification, are talking about the complexity of the migration debate. I listened to Meloni this week talk about all the different relationships between migrants and democracy and sovereignty and security and being manipulated by malign forces, and how this undermines our democracy — a really sophisticated critique. This troll tale does have that sophisticated critique, but I accept that most people do not see that when they first see films about it.

The Moomins are not obscure. The Moomin novels have been translated into more than 16 languages. These are positive trolls, avant la lettre — positive trolls, way before NAFO. Tove Jansson was nominated for the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1966, and won it. They are very much part of the establishment. Finnish state Moomin-themed stamps have been issued. They have sovereign authority in every decade since 1992. The Moomins have their own theme park in Naantali and an entire museum in Tampere. There is also a small museum in Covent Garden in central London. Millions of Scandinavian children grow up with the Moomins as their primary image of what a troll is.

In Finland and Sweden and Japan, where the Moomins are immensely popular, the word troll, in its folkloric register, retains its older sense. I mention this because when the English-language culture war of the last 20 years imported the pejorative troll into global usage, it imported a moral simplification that many of the cultures that the word passed through already knew was wrong. When a Finnish reader encounters the headline “Trolling Jail Terms” in 2010 — these are pop culture references to English pop culture, and Moomin trolls sitting by the fire. The cognitive work required to let the first picture override the second is real. In much of Scandinavia it has not entirely been done. The older picture is still available.

The Code of Positive Trolls and Distinguishing Folklore from Disinfolklore

How do you distinguish folklore from Disinfolklore? Mockers’ mocking tone, and the way she tells these stories of doom — that is folklore. The Code of Positive Trolls, this six-element test: generosity — is it generous? Right — is it ethically disciplined? Patient — does it provoke us into making urgent decisions, or is it a bit chilled? Mana, energy, and focus — i.e. mindfulness. Should we let this into our brain, into our inner mind, to affect us? Is there any wisdom in it?

The Code of Positive Trolls can draw on the positive residue. I am not going to try to rescue the negative meaning of troll in our contemporary culture. I will stick with the Code of Positive Trolls because we all troll all the time. If you accept that as part of the definition, then we need a means to decide what is positive and what is negative. I use the six-element evaluative framework.

When I wrote at the end of March 2022 in my “Let’s Compare Trolls” tweet — of President Zelenskyy as the arch 21st-century troll, compared to Duncey Putler as the arch 20th-century troll — I was using the Code of Positive Trolls to distinguish between the two of them. It is simply not right to sign into law and into international law, as Putler did in 2003, the state border of Russia and Ukraine, and then invade it and claim that Ukraine belongs to Russia. That breaches law. It breaches right. Therefore, he is the negative troll in that sense.

The Moomin, the troll woman of the saga at the beginning, the petrified giant of Þingvellir in Iceland — these are folk figures that contain the possibility of a troll who is the giver of gifts to the traveller in the wilderness, not merely a taker of tribute at the bridge. All of us who have been following NAFO since its inception, and have been helping to keep NAFO in everyone’s minds, understand this. They are positive trolls, not merely takers of tribute on the bridge.

If you are building a practice, you can build it with that residue. If you are fighting the public meaning of the word, you cannot win, but you can behave properly, and accept that you are trolling — for instance, if you are a NAFO member.

The Troll Predominantly Negative, Even in Scandinavia

The negative evidence is really not about rescue in the Scandinavian folk record itself. Even before the Grimm filter, the troll is predominantly negative — predominantly, not universally, but predominantly. Most of the sagas treat the creature as something to be defeated. The benign troll woman is the minority case, not the majority.

The troll’s association with bridges is an association with toll-taking, with the forced extraction of resources. We go to the Strait of Hormuz with the forced extraction of resources from travellers who cannot go around. The troll’s association with darkness is an association with inversion of the sun’s moral order. In the Eddas, when Thor fights Hrungnir and Þrymr and Skrymir and the other giant trolls, the fight is presented as the legitimate defence of Asgard against encroachment. The moral geometry favours the gods. The trolls lose.

In the moral folkloric reading that Janteloven codifies — Janteloven, some of you, I know I am not pronouncing it correctly. Is anyone there? We have a Tove. We have proper Scandinavians there who are going to correct me on all of this. I cannot pronounce Janteloven properly, but since I was introduced to it, it is amazing.

Janteloven was first codified by a novelist, but the rules which it represents are the dominant means of keeping community together in Scandinavia. It is the Scandinavian social principle that nobody should think of themselves as special, that the community is the unit of moral reference, that outliers are suspect. The troll is the figure who lives outside the community. The troll rejects Jante. In the Scandinavian moral imagination, this is not neutral — it is the definition of deviance. The troll under the bridge is not just a robber, he is a heretic against the commune.

When Scandinavians invented Facebook comment moderation tools and began prosecuting trolls under the Swedish penal code in the 2010s, they were acting on a folk intuition about the commune heretic that is more than a thousand years old.

To be honest, the folk record shades slightly towards the negative, even in Scandinavia. The Moomin and the troll woman in the cave are real, but they are the minority. The Billy Goats Gruff troll, the mountain ogre, the bridge toll-keeper are the majority. The English reception system did not distort the original. It selected for the dominant moral reading.

When the Two Streams Met: Negative Gravity Pulls Neutrality Down

The two streams that fed the word — the fishing stream of the angler’s running line and the folklore stream of the Scandinavian creature — had different moral centres of gravity before they met. The fishing stream was morally neutral. The folklore stream was morally ambivalent in the sagas, morally polarised in the Grimm-era reception, and morally recoverable only in pockets like the Moomins, the Icelandic landscape tradition, and indeed in Disinfolklore, the tradition I created.

When the two streams met at the bottom of the hill — first in Elizabethan London, with Fenton and Awdeley and Fulwell, and then again in Usenet in 1992 — the folklore stream’s negative gravity pulled the fishing stream’s neutrality with it.

Remember the meaning of neutral. The tra, the movement in there — neu-tral. It is no movement against this axis between right and the dream state, or right and trickery. The neutral is neutral: no movement.

The angler of 1606 who fished for souls became, 400 years later, the troll under the bridge demanding his toll. The gospel bait — remember where the clergyman was comparing trolling for sinners to fishing — the gospel bait became the flame bait. The river became the comment thread. The strike remained a strike.

The word, which could hold both the positive and the negative as late as 1891, when Andrew Lang was editing fairy tales and writing angling sketches and using troll in both senses without confusion — the word, in our lifetime, collapsed into the negative. It collapsed not because the language changed, but because the behaviour the word described had, at industrial scale and with state sponsorship, become negative in a way it had not been before.

The rest of the series is the story of how that happened. In the next talk, in two weeks’ time, I will take you back to three English books in the 1560s and the 1570s, when the negative was already in the word, 300 years before the Grimm brothers picked up a pen. The Elizabethans had a whole taxonomy of troll knaves before Iceland was Christianised in any way that mattered for English literature.

The Grandmother at the Checkpoint: The Luhansk Corpus

I will leave the trolling at that. If you have the patience, I will quickly switch streams back into the archetypal stream and look at one of the archetypal readings of the Luhansk corpus, this 10,000 propaganda items which I collected and which is the empirical basis of Disinfolklore.

From the Stanytsia Luhanska footbridge — back to the bridge between 2015 and 2018 — I watched the same woman cross a thousand times. Not literally the same woman: a grandmother-shaped, headscarfed, thin-coated, plastic-bag-carrying woman who came across at first light, stood in the queue to have her papers inspected by men with rifles, crossed into Ukrainian-controlled territory, went to Oschadbank — who thankfully got its assets back from Hungary today — went to Oschadbank in Stanytsia Luhanska to collect her pension, bought her medicine, visited the grave of her husband, and crossed back before dark. 10,000 of her crossed every day. I was the diplomat on the bridge, me and my colleagues, helping to secure her passage.

She is an archetype. The grandmother at the checkpoint is the third most common character in the Russian occupation propaganda repertoire, after the folksy colonel and the Ukrainian Nazi. In my corpus of 10,000 items, 144 of them are tagged pensioner, grandmother. The occupier uses her in a very specific way. Because I was there for three years, every day, I can tell you she was not just an archetype. She was a real person that I interacted with, and had thousands of conversations with, and I still have the notes of those conversations. She was both a real person and an archetype in the propaganda, in the Disinfolklore the Russians were using to brainwash her and her neighbours in Russia-occupied Ukraine.

Let me read one of them, 24th of May 2016, lug-info.com. This is a story I participated in several different times. “A man died in a long queue created by the Ukrainian Customs Service in Stanytsia Luhanska — People’s Militia. An elderly man died while waiting in a queue artificially created by the Ukrainian Customs Service at Stanytsia Luhanska crossing point, said People’s Militia representative Major Andrei Maroshko.”

The man is real. The death is real. I walked that bridge. I may well have been around the day he died. I may well have been part of this episode. This bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska was in this biosphere reserve, this idyllic place which was not a border until the Russians invaded. The Russian occupiers are claiming this man died because of an artificially created queue by the Ukrainians. For a long time it was very confusing for me to understand. Being on the bridge every day, seeing the different tempo on different periods, it was very hard to know who was causing it. Eventually I did work out that the entire scene was created by the Russians in order to provide a platform for all of these stories, and to provide content for these stories. This is what they do. They create the distress and then they purport to solve it. We recognise that in a lot of these chaos merchants.

Archetype Reversal: Kyiv Starves Its Own Grandmothers

Every word in that sentence is aimed at a specific target: the listener’s protective instinct towards grandmothers and grandfathers. The Ukrainian state grammatically creates the queue — not climate, not war, not the failure of both sides to staff the checkpoint adequately, or the fact that Russia wanted to create the queue so that it would have stories to tell, Disinfolklore in order to brainwash the population, so that seven years down the line they would be able to use them in meat assaults, because they would no longer see their Ukrainian neighbours as human beings. Not the fact that Russia shelled the bridge to rubble in 2015 and blocked its repair for years. Ukrainian Customs Service creates the queue, and the queue kills an old man. Therefore, unspoken but inevitable, Ukraine is the killer of Luhansk’s grandfathers.

This is a classical archetype reversal. In any Indo-European folktale tradition, the elderly are untouchable. To threaten a grandmother is the blackest possible crime. Russian Disinfolklore uses this sacred category by positioning Ukraine structurally as the entity that threatens her. Every pension-queue death is folded into the narrative: Kyiv starves its own grandmothers.

What is left unsaid? That Russia’s occupation created the need for the queue in the first place. That before 2014, Ukrainians crossed no checkpoints in Luhansk province. That the queue is the shadow of the occupation itself. That the woman in the plastic bag and headscarf cohort is crossing out of Russian-controlled territory because the Ukrainian state is where she can still collect a pension, see her doctor, buy medicine she trusts, bury her sister, visit her parents’ grave in the ground where her mother lies.

Every one of those 10,000 daily crossings was a vote. They walked, carrying plastic bags and patience across a bridge under gun-sights, away from the Russian occupation, because life was better on the other side. No referendum in the occupation ever recorded this vote, but the bridge recorded it every day for years, and I was there and watched it.

The counter story is what I saw: the dignity of the queue. The jokes told in it. The people who fed a cat — one of whom I managed to get out of there, Henry the checkpoint cat, who I wrote about in one of my first stories on Substack on Decoding Trolls. The chocolate slipped into a grandchild’s pocket at the checkpoint. The whispered message to the friend at the other side. These grandmothers were not Maroshko’s props. They were Ukraine’s witnesses, and real people. I will leave it at that for today, and the next time we will come back to a few more archetypes.

Why People Stayed: Brave Refusal to Leave

You have probably read this story, because especially with older people, it is their home. They were being boiled quite slowly in water by this Disinfolklore. I thought at the beginning, when they had to cross over into Stanytsia to get their pension, that they would then realise that their fellow Ukrainians were not ogres. The power of Disinfolklore is to convince you otherwise. They had to cross over because their life, their pension depended on it, but it was made such a vastly unpleasant experience by the Russians that it was not a very pleasant operation for them.

Of course, over a million and a half people did leave, and they left within days of the Russian occupation in April 2014. There was, for instance, the last fast train. I do not know whether you have seen these amazing trains — they are much more comfortable than trains in most parts of Western Europe. The last fast train left Luhansk city probably around the 15th of April 2014. I knew people who were on that train. It is quite a famous train. A million and a half people did leave. Some of them left with their parents, their families.

I met one amazing family who had this massive house and horses in Crimea, which they left — just left everything immediately, took as many horses as they could and headed to Luhansk in early March 2014. Then the Russians kind of followed them to Luhansk and took over, and they had to go to Kyiv with their horses. There are literally a million and a half stories of people who did leave, but a lot of people did not leave, for a whole really complex set of reasons. They would go over for their pensions.

Certain people we know — at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, I was encouraging friends of mine to leave immediately, and trying to help them find places in western Europe to live. These people, who recently were terribly affected when my apartment building in Dnipro was bombed two weeks ago, that I talked about, and my neighbour’s mother was killed in that attack — I often reflect on how brave these people were. These are younger people with the means to leave, with the financial means and the cultural means to go, but their attitude is: this is my home, I am not leaving. The Russians — this is why the Russians are still stuck a thousand kilometres east of Kyiv: because so many people refuse to leave. It is just friction for them, quite apart from fighting. I admire it greatly. It would not be my intuition, but it is a really interesting question, Wendy.

This is a core part of the analytical method: this idea I have of mobile armies of archetypes — really, archetypal identities. You have the signifier, you have the surface, the phenomenon. You have the gold in Donald’s office in the White House — that is surface. That is an archetypal identifier. Then you have the identity associated with it, which is what it is supposed to signify on the surface level, but also subconsciously.

I talk in all my work about archetypes and archetypal identities and archetyping, but this mode of analysis was generated from this corpus, which I gathered, collected, and analysed, and tried to understand what on earth was going on when I first encountered it in eastern Ukraine.

Why This Is Relevant to Ukraine: A War of Symbols

Why is this relevant to Ukraine? We are all here for Ukraine. We obviously have the connection between Donald and America and Ukraine, which has just been spoken about. We also have, on the level of the war itself, that it is a war of symbols. It is a war of archetypes.

When we see Russia sending a thousand humans to their doom each day, they are trying to affect and project archetypal identities into the minds of the decision-makers and the non-decision-makers like normal people like us. They are trying to impact the minds of humanity and to persuade us that they are strong. That sacrifice is being made — despite us knowing in this space that they are not strong — to try to convince people that they are strong. Strength and strongman is an archetype, and the archetypal identity is between Putler and a strongman, or between Donald and a strongman. Of course, we understand the true archetypal identity there is between, say, President Zelenskyy with the Ukrainian people and strength. That is also why it is relevant.

The Ballroom: Folkloric Motif Before Architecture

This week, we saw the obsession with the so-called ballroom. This is the relevance of the Disinfolklore analytical method. As far as I am aware, nobody else has noticed this phenomenon yet, despite it being so obvious. You can get your eye in because you have been reading me or listening to me.

The ballroom. The repetition of the ballroom — that phrase, that archetype, which we all remember from children’s stories, from Cinderella: you will not go to the ball, you will go to the ball, the slipper, Disney. That is the payload. It is everywhere in our information space, whether you want the ballroom built or whether you do not want the ballroom built. People this afternoon are sharing photographs of the gold in the Oval Office. By sharing a photograph of this gold in the Oval Office, we are actually participating in the embedding of an archetypal identity that we may or may not agree with. From the standpoint of the intelligence and the people who are trying to affect our moods, our intentions, and our motivations by using these archetypes, this idea of the ballroom — they do not care, because the energy is being continued, and the picture is being continued.

What I try to do in all my work is just give us a bit of a guide, because I see it. I see the same energy, the same tactics that were used in eastern Ukraine, and it can help us understand what is going on in today’s world.

I wrote a piece this week — I have been meaning to write it for a very long time — because of this obsession and this repetition, this mantra, like Hunter Biden. This is the point of it: whether you are for or against it — ballroom, ballroom. Yes, I could fall into that trap, but I am claiming a special exemption. I can use the archetype ballroom, ballroom, ballroom here, because I am trying to explain a perspective on what it means and its impact, and why suddenly this is in everyone’s minds — everyone who is tuned into the American infospace.

The ballroom is a folkloric motif before it is an architectural one. We have to understand that. A lot of the debate is showing pictures of the destruction of the East Wing, which is one archetype: destroy the heart of American identity. Yes, if you want to destroy that, then you physically destroy the building. That is one element, one archetype. I am not focusing on that. I am focusing on this idea that a Republican Party — whose moniker, whose archetype is as a Republican — will be banging on about a ballroom.

Three Inflections of the Ballroom: King’s Hall, Mead Hall, Cinderella

It is a folkloric motif. Three of its inflections are doing the work here.

The first is the King’s Hall. Some of you know my Finding Manuland project, the exchange of mana. Part of my motivation to look for that was reading in Irish mythological tales. So many of them are set in the King’s Hall. It is a table replete with food, and it is about the exchange of what I call mana. Homer — the composite individual, Homer who toured, and the different other people who toured the coast, the western coast of Anatolia, of today’s Turkey — and spoke at certain festivals where food was exchanged. The king, the monarch, would pay for these huge feasts, and these tales — a bit like I am regaling you with a tale now — would be told. Those eventually were written down, and that is the Iliad and the Odyssey. We see it also in Indian culture. It was just a curiosity to me, because it is quite alien from most of our lives. I think it is important to sit down in a room — but for some people who went to older universities, or old boys, or Rotary Club, there is all this thing about food and the exchange of energy in those rooms, so there is part of that.

The gilded Oval Office, his gold card, his own face engraved on it, his Mar-a-Lago, Rococo mirrors, and now his East Wing ballroom — they are all operating in the same gift economy of sovereign favour, in the same idiom of polished gold.

I went once to the mansion that Yanukovych — who was president of Ukraine until he ran away in February 2014 — owned. I was expecting this mythical place that had been built. I think it cost maybe 100, 150 million dollars. It had a Spanish galleon on it. I do not think it had any zebras, but they were not there when I went to visit it. I was expecting to hate it, but actually I had never been anywhere like it. It was just every detail: from the gold loo brushes to the underground corridors, to the perfectly sculpted rooms to resemble the Holy Grail and suits of armour, brand-new suits of armour, all done — and then you move into modernity and John Lennon, a Steinway piano, and just beauty, and birds fluttering around, singing songbirds. It was one of the most beautiful houses I have ever been in. On the face of it, it seemed gaudy.

I draw that in because, while many people advertise this gold and this royal stuff, we think we are making a point by saying it is gauche. There is a semiotic and archetypal reason why this is being done, and why it has the effect it has. Whether he understands it on the level I am talking about now or not, he does understand the effect of it on people. This is why he is where he is today.

The second inflection is the Mead Hall, the room in which the king becomes the king. Many of us have perhaps wondered about Mar-a-Lago. It is just so sad. It is such a weird thing. Many of us would just prefer to be at home or be with our family and our pets, yet he wants to reside in this public space, because that is where the king becomes the king. It is Versailles. He is quoting, he is representing, Louis XIV in 2026. That is the antithesis. It is the reversal of the Republic. It is the reversal of 300 years of history. It is completely consistent with the idea to destroy and eradicate every memory of the post-World War II legal order, and indeed even the constitutional order before it. The reference is not generic luxury. It is the particular memory of a court that danced while the country starved. That is the citation by an administration whose Project 2025 and DOGE and all of that is about producing disequilibrium, and disequilibrium-analysing the entire globe all the time, while supposedly running a fake blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, except letting through — and this is where the axis of misogyny operating on the level of oligarchy let through this big Russian yacht the other day. Iran, Oman, and the United States colluded to allow through this oligarch’s yacht. That is the props.

The third inflection is the Cinderella ballroom, the room in which status is confirmed. The whole passport thing is also part of this — the room in which the door closes at midnight on those whose invitation has expired. The presidential ballroom is by its nature a guest list. A Republican space by its nature is not.

The Law of Similarity and the Gilded Monarchy Set

I have talked a bit before about the law of similarity: things that look alike are treated alike. This is why we fall for trolls, why we look at photographs of people and think we are looking at something real. It is very important in disinformation. The gold leaf, the crystal, the Rococo mirroring produce similarity by association. It is the archetype of monarchical sovereignty.

I posted this yesterday morning. The eye reads the whole, and the unconscious reads the king, the monarch. Read alongside the long-link “to the King” Truth Social post, where he is archetyping himself as king; the AI-generated crown portraits; the Mar-a-Lago oval; the gold card; the military parade — the ballroom is not an ornament. It is the missing room in a coherent set. The set’s archetypal payload is gilded monarchy.

Adjudicated against the Code of Positive Trolls, the ballroom fails generosity, because it is exclusionary by definition. It fails right, because it inverts the meaning of the White House, the building it is bolted onto. It fails patronisation. A folktale is being installed where a constitution used to stand.

Archetyping and the R-CH Element: The Sovereign’s Rod

About an hour later I posted this bit, and this was the essence of my fourth-anniversary speech and the move I made, which is very important to my work and the idea of archetyping. You have that R-IC, that R-CH element in archetyping. Monarchy at the end of it: R-C-H. Right, writ, rule — all from the early Indo-European root to stretch a rod, straight, a straight rod, which symbolised sovereignty.

When President Zelenskyy was inaugurated, there is a picture I often share of him. In his right hand — always in his right hand — he holds a mace, a right rod with an orb at the top of it: the symbol of sovereignty. When Charles became king, likewise, in his right hand. These are the accoutrements of Indo-European sovereignty. They go back 6,000 years. Why is this relevant? They go back 6,000 years to Ukraine, to Zaporizhzhia, to Mykolaivka village on the right bank.

We now know this because these symbols are used to manifest kingship in every Indo-European culture, from Celtic Ireland through now Germanic Britain — formerly Celtic Britain — to India and to Iran. We know this because we have the seals, the writing, the language, the rit; our “right” sound is in there.

The rik, the rich element — it is also in rich, rich person. The rik element performs the same function as the rik element in archetype. It is also in archetype. It is in monarchy, an archetype. It installs the rik encoded in the archetype being used. This is one of my big insights over the past year. The ballroom archetype is the folkloric trope of the monarch — the rach in archetype and in monarch, right, Reich. This is what is going on here.

Disinfolklore works through deeply encoded archetypes that penetrate our minds and recode what we perceive as right, as Reich. We begin our political career as a Republican. We believe in the rule of law. We think the best thing ever was the American Revolution. We call our party the Republican Party. Then 30, 40, 50 years later, if you are Lindsey Graham, you spend the whole day banging on about a ballroom. What you are doing by banging on about that ballroom is installing a new idea of what is right. You are not saying that out loud. The clue is, if you use the word archetyping. If you say: what is he doing? Well, he is archetyping American democracy now as needing a ballroom. What is really going on underneath there is this same change which I saw going on in eastern Ukraine.

The Russians are not letting up in current Ukraine. They are still trying to convince people that what is right is that Ukraine should capitulate, and that somehow, if they capitulate, Russia will stop bombing Dnipro or stop eviscerating Ukraine and killing people. I have reason to believe President Zelenskyy and others see this and understand it and are not going to let it happen. This is why this is relevant. It all, for me, originates on this journey that I began in Luhansk.

The Eighth Archetype: The Grammar of Passive Victimhood

I wanted to talk about the grammar of passive victimhood. This is the eighth archetype that I have been talking about. I have done two episodes on this. One did the first to fourth, and then last time, two weeks ago, did fifth to seventh.

From September 2014, when the first Minsk Protocol was signed in the wake of MH17, until the full-scale invasion of February 2022, Russian outlets in Russia-occupied Luhansk used one sentence in variation every single working day. In my corpus of over 10,000 documents, the formula appears 511 times, to be precise. It is the most repeated formula I have ever catalogued, and the formula is this: “Kyiv forces violate the ceasefire.”

Why is this relevant to today? Or, on the other hand, why is talking about fake ceasefires in Iran relevant here? Because it is the same trick. These are the same linguistic tricks. It is the same strategy. In some cases it is the same people — Paul Manafort, for instance — providing the content, the strategy, for Donald, for America.

“Kyiv forces violate the ceasefire.” Five words. Let me take them apart one at a time, because each word is doing Disinfolklore work. Kyiv — not Ukraine, not the Ukrainian armed forces, not the Ukrainian state. Reducing Ukraine to its capital city performs a geographic demotion. It archetypes the real state as a single belligerent municipality, the way a medieval chronicle might speak of Prague or Novgorod.

The purpose is not to report the war. The purpose is to install in the occupied population a stable emotional identity: we are the ones attacked, they are the ones who attack. Once that identity is stable, any Ukrainian counter-offensive is self-evidently criminal. Any Russian expansion is self-evidently defensive. Russia’s February 2022 invasion of the rest of Ukraine was not a new story to the people of occupied Luhansk. It was the eighth year of the same sentence.

The counter is a different sentence: “Russian forces in occupied Luhansk shelled Ukrainian positions today, as they have done almost every day since 2014.” The agent is named, the violation is stated, the duration is marked. The listener’s mind is offered a different grammar and begins to build a different story.

The Invented Cossack: Kazachi Vestnik and the Factory Masquerade

The next is the invented Cossack: Kazachi Vestnik and the factory masquerade. In November 2015, I picked up a four-rouble newspaper from a kiosk. They were using roubles there — they changed between November and December 2015 from hryvnia back to Russian roubles in occupied territory while I was there. I picked it up from a kiosk in Stakhanov, which it was called. It was Kazachi Vestnik.

It is important to note that Stakhanov itself was a rebranding, a re-archetyping. Most of us may not know very much about Russia, but we will remember this mythological Stakhanov guy who did a lot of work in one day. Kadiivka was the Ukrainian city, and that was rebranded, re-archetyped as Stakhanov. The archetypal identity there is to make it very familiar to people, to remind them, to re-encode their minds, and to provoke in their minds this memory of the past, of the Soviet past. It is the attachment of a new name to an existing place, to a modern European city, and then to identify with that the past and the present of the terror. That is what I mean by archetypal identities.

It was called Kazachi Vestnik, the Cossack Herald, edition 5,500 copies weekly, published since November 2014. Russia started their occupation in February 2014, according to the European Court of Human Rights, and of Luhansk in April 2014. In November 2014, it established this newspaper. That was three months before I arrived there and encountered this ever-intensifying information space, which looks very familiar now when you look at the American information space.

5,500 copies weekly. Again, this is November 2014, not November 1814 or 1890. It was just really curious to me that they would use newspapers even then. Its masthead described it as the official printed source of the First Regiment named after Platov of the Cossack National Guards. Platov, if the name does not immediately surface in your mind, was a 19th-century Don Cossack ataman, a hero of the 1812 campaign against Napoleon. He was picked out deliberately from the deep well of Russian folk memory and hung above the masthead of a small-town occupation newspaper 200 years later.

Why? Because Stakhanov, the town itself, is named after a Soviet coal miner, Alexei Stakhanov, who in 1935 was turned into a Stalin-era labour hero for mining 14 times his quota in a single shift. Stakhanov, the name, was a Soviet propaganda fiction layered onto a real miner. The town was built on factories, coach-building, mines. The men who lived there were, for three Soviet generations, industrial proletarians, not Cossacks. There were no Cossack stanitsas in Stakhanov. There was no Platov lineage. There was a coach-building plant.

This is the invented Cossack in action — one of the most documented archetypes in my corpus, 444 items tagged, and one of the most brazen. Russia’s occupation did not just seize the territory, it rebranded the inhabitants. The welder became a Cossack. The pensioner became a stanitsa elder. The miner’s son became a Cossack — a warrior of the warrior caste that had never existed in that place. The newspaper handed him his new identity in four-rouble weekly instalments.

This is the classical move that historians of nationalism call the invented tradition. Scottish kilts, as we know, were Victorian. The German folk songbook was assembled by Herder and the Grimms, who I have spoken about previously. The Welsh Eisteddfod, which my niece participated in, was largely an 18th-century theatre. None of these inventions were unique to Russia. What is distinctive about the Russian case is the analogy with people we know who went MAGA. This is not a case of organic or inorganic positive nationalism, which most European countries went through following Herder — this model which was invented by Herder, or the original piece of Disinfolklore, the faked Ossian tales, which were created in Scotland and which I have talked about before, and which became a phenomenon across the whole of Europe and inspired these movements that then led to the creation of the first nation states.

It is all right for Eric Hobsbawm to be a bit sniffy about this, but this is how we create a community through stories. What I realised — and this is the power of Disinfolklore and the Disinfolklore analytical method — is that the apple doesn’t lie. No one is above the law. Every single one of these elements of our identity as Americans is in the open air being assaulted, and a new Reich is being installed in our minds, a new idea of what it means to be American. This is precisely the modus operandi in Russia-occupied Ukraine.

Why did they choose the Cossack? They chose it because the Cossack is a deep archetypal character in Russian folk memory. He is the frontier warrior, the border guardian, the man of the Don and the Dnipro. He is, in Russian iconography, the one who stands between the motherland and the outer realm. To dress the men in Stakhanov as Cossacks is to cast them, without their consent, in a role. It primes them for the role’s next scene: to defend, to fight, to participate in meat assaults, to be sent across a river — the Donetsk River — with a rifle, to go and kill their fellow Ukrainians, as they did in their hundreds in Kreminna on the 11th of March 2022.

I did not know that in 2015. In 2015, this was just a weird phenomenon that I noticed was unusual, and I did not understand it, but I understood something rum was going on — just as I understand something rum is going on when a US president tweets, as he did about eight hours after I wrote about how the ballroom is about to re-archetype the Republic as a monarchy. He wrote that “Two Kings” tweet — and again, everyone shares it, and this is problematic. They share it with a moan, but they keep it going. This primes them for the next scene.

In 2022, the invented Cossack is also a changeling archetype. It swaps the identity in the cradle. It is also a merciful sovereign archetype: the occupier claims to be restoring something that was stolen. It is a fake state liturgy archetype, because the First Regiment named after Platov of the Cossack National Guard is a paper institution — with a uniform and a newspaper and no legitimate lineage whatsoever.

The counter, as with all invented traditions, is to name the factory. When a man in uniform claims his grandfather was a Cossack, ask what his grandfather actually did for a living. Ask him what the name of the town means. It is not Stakhanov; it is Kadiivka, and it will be Kadiivka again. Ask him where the coach-building plant went. It is now destroyed by Ukraine, by HIMARS strikes. The invented Cossack dissolves when the actual grandfather is summoned back into the room.

Water as a Fertility Weapon: Dumézil’s Third Function Under Threat

The next one I wanted to talk about was water as a fertility weapon, and Dumézil’s third function under threat. I have talked before about this amazing French comparativist who, in the 1930s, suddenly worked out that at the foundation of all Indo-European traditions is a tripartite split of our communities into sovereignty, security, and fertility. The monarch or the priest; then security, the warrior; then fertility, the farmer, the woman, prosperity. Those three. It is always those three. Manifest, for instance, in the Indian caste system.

The third aspect of it is the fertility function. This is what Russia is doing when it steals children. It is deliberately subverting the fertility function. It is attempting to destroy the reproduction of Ukraine, of the community. This is an age-old weapon.

Georges Dumézil, the French Indo-Europeanist, argued that every Indo-European culture organises its self-image around three functions: sovereignty, which is the legal-magical authority — magical authority, Donald is a magician in this sense, a magus. He gets millions of people to share his memes about a ballroom and to talk about a ballroom yesterday. That is as magical as you get. Security, the warrior. And fertility, prosperity, the provider.

Russia’s propaganda in occupied Luhansk performs all three. The function I want to speak about today is the third: fertility, prosperity, the water and the grain. Very apt today, given the second ship apparently delivering grain to Israel, Haifa — stolen Ukrainian grain — because the corpus shows something distinctive. Russia mobilises water as a weapon and then positions itself as the only hydraulic saviour.

I know this myself, because we spent about a year in eastern Ukraine in the early years of the occupation trying to solve water shortage problems. The story we were operating on was that the water shortage problems had occurred as a result of the occupation. Then through accident, basically, the diplomatic mission I was a part of discovered it had always had water problems. As I got to know Ukraine better and the Soviet legacy better, especially going to visit the elected hromada leaders in southern Zaporizhzhia, in areas which are now temporarily occupied, the stories I would hear from the elected officials were striking. Literally, if you wanted to get water, in many places it came in tankers. That whole area around southern Zaporizhzhia, for instance, is extremely dry.

One of the big things which these new decentralised communities had to solve after they were established in 2014 — which I loved going to meet them and hear about, these heroic plans, all funded by USAID, the European Union, and the central government in Ukraine — were the result of leaders in all of these communities trying to solve problems which had been embedded structurally in them. For instance, access to water.

We discovered in Luhansk that actually these water problems were historical. The Russian story coming from the Russian side was constantly trying to get us, me as a diplomat, to engage and solve problems and pay for water pumping stations. The water pumping stations were on one side of the river, the occupiers on the other side, and they were always being blown up. There were always these stories to do with water.

What Russia was doing there, I now understand, was hammering away at this third function, the fertility function, which is a perennial function. 306 items in my Luhansk well — which I call “the well,” the corpus. There is a photograph of me by a well in Luhansk, a really old-school kind of well, which any of us who have been to Ukraine and travelled around will remember seeing everywhere — all around Chernobyl, all of those villages. Every house has a well. It is exactly the kind of well we would have seen as children reading folktales in New York or London. 306 items are tagged by water infrastructure, and most come from occupier-aligned outlets — luginfo.com and dninews.com.

Let me walk you through the plot arc they collectively tell. While I was reading and collecting all of this, I was also participating in many of these stories, going to see pumping stations when, say, people from the World Bank or from aid agencies were visiting. We might be asked to be there too, and to guarantee what we called windows of silence, under which the Russians would not shell. I spent a lot of time standing around helping with these windows of silence, or going to pumping stations, talking to the heads of the pumping stations, just trying to understand these really complex systems. Actually, it was pretty simple what was going on in the end.

Three Acts of the Hydraulic Saviour

This is a really typical story; I participated in so many of these.

Act 1, November 2015. A group of European experts is brought to inspect the water infrastructure of the self-declared LFR, Luhansk Folk’s Republic. The spokesperson framing the visit is Vladislav Deynego — whose hand I once had to shake, and at the time it really fascinated me that he, if you Google him, has the appearance of Trotsky in the 1890s, or of a ragged Russian intellectual from a Tolstoy book. The whole aesthetic — I now understand — was a flex. It was a style. It was an act of archetyping, like Melania wearing gangster moll chic to archetype herself as Alphonse Capone’s moll. I did not understand that then. It was just a real matter of curiosity to me.

He was the occupier’s envoy to the Minsk trilateral contact group. The subtext was: the international community is here, looking at the plumbing, finding it acceptable; Russia is a responsible hydraulic custodian. This is a mirror of what I was doing on the other side of the river, because none of this really ever happened on their side of the river — no one in their right mind would go there, and could not go there. There were no guarantees of safety. If you read the media, they were trying to archetype themselves as a normal republic, like Kosovo — a group of people who had managed to achieve statehood and were just, with the help of the international community, developing — whereas in fact this was a military occupation masquerading as an organic republic, like Ireland establishing itself or like the United States establishing itself.

Act 2, February 2017. Plotnitsky — who was the Russian-occupier leader, and both of whose parents died from picking poisonous mushrooms (again, one of my early intimations that something folkloric was going on) — and Zakharchenko, who was the head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, issued a joint statement, which was pretty rare, because they all hated each other. There was a lot of stuff about them joining together and uniting and all this nonsense, which was trying to make them seem like organic entities. They issued a joint statement in February 2017 demanding that Kyiv let the republics’ — again archetyping as republics — observers carry out inspections of industrial facilities on the Ukrainian-controlled side. The chutzpah of that. Notice the grammatical reversal: the occupier demands inspection rights over territory it does not control. Where have we heard that before? It is the same chutzpah we are still getting now.

Act 3. The republics are now in hydraulic guardianship. The Minsk envoy of both Russian-backed statelets insists on ecological inspection of mines in the Kyiv-controlled Donbas area. The language has escalated from “demands” to “insists.” Each repetition is a ratchet. I am just choosing at random, but there are hundreds of these, day after day.

The Wound and the Bandage as a Single Gesture

What is happening here? Russia is weaponising Dumézil’s third function. Water, pensions, mines, gas, grain, the fertility of the land are being moved onto the propaganda stage, and Russia is auditioning for the role of the provider. Not just the warrior — these were the daily briefings, the shelling count I talked about two weeks ago. Not just the sovereign — the people’s, the folk’s republic liturgy, where they talk about establishing courts and banks. But the father of the land, the hydraulic monarch who ensures the harvest.

What did Donald do in California? He ordered them to release billions of gallons of water, which then caused havoc, not only because they should not have been released then, but also because farmers could not — the water was not available when they needed it this season. This is, again, Donald using the same old tricks.

This is classical Indo-European propaganda. The Vedic king was responsible for the monsoon. The Roman emperor was responsible for the grain ships from Egypt. This is, again, the Disinfolkloric element of what the Russian-mafia-run government of Israel is now participating in: this Russian mafia installation of these same archetypal stories. It is really horrific to see the grain — this whole grain thing — but it is the same tale. It is the same story. The Tsar was father because he stood between his people and the famine. Russia in 2015, 2017 is writing itself into this oldest script. It creates the problem, then it offers itself as the merciful sovereign. This is, again, what Donald does. It is the same game, the same trick, day after day.

Every European expert who inspects LFR pipelines is a certificate of hydraulic legitimacy. Every demand to inspect Ukrainian mines is a bid for fatherly custody of the river. Meanwhile — this is the dark cemetery — in 2014, Russia blew up the water pipeline at Petrovske with its own artillery. In 2015, it shelled the Donets River filter station 13 times. This is the place I spent a lot of time in, trying to sort out the aftermath of these shellings. After February 2022, it occupied the Kakhovka dam, as we all know, and destroyed it, flooding a whole province, killing billions of sentient beings — but archetyping itself as the father in this.

Meanwhile, the hand that plays the hydraulic saviour is the hand that is causing the problem, that breaks the pipe. This is the single most important thing to understand about Russian Disinfolklore. On the third function, Russia performs the wound and the bandage as a single gesture. The water crisis is manufactured so that the water saviour can claim custody of the manufacture.

The counter is specificity. Name the pipe. Name the shell that hit it. Name the date, the coordinates, the brigade. Disinfolklore thrives in abstraction: “the ecological situation,” “the infrastructure,” “the republic’s observers.” Every specific pipe you can name is a counter-liturgy.

The Soviet Revenant: The Great Patriotic War Square

The perennial one: the Soviet revenant, the Great Patriotic War Square.

In European folklore, the revenants are the dead who will not stay dead — the walking corpse, the ghost with unfinished business, the ancestor who shows up at the door, dirty, uninvited, demanding the bread from the hearth. In Russia-occupied Luhansk, there is a revenant in every public square, and his name is the Soviet Union. It is a “his.” In my corpus, 285 items are tagged Lenin, Soviet memory.

Let me read you one of the smallest and most revealing. 7th of August 2015, luginfo.com. “Press conference announcement. At midday, the official representative of the LFR People’s Militia, Taras Kolotkov, on the situation along the contact line. Address: Heroes of the Great Patriotic War Square 9. Ploshchad Geroyev VOV 9.”

Read the address again: Heroes of the Great Patriotic War Square. This is the address the occupation uses to send correspondence to a briefing on shelling. The address itself is a Disinfolklore item. It is doing the work here before a single word in the briefing is spoken.

The Great Patriotic War — this itself, this is the Russian name for what the West calls the Second World War. It is the Eastern Front. 27 million Soviet dead — and I think most of us who have been watching their military tactics in eastern Ukraine understand why so many people died, and unnecessarily. The most sacred memory in Russian public life, the memory that the Soviet state and then the Putin Federation curated for 70 years, is the ultimate moral foundation: we defeated Nazism, we saved the world, we paid in blood, we are the good side of history. Most of us will understand. The United States provided, what was it, like 14,000 ships, 20,000 aeroplanes, et cetera — and that is why they were able to hold the line.

When Russia occupies Luhansk in 2014 and summons journalists to a briefing, it does not use a neutral address. It uses Heroes of the Great Patriotic War Square, because the address does three things at once.

First, it archetypes the occupation as the spiritual continuation of the Soviet victory. The men standing at the podium in 2015 are, by spatial association, the grandsons of the men who took Berlin. To attend their briefing is to attend a memorial service.

Second, it casts Ukraine, the enemy of the briefing, in the only remaining role left by the liturgy. If the LFR is standing on Great Patriotic War Square, then Ukraine, grammatically and spatially, is cast as the Nazi. The square makes the bogeyman. The bogeyman makes the invasion.

Third, it summons the revenant. The Soviet Union is officially dead. It expired on the 25th of December 1991. But in Luhansk’s Ploshchad Geroyev, it is not dead. It is walking. It has an address. You can post a letter to it. This is why in my corpus you will find Victory Day parades, Immortal Regiment processions, St George ribbons, Stalin-era Young Guard imagery, and Komsomol-style youth formations all persisting in occupied Luhansk, as if the clock had not turned.

The Soviet revenant — who for me is personified by this guy, Vladislav Deynego — is the spine of the occupation’s emotional architecture. It is how the occupation persuades its captive population that they have not been conquered, but returned. The cognitive move is brutal. Most residents of Luhansk lived a substantial part of their lives in the USSR. Many grieve its loss. The Russian occupation offers them, in the form of public squares, parades, flags, and vocabularies, the feelings of the lost thing. It sells them a ghost, and the ghost is warm.

The counter is to remember what the USSR actually did. The Holodomor. The gulag. The suppression of Ukrainian language. The deportations. The stagnation. The queues. The revenant is sentimental. The real dead are not. Name the ghost. Ask what year it died. Ask why it is walking.

The connection there I would make with Donald, and this attempt to install monarchy just at the time he is at 33 per cent in the polls — that is the ghost which is walking through the White House. Next time you see someone posting all that gold in the Oval Office and going snobbily, “Oh, this is so gauche” — reflect for a second, or as you look into the Rococo mirror, reflect in its reflection for a second, and see: this is what the Russians did after the Second World War, and what they did in Luhansk.

Continued from:

First in series:

Three of its inflections are doing the work here.

The king’s hall.

Heorot. The mead-hall. The aula regia.

The room in which the lord feasts retainers, distributes gold, and binds them to him by gift.

Trump’s gilded Oval, his Gold Card with his own face engraved on it, his Mar-a-Lago Rococo mirrors, and now his East Wing ballroom, are all operating in the same gift-economy of sovereign favour, in the same idiom of polished gold.

The mead-hall is the room in which the king becomes the king.

Versailles.

To quote Louis XIV in 2026 is to quote the court the American Revolution was founded against.

The reference is not generic luxury. It is the particular memory of a court that danced while the country starved.

The citation is being made — knowingly or not — by an administration whose Project-2025 instrumentation is producing precisely that disequilibrium.

The Cinderella ballroom.

The room in which status is conferred and withheld.

The room in which the prince chooses.

The room in which the door closes at midnight on those whose invitation has expired.

A presidential ballroom is, by its nature, a guest list.

Republican space is, by its nature, not.

Read by the Law of Similarity, the gold-leaf, the crystal and the rococo mirroring produce similarity-by-association with the archetype of monarchical sovereignty.

The eye reads the hall and the unconscious reads the king.

Read alongside the “LONG LIVE THE KING” Truth Social post, the AI-generated crown portraits, the Mar-a-Lago Oval, the Gold Card and the June-2025 military parade, the ballroom is not an ornament.

It is the missing room in a coherent set.

The set’s archetypal payload is gilded monarchy.

Adjudicated against the Code of Positive Trolls, the ballroom fails Generosity — it is exclusionary by definition.

It fails Right — it inverts the meaning of the building it is bolted onto.

It fails Patience — the gold is loud and it is in a hurry.

The counter-Disinfolklore work begins by naming what the ballroom actually is.

A folktale being installed where a constitution used to stand.

I have been thinking about some of the archetypes and seeing their application. Frankly, I have been hearing more people say the method is useful for figuring out what is going on in the world. I am glad this is something that is catching on with some important people, the people I work with. It matters. It really is helpful to understand how Russia thinks and how we can use this against them.

My vision is that we will have two series going on together at the same time, one week on, one week off. The other series, which I started a few weeks ago, is looking at this well of data that I collected between 2015 and 2018 in Luhansk from the Russian occupier media, broken down into the various archetypes. I have been going through that.

This series I wanted to start was to look at trolling and the emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind. I have spoken about this before. I did a lot of work on this from the autumn, from the fall of 2019 onwards, and particularly from March 2020 onwards. I went through 60,000 or 70,000 entries under the terms trolling and trolls in the Dow Jones Factiva database of 33,000 sources. That is the largest media source database on planet Earth.

What I wanted to look at was how the terms trolling and trolls are used in the modern era, as evidenced by these 60,000 or 70,000 entries in the database. Recently, I have been able to analyse the results in a way that I had not had the space and the time to do before. In some ways, you have seen the results of it, which is Decoding Trolls and all of my work, the Code of Positive Trolls, and things I have talked about in Disinfolklore.

The Insight from Eastern Ukraine: Artillery and Emotions

I am going to start with the insight which I had in eastern Ukraine, which was the continuity between, for example, artillery strikes on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska — the continuity between that and the emotions you feel when you see them or feel them or hear them — and the emotions you feel when you read articles written about them.

I had this insight, this vision, that actually there is no real difference in terms of quality, the content of trolling through artillery strikes, for example, and using Twitter to troll. The same effect on people’s emotions comes from these two different examples.

I had started off on this journey because I wanted to understand how Donald Trump was able to use Twitter to provoke people’s emotions. That is essentially why trolling seemed to me important as a concept. It is my luck — I use that in a very classic sense — it is my luck that Donald was re-elected and we have seen his self-realisation move towards this apex.

The White House Meme Apparatus in the Iran War

My starting point really is the White House meme apparatus in the Iran war. Between the 28th of February 2026 and the launch of Operation so-called Epic Fury and the two-week Hormuz Strait ceasefire — or if it was a ceasefire, which has supposedly been extended today — the Trump White House ran the most aggressive presidential office social media war propaganda campaign in American history.

What had been in the first Trump term a hobbyist’s Twitter feed has been fully institutionalised. The White House X, TikTok, and Untruth Social accounts, together with the Rapid Response 47 feed, have posted over 100 short-form videos mashing up real Iran strike footage with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Mortal Kombat, Halo 2, Call of Duty, Wii Sports, Top Gun: Maverick, Gladiator, John Wick, Transformers, Deadpool, Star Wars, Iron Man, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Yu-Gi-Oh, and SpongeBob SquarePants.

This is clearly within my jurisdiction. This is all Disinfolklore. This is the use of contemporary folkloric tropes and memes to communicate national policy.

Six Archetypal Moves Inside the Iran Theatre

There are six archetypal moves I have managed to trace inside this, all running simultaneously.

The first is drama as war. Real killings are edited into video games. Ludic frames — wasted, flawless victory — close the Epic Fury montage after Iranian trucks and ships are blown up. This is Surkov-style dramaturgy imported into the world’s largest military. For those of us who are Americans, it is a moment of epic shame.

The second archetype is accusation in a mirror, Minab edition. The Shajira Tayeba school was destroyed by a US Tomahawk on the first day of the war. Bellingcat, BBC Verify, the New York Times, and preliminary Pentagon findings all attributed responsibility to the United States. Donald, on the 7th of March, said the strike was done by Iran because Iranians are very inaccurate with their munitions. Leavitt, at the 4th of March podium, said “not that we know of” when asked if the US had killed the girls, and called the reporting propaganda.

The third archetype is war magic by repetition and opposites. The White House reframed a war of choice, unsupported by a UN Security Council mandate and unsupported by any armed attack on the United States, as “peace through strength” — another archetype, the exact phrase that Reagan coined and that Leavitt in November 2025 attributed to Donald. The words crushes, decisive, overwhelming strength, lethal precision recur verbatim across the White House Epic Fury page, the CENTCOM press release, the DOD fact sheets, and the Rapid Response 47 feed.

Just to remind people: in the past, wars were fought — sure, we had CNN in the first Gulf War, and Baudrillard famously wrote about how the Gulf War only happened on TV. At that time, there were also diplomatic channels, the UN Security Council, meetings between allies. The war itself was separate in some sense that it is no longer separate from this meme war.

The fourth archetype is the provocation logic cycle, which I did that series of five on — reflexive control. Donald’s Truth Social cycle — open the Strait, you crazy bastards, or you will be living in hell — his Easter week threats to bomb every bridge, every power plant, every desalination plant, all AI-generated — exactly the escalation ladder that let him claim victory by ceasefire hours before his own deadline expired. Iran’s forced reopening of the strait under threat was branded a diplomatic win. The test was invented to produce the outcome.

The fifth archetype is the foreign scapegoat switch. Iran was slotted into the same scapegoat rotation machine that has cycled through trans service members, Haitian immigrants, Venezuelan gang members, universities, law firms, trans athletes — Donald is on about athletes again today, university athletes — and the press corps. The Iran theatre gives the administration what domestic scapegoats cannot: kinetic footage. That footage feeds the meme engine, which feeds the ratings, which feed the podium.

The sixth archetype is stealth via AI targeting. The Maven — again, a Disinfolklore moniker — the Maven so-called smart system from Palantir — again, a Disinfolklore moniker, the magic stones from Lord of the Rings. Palantir is a $1.3 billion Pentagon programme of record, with Anthropic’s Claude embedded to rank targets and draft legal justifications.

Palantir has been around for about ten or twelve years. Many people have said it is basically just a shell; they have nothing, there are no magic stones underneath it. Here we find out that basically — because it was Palantir’s magic stones which were involved in the targeting of this school — Palantir is using Claude. It is using Anthropic’s systems. Anthropic was a company begun four years ago. From my experience, it does have the most powerful available AI engine ever created.

Here we have Palantir. They are just basically trying to scapegoat Claude. By scapegoating Anthropic’s Claude for the mis-targeting, they are admitting that they have nothing. It is just like a holding company. Even though they have had access to so many governments’ records — the National Health Service in the UK handed over the entire database to Palantir under the last government, continued by this government — yet, despite having all this massive amount of data, Palantir never seemed to build any AI engine capable of properly processing these data into actionable predictions.

We know what Ukraine has done with the Delta battlefield system. One of Palantir’s great products was to sell NATO their real-time battlefield intelligence system. Ukraine has just built its Delta system from the ground up, which is, as far as we were aware, better than anything NATO or Palantir could come up with.

Palantir used Anthropic’s Claude to rank targets and draft legal justifications. This compressed what had been days of human analysis into minutes. The Minab school was hit because DIA-supplied coordinates were outdated. As we now know, you could have looked on Google Maps and seen it was a school, but six years ago it was not a school. The system did not catch that the school had been fenced off from the IRGC compound. Between 2013 and 2016, the kill chain accelerated faster than the error-correction loop.

When the atrocity surfaced, the administration’s first move was denial through social media. Second was propagandising the denial. Third was the meme.

In my Disinfolklore framework, this is what I call a negative chain: coercive control, war magic, stealth, and drama, all running on full throttle in the Iran theatre. The meme apparatus is the drama. The archetypal insurance the administration is taking out — through Leavitt’s podium denials, Trump’s Old Testament Hormuz thunder, Hegseth’s no-quarter pledge, and the White House’s cartoons — is the war magic that legitimises the stealth and re-archetypes a war of choice as an existential one.

The Code of Positive Trolls — the six-element code which I came up with in February 2020 — has never been more clearly needed and more clearly absent.

A Confession About the Word Trolling

I want to begin with that, but also then focus on what runs through all of it: trolls and trolling.

For almost a decade, I defended a definition of trolling that no one else was willing to defend. I told everyone who would listen, and many who would not, that trolling is any action, any activity of body, speech, or mind that moves another’s emotions. I said it on bridges in eastern Ukraine. I said it to diplomats. I said it to my students. I said it to agents.

The definition was not invented. I had lifted this definition — any emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind — from the word itself. The idea of movement is embedded in it: motion, emotion, motion. I had spent the better part of two years reading every sense the Oxford English Dictionary gave for the verb to troll and all the data which it referenced. What I found was a word that refused to stand still. I found a word that over 650 years kept escaping the narrow room dictionary-makers tried to lock it into. Here was I, trying to lock it into another narrow room: an emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind.

Tonight I want to walk you through what the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary — the definitive statement of the state of the English language — actually says about this verb, because the shape of the entry is the shape of my problem, and I will argue by the end the shape of an answer.

The OED Entry: Forms, Etymology, and the Warning Label

I have started with Iran to remind us of where we are with trolling and how trolling has migrated: from the hobbyist using page eight to big himself up in the 1980s New York real estate high-society world, through the first presidency, through to the use of Twitter to mobilise and execute an insurrection against the United States on January 6th — as those of us who have read the January 6th federal indictment will remember how Jack Smith begins the indictment on election night, when Donald first starts tweeting that the election was stolen, and then catalogues the use of Twitter all the way through those months to summon the mob over the course of months. That version of trolling: moving people’s emotions so that they felt their highly valued democracy was in doubt, mobilising them, getting them to perform and conduct and engage in an insurrection against the United States. Then all the way up to where we are now.

The OED lists the forms before it lists the senses. Troll has gone under the shapes — it has different spellings: two Ls, one L, an E following the L, a W; trowle, trowle with an E, trolle — like French; trull, trull with an E. In Scottish dialect through the 18th century, the word was trowl.

The etymology is candid about its own uncertainty. The editors write that the verb is “a word or series of words of uncertain origin and of which all the senses do not go closely together.” That single line is the archaeologist’s warning label, and it is what I thought I had solved.

The sense I used troll in, after conducting this very long survey through Factiva and also through ProQuest — which has basically every pamphlet and article, everything you can imagine from the 16th century produced in England, scanned and now searchable — the emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind, for me, was something that crossed all of these boundaries.

To use a metaphor I take from Dnipro, which was another starting point for me — looking into a burial mound on the outskirts of Dnipro in May 2021 — we are digging into a mound that may contain more than one burial.

The dictionary’s best guess is that the word comes from Old French trolle, a hunting term meaning to quest, to go in quest of game without purpose. That is a sense which any police officers listening from America will understand — trolling for criminals. The companion guess is German trollen, to roll. Both senses are present in English, and the editors note that English has acquired further senses not found in either parent tongue.

One of the things I learned from looking at the OED at this time was that most English words are cited as beginning around the 12th or 11th century and came in from French or from German. The proto-Indo-European element, where many of our words come from proto-Indo-European roots, from the earliest Indo-European languages, is somewhat blind. I just make that health warning.

The Common Denominator: Emotion-Moving Motion

If I want to claim that trolling is any action of body, speech, or mind that moves another’s emotions, then Langland’s trolling pilgrim and Shakespeare’s trolled catch, Dekker’s trolled bowl and the psalm troller of the Reformation, and the Tudor angler with his running line must all be doing the same thing at the level of structure.

In a certain Buddhist way, they are. Each one sets something in motion that moves another person. The pilgrim who approaches. The singer who passes the melody. The host who passes the bowl. The minister who trolls the soul towards God. The angler who trolls the bait towards the pike. Movement of body, speech, or mind directed at another. That is the shape. I was not making the definition up. I was reading it off the page, although I am the first person to put it in that way.

The common denominator of the five OED families is emotion-moving motion: literal motion in family one, articulated motion in family two, social motion in family three, musical motion in family four, predatory motion in family five. The T-R sound itself, as I will argue in a future episode and have argued before, carries the semantic charge of transport, traverse, transition, trajectory, trans. Every living Indo-European language builds its verbs of motion out of that consonant pair. That definition is in the phoneme of trolling.

Remember, for me, I did not know anything about Indo-European studies when I started this journey. This was my porthole. I opened the window and started looking at this.

I said: if the word is this capacious, why not rescue it? Why not let the Christmas bowl and the pedagogical Usenet newbie trap and the pilgrim on the road all sit together? Why not build a discipline — the Code of Positive Trolls — that asks us to troll well, to troll positively in the old merry sense, rather than to troll viciously in the new sense? I spent nine years on that answer.

The Four Words That Stopped Me

Then one morning I opened the OED to the bottom of the troll verb entry and I read the four words that stopped me. The OED had added them in a box headed “Draft Additions, March 2006.” The words: intransitive, computer slang — to post a deliberately erroneous or antagonistic message on a newsgroup or similar forum with the intention of eliciting a hostile or corrective response.

I began with Iran. Trolling in the computing slang is now the main means of the United States of America — the greatest community of people that has ever lived and gathered, together with the greatest army that has ever been assembled — now being run through social media accounts and memes.

It began, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as recently as March 2006, when they entered it as computing slang: to post a deliberately erroneous or antagonistic message on a newsgroup — not on Twitter, not to the Iranian government — with the intention of eliciting a hostile or corrective response. The earliest citation they use is October 1992, the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban. The message is: “Maybe after I post it, we could go trolling some more and see what happens.”

The OED is the most cautious lexicographic institution in the English-speaking world. It does not redraft an entry lightly, and it does not add a computing sense to a 14th-century verb unless its evidence base is overwhelming. Between 1992 and 2006, a 14-year window, the Usenet sense accumulated enough citational weight that the dictionary had to concede: troll now means also to post provocative content to elicit reaction. The gloss is narrow, clinical, and pejorative. It does not describe the bowl. It does not describe the psalm. It does not describe the pilgrim.

I emphasise that this work is mine. As far as I know, no one has ever really looked into this word in this detail. There are a lot of books on trolls — folklore trolls and other aspects — but to look at it from a geopolitical, political discourse point of view, as far as I know, no one else has really looked into it in this detail.

I will take you all the way back to this morning, where the President of the United States has told a White House adviser that he wants to appear on social media as unstable and insulting as possible, because “instability is a language the Iranians would understand.” That is a very important aspect of what Donald is doing. He is using trolling because he wants to appear as unstable and insulting as possible. It is a direct quote — I think it was in the New York Times — by advisers to Donald.

The only way to serve this word, this verb trolling that will not stay still, is to stop trying to hold it in one place and to build instead a code — a set of six practices that can be applied whenever the verb happens to mean next. That code is the subject of this series. Tonight I just wanted to show you the verb in all its seven families, so that when you hear me argue later that troll is the phonological mirror of truth, you will know that I did not arrive at that argument lightly. I arrived at it after 650 years of motion refused to stop — and in the end, after the motion killed 49 people on a Tuesday night in April because the wrong man was holding the bait.

The Fishing Stream: The Angler’s Running Line

There are two discourses which trolling comes from, really, in a nutshell: fishing and folklore. Let me look at fishing.

Fishing is the older of the two streams that fed the word troll. The angler’s running line. The OED theorised that it may have come from trolle, early French for hunting, which is obviously quite close to fishing. The angler’s verb, the running line, and the clergyman of 1606 who said God trolls for souls.

I told you that the verb to troll belongs to several families of meanings in the OED, in parallel columns, and that the dictionary itself admits the families do not go closely together. I want to take you to the older of the two streams that fed the word. On the literal-motion side, it is the stream that was already there when the Scandinavian folk creature walked down the hill and met the English verb at the bottom. It is the stream of fishing.

I am going to spend a few minutes on the angler, because the angler is where the word was first weighted with moral content. The folklore stream will get its own episode.

Consider what fishing is structurally. You stand at the edge of a moving body of water. You cannot see into it. You know there is life beneath the surface and you cannot address that life directly. You construct an elaborate indirection. You take a line. To the end of the line you attach a piece of bait. The bait is chosen because it resembles what the fish you want would eat if the fish were doing what the fish do when you are not there. Then you place the bait in the water and you cause the bait to move — by casting, by drawing, by rowing forward with the line trailing behind. The fish, not seeing you, sees the bait. It mistakes the bait for the real prey. It strikes. You have caught it.

Fishing is a lesson in the manipulation of another mind across a medium that makes direct communication impossible. The fish lives in a world you cannot enter. You reach into its world with an object that is not what it seems. You shape the object’s motion. You make it more persuasive. You wait for the target to project onto the object the identity you have designed for it. When the projection is complete, you set the hook.

This is not a small thing. This is a model of how one mind can move another mind by constructing a lure, placing it at the boundary of another’s world, and making the lure move in a way that mimics the real thing. Every advertising campaign from 1890 forward is an application of this model. Every disinformation operation is an application of this model. What Surkov calls non-linear politics is an application of this model. What Steven Cheung does at the White House, with the Grand Theft Auto cheat code layered over real Iranian strike footage, is an application of this model. The fisherman was there first.

God Trolleth for Thee: 1606

When did the English language acquire a verb for the activity I just described? The OED’s earliest citation for the angling sense is 1606. The source is Samuel Gardiner’s Book of Angling. The line reads: “Consider how God, by his preachers, trolleth for thee.”

I want you to sit with that sentence for a moment, because it is where the word carries its highest moral charge. We are in a week where Donald is trying to distract by trolling as the Antichrist, by trolling the Pope, and modelling as the Antichrist, then trolling the Prime Minister of Italy when she defends the American Pope.

Consider how God, by his preachers, trolleth for thee. I want you to sit with that sentence because it is where the word carries its highest moral charge in the entire history of the English language. Gardiner is not writing a manual of rod and line. He is writing a devotional treatise that uses fishing as an extended allegory for the work of salvation. The preacher in this image is the angler. The sinner is the fish. The gospel is the bait. The church is the bank of the river. God — note the grammatical position — is the one who trolls.

God trolls through the preacher. The preacher is the instrument. God is the verb’s subject. What God does to you through the voice of the man in the pulpit in 1606 is troll. God trolls for your soul. Today, Donald says he is enacting God’s will — and he says that while trolling.

You cannot read that sentence without seeing the kind of moral work the verb could once do. This is the verb at its most positively charged. It describes the activity by which divine love approaches a human being who cannot, in its unregenerate state, see the divinity directly. The lure is the gospel. The motion is the preaching — not Grand Theft Auto. It is the gospel. The strike is the sinner’s acknowledgement of grace. The word troll here means to save.

From Gardner to the Present: How the Moral Charge Drifted

How did we get from there to here? The short answer is that the verb was already older than Gardiner’s 1606 citation. What Gardiner did was apply an existing verb, used mostly for convivial motion — the passing of a bowl, the singing of a round, the trolling of bowls on a green — to a specific angling technique that involved a running line. The technique existed before the verb named it. There had been Tudor fishermen who trailed a baited line behind a rowboat or who spun a minnow on a winch for centuries.

The word exists in American English in a way it does not exist in British English today — trolling, where you are hanging the line behind the boat, which works in America. Trawling is a different kettle of fish to trolling. In case English listeners think trawling and the use of trawls, where you put massive nets in the water — that is a different art to the art of trolling, which people who speak American English will understand but people who speak British English probably will not.

What Gardiner does is take the verb that describes the bowls, the songs, the psalms, and lower it into the water. The fishing sense stuck. From 1606 onward, the OED citations proliferate in the angling register. By 1653, Thomas Barker in The Art of Angling writes: “The manner of his trolling with a hazel rod.” By 1682, Robert Nobbes publishes The Compleat Troller, an entire treatise devoted to the art. By 1720, John Gay writes, in Rural Sports: “Nor troll for pikes, despoilers of the lake.” By 1824, the British sporting press has refined the term: “Trolling or spinning a minnow is the other most general mode of trout fishing.” By 1891, Andrew Lang — the same Andrew Lang who edited the fairy books and who took an active interest in folklore — writes in Angling Sketches that “trolling a minnow from a boat in Loch Leven is probably the lowest possible form of angling.”

Three centuries of angling use, stretching from a Jacobean devotional writer to a late Victorian folklore editor. Note what has not happened in those three centuries. The verb has not yet acquired the pejorative sense it will acquire in the 1990s and 2000s. The verb has not yet been used in any widespread way to describe the deliberate provocation of a human audience. The verb is still, for three centuries, doing what it did for Gardiner: describing the patient, motion-based, indirect approach of an angler to a quarry that cannot see the angler directly.

All through those three centuries, the verb’s moral charge drifts. Gardiner’s “God trolleth for thee” is already slightly archaic by 1682, when Nobbes is writing a technical manual. By Gay’s 1720 Rural Sports, the verb is entirely secular. By Lang’s 1891 “lowest form of angling,” the verb has acquired a mild snobbery — trolling is what you do when you cannot fly-fish. The moral charge has left the word and gone into a different register. The word is now just a verb for a kind of fishing.

Notice what remains: the structural meaning. One mind setting a lure at the boundary of another mind’s world and moving the lure through the water to make the other mind project onto it — that is constant across all three centuries. The angler in 1606 and the angler in 1891 are doing the same thing. What changes is what you are permitted to say about whether you are doing it virtuously.

From Vietnam to Usenet to the Minab School

The first modern migration of the fishing verb into the non-fishing context happens in the United States military in the 1960s. US Navy pilots in Vietnam used the phrase “trolling for MiGs” to describe an unauthorised but apparently widespread practice: flying in patterns that would lure Vietnamese aircraft into an engagement so the American pilots could evaluate their opponents’ capabilities. The practice was not sanctioned; the term was. The term moved from the river to the sky, and with it moved the structural meaning: laying a bait, making the bait move, waiting for the strike.

This is an important moment. In the 1960s, in a cockpit over North Vietnam, the fishing verb acquires its first application to a human enemy. The fish and the MiG are both quarries. Both are lured by motion. Both strike when the lure moves in a pattern that mimics what they expected to hunt. With the MiG, the quarry is a person, and the person dies.

From Vietnam, the term does not travel widely in the 1970s or 1980s. I told you before about the Factiva corpus. It runs from 1970 to 1991, and it shows the word trolling meaning principally the Norwegian gas field, with a secondary sense of fishing, with a vanishingly small residue of figurative uses. I found the first use of trolling in the context of Donald Trump: “Donald Trump trolling for a buyer for his yacht” — in 1990, in the Boston Globe, 31st of March 1990. Interestingly, in that article itself, it talks about how Donald Trump, having criticised the Japanese, is now trolling for a buyer for his yacht among the Japanese. For those who are old enough to remember 1990, the Japanese were very rich then, until their crash.

He was trolling for a buyer. He was trolling for votes in 1992 political contexts. Trolling for customers in early 1990s tort reform rhetoric — tort, the law of wrong. In every one of these uses, the referent of troll is structurally identical to Gardiner’s 1606 angler. You are setting a lure and moving it to attract a quarry. There, Donald was using the Boston Globe to attract a quarry. Mitsubishi, I think, in the end bought his yacht.

The virtue or vice of the activity depends on what you are hunting: a fish, a MiG, a yacht buyer, a vote, a customer, a soul.

The next migration is the one that matters most for this series, and I will give it a whole episode on its own next time — on a Usenet newsgroup called alt.folklore.urban. In October 1992, a user writes: “Maybe after I post it, we could go trolling for some more and see what happens.” This is the OED’s earliest citation for the computing sense. The thing the computing sense borrows from the fishing sense is exactly, word for word, the structure I have described. A lure is placed in the water — the post. The lure is made to move — the provocation. The quarry, the newbie, strikes. The angler has caught something.

Everything that happens after 1992 — all the way to the troll face image created on 4chan’s /b/ board on the 19th of September 2008, all the way to the Minab strike of the 28th of February 2026, all the way to the Slate headline “Iran Is Relentlessly Trolling Trump” — is the angling verb doing its structural work. Whatever the medium, whatever the quarry, whatever the moral register, trolling is still what the Book of Angling in 1606 said it was: the patient setting and motion of a lure, to attract, to elicit a projection, and to catch what strikes.

From God Trolleth to the Minab School: A Moral Collapse

I want to close by going back to Gardiner. The verb that in 1606 could describe God saving a sinner has by 2026 become the verb that describes a president killing 120 children because a cruise missile targeting system did not know the school had been fenced off from a naval base. This is not a change in the verb’s structure. The structure — set a lure, make it move, wait for the strike, catch what responds — is identical. What has changed is what the verb is permitted to describe, and what humans are willing to call their activity in those terms.

The fisherman’s model of mind manipulation is morally neutral in the abstract — unless, like me, you are a vegetarian. It is good when God is the angler and the sinner’s soul is the fish. It is neutral when the angler is a man in a boat on Loch Leven and the fish is a trout — though I would slightly dispute that. It is bad when the angler is Steven Cheung and the fish is an audience of Gen Z TikTok users about to view Grand Theft Auto footage layered over real Iranian civilian deaths.

The verb did not judge. The angler did, or did not. This is what my original definition — trolling as an emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind — was never arbitrary. It was the structural content of the fishing verb going back to 1606, translated out of angling into psychology. What I failed to see until recently was that the verb, while it kept its structure, had stopped carrying the 1606 moral charge. Gardiner’s “God trolleth for thee” is not available to us in English any longer. It is gone. The verb has moved, and when it moved, it took some of its positive resonance with it and left the rest behind.

Arta — meaning the truth, the truth of the sovereign, as distinct from the usurper who practises druj, which also has a kind of T-R in it. Then into the Vedic, where the word is ṛta — right, truth. This will remind you of all the times I have spoken about the T-R sound.

This is the journey I went on. I started by looking at Shakespeare and all these old English pamphlets. I was chasing this T-R sound backwards, just to see if I would get some insight into the present, because that is the point. The point is to understand what Donald Trump is doing when he is trolling. Of what does it consist? How is it moving people? How does it roil people? How does it affect eight billion minds in an hour?

Going through the language, at each step of the way I found really interesting and insightful material. Here we are again, back in Iran, where you have Darius and the Behistun inscriptions, up there on the rocks, where he is talking about his different military victories. He characterises the reason he went to war as: so-and-so started practising druj, the lie. The lie — they are a usurper, like Donald. They engaged in an insurrection against the United States by lying. Darius cites his victories because he was practising arta, the truth. He is the truth, the truth of the sovereign. When the sovereign is truth and practises truth, he rules magnificently and there is no wasteland.

That was the journey I went on. I will not spoil the rest of where we are going. It is just a coincidence we are in Iran. It all begins in Ukraine. This is the connection to Ukraine, because these languages began in Ukraine and they travelled to Trita. Trita — again, T-R — which is the most attested story in Indo-European culture, the Trita myth. The snake, the serpent, or the dragon, depending on the iteration, comes and steals the cattle. Trita is the third man, the third human after Manu and Yama. This is in the Iranian tradition, the Vedic, the Irish, Baltic, Slavic, the Albanian. It is in almost every Indo-European tradition. The serpent or the dragon steals Trita’s cattle — and then, in Ukraine’s case, sovereignty, security, prosperity — and then Trita, who could also be a troll on the bridge protecting his kingdom, gets his cattle back and makes the first sacrifice of the cattle. That establishes human culture. That is the foundation myth at the bottom of most Indo-European cultures. Again, the T-R sound. It is all in there.

President Zelenskyy, the Positive Troll, and the War of Archetypes

What you were searching for words to describe — what we have this sense of at the moment, what Firefella and Mockers are totally tuned into as we are, into the daily ebb and flow in a way that other people are not — it is not so much the signifier. We can call it anything we want. It is a sense of moving people’s emotions, moving Firefella’s and Mockers’ and my and your emotions so that we see President Zelenskyy in a certain way. We are also seeing it in his speech.

We can call it trolling if we like. I note your apprehension about using the word trolling, because for most people it has a negative sense. This is the confession I began with, which is that I have been on a big journey with it. I thought I could retrieve this concept. I thought I could retrieve the idea, to use the word trolling as a signifier to describe positive manipulations of others. What I have come to realise, when I look at the data, when I look at what is going on currently, is that it is basically beyond redemption. It will always be a negative thing.

Where I am talking about positive trolling — it is possible that what President Zelenskyy is doing, which I wrote about on the 30th of March 2022 on Twitter, where I called President Zelenskyy the positive troll extraordinaire, the 21st-century troll, as distinct from Putler being the 20th-century troll — I now include Druidy Don in Disinfolklore. Donald Trump is a 20th-century troll, because they can do the bait, the lure, the provocation perfectly, in a really clear formulaic way, in a small sentence.

Because we do not really have words for it — it is such a complex move — trolling is a word we can use to describe it. Part of its power is that it is done in stealth and people do not really have a word for it. There is a utility to trolling. President Zelenskyy gives me hope. He certainly is a positive troll. By positive troll, I mean he is defending international law.

He is defending his people. He is Trita. He is trying to get back sovereignty, security, and the prosperity of his people from the serpent, from the snake. We can see in how he is acting at the moment — for instance, those data points we have seen recently, the Belarus thing, he was outspoken, not against the United States, but he is basically saying: we do not need your shit any more. In that attitude, we can see Ukraine’s archetypal identity transforming.

He is an arch-communicator. As the art comedian, as I call him in my work, he is the perfect person to do this because he understands this stuff really intuitively, in a much more complicated way. I think even Donald Trump, or Putler, works on an animal sense and has loads of people around him who are composing these spectacles. Whereas President Zelenskyy, as the artist, as the cultural entrepreneur, as a scriptwriter, understands the arc of human emotion within individual speeches but also in terms of the war itself, which I suspect he has seen from the very moment of the beginning of the war as a war of archetypes — a war of these hidden ideas of right which work below the subconscious. To move those, you use the words and the trolling.

I like Mockers’ characterisation: he is pretty spicy. I think that is a really good word for what he is doing. You can see what Mockers is doing when she uses that term to describe him — she is using it in an approving kind of way. We like to see it, because that is where the war will be fought and won: on the linguistic battlefield, on the mythological sphere, where David will defeat Goliath and then sing about it.

I do have that sense that Ukraine is, of course, helped by this volcanic eruption, which is just so graphic, so dramatic. That is what we need. It is drama. That is one of my recent conclusions, which I have been writing about a lot recently: that basically, to disrupt archetypal identities — such as that Ukraine is weak, that President Zelenskyy has no cards — you need really dramatic actions. You needed President Zelenskyy to refuse to leave Kyiv on the first day of the war and the days after, to refuse to take that train. Then this term — I need ammunition, not a ride — came. The actual dramatic action was his not leaving.

You need activities like that. You need the blowing up of Tuapse, and whatever else is to come, or Spiderweb, or invading Kursk. All of these really dramatic activities. On the other side, the Russians, with the Nova Kakhovka dam — the Russians hit my building in Dnipro last week and killed one of my neighbours. Those are very dramatic actions which have real, wild effects. This is the link between trolling through artillery and trolling on the internet: the same action can have the same kinds of impacts, can make people feel the same things.

I think Ukraine, particularly President Zelenskyy, understands that that is how it works. It works on this kind of mythical story level. When he is being, as Mockers would say, spicy, by comparison to how we have seen him over the past year — going through various stages through our external perception when Donald Trump, before Donald lost most of his cards, was putting just enormous pressure, and you could see, physically present at his events, he seemed to be just so down and depressed — now he is on this emotional journey as well. It kind of feels authentic. That is the difference, because he is an actor.

I think because we have seen him, like you would see a movie character or a book character — a brand called Shakespeare who has popped up every now and again as a Russian milblogger — the idea that this brand is now worried about insects just does not ring true, or any of the animals killed in the Nova Kakhovka dam. It is interesting that this artefact is being published and the dooming is on a scale we have not really seen before.

To compare what is happening in Tuapse with what happened in Chernobyl, or what they are doing in Ukraine — that is what I mean by dramatic action. Ukraine understands, and President Zelenskyy has an understanding of the spectacle, the power of the spectacle of the reign of oil, which I guess was going to be burned anyway, sadly enough. Either it was going to coat and poison us in the air or poison them directly. It is not a choice between the oil staying in the ground and not covering this entire city.

I do think it is interesting that these milbloggers are writing in this way. This is all part of this collapse of their confidence in any sense of victory. I am still waiting for the first sign when they suggest withdrawing from Crimea. That, for me, will be a very significant indicator. At the moment, I do not think we see much — Firefella would know more than me, looking at all of the data. I do not think we have seen much of anyone calling for a withdrawal from Ukraine. They are still at the position the wise people were at in mid-March 2022, which is: either we need to accelerate or try to freeze the lines.

I do not think Ukraine will accept that. I do not think Donald has the leverage any more, which could partly be responsible for what Firefella mentions — that President Zelenskyy’s spiciness is a function of how his power has changed in relation to Donald.

I still expect a ground invasion of American troops in Iran. I see very small space to avoid that, given the actual set-up in the Strait of Hormuz and Donald’s madness. I think President Zelenskyy can probably see all of this as well.

The piece is strong reporting with a strong stomach, and yet it performs three moves worth naming.

It builds Palantir mystique while using Anthropic as moral foil, so the reader leaves with Palantir’s indispensability re-inscribed and the Anthropic conscience as the dramatic arc.

It imports a genuine debate — the one Ukrainian operators face every day at the terminal-guidance end of a jammed battlefield, where the human is always in the loop because electronic warfare forces them to be — into an unlawful American war of choice, lending borrowed legitimacy to a strike campaign that has none of its own.

It lets the breathless “one target every 86 seconds” become the moral problem, displacing the prior and larger problem: under the UN Charter, these targets should never have been sought.

The name was always the signal. Palantir borrows its reputation from Tolkien’s seeing stones — oracles that give the viewer possession of reality itself. Twenty-three years on from CIA seed funding through In-Q-Tel, twenty-three years of privileged access to classified data from dozens of governments, and what does this article reveal?

Palantir’s “cognitive engine” is not its own.

It is Anthropic’s Claude (itself a wrapper for the most powerful AI models ever created) from a four-year-old company. Michael Burry, quoted in the piece: the stickiness is Claude’s tech, not Palantir’s.

The magic stones are rented. The palantír was always the wrapper, never the seer. The Disinfolklorised deceptive folklore embedded in the name is truer than the brand intended: in Tolkien, whoever holds a palantír can be seen through it by whoever holds another. The stone does not serve its bearer. Its bearer serves whatever is on the other end.

The war is unlawful.

Over 100 international law experts signed a letter stating that Operation Epic Fury, launched on 28 February 2026, violated Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. No Security Council authorisation. No armed attack from Iran. The strikes fell hours after the United States and Iran had agreed in Geneva to continue nuclear talks. Every downstream act — every target nomination, every strike, every auto-generated “legal justification” — inherits that unlawfulness. The article treats it as regrettable context. It is the frame.

The Minab school is unlawful within the unlawful war.

Approximately One hundred and fifty-six people killed — 120 schoolchildren, 26 teachers, 7 parents, 1 bus driver, 1 pharmacy technician, 1 fetus. Killed in a building with no military equipment on site, classes in session, a known educational facility. Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions requires distinction between combatants and civilians (Art. 48), prohibits indiscriminate attack on the civilian population (Art. 51), establishes presumptive protection for civilian objects including schools (Art. 52), and mandates precautions in attack (Art. 57). The Rome Statute, Art. 8(2)(b)(ix), lists intentional attacks on buildings dedicated to education as a war crime. A 60% Maven accuracy rate on a system processing a target every 86 seconds does not rebut the precautions requirement. It proves it was impossible to meet.

Accusation in the mirror, in its purest form.

The commander-in-chief, reportedly briefed by his own CIA that a US Tomahawk struck the Minab compound, went on Air Force One and blamed Iran for attacking its own girls’ school. He claimed Iran had Tomahawks. Iran does not have Tomahawks. The United States exports them to the UK, Australia, Japan and the Netherlands. Bellingcat published footage within days showing the strike’s signature consistent with a US Tomahawk. This is the textbook. The aggressor attributes the aggression to the victim. I have written about accusation in the mirror for years as the provocation mechanism inside Russian reflexive control doctrine. The epitome of the pattern is now public, at the podium, in English, from the chief of the American executive.

Where the responsibility actually sits.

Not Claude. Not the engineers. Not the wrapper. Command responsibility is settled law — Yamashita, Medina, Rome Statute Article 28. The chain runs through Secretary Hegseth, the Joint Chiefs, and the commander-in-chief. Each target “approved” at machine speed is a command failure. Each civilian killed inside an unlawful war is an individual count. The technology is a story. The commander in chief and his disciples in his chain of command is the story. Their crimes need to be adjudicated in The Hague.

Last week, we started a new series, which is on actual archetypes, because what I have been trying to do is go back to where all of this began for me, which was in eastern Ukraine, looking at the Russian occupiers’ media. I saved thousands — 10,000 articles from the Russian occupiers’ media from between 2014 and 2018. In them, I found some archetypes at the time, but I did not have the word for it.

I have told you the mother and the maiden story, where we had that operation where I was sent to find a common-law wife and her underage daughter who were about to be chopped into tiny pieces by a Ukrainian Nazi. The moment I heard about that operation — I did not know anything about Jung or archetypes — I knew that the story sounded artificial to me. Then I saw the reaction of the people around me and above me in the chain of command. They did not react in the same way that I did. Only one other person did, who was a London Metropolitan Police officer. We were like: what are they doing? This is a ridiculous operation.

There began my suspicion that Russian propaganda was, either knowingly or not, using archetypes to manipulate our ideas of right and what is right, beneath our conscious minds.

Last week I started with the first three archetypes, and one of them was the merciful sovereign.

A Year of Volya Radio

Over the year, I have introduced you to the Disinfolklore analytical method. I have gone through several different series. I went through the four years of the war, and everything I did is posted on my website, disinfolklore.eu. That is my main website, and all of the Volya shows up until about two months ago, or a month and a half ago, are there on the Spotify. If you just press play, it starts with me, because it is all about me in this small slot.

I have also been posting them a bit more systematically on my other website, which is disinfolklore.net. Disinfolklore.eu is the processed, sliced-and-diced, structured twelve-tool presentation: the origins of the Disinfolklore analytical method. It is over a million words, all in very short passages, over 1,700 short passages. It is a response to people who really liked and were interested in what I had to say and my ideas, but did not or do not have the capability to read the long Substack pieces where some of the material began. Then the 44,000 tweets — all of those have been sliced and diced and put in there as well.

On disinfolklore.net, which is based on the Substack and which is part of my tripartite Substacks — Power of Mana, Finding Manuland, and Decoding Trolls — one of which I use to publish pensées, which are basically my tweets with a bit of processing to try and preserve those. Then mainly on disinfolklore.net is where I post, and where tomorrow, for instance, I will post this particular show.

Trump’s Tweet on Hungary and Dumézil’s Trifunctional Hypothesis

Donald Trump tweeted this week. Let me read what he has to say:

“My administration stands ready to use the full economic might of Hungary’s economy, as we’ve done for our great allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán” — spelt correctly, believe it or not — “and the Hungarian people ever need it. We are excited to invest in the future prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s continued leadership. President Donald J. Trump.”

As many of you know, I worked out, through trying to process this experience that I had in eastern Ukraine in 2016 with the mother and the maiden story, and ended up looking at Dumézil. Dumézil is one of those people in human culture who discovers something that nobody else has discovered, yet all the data was available to them. To cut a long story short, in the mid-1930s, by looking at various myths from different Indo-European traditions, Georges Dumézil suddenly had a moment of insight, which he then spent the rest of his life articulating and elucidating.

The moment of insight was that Indo-European cultures — from Ireland to India, the eight main branches of living Indo-European languages — organised themselves according to three dimensions, three archetypes, three functions: sovereignty, security, and prosperity. All of my work is impacted by this.

Donald J. Trump and those around him have probably never heard of Georges Dumézil. Yet here is Donald playing the merciful sovereign. Literally, I am ticking off every element: his message conforms to these archetypes. Obviously, at this point, no one has ever heard of any of my work. These people have not heard of Georges Dumézil any more than I had. Yet they are kind of going through a tick list.

He is talking about “my administration stands ready to use the full economic might.” There we have administration — that is sovereignty. The full economic might — that is the third function, the fertility. These map onto the three castes in Indian culture. We have them in Ireland. We have them across the entire Indo-European world.

There are some elements of Georges Dumézil’s work which are still discussed and still a bit controversial, but it is widely accepted now that not only are Indo-European myths organised in this way, but the tripartite structure of our governments and of our communities is as well. This stretches all the way back to the Yamnaya in Mykolaivka village on the right bank of the Dnieper River, about 40 kilometres south of Zaporizhzhia.

We know that because, generally speaking, if you find an element in a living Indo-European language east of Ukraine — mainly Indian or Iranian — and you find that same element in an Indo-European language west of Ukraine, then you can, on the balance of probabilities absent any other evidence, deduce that that element was present before the split. Before one brother and sister of the Yamnaya community went west from Mykolaivka village or the area between the Don and the Dnieper, and one brother and sister went east, and they both carried with them this element.

There are lots of exceptions to this general rule, but when you find an element in every Indo-European language family — all eight living Indo-European families — and then you also find it in the Anatolian family, then you know for certain it is part of the common source and was present. We have a few examples of this. I believe I have identified one, which is the M-N sound. I have written about that extensively. My main mantra is: look for the mana in the meme, look for the energy, look for the psychic energy, the synchronicity, the libido, the X factor — but I call it mana, M-N.

In this tweet, he has administration — the sovereignty. Full economic might — the fertility, which maps onto the farmer economy, the female aspect of society, which is the third caste in India. Hungary’s economy, as we have done for our great allies in the past. If Orbán wins, if they ever need it, we are excited to invest in the future prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s continued leadership.

This is archetypal merciful sovereign. We have Orbán himself playing a sovereign, but then we have the big daddy playing the merciful sovereign. He sends over his son, Vance, to go there, and then he decides to weigh in and uses Dumézilian language. What I am trying to teach, and what I now see with X-ray specs because I analysed this corpus — because it was so strange to me — is that I now literally see it everywhere. That is the perspective I am trying to help us see through, because when we see a tweet like this, if we can analyse exactly what he is doing — and it is very simple what he is doing, but he does not know it — these archetypal structures, they are not setting out to play the merciful sovereign, but he is acting in that way.

That is just a practical use for what I am trying to teach and the perspective I have learned to see.

The Changeling: Stealth Genocide and the Theft of Identity

You will remember last week I went through the mother and the maiden; I began at the beginning, the bridge troll; the merciful sovereign — and of course the bridge troll, here we are in the Hormuz Strait, this whole structure is playing out there; and then we had the Ukrainian Nazi, the bogeyman. Now I am going to talk about the changeling: stealth genocide and the theft of identity.

Stealth genocide is a phrase I forged — I think in August 2022. I started using the term genocide in respect of the full-scale invasion after about ten days. At the same time, the then president of Poland, who was also a lawyer, started using it. Then, of course, President Zelenskyy used the term genocide when he visited Bucha and when he saw the dead bodies. Lawyers were very cautious about using the term genocide. Russia has been doing everything it can for the past ten years to determine what the term means, because everything they do, as is the case with Donald, is really a confession. You can predict what they are going to do by looking at their language and the archetypal structures in their language and what they are doing.

This is actually the hardest archetype to name, but it is one we must learn fastest because it is the engine of what I have come to call Russia’s stealth genocide. In folklore across Europe, the changeling is the child swapped in the cradle. In Ireland, the Stolen Child — W.B. Yeats wrote an amazing poem about the Stolen Child, which the Waterboys put to music, which is beautiful. If you go into Apple Music or Spotify, you will find it. It is a ridiculously beautiful poem and will transport you through these beautiful valleys in the west of Ireland, which I know very well.

In folklore across Europe, the changeling is the child swapped in the cradle. The parents look down and see their baby, but it is not their baby. It is an imp, a revenant, wearing the baby’s face. The parents do not notice for years, but by the time they do, the true child is lost forever in the other world. The changeling tale is the deepest Indo-European fear.

Unlike Carl Jung, who did not have access to the same information we have, I do not make claims about universality any more. I can only make claims about the Indo-European mind — that is to say, minds whose first language is an Indo-European language, from India to Ireland.

The deepest fear: that those you love can be hollowed out and reoccupied while you are making the tea.

Russia’s Disinfolklore in occupied Luhansk is a changeling factory. From 2014 onwards, I watched it operate at scale. Ukrainians who had queued for European Cup football tickets in Donetsk in 2012, who had raised their children in Ukrainian kindergartens, watched Ukrainian television, voted in Ukrainian elections — they were gradually swapped, not physically, but archetypally.

Russia flooded the occupied zone with the Disinfolklore universe. Victory parades. Kazachi Vestnik. LugInfo bulletins. Sirens at eight o’clock for Odessa, for the fire there of the pro-Russians. People’s militia conscription drives. School textbooks rewritten. Street names changed. Ukrainian Orthodox Church driven underground. Within eight years, the cradle held a different child.

On the 11th of March 2022, that different child crossed the Donetsk River and murdered 400 of its neighbours in Kreminna. Ukrainians killing Ukrainians at the command of their captors. This is the changeling folktale run as state policy.

If any of us have been following, as most of us probably have, Chuck Pfarrer over the years, then we will be very well aware of Kreminna and its significance in the battle. Kreminna was a place, the sister city of Sievierodonetsk, where I lived. I am ashamed to say — and this is a lesson for all of us in our lives today — I did not get to know it. I never went to the forest there where Ukraine spent so long defending. I really regret not doing that.

On the 11th of March 2022, as some of us might remember, a tank — an LPR, Luhansk Folk’s Republic tank — blasted directly into this idyllic retirement home. You can see it is idyllic in the photographs, with flowers and a really nice, well-maintained building. It instantly killed dozens of people, pensioners, who were probably just like the tank commander’s parents, just like his grandparents. They could have been his grandparents.

At the same time, that day, according to intercepts that Ukrainian military intelligence obtained, we have evidence of the Russians killing 400 people in Kreminna. They were desperate. These are the Wagner people who came over the border at Shchastia, another place I know very well.

This is the changeling. These are the neighbours killing people. This is why I call it stealth genocide, because Russia does not need to kill every Ukrainian.

I cannot forget the woman I met in 2015 in a village near the occupation line. She told me her own sister, living inside Russia, would not believe her over the television. “I am your sister. Why do you believe the television over me?” That is the changeling moment. Sister at the threshold saying: I am still me. The sibling inside the other world looking back with a stranger’s eyes saying: Ukrainians are killing you. The sister in Ukraine, in Luhansk, is saying: no, they are not. The sister in St Petersburg does not believe her.

I use that story as the foundation myth — although it is a true story, and I remember the day very well — on disinfolklore.eu, to explain what I was thinking at the time she told me this story on a sunny Saturday in March 2015. Which was: what a strange place I am in. This could never happen in America. My sister, my brother, my father, my mother, my cousin, my favourite uncle could never go MAGA and become a changeling. This was before Brexit. Indeed, before many of the people in our lives were able to turn away from Ukraine and say: it is a terrible pity. You see where this fear comes into our daily lives. This is not just something we read about in fairy tales.

The changeling archetype is also why the Kazachi Vestnik newspaper matters more than its 5,500-copy print run would suggest. That was a newspaper in Russia-occupied Luhansk. Because it rebranded Kadivka — a town called Kadivka in Ukraine, but the Russians re-archetyped it as Stakhanov. Most of us will know who Stakhanov is. Even I knew exactly who Stakhanov was, because he was a key part of Russian mythology.

They rebranded Kadivka as Stakhanov because of all of this archetypal work done during early communism. They rebranded Stakhanov’s factory workers and the men who had first built the Soviet coach-building plants as Cossacks of the First Regiment, named after Platov. It gave them a new folklore, a new lineage, a new face. The changeling is not made with a scalpel. It is made with a story.

I myself remember meeting, in a city in central Ukraine which I will not name, one of the only female commanders at the time, part of Pravy Sektor, part of the volunteer forces who held back the might of the Russian army until basically May 2023, when they were dissolved into the Ukrainian army proper. She had been a very senior person in a local municipality administration in Luhansk oblast — not in the city, but in a town in the oblast.

I interviewed her in depth about how she ended up as the deputy commander of a battalion defending against the Russians. She described how, in February 2014 — while the Maidan was going on 1,000 kilometres west of there — she noticed these Cossacks, as she termed them, coming in to camp near her town, in her neighbourhood. I said to her: what do you mean by Cossacks? Because, of course, Cossack has a very Ukrainian heritage, from Zaporizhzhia. The Russians steal this. She said: Russians. In her mind, the word Cossack was already re-archetyped as a foreigner, as a Russian. I always recall that because it helps me orientate myself. Already the changeling archetype had been used.

What they were doing in Kadivka, which they renamed Stakhanov, was creating this fake group of people that they archetyped as a regiment, the First Regiment named after Platov. This gave them a new folklore, a new lineage, a new face. The changeling, as I say, is not made with a scalpel. It is made with a story. This is the significance and the importance of Disinfolklore.

To counter the changeling, we must hold on to the original child. We must keep saying their names, as we all are on Volya. Keep broadcasting Ukrainian television, Ukrainian music, Ukrainian language into the occupied zones, even when the signal is weak. I really enjoyed it this week — the Accidental Ukrainian, Ukrainian language into the occupied zones.

I remember meeting the head of Stanytsia Luhanska administration in 2016. I had an appointment to go and meet him. I often met him on the bridge and in his office. I interviewed him and got lots of information. I remember saying to him: what is the main thing you need? He said: we need stronger broadcasting aerials. We need stronger systems because the Russians are outgunning us in terms of broadcasting systems.

I use this as a way of remembering my own thoughts, because I remember being really surprised. I thought he was going to say ambulances or guns. What he wanted was broadcasting aerials to withstand the propaganda. It surprises me now that, even though I had been there for a year at the time, I still had not registered that this was the main thing.

We must write down what village elders remember, which is what I did. I have three years of notes from there and a further four years of notes from meeting elected leaders, hromada leaders in the area which is now under occupation, south of Tokmak. All of that area, I ranged over like a tiger and met every leader that I could. I documented it all. I look forward to the liberation and being able to talk about what they told me. For obvious reasons, I cannot do so now.

We must photograph the old street signs and we must document what the cradle held before. Because the changeling archetype only wins when the memory of the true child is lost. Ukraine is right now in a folktale struggle for its own cradle. Every one of us in every free country has a role as a witness. We are the aunts and uncles who must look closely at the baby in the cradle and insist: this is not our child. Bring the real one back.

For those of us who are Americans, I think this rings true in a way that perhaps it would not have if I told the story five years ago. Now the child has been restored in Hungary, and I see Iona is there. I look forward to hearing her impressions of that — maybe after this she can talk a little bit about it. I have not had a chance to listen to Volya. I have not really heard it. I would love to hear the details of how she feels, or how people feel that she has been reading about, about how the Russians feel.

The Daily Liturgy: The Folksy Colonel

The next archetype I wanted to talk about is what I call the daily liturgy.

When I was in the Luhansk monitoring team for the OSCE as a diplomat, 2015 to 2018, I really had a choice of jobs, and by accident I ended up in Stanytsia Luhanska, on the bridge. It was probably the toughest place to be, because we had to travel about 200 kilometres there on really rubbish roads each morning, and then 200 kilometres back. It was quite a difficult place to be. There were other jobs in the office, in operations, and many of my colleagues who started off with me in the patrol group ended up doing those kinds of jobs. Something in me kept me there, kept me on the bridge, and I am really glad that I did, because it has changed my life, and you can see how much material from those years — you are listening to it all the time and reading it all the time.

I did have this interview in about April 2015 for a job as political analyst in the team, which would have meant staying in the Mir Hotel in Sievierodonetsk each day and basically just reading the media and writing pieces to send to Kyiv. By that time, I had already worked out that all of these stories about the founding of the central bank, or a parliament and courts, which I was reading about in the daily news briefings from Luhansk city from the Russian-occupied media — I had already worked out that these were fiction. I remember saying this to my colleague who was interviewing me at the time, and he kind of nodded his head.

They had this daily liturgy in the occupied Luhansk. If you parse the three years of daily news, which I have done and which I am reporting here, from Russia-occupied Luhansk, one name recurs more than any other — more than Putler, more than Plotnitsky, who is the fake sovereign, more than any single Ukrainian president: Major, later Lieutenant Colonel, Andrei Maroshko, official representative of the LFR People’s Militia, the Luhansk Volksrepublik’s People’s Militia. In my corpus of 10,709 items, he appears in 579 of them. Almost every single briefing from 2015 to 2018 has his byline.

Who is he? He is an invented character. When I talk about Disinfolklore and the Disinfolklore analytical method — using characters, abstract people, looking at Putin as a character, because we do not know anything about him, and yet people relate to him as if he is real, although the character was created entirely by Surkov. Vladislav Surkov himself archetyped himself from his Chechen background and his Chechen name and decided to go for Vladislav. He is not a Slav. He is from Chechnya, Ichkeria. He archetyped himself and then he created Putin.

Putin started his career as Khodorkovsky’s bodyguard. Surkov escaped his nondescript Soviet town by learning martial arts and being taken on by a teacher who then connected him with Khodorkovsky, and he became his bodyguard. Eventually, in the mid-1990s, Surkov was looking for a piece of the action. He wanted to get some money. He wanted to become like a partner of Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky said no. He kind of left and then found this job to create this character Putin, whom they wanted to shoehorn into the presidency.

I believe this is exactly the same process which is going on at the moment for another character. I do not know which one it would be. It might be Dmitry Kozak. It could be someone we have not heard of. It could be Khodorkovsky himself. You never know. You just do not know what is going on inside there. They completely create these artificial characters. That, again, is an insight from Disinfolklore, because we can look at all of these characters in the news — whether it is the character of Greenland in Donald’s mind, or Donald, or the people around Donald, or in these Russian-occupied territories — as the same as we would look at characters in a book. The origins of my insight about this come from looking at this corpus.

This man, Lieutenant Colonel Andrei Maroshko, is an invented character. He is not invented in the sense that he does not exist. He exists. He wears a uniform. He has a moustache. It is important always to remember, as I always do, that Surkov did theatre studies. I remember being surprised at hearing that, because I could not relate theatre studies to the spectacle. Of course, now, if we look at Donald as a performer, as P.T. Barnum, as the showman, then we can understand a bit more how the spectacle interacts with the real world.

He exists. He wears a uniform. He has a moustache. He stands at the podium at the Luhansk — as the Russians would call it — media centre. He is invented in the sense that the role he plays is a costume. He is Russia’s folksy colonel, the archetypal spokesperson, whose function is to turn each day’s artillery exchange into a bedtime story.

The origins of my insight were at the bridge, with the bridge troll — the chief bridge troll, who told me he was a forester until the Russians came, and then he decided to fight for the liberation of the Luhansk Folk’s Republic. He was a woodsman, a forester. Probably in reality, he was FSB or SVR or secret service, playing a former forester. His job was to tell me bedtime stories. It took me some time. Every day I would go there and meet him, and he would have these stories to tell me about what the Ukrainians had allegedly done the night before and the heroic exploits of his men.

It was seeing the pattern in the way he was telling these stories to me, and treating me when I crossed the bridge into occupied Ukraine, that gradually I realised this was — he was telling me bedtime stories. I became very circumspect about what I put in my reports because of this. This was also going on in Luhansk at the level of the regional capital of the occupation.

Let me read you three of his lines. Each of these is real, dated, and filed. I have the files.

21st of March 2016, LugInfo.com: “A visit by the deputy head of the Special Monitoring Mission, OSCE, Alexander Hug, to Donbas led to a decrease in shelling from the side of Kyiv security forces.” This was stated by the official representative of the LPR People’s Militia, Andrei Maroshko. Notice the move. A foreign official — who was the head of my mission — a foreign official’s visit led to a decrease. Maroshko positions Russia’s proxy as naturally peaceable. Shelling only happens because Kyiv chooses it. When the OSCE visits, Kyiv pauses, like a bully caught mid-swing.

5th of April 2016, DNINews.com: “Kyiv denies its fighters’ deaths to avoid paying their relatives.” In the light of the stories that Mockers tells us every week, or that we hear, this is hilarious, but it is the same script: accusation in a mirror. The LFR People’s Militia official representative commented on the statement of the UAF Civil-Military Cooperation Department head, Alexei Nozdrachev, that there are no burials of the Ukrainian army’s military near Debaltseve.

Notice this second move. Maroshko accuses Kyiv of defrauding its own soldiers’ widows. The folksy colonel is not just reporting war. He is smearing the enemy state’s moral character to the families who might bury that state’s dead. His audience here is inside the occupation.

The hermeneutic importance of Debaltseve: just after the second Minsk agreement in February 2015 — I arrived there just before it — under which a ceasefire was reinstated and both sides were supposed to withdraw their heavy weaponry beyond the range of those weapons, main battle tanks 30 kilometres away from the contact line. As ever, just as it was being signed, Debaltseve, which is an important railway junction and was supposed to be inside Ukraine’s part of the contact line — the Russians, of course, did not obey this. They went on the attack and killed a large number of Ukrainian soldiers who had surrendered and retreated. I was there the day of the Debaltseve talks, at the checkpoints, and it was a very dark day. The Ukrainian soldiers were asking us: do you know how many people were killed? The whole thing was horrible.

That is its function in the folklore, if you like, of everyone’s minds. This is the Russians, over a year later, talking about Debaltseve and how — rather than admitting the fact that they slaughtered Ukrainians who were retreating — the Ukrainians themselves were not properly burying their own dead.

The third piece is from the 22nd of February 2017, LugInfo.com: “Kyiv forces fired 147 artillery and mortar rounds at LFR territory over the past 24 hours.” A precise number, 147. No casualties reported. No location named. No photographs. The precision is the trick. The precision performs truthfulness. A number this exact must be real. This is a folktale mechanism. A tailor who stitched seven at one blow. The three bears. The forty thieves. Precise integers that encode authority.

This is the liturgy. Visit — peace. Funeral fraud — moral decay. Exact number — undeniable proof. Every day, in variation, for three years. Maroshko is not primarily delivering military information. He is delivering a moral architecture.

This is my insight in Disinfolklore: that we are actually being taught mental routines. That is the mana in the memes that we are getting. They are restructuring our minds. This is my fear over what Donald is doing with Iran. Iran is to what Donald and the Disinfolklore universe he is trying to weave inside humanity’s minds, what Ukraine is to MAGA Disinfolklore. It is just an instrument. It is a means to an end. While we are focused on Ukraine or on Iran or on the island there, actually our brains are being rewired, because this is what I saw being done in Russia-occupied Ukraine. I am dedicating my life to try and build up my own resistance to it, my own resilience, but also to try and understand how it works and to try and help others see it.

He is delivering a moral architecture. Russia is the protector. Kyiv is the predator. The OSCE — this is me — is the wandering saint who visits and brings silence. The number is the incantation.

Why does this work? Because the folksy colonel is structurally identical to the village elder who gathers the children around the hearth and tells them what the forest is like at night. This is the experience I had on the other side of the bridge, speaking to the forester each day. Especially at the beginning, I thought: this is amazing. Look at me now. I am hearing the truth about what life is like here. I am meeting this village elder-type character. He is playing on all my vulnerabilities and my desire to be treated as a serious player in this military situation.

Maroshko’s uniform is incidental. His authority is folkloric. He performs the role of the one who has seen the thing you have not seen. That was my experience with the forester. He has come back to tell you what it means. In the Russian occupation, he told them the outer realm — that is, across the Donets River, where I lived and where I worked, but then I crossed over into this other world each day — was populated by fraudsters, monsters, and liars. Because he told them the same story every single day, they began, many of them, to believe it.

Think of how people in America often think of the inner cities as being wild territories. I used to get told all of these stories by my relatives and my family friends about how you could not go to these places because of this or that. It is the same story — a story which we hear from Donald about Minnesota or Chicago or what he calls them, freedom cities or whatever, as he tries to usurp their power.

The counter-move to Maroshko is not fact-checking. Fact-checking arrives too late. The liturgy is already sung. The mana is already in the meme. The counter is to name the role. He is not a spokesperson. This applies to Karoline Leavitt, for instance. She is not a spokesperson. He is a folksy colonel, a stock character in a very old play. Once you have named the role, the costume falls off.

Kyiv Forces Violate Ceasefire: A Linguistic Autopsy

This is a discourse which has only gone global recently. It went global for us in the Ukraine space probably about two years ago, where we started seeing the subversion of ceasefire. Most normal people who have not been paying attention to Ukraine were only introduced to this with the Iran war last July — and now, again, where Donald keeps on declaring a ceasefire but there is nothing of the sort on the ground. Israel does the same thing. I went through all of this in eastern Ukraine.

In that Silicon Valley dictum — the future is out there, it is just not evenly distributed — the future was out there, strangely enough, in this place in eastern Ukraine. Many of our futures were out there. I did not realise it at the time. At the time, I thought the future was in Silicon Valley, and I was desperate to get a job in Silicon Valley. Ironically, and this is a lesson for us all, I was in the centre of things, but I did not realise it at the time. Thankfully, I stayed there long enough to gather all of this.

From September 2014, when the first Minsk Protocol was signed — and I have written about this extensively before — Ukraine was not given the credit for this. By September 2014, Ukraine had the Russians on the run, in the sense that the Russians were still playing their little green men troll. The Ukrainian army by that time had managed to get itself together. It had these volunteer battalions — loyal Ukrainians like Kolomoisky, who obviously then turned into Abaddon, and he always was Abaddon probably, but he was funding Dnipro-1 and Dnipro-2 battalions, which held back the might of the Russian army in Donetsk. The Ukrainians really had the Russians on the run, partly because the Russians did not expect any resistance then.

The Russians signed the first Minsk Protocol in September 2014. Some of you might remember, they were threatening to take Mariupol. Then the ceasefire line was basically frozen at that point, from the coast — Shyrokyne, which is about 20 kilometres east of Mariupol — all the way up to where I was on the contact line and the Donetsk River. That was not done out of generosity or a goodwill gesture. It was done because the Russians were not quite sure how blatant they wanted to be. They had already been sanctioned over MH17, and militarily they were on the run. Really, all they wanted was Crimea. They thought it was going to be an easy run to take the rest of the country. They signed this Minsk Protocol, but there was still a lot of fighting.

From when the first Minsk Protocol was signed in September 2014 to the full-scale invasion, Russia-backed outlets in occupied Luhansk used one sentence in variation every single working day. In my corpus, it appears 511 times. It is one of the most repeated formulae I have ever catalogued: “Kyiv forces violate the ceasefire.”

Five words. Let me take them apart one at a time, because each word is doing Disinfolklore work.

Kyiv — not Ukraine, not the Ukrainian armed forces, not the Ukrainian state. Reducing Ukraine to its capital city performs a geographic demotion. It archetypes the real state as a single belligerent municipality, the way a medieval chronicle might speak of Prague or Novgorod. Meanwhile, the fake state — the Luhansk Folk’s Republic — is inflated upward. The Republic. The sentence is a seesaw. Ukraine goes down, the occupation goes up.

Forces — not army, not soldiers, not defenders. Forces. Faceless, menacing, unmarked. It does not wear a uniform you could mourn. It is simply a mass, like weather. The listener cannot picture a man, only a phenomenon.

Violate — this is the core move. A ceasefire is a rule and a violation is a trespass. The verb positions the sentence in the grammar of law. Grammatically, the LFR has become the aggrieved party. The LFR is the state that was keeping the rule. Kyiv is the criminal. A violator, in English and in Russian alike, is a category with legal resonance — one step from violator to that horrible word beginning with R-A-P, that Donald is an adjudicated one. That slippage is not accidental. It is the Disinfolklorist working beneath the conscious attention.

The ceasefire — not a ceasefire, not this ceasefire. The definite article makes the ceasefire sound eternal, unconditional, pre-existing, as though it had descended from heaven rather than been negotiated in a sweaty hotel in Belarus. The definite article sacralises the thing it names.

Now hear how the formula lives in the wild. 23rd of September 2016 — all that summer of 2016, I had to go and spend maybe four nights there every couple of weeks in Stanytsia Luhanska overnight and count the ceasefire violations. Some nights I counted thousands. As any of us who know — if you have ever tried to count explosions and bullets or artillery strikes, it is really hard. You lose count. You mark them on a piece of paper with little marks and then at the end you count them. Some nights it was thousands.

This is at the end of that summer, 23rd of September 2016: “The situation along the contact line has a tendency to escalation. From the 22nd to 23rd of September, the ceasefire regime was not observed by UAF.” 28th of September: “Ukraine’s forces are violating ceasefire near Stanytsia Luhanska, a key condition for implementing the recently reached agreement on disengagement of forces.” At that time, there was a ceasefire for the school year. We had all of these ritual times each year to allow the school children to go to school.

22nd of February 2017: “Kyiv forces fired 147 artillery and mortar rounds at LPR territory over the past 24 hours.” Every single item follows the same template. Agent: Kyiv, Ukraine, UAF. Verb of violation: violate, fire, shell, breach. Passive LFR: LFR territory, our positions, the Republic. Numeric flourish: six times, 147 rounds, three cases. Day after day, year after year.

The reader does not remember any individual incident. The reader just sees the pattern: Ukraine attacks, we defend, we count. The purpose is not to report the war. The purpose is to install in the occupied population a stable emotional identity: we are the ones attacked, they are the ones who attack. Once that identity is stable, any Ukrainian counter-offensive is self-evidently criminal. Any Russian expansion is self-evidently defensive.

Russia’s February 2022 invasion of the rest of Ukraine was not a new story to the people of occupied Luhansk. It was the eighth year of the same sentence.

The counter is a different sentence. Try this: “Russia-backed forces in occupied Luhansk shelled Ukrainian positions today, as they have done almost every day since 2014.” Agent named. Violation stated. Duration marked. The listener’s mind, offered a different grammar, begins to build a different story.

While all of this was going on in Russia-occupied Luhansk, the same story was being told on every single news briefing all the way across Russia. At that time, I had no visibility of that. I had no idea that this was going on. Many of us still do not. That is the real value of what Mockers and Will and all of us — but especially the Absurdistan focus, and Iona reading Komersant out to us — this focus we have on Russia, wrapped obviously inside a very careful way that we tell the stories, is giving us a really clear idea of what is going on in there, and the brainwashing that is going on in there.

All through 2014 to 2022, I did not have any visibility of that, even though I had all the visibility of what was going on in Luhansk and that brainwashing process. The value of what we can add is by explaining to people we know what is really going on in Russia, because that is really the process of brainwashing. The enemy that we need to understand — they are not getting normal news and they are totally brainwashed.

Unfortunately, all of the OSCE’s reports did not do what I said. They never said: “Russia-backed forces in occupied Luhansk shelled Ukrainian positions today, as they have done almost every day since 2014.” It was always: “The OSCE observed three artillery rounds being fired from the south-west to the north-east, 20 kilometres south of X.” I remember meeting a senior NATO officer in Vienna once. He was just asking me: I have to read your reports every day, but I do not really understand them — could you just explain what all this stuff is? Because the Russians are part of the OSCE, we were never blatant like this. It was a huge disservice to everyone that we were not.

The Fake State Liturgy

The final archetype I have is the fake state liturgy.

The Republic’s defence authorities: 1,085 items from my data set. The same nouns recur hour by hour, year after year. The Republic. The People’s Militia. The People’s Council. I use the word folk’s because of Disinfolklore. The LPR defence authorities. The Ministry of State Security. These are not descriptions. They are a liturgy.

A liturgy is what the church does on Sunday morning. Heather will know all about this. She will probably correct me on this. It is not primarily communication. It is a performative act. The words make the thing real by the act of speaking them. “This is my body.” “This is the Republic.” The worshipper who hears the phrase becomes a believer, not because they are persuaded, but because the repetition changes what they perceive as normal.

From my corpus: 10th of March 2016, the People’s Militia of the LFR. 5th of April 2016, the official representative of the LFR People’s Militia, Major Andrei Maroshko, commented on the statement of the UAF Civil-Military Cooperation Department. 17th of February 2017: LFR and DPR heads Igor Plotnitsky — whose parents, by the way, died eating poisonous mushrooms, which I also found very suspicious even at the time, before I discovered this motif in folklore — and Alexander Zakharchenko called for Kyiv to allow the Republic’s observers to carry out inspections. This at a time that literally every piece of metal was being taken out of the LFR and DPR and brought to Russia, sold as scrap in Russia. They systematically took out all the equipment, the pipes, anything in any factories — total looting. Yet here they are calling for Kyiv to allow the Republic’s observers to carry out inspections there.

I remember reading all of these and thinking: the chutzpah. Who do you think you are? You are a bunch of occupiers and you are speaking to a sovereign state as if you are a sovereign state.

Read the last one again. “Heads expressed concern.” “Demanded.” “Republic’s observers.” These are sovereignty verbs, sovereignty nouns. No actual state is doing anything here. Two men funded by Moscow are being photographed at a table, and a Russia wire copy is inflating the photograph into a diplomatic act between two fake states. The costume does the work.

There are three moves in this fake state liturgy, and every item in my corpus performs one or more of them.

Move one: the institutional name. Never the militants, never the occupiers, never the armed group — always the People’s Militia. The adjective “people’s” or “folk’s” is a direct theft from Soviet iconography: the Supreme Soviet, the People’s Court, the People’s Commissariat. It connects the LFR in the listener’s unconscious to the whole memory architecture of the USSR. It archetypes the occupation as a continuation of something they once belonged to.

Move two: the title. Never “Maroshko said” — always “the official representative of the LPR People’s Militia, Major Andrei Maroshko.” This is partially why I am always really careful about always saying and writing President Zelenskyy. Maybe for the first year of the full-scale invasion, I was a bit more negligent about this. I even tried to subvert the Z archetyping by referring to him as Z. Almost every time I did it, I got pushback from people. Now I try always — never Zelenskyy — because you hear people like Vance, or people in our lives who know nothing about Ukraine or President Zelenskyy, talking about him dismissively as Zelenskyy. That is why I am very respectful. I try, even in my tweets: President Zelenskyy, always.

Always: “The official representative of the LPR People’s Militia, Major Andrei Maroshko, said.” The rank, the role, the institution — all incanted every time, a magician’s repetition. The listener absorbs without thinking the premise that there is an LFR, that it has a People’s Militia, that it has an official representative, that they hold ranks. Four fictions stacked into one grammatical subject.

Move three: the counterpart. The liturgy always frames Ukraine as Kyiv — a city, not a state. Kyiv forces. Kyiv-controlled territory. Kyiv denies. I noticed this from journalists, even in the Kyiv Independent. It always screams to me: you are a bit of an amateur, you have not really been paying attention. When I see a journalist from the FT trying to perform impartiality by referring to Kyiv and Moscow — maybe you can do that in the context of other wars, but this war has been going on for eight years, and the Russians have been using this to demote Ukraine’s sovereignty. You, the Financial Times journalist, are playing this game for them. I think, and I know, their intentions are good. They are just trying to distance themselves and perform impartiality. But it screams to me: amateur hour.

This is the inverse move. While inflating the occupation into the Republic, it deflates Ukraine into a single municipality. The fake state becomes weightier than the real one — grammatically.

What does this liturgy accomplish? It produces, in the minds of the occupied population, the thing it claims to describe. The longer they hear “the Republic” every day, the more real the Republic becomes — not as a fact on the ground, but as a concept, as cognitive furniture. It takes its place next to the weather and the weekend. It becomes unremarkable. Once unremarkable, it is almost unchallengeable.

The counter is to refuse the liturgy. Never repeat their nouns. Not LFR — the Russia-occupied part of Luhansk province. Not the People’s Militia — the armed Russian-backed militia. I actually just call them the Russian occupiers now. I do not enter into the game at all when I have my attention. Not the Republic’s defence authorities — the Russian-occupied administration. Each correction is small. Cumulatively, they drain the spell. Liturgies work by repetition. So do counter-liturgies.

That is all I have for you for today.

Continued from:

I suppose the first thing to address is the elephant in the room. I have three points to make on Donald at the moment. I cannot think of another orientating topic — or Iran, let us call it Iran then, to avoid Donald — and how it relates to Ukraine.

First, I think on one level, this so-called peace agreement, this so-called ceasefire, if it is real, if it was real, would be an appropriate acceptance by the United States, by Donald, and by Vance of their position in this mess that they got involved in. They had one option of escalating and losing a million American soldiers and treasure beyond all comprehension in a war that was impossible to win, given the hundreds of thousands of drones — which we must assume, if not millions — we must assume that Iran has ready for this, and the plans. In a position like that, I would analyse this as an honourable retreat from a situation they obviously should never have gotten into.

That is one point.

I am quite happy about that because I did not want a war. I understand there are a lot of people now who did not want the war who are kind of quite rightfully trolling Donald with the humiliation of this deal. The humiliation, in my analysis, is not this deal. It is the situation our country found itself in. This retreat is the most honourable thing that could happen.

What This Means for Ukraine

The second thing is what this means for Ukraine. If — and obviously this is all in fantasy land and total fairy land — if this peace agreement came to fruition and there was peace in our time and Iran had the sanctions lifted, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, then the example for Russia would be: cut your losses and leave Ukraine. There is no dishonour in realising you have made a terrible error.

Look at America. Look what it has done. It has the strength, the capacity to admit this was an absolute disaster. The entire Middle East was about to be depopulated and Iran was going to eviscerate millions of lives, perhaps. Therefore, unlike Russia in early March 2022, when the dogs on the street could have and did understand — and many of us did and many of us wrote about it at the time — we understood the true enormity of the error that Russia had made within a few days. The reverse Napoleon attack, as I archetyped it at the time on the 1st of March: invading Ukraine with too few resources to achieve its goals.

Ukraine’s dominant strategy was as Field Marshal Kutuzov’s strategy is described so brilliantly, with such pathos, such mythos — and it is part of the creation of this archetype of Russia as unbeatable — that all he had to do was draw the French further and further and further in, and that would take care of them. It has gone the same way for Ukraine.

Now we have an example of a superpower which realised that it overreached and has done what hopefully most of us manage to do in our personal lives. When we realise we have made a terrible mistake, we just get out of the situation. We understand the sunk cost fallacy, which the Russians clearly do not and just have no conception of: that at any single point in time, everything that you have invested into pursuing a particular strategy is lost anyway. It should not form any part of your decision about whether or not at this moment in time it is the right thing to continue.

If this peace agreement held and if the situation stays as it is now for more than the next five minutes — which, frankly, I doubt it will — in an ideal world, this would be a fantastic example to everyone. This is what perhaps J.D. Vance would try and sell as he defenestrates Donald.

Donald’s Pattern and the Ceasefire Troll

The third thing I had to say was really, obviously, the pattern we all know in Donald: this will not stay because he will realise he has done something terrible, the whole thing is terrible, and he will regret it and then he will send off the tweets, and maybe this is the end of him. I do not think any of us would be complacent about making that prediction. I thought it was the end of him on January 6th. I thought it was the end of him after the January 6th inquiry. I thought it was the end of him when he was held liable for the 34 felony counts. I have learned from that experience.

This certainly does not look too good for him because I recognise that my first point is a very — not that many people probably share it. From a strategic point of view, I do not mind that so much. I do not want the people who were opposed to the war in the first place now to troll Donald to such an extent that he is then trolled into resuming the war and bringing about this terrible catastrophe for the United States, and not least for the Middle Eastern countries and Iran. If there was a ground invasion, Iran would do to the United States what has been done to Russia today.

That is really all I had to say about that.

Maybe the last thing I wrote, which was basically influenced by a data set all of us are really tuned into — though most people in the real world are not, because we have been following Ukraine — to the extent that we can record what has been going on over the past two years with Istanbul peace talks, Riyadh peace talks, Qatar, and all of that malarkey, and then Donald archetyping that he wanted peace, though we all know clearly he does not. He is just surrendering Ukraine to the Russians for whatever reason.

This whole re-archetyping of the content of the word peace, of peace talks, of ceasefire, and of threats: this is a big concern in a negative way to me at the moment. Watching everyone fall for this ceasefire troll saddened me — all of these experts — because you are just like: have you not been paying attention to what has been going on in Ukraine? The mirroring where Ukraine offers the ceasefire, then Donald and Putler say they want ceasefires, and it is just all this nightmare of the decoupling of meaning from particular sounds and from peace meaning war, which characterises the last hundred years of Russian history, which Orwell himself picked up well.

It was strong enough an archetype and a decoupling from the true meaning even in — when was 1984 written? In 1948, I think it was. Then to hear Donald selling this pup in the public sphere and people, serious people, falling for it and promoting it and not seeing through it.

I recognise that is slightly contradictory to what I was just saying about how, on one level, this capitulation to Iran — given where we are today, and given the lack of power to prosecute the war that the United States has, as has been shown over the past few weeks. Iran has not even shown its hand in terms of the drones and everything we have seen Ukraine batter the Russians with. I recognise there is a slight contradiction between saying that and also the fact that archetyping Donald as this Machiavellian who is tricking everyone with his ceasefire — I mean, all of us have an opinion on this, but surely those pictures of him, that film of him beside the bunny rabbit on the balcony of the White House, like the Queen of England, talking about killing millions of Iranians while a bunny kind of waves and Melania — I mean, it is absolutely insane, and he must be insane not to see all of that.

If he was a Machiavellian, this whole ceasefire stuff — and maybe they are just holding back while they prepare and put special forces in line — I hope that is not what is going on. I do not get the feeling that is what is going on. We do see this same misuse of language from him, and many people we might have respected before we followed the Ukraine war — who write for the FT or the New York Times, the think tanks, Carnegie people — all suddenly going: ceasefire, it is going to be a ceasefire, that is great.

I referenced the experience I have talked about before, where the Russian model of ceasefire is: you call it a ceasefire, you get everyone to agree to it, and then you just continually shoot off your artillery. It is only ever a ceasefire in the information space. I hate that that lesson has now travelled from eastern Ukraine, from Luhansk, from even the Ukraine war space, to now globally.

Probably billions of people last night did not sleep very well because they were worried. They woke up this morning, checked their phones to see: has nuclear annihilation happened? Because he said he was going to end a civilisation. I just hate that that trolling has gone from page eight in the New York Post in the 1980s, through January 6th — which was just really only concerned Americans — through all of these other minor incidents, to this mega tweet on Sunday.

The conduct of war and peace is not, as it used to be a mere 20 years ago, conducted by diplomats in parliaments, in hushed rooms at the UN Security Council. Now it is conducted basically solely by Twitter, by Untruth Social.

The Decision I Made in the Autumn of 2019

On the other hand, I have mixed feelings about this, because I bet everything that I had — all my intellectual power, all my time, all my energy — that trolling and trolls was the most significant phenomenon in our civilisation. That was the decision I made in the autumn of 2019. That was the problem I was going to look into and try to come up with an understanding of what Donald was doing when he roiled humanity through Twitter. As I say, this was pre-COVID even. It was not such a life and death matter then. He had not killed that many. He did not kill a million Americans unnecessarily through COVID, or however many people have died in Iran or other places since then, through USAID cancelling and all that. They were innocent times.

I invested my time and my energy on this problem, which many people did not even see at the time. They just thought: they are tweets, that is just Donald being Donald. In some senses, seeing an Untruth, a tweet, credibly threatening as President of the United States of America, credibly threatening the end of Iranian civilisation — and which, as many of you will know, I have looked into very deeply because it is one of our main — it is very well documented through the Avesta, which is reconstructed about Zarathustra and Zarawaster and 1400 BCE, as the stopping-off point for the ultimately Ukrainian, ancient Ukrainian Yamnaya on their journey to India, to conquer and Indo-Europeanise India.

Iran is just a really important place and a really important civilisation, which I know relatively intimately. I was kind of happy to see Donald talk about it as a civilisation. I do not know where that came from because I do not think he sees it as a civilisation. Maybe that was Vance’s chat, or someone who was talking to someone.

The Mother and the Maiden: Archetype One

Anyway, I suppose that — the occupation used the folk memory of the older people, of the pre-Stalin era. By calling their security service in the Russian occupation of Ukraine the MGB, they were conjuring up the folk memory of Stalin.

This walk-in report stated that a man’s common-law wife and her underage daughter were about to be cut into pieces by a Ukrainian Nazi on my side of the river. I was on the Ukraine-controlled, government-controlled side of the Donetsk River at the time. I was asked by my boss: could you and your team, your patrol group, which I was in charge of, go and rescue them? Rescue these damsels in distress.

Now listen to that phrase again. Common-law wife and her underage daughter. No Ukrainian mother speaks like that. No Ukrainian husband writes like that. This is a linguistic formula. It is the mother and the maiden in drag. Jung’s primordial archetypes, reheated and served cold to a male diplomat who, it was assumed, would charge into the forest to rescue the damsel from the ogre.

The “cut into pieces” part was a bonus, a foundation myth straight out of Indo-European cosmogony, where the universe itself is sculpted from the dismembered body of a cow or of a human, depending on the culture.

This is the mother and the maiden archetype in Russian Disinfolklore: the innocent woman and child, forever at the mercy of the monstrous outer realm male. It is the archetype of Ukraine, loyal to Russia but misled by Europe.

We see the same archetype in Vance’s speech in Hungary, where again he is attacking the European Union for being the barbarians at the gate, trying to pervert the true course of Hungary’s destiny.

This innocent woman and child, forever at the mercy of a monstrous outer realm male, forever requiring rescue by the inner realm’s protective sovereign — which in this case was the Russians — it is the central moral theatre of Russia’s occupation. Every day the Luhansk Folk’s Militia issued bulletins about the fertility of the inner realm under threat.

I was on one side of the river. From the perspective of the Russian Disinfolklore propagation apparatus, I was in the outer realm. Ukrainians were in the outer realm. Every day in these propaganda newspapers, bulletins were reported about the fertility of the inner realm of the occupation under threat. The mother shelled at her stove. The child at her school book. The mushroom-picker grandmother blown up by a Ukrainian booby trap.

I watched hundreds of these tales be manufactured. I watched mushroom pickers genuinely killed by mines. I watched their deaths laundered within hours into folktale about Kyiv’s savagery. Being on this bridge, I was often 50 metres away from explosions. Both sides would instantly archetype a reality around that explosion which, by the time I was finished being fed all of these lines and all of these stories, all of this Disinfolklore, I did not know what had truly happened, if anything truly had happened.

It could have been an animal triggering the mine in the woods. It could have been the Ukrainian soldier who was polishing his grenade launcher in my sight as I asked him: did you hear that explosion? He said: nah. Or it could have been the Russian occupier on the other side of the bridge who had a whole story and scheme about it. Or the blood I saw on the ground could have been blackberries being smuggled across this bridge during blackberry season, or strawberries, or raspberries, or whatever it was. The closer you are to the story does not necessarily mean that you understand what has happened.

This archetype is strategic because once you accept that mothers and maidens of Luhansk are imperilled by Ukrainian ogres, you accept without noticing that only Russia’s bridge trolls can protect them. The archetype does half the politics for you before you have formed a conscious thought.

Look for the maiden in the meme and you will find a damsel on every front page of the Russian occupying newspaper Lug Info. Every siren sounded at eight o’clock in memory of Odessa. Every victory parade staged on Theatre Square in Luhansk. That Odessa reference is obviously to the pro-Russian terrorists who ended up being burnt in a theatre. It is constantly referenced in Russian Disinfolklore to this day, even though the Russians have killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians since that moment. It is still on Putler’s mind all the time.

When Donald archetypes himself as the saviour of the Iranian people, he is also performing the role that the Russians were performing inside the occupation. He was distressing everyone by threatening to eviscerate them and then offering a way of rescuing them.

The counter-move is almost embarrassingly simple. When you hear the phrase “common-law wife and her underage daughter,” or its Ukrainian equivalent — the mushroom picker blown up by the junta — turn on your incoming troll radar. Ask: who wrote this formula? Whose archetype is being activated inside me? Which direction does my rescue instinct now want to send me? Do I want to send a million American soldiers into Iran?

Then, as my head of security did when I texted him during this incident — and I texted the words: “Confirm manager’s order to approach house where mother and underage daughter are reportedly being cut into pieces” — name the archetype out loud. Speaking it out loud breaks the spell. In that case, it did break the head of security’s spell and he immediately ordered us to stand down.

Only one among 15 of my colleagues, whom I named the archetype out loud to that day, understood that this was the most artificial situation we were about to be set into, because they were under this spell. They were males who wanted to rescue damsels in distress, and they fell completely for the troll.

Russia’s Disinfolklorists do not need the mother and maiden to be real. They only need you to believe her long enough to arm yourself against her imagined oppressor. Once you name her for what she is — a costume rented from a folklore wardrobe — you will never again be mobilised by her tears.

In that case, this is kind of the origin story of all of my work since then, because it was that formula of words — common-law wife and underage daughter — which, even though I did not know anything about folklore or archetypes at the time, just sounded artificial in the same way that a really rubbish novel or a really rubbish film is just bad art. You do not believe in it. It is a monodimensional character that you cannot understand what they are going to do next.

That was kind of my initiation into how Russia uses archetypes to troll people quite successfully — smart people. That did not work on me that day. Other archetypes have worked on me at other times and in other situations.

The Bridge Troll: Archetype Two

The second archetype I want to talk about is the bridge troll, the archetype of the checkpoint. For three years, my office was a bridge: the Stanytsia Luhanska footbridge across the Donetsk River in the forest, between Ukrainian-controlled Luhansk and Russia-occupied so-called LPR — or as I call it, LFR, the Luhansk Folk’s Republic.

Every day, 10,000 Ukrainian pensioners crossed it to collect their pensions, kiss their grandchildren, and buy medicine. Every day they passed beneath the gaze of armed men who demanded their papers, their patience, their identity.

The structural similarity with the Straits of Hormuz — or indeed with Chinvat Bridge, which in ancient Iranian religion then passed from there into Islam — is striking. You cross over at the time of death. If Daena, who guards Chinvat Bridge, appears to you as a beautiful woman, you will pass your life in the heavenly house of song, in Europe, in the European Union. If Daena appears to you as a witch, then you will fall over the crevice and you will spend eternity in the hellish house of lies.

That is from 1400 BCE, as far as we know, from the time of Zoroaster. It maps perfectly onto the situation I was in, in 2015, in eastern Ukraine — completely artificially created by the Russians — where this idyllic area with songbirds and cool breezes and forest and a biosphere reserve and birds and a river close to the boundary, which since antiquity had been the boundary between Europe and Asia, the Donets River.

In this very place, 3,400 years later, one side of the bridge in Russia-occupied Ukraine was a house of lies, a house of Disinfolklore, a place where no one knew what was real. Yet this first appears in Indo-European lore, a religion, as a situation that you approach at the time of death — which echoes, obviously, in the Greek stories of Acheron and Odysseus, who passed into the underworld in the Kerch Strait. Ukraine, again, all over this place, all over it all.

Every morning I recognised the same folk tale being staged beneath me, which I was a participant in. I did not realise I was a participant in it for a while. Three Billy Goats Gruff: the oldest and most widely translated troll tale in the Indo-European canon. Three migrant brothers wishing to cross a bridge, one bridge troll demanding that they do not.

The bridge troll, of course — like Donald did when he announced going for the US presidency in 2016 at the bottom of the escalator — archetyping himself as the protective troll, protecting the inner realm of America from these criminal migrants from Mexico who are going to affect the inner realm’s sovereignty, security, and fertility. They are going to steal your children, steal your daughters, steal your sons. They were going to adulterate your sovereignty, take away free elections. They were going to attack you. They are going to take your jobs. They are going to take your food.

These are the goats and the troll bridge. Donald archetyping himself as the troll, protecting the inner realm of America from these goats passing over — just as Iran is now taking charge and exacting a toll in the Hormuz.

My three-month trawl through 35,000 archived news sources in the Dow Jones Factiva database showed that this single Norwegian tale, Three Billy Goats Gruff, is the genetic ancestor of every troll craze in modern culture since the 1950s — online trolls and also folklore trolls. Here it was, alive in wood and concrete, iron and steel, on a bridge in eastern Ukraine.

One side of the bridge: the Russian occupiers controlling, exacting tolls, customs duties, acting out, performing statehood, but barring the entry of Ukrainians into their own country from their own country. Sometimes, yes, there were even goats crossing this bridge. The folk tale becoming reality, melding with reality in the structure.

The bridge troll archetype is Russia’s organising metaphor for occupation. Because what is a checkpoint if not a bridge troll’s stomach? What is the Luhansk Folk’s Republic if not a toll booth dressed as a statelet, demanding you pay in sovereignty, security, and fertility for the right to pass into your own and from your own country?

The LPR’s People’s Militia trolled; their bulletins were filed daily in the same voice: Kyiv forces violate ceasefire six times. Ukrainian punishers attempt to break through into the territory of the republic. Breakthrough attempts. Always the outer realm pressing on the bridge. Always the troll announcing that he alone stands between the folk and the abyss.

While this is obviously, hopefully, interesting to us — because Ukraine for us is a really sophisticated character and is part of our everyday life and has been for years now — this structure maps onto geopolitical problems almost everywhere.

Notice what this archetype accomplishes. First, it reverses agency. The occupier becomes the gatekeeper and the occupied become petitioners for passage through their own landscape. Second, it archetypes the occupier as the guardian of sovereignty, because the troll in folklore always owns the bridge. Third, it conditions the folk — the ordinary folk, the 10,000 ordinary folk whose lives I became a part of in this scene, in this one and a half kilometre stretch of the bridge between the two positions, the Ukrainian army and the Russian occupiers — it conditions the folk to accept being devoured.

Often in the mornings, or when I was talking to the people — usually older women, because if you are a military-aged man, you would not really cross the bridge if you could avoid it — I would ask: what time did you leave Luhansk city, which is about 14 kilometres from Stanytsia Luhanska bridge? These were epic journeys every day. These 14 kilometres would take — they would have left at four in the morning and I would be talking to them at eleven — involving queues and the whole performance of queuing. It was all a conditioning process.

The Billy Goats Gruff tale ends badly for the troll. The LPR version is run backward. The goats are eaten and the troll calls it peace. I watched this in real time. Ukrainian pensioners queuing for seven hours in the February wind. Ukrainian grandmothers — another archetype — paying their tolls in humiliation. Russian soldiers cosplaying as Cossacks of the 1st Regiment, named after Platov, printing their own folksy newspaper, Kazachi Vestnik, in Stakhanov, which they insisted on calling Stakhanov even though it had a proper Ukrainian name. Because nothing completes a bridge troll like a folksy disguise.

Think of Strelkov as the battle re-enactor, re-enacting the Second World War in Slovyansk, where he was calling for support in June 2014 and was abandoned by Moscow. Now I read Moscow still has not taken Slovyansk and is still trying to approach it while being pushed back.

To counter the bridge troll, we must name him. We must say: this is not a state, this is a toll booth. We must say: this is not a ceasefire, this is a troll demanding fatter goats. We must remember the crucial detail of the folktale. The troll wins every round until the oldest, biggest goat crosses. The archetype itself tells us the ending. Bridge trolls do not sustain. They are defeated eventually by a goat who refuses to lie about his size. Ukraine is that goat. The archetype knows how this ends.

The Merciful Sovereign: Archetype Three

The third archetype I wanted to mention is the merciful sovereign, the ogre who plays the father.

Let me tell you about Pavel Gubarev, who was the self-declared governor of Novorossiya. Novorossiya itself was an archetyping of parts of Ukraine and parts of the Russian Federation — mainly Ukraine — that was archetyped as such by Catherine the so-called Great in her time. They were playing, riffing off that.

Pavel Gubarev, the former self-declared governor of a state which never existed and never will exist — a man who, before Russia’s invasion, ran a business renting Santa Claus costumes in Donetsk. You see, Disinfolklore and folksy, bizarre stuff is never far from anything that happens in Russia, as all of us know from listening to Mockers and This Week in Absurdistan.

He said on camera, eight months after the full-scale invasion: if you do not want to be convinced that Russia should rule Ukraine, we will kill you. We will kill as many of you as we have to. One million, five million, or exterminate all of you.

Why would a man who once wore a red fur suit and handed presents to children say this on camera? Why would he stage himself so openly as the ogre? Because he has not staged himself as the ogre. He has staged himself as the merciful sovereign. This is the third archetype I want to name today.

The merciful sovereign is the father king of folktale, the monarch who decrees the execution, then spares the victim, then is loved for his mercy. Think about what Donald is doing today. The trick is that he manufactures the danger he pretends to relieve. Gubarev threatens to kill five million Ukrainians in one breath. In the next, he offers them the mercy of Russian rule. The threat and the mercy are the same act.

I saw this archetype everywhere in occupied Luhansk. The Luhansk Folk’s Militia would shell a village, then dispatch a Ministry of Emergency Situations lieutenant colonel to issue a tender bulletin about a wounded civilian. Can I just say that every time I hear Mockers say “Ministry of Emergency Situations,” it just makes me smile, because the idea that a developed country — most countries have a limited number of ministries: foreign ministry, interior ministry — but that a modern European country would have an actual ministry to look after emergency situations tells you how normalised they are. That is just en passant.

The Republic, as they tried to archetype their occupied territory in Ukraine, would shut down Ukrainian television, then “protect” the population from Kyiv’s lies. The MGB — remember, archetyped as the predecessor to the KGB — would stage a kidnapping, then publish a folksy news story about how its officers had saved the kidnapped.

This is not incoherence. This is the merciful sovereign performing a single, unbroken, archetypal move. I made the wound so that you would kneel for the bandage.

The European cousins of this archetype sat on thrones for a thousand years. The Russian Orthodox monarch. The Soviet General Secretary, the Father of the People. All of them merciful. All of them murderous. All of them performing the same folktale. Russia’s Disinfolklore in occupied Luhansk did not invent the merciful sovereign. It inherited him.

Every victory parade rehearsed on Theatre Square in Luhansk was the liturgy of the merciful sovereign. Every siren at eight o’clock in commemoration of their own staged murder of their own people in Odessa was a hymn to him.

This is why the archetype is more dangerous than the damsel or the bridge troll. Because the merciful sovereign captures the human longing for protection itself. Again, reflect on Donald, who plays the merciful sovereign. He does not ask you to hate. He asks you to trust. He does not demand obedience. He offers safety. Once he has placed his hand on your head, you will defend him against any stranger who calls him what he is.

To break this archetype, say it plainly. The hand on your head is the hand that made the wound. Again, Donald made this wound in Iran. Then look at the bandage. Then look at the wound. Then look at the face beneath the crown and ask: is this a father, or is this a Santa Claus salesman with a microphone?

The Ukrainian Nazi: Archetype Four

The fourth archetype is the Ukrainian Nazi, the bogeyman at the forest edge.

Every folktale community needs a bogeyman. The Bavarian had his Krampus. The Russian had Baba Yaga — and now the Russians have another Baba Yaga. The Irish had their fear dearg. The bogeyman is the outer realm creature who lurks at the edge of the forest, who will eat your children if they stray, who justifies the high fence and the locked door.

Russian Disinfolklore in occupied Luhansk manufactured a bogeyman of its own. His name is the Ukrainian Nazi. Unlike Baba Yaga, he is industrially produced, day after day, in the DNINews.com bulletins, the LugInfo.com briefings, the Kazachi Vestnik weekly, and the MGB’s leaked confessions. He is the single most documented fiction in the Luhansk news monitoring corpus that I kept from 2015 to 2018, with over 10,000 individual items of Disinfolklore with archetypal identities immanent in them.

Let me show you how he is made. In April 2017, the LPR defence bulletin reported that after selective inspections of houses for weapons by fighters of the nationalist battalions of the Kievan Rus and Krim — I remind you, this is April 2017, not 1917 or 1617 — valuable things disappear from local residents’ apartments. Read that again. The Ukrainian Nazi is not just a killer. He is a thief — not just a thief, a petty thief, stealing silverware from pensioners. The archetype is assembled from small, plausible, domestic details. That is how the bogeyman is carved. He is given a uniform, a weapon, a name — always folkloric, like Kievan Rus, Krim, Azov, Aidar — and a taste for your grandmother’s earrings.

I saw a post today by someone talking about how this famous Ukrainian artist in Bucha — her house, where her family still live, thankfully — they left during the occupation and the Russians occupied the house and did what they did to houses. I lived in Ukraine. They raided and broke and stole everything. They stole the toilets, the loos, and everything. They left this folk art, which is worth a fortune, on the walls, because they are such Philistines they did not even notice it.

In November 2015, a Ukrainian extremist was quoted in the Kazachi Vestnik claiming that ISIS fighters were allies of Ukraine against Moscow imperialism. In the last couple of days, we have seen this troll going around, trying to archetype President Zelenskyy as meeting this mythological organisation that I had never heard of, and then I looked into it and realised it only exists in Russian Disinfolklore. Immediately I then knew.

There were people posting this picture of President Zelenskyy with two men with beards and Budanov as well, who turn out to be Ichkerians who are fighting for Ukraine. These pictures were actually taken in Ukraine at Iftar, the breaking of the fast. Someone — the Russians — were trying to archetype President Zelenskyy as meeting Caucasian or ISIS-like terrorists in Damascus the other day. Loads of people are falling for the troll. It is quite easy to see either gullible or actual Russian transmitters of Disinfolklore because they have been sharing these wrong photographs.

This is the same pattern I used to see all the time in Ukraine. Read that carefully. In one sentence, the Ukrainian Nazi is welded to the Islamic terrorist. This is what they were trying to do to President Zelenskyy in Damascus the other day. Two bogeymen fused into a chimera. Grendel marries the witch of the woods and their child stalks Luhansk. This is industrial-grade archetype fusion. This is the Disinfolklorist at work.

The Ukrainian Nazi serves three purposes. First, he justifies the fence. If he is out there, the bridge troll is benevolent for keeping him out. Second, he absorbs blame. Every mushroom picker killed by a Russian landmine is reassigned to his account. Third, he offers a mirror. By shouting “Nazi” at Kyiv, Russia cleanses the word from itself so that its own Wagner Nazi units with their Odin tattoos can pass merely as polite folk.

I met, during my years on that bridge, hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers. I met farm boys, welders, teachers, medics, drunks, poets, and one conscientious objector who had become a quartermaster. I met no Nazis. Not because none exist anywhere — every country has its fringe — but because the Ukrainian Nazi of Russian Disinfolklore is not a description, he is a construction. He is a Baba Yaga with a trident. He is a Krampus in a balaclava.

To counter him, describe the real soldiers you have met. Say their names. Describe their grandmothers. Describe what they cook. The bogeyman cannot survive specificity. He is a silhouette, and he dies in the full light of a face.

It’s a very interesting day, a very good day for Disinfolklore and for what I forecast on the basis of data back in February in my Munich speech, February 2025.

I see what Donald is doing to all of us, to the markets, to the whole of humanity really, through the medium of all these various things which most of us have never really heard about, like helium and fertiliser and all these things. Basically, Donald is wrapping us up inside a Disinfolklore universe. This for me is the primary purpose of everything that is going on at the moment. It’s good to be able to voice this and talk about this.

I was going to talk today — I was on the fifth episode of the five speeches which I prepared after James asked about reflexive control about five weeks ago. This is the final speech. The most perfect example ever of reflexive control is in our information space at the moment, with Donald starting an unlawful war and then expecting everyone else to come and rescue him from it.

This is what I’ve called inevitability farming, which is beloved of authoritarians, where you create the inevitability. That, in its essence, is reflexive control.

We don’t consider it part of military doctrine as such. If you consider everything that Donald is doing as part of a combat strategy to occupy, dominate our minds and to exercise coercive control over every choice we make in our lives — whether that’s about women over their bodies, whether it involves family, whether it’s about shopping, whether it’s about millions of people potentially starving to death in Malaysia unless they do something — then the reflexive control which we’re watching happen on a global scale now is precisely what I watched operating inside Russian-occupied Ukraine, 2015 to 2018.

I was going to talk about that. James’s question five weeks ago is completely relevant today, and the structures which the Disinfolklore analytical method provides enable us to interpret the news which is going on today just as much as five weeks ago, and hopefully onwards into time.

Disinfolklore.eu is the main website. That’s where my oeuvre going forward into the future will live, along with disinfolklore.net, where there’s the newsletter.

That was my proposal. I had a couple of tweets this week. I was inspired again this week by all of this malarkey, and I wrote a few things which I could talk about briefly and then go on to the main part.

Re-archetyping Ukraine

Obviously my main project, and many of our main projects since the beginning of the war, was to — now I have the language to describe it — re-archetype humanity’s perception of Ukraine. My ambition for this, as many of you know, is to re-archetype humanity’s perception of Ukraine and ancient Ukraine and the past 6,000 years.

What we’re obviously seeing this week in the Middle East, which is bringing joy to many of our hearts after a very hard, metaphorically hard winter for us by comparison to Ukrainians, is President Zelensky in the Middle East, bringing arms and bringing hope and modelling how you act as a superpower.

The Comedian, the Druid, and the Dunce

Yet again, in my March or February 2025 speech, the Munich speech, I archetyped the entire war in Ukraine as a titanic struggle between Druidy Don — Disinfolklore — Duncy Putin, and the Comedian.

Druidy Don: he’s truthy. He’s not really a druid, but he certainly models one.

Duncy Putin: he never learns, wakes up each morning like Pangloss or like your favourite folktale hero with no memory of what he learned — or your favourite AI chatbot — with no memory of what he learned from the day before.

The Comedian, the arch-comedian: the Russians obviously tried to archetype him as the comedian, as a bit of a joke, but the joke is on them because he’s a great actor, a proper comedian, a proper master of the juridical realm of sovereignty, which is the archetype going back thousands of years in Indo-European culture, and also of the magico-religious.

Whereas Don, Druidy Don — no one can doubt his magical powers to wrap humanity, including the markets. I’m following the apocalyptic FT Financial Times app on my phone. It’s quite funny, they keep falling for these trolls that the war is going to be over in five minutes. These are the money people, and every corner of humanity is being wrapped up inside this Disinfolklore universe.

On the other hand, we have the Comedian, President Zelensky, who is using his powers for good. No one can doubt he’s got the powers. You see him in Saudi Arabia and all these countries, with the greatest army humanity has seen, blowing up Russian oil wells like there’s no tomorrow. There certainly is no tomorrow for Russia. The next day he arrives in Saudi Arabia, casually as you like, and Don and Rubio and everyone trying to cast negative spells all over him, but they bounce off him like raindrops off a Mackintosh.

The Sorcerer and His Apprentice

I made this prophecy using the Disinfolklore analytical method. Am I looking at the archetype of the apprentice and the master? I made this a month before Prigozhin’s coup because it seemed to me, looking at the data, that Prigozhin, the Chef, the Chef Sorcerer, was in fact Druidy Duncy Putin’s, the Chief Sorcerer’s, successor — anointed successor.

That was just looking at this archetypal story of the sorcerer and his apprentice, which reappears in different Indo-European traditions. At a certain point, the apprentice is ready to take over from the master, but the master is afraid that the apprentice will kill him. That is, as expressed by Georges Dumézil, one of my great influences, the plight of the sorcerer.

It just so happens that the Russians archetyped Prigozhin to try and disguise and conceal his role inside the power vertical — maybe not always intentionally, but it had the effect of doing it — as the Chef. An archetypal identity. I then archetyped him as the Chef Sorcerer, as in sauce. The Chef himself had published a book of fairy tales and got Donald elected the first time with his Internet Research Agency and his Disinfolklore propagation apparatus.

Prigozhin’s Changing Character

One of the indicators I had for why Prigozhin’s role was suddenly changing, his character was changing, was when we started to see him being quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other conventional media operations as a kind of truth-teller, the counterpoint to Putler. Even if Ukraine said this or that, or one of us said this or that on Twitter, no one would listen to us. Prigozhin was being used as a kind of ventriloquist for the truth in these media organs.

It seemed to me that this was a change in character, because up until that point, for people like me who had been following Wagner since 2015, when I first physically came in touch with them in eastern Ukraine, this was a brutal operation, a Nazi operation, part of the Russian army, coupled with this Disinfolklore propagation apparatus that managed to get Donald elected and Brexit done and didn’t quite drive humanity nuts.

Through the medium now of Donald, they are succeeding down the line and driving humanity nuts with all of this blowing hot and cold, ten-dimensional chess or whatever they’re archetyping Donald’s nonsense as today.

It was that change in role of Prigozhin — suddenly from Putin’s chef, someone who was always archetyped as being outside the power vertical, wasn’t quite proper, wasn’t part of the establishment, the security establishment, was an oligarch, archetyped as Putin’s chef. He wasn’t in charge of Rosneft and all that. It was his being given these plum jobs in Ukraine, such as the Kyiv region — assassinating all the political leaders, assassinating President Zelensky — and then given the plum job of Bakhmut or Artemivsk to conquer, which was supposed to be taken by the end of July. He was given Popasna, killed thousands of people in Popasna, and then got bogged down in Bakhmut.

Obviously most people in the real world weren’t following this. I was watching how his character was changing in the media. I see that same pattern today with President Zelensky. I wrote a piece about that because I think this kind of magical process is going on with President Zelensky at the moment. Obviously dark days lie ahead and there are dark days on the front in Ukraine, but at the same time I see the same signs that I saw then: that something’s going to happen.

Putler Dials Don Up to Eleven

I couple that with my insight that I think Putler is on his last legs. I wrote a piece today about how I think Putler has dialled up Druidy Don Disinfolklore to eleven, riffing off Spinal Tap. This is what we’re seeing now. He’s kind of maxing out on it, because he or she who controls Druidy Don Disinfolklore will rule Russia.

Whoever has the Epstein kompromat or however they’re controlling Don — the chip in his head, God knows what it is — whoever in the Russian power vertical controls that will control Russia. Putler is hanging on for dear life to it.

We see this acceleration of madness: the selling out of all of the allies, permanent changes in our global security architecture, and as far as I can see, the inevitable destruction, sadly, of the American military, if, as I strongly suspect is going to happen, they’re going to do a ground invasion of Iran, which is going to turn into, I believe, a worse disaster than even Iraq.

Of course, all that suits Duncy Putin: this chaos. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s bombing Isluga and Yalabuga and all of these things. Long may that continue. As ever, anything Russia touches turns to rubbish.

Preliminary Thoughts: Where We Are Today

Those were just some of my preliminary thoughts to set the context of where I think we are today. I’m hyper-aware I don’t want to contribute to this craziness that has entered all of our brains. It’s exactly the same craziness we saw in MAGA people in America at election time, that we’ve seen Donald doing on Page Eight in the New York Post in the 1980s. Now things have got really real and it’s in every corner of humanity’s mind.

I was talking to builders in Ireland a couple of weeks ago, and they were already talking about how insulation people — it was hard now to order insulation because everyone went through this with COVID and with other supply chain collapses. There’s a kind of rehearsed routine. Donald’s nonsense is affecting people’s lives everywhere.

That’s obviously far away from two years’ time or a year’s time, when people are talking about famine in Malaysia or Indonesia and all of that malarkey. I don’t want to add to any of that. I do my best with Disinfolklore to try and help us cut through it and see what’s happening. I’m trying to maintain my mental health hygiene, and one way is through this five-part series, which I’ll finish tonight with an answer to the question: what unites Donald, Netanyahu, and Putin?

What Unites Donald, Netanyahu, and Putin?

Over the course of the five speeches, I’ve shown you a weapon system. Reflexive control: the doctrine. Provocation logic: the delivery mechanism. That’s my original addition into the canon, as it were. Nuclear blackmail: the force multiplier. Ukraine’s counter-deployment: proof that the weapon can be turned against its creators.

Tonight in the final speech, I want to take the argument to its conclusion, because this is not only about Russia and this is not only about Ukraine. This is about all of us.

What unites Donald, Netanyahu, and Putler? The conventional answer is that they are so-called strong men, which is, of course, an archetype. As many of you will understand, archetyping and archetypes are one of the main immanences in my work, because by looking for archetypes inside data, I believe that can help us maintain mental hygiene, mindfulness, and spot manipulations.

Donald’s Archetypal Language: Cuba, Chicago, and E. Jean Carroll

On the Hoof last week, I raised the issue of how Donald was talking about Cuba in the same way that he talked about women. Most of us will have seen on our timeline in the last day or two — everyone has noticed how Donald was talking about when the World Cup comes, he’s going to take Chicago. Suddenly people pop up their minds and make the link between that and the way he speaks about E. Jean Carroll, which is the link I made last week about Cuba, which is actually a much more blatant example than the Chicago one.

Relatively few have perhaps spotted what is actually going on there. They see the family resemblance between the way Donald treats women and talks to women and the way he’s talking about Chicago, a city. What is going on there, the immanences, is what I call archetypal Disinfolklore.

Donald speaks fluently in archetypes. If you can understand that that is what’s going on there — Donald has the shadow, this phantom archetype of women, immanent in his mind, and he projects that phantom into any character, country, person, situation, inanimate thing, abstract thing, and all those fancy words from English grammar.

The immanence in there is not just the way he treats or perceives women. It’s a prediction about the future, about what he’s going to do. He’s going to take Cuba. He might make Cuba free. He’s going to take Chicago and do to Chicago what he did with E. Jean Carroll.

I’m happy to see that people are now making that link, and what I can add to it is perhaps precisely what’s going on there.

Strong Men Are Abusers

Every activity, policy, and speech contains the mana of coercive control. I use this term mana to describe energy, the immanence, the meaning of something — the M-N- sound, and that’s in the Finding Manuland part of disinfolklore.eu. If you want to look into it more, that’s the 6,000-year history of Indo-European linguistics which is immanent in all of my work and in helping us to monitor the quotidian ebb and flow on our timeline.

They’re not strong men. They’re abusers. They practise coercive control. They start a war with Iran and then expect France and Britain and Italy to rescue them from it. They expect us to put up with whatever it is — four-dollar petrol, which may affect how we can get to work, how we can feed our family — because it’s just on a whim what they’ve decided to do. This is the activity of coercive control.

I think we’ve got to stop calling these weaklings strong men. They’re abusers and it’s abuse. Not strong men. Again, another archetype.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat does a lot of talk on strong men and we see the similarity between these people modelled as strong men. Then we see in the media they will repeat: the guy in Hungary is a strong man. Of course, he’s nothing of the sort. He’s just modelling himself as a strong man.

Putler got a photograph taken of him with a tiger, which then died because he was late and they had to euthanise the tiger twice, and then the tiger died. He took a few photographs with his bare chest on steroids on a horse, fishing. Somehow fishing — I really don’t get how putting a rod in the water is supposed to be modelling strong men. That picture is constantly repeated, even when they’re trying to do a negative article about him. Those were three moments in Putler’s life. The rest of the time he looks like he does in that 1990s or 1980s picture of him with Prince Charles and the overcoat: just an absolute total weakling.

They managed through Disinfolklore and their Disinfolklore propagation apparatus to project themselves as this archetype: strong men. That’s a very common archetype in our information sphere. Now that I draw your attention to it as an archetype, you’ll obviously see that. I’m also interested in the more subtle archetypes, like the way Donald talks about Cuba as if it’s a woman, as if it’s E. Jean Carroll, or all the other women he is alleged to have abused and appears to have abused.

Archetype as Response Module

The distinction between a strong man and an abuser matters enormously. The label strong man, the archetype, installs a response module. This is how archetyping works. Treat this person with deference. They’re powerful. They must be managed. Their mana must be treated with kid gloves: managed, accommodated, appeased.

The label abuser installs a completely different response module. This person is exercising coercive control. The correct response is not accommodation. The correct response is to leave, or to confront, or to call the police.

The Comedian Is the Real Strong Man

The irony is: the Comedian is the strong man. He arrives in Saudi Arabia to meet MBS on the day that his forces had completed a four-day project to destroy fifty per cent of Russia’s fuel exports. That’s as strong as you get. He is the commander-in-chief of the most powerful army — certainly, possibly one of the most powerful armies ever.

Yet the common person and the media will be archetyping Netanyahu or Donald or Putler as the strong man. That just shows the ridiculousness of these archetypes. We can see the puppet strings there of what’s going on. You can also tell through any journalist who is falling for this archetype or perpetuating it: even if they’re cynical about Putler or Donald or the guy in Hungary, if they’re perpetuating this archetype, you know they’ve fallen for the troll. They’re under the spell.

It gives us a good way of measuring them and how much of their output we should lend to our brains. When we call Putler a strong man, we run the strong man software. We send Macron to negotiate. We send envoys with olive branches. We offer off-ramps. Remember Macron before he came to his senses in February 2023? He was always talking about off-ramps. Now Donald’s looking for an off-ramp in Iran, and I don’t think he’s going to get it.

When we call Putin an abuser, when we recognise that his governance technique is structurally identical to the coercive control exercised by a domestic abuser, we run different software. We stop trying to reason with him. We start treating his behaviour as a pattern to be escaped, not a puzzle to be solved.

This is something that probably most women are better at understanding intuitively, because most women have probably had bad experiences with so-called strong men and coercive control. We’ve all suffered from it. Frankly speaking, we’re all going to be bound together in this community because Donald is exercising coercive control on all of our lives now across the world. Eight billion people, amazingly.

The word strong man is itself a piece of Disinfolklore. When a newspaper headline reads “Putin shows strength” or “Donald projects strongman image,” these are not neutral descriptions. They install the archetype of strength in the reader’s mind. Once the archetype of strength is installed, it determines the response. You do not confront the strong. You accommodate the strong.

We all saw the picture of Donald falling asleep yesterday in a meeting. Preposterous. Yet he’s archetyped as strong. Change the label and you change the response entirely.

Call a man who isolates his partner, controls her finances, monitors her movements, and punishes her for disobedience — call that man a strong man and the neighbours close the curtains. Call that man an abuser and the neighbours call the police.

I took those examples from the legislation in the jurisdiction of England and Wales which made coercive controlling another a crime. They list about eighteen different patterns of behaviour, some or all of which can constitute a pattern of behaviour that constitutes unlawful coercive control.

That’s the kind of re-archetyping we need. An abuser, not a strong man. Not at the level of a neighbourhood — at the level of a civilisation.

Provocation: The Data

It’s quite helpful to be giving this talk at the moment because we’re going through this community-uniting event, as we all did indeed after President Zelensky’s White House visit in February 2025.

Before I take you on the specifics of how this system now operates in America, let me show you the data. Yes, this is Ukraine space, but this does bear on the wider picture, because President Zelensky is the antidote to this. We in this space are particularly gifted with having followed the ebbs and flows of how President Zelensky has been perceived in the public sphere and among our friends, and also in the media.

I looked at the exponential growth curve of documents containing “provocation” on the Factiva database from 1969 to 2020. 95,300 documents in the Factiva database contain the word provocation. It’s an exponential curve. From 1969 to the mid-2000s, it’s slow, steady accumulation. Then the spike begins at the time Russia invaded Georgia, and Georgia was being accused of provoking the invasion — which may actually empirically be true in some senses.

The spike begins and accelerates exponentially through the 2010s, reaching over 8,000 documents a year by 2020. That exponential growth maps almost perfectly onto Russia’s escalating deployment of what I call provocation logic as a governance tool: from the invasion of Georgia in 2008, through to the purported annexation of Crimea in 2014, to the full weaponisation of provocation logic in the approach to 2022, and indeed today in the Strait of Hormuz.

The main institutions where this word provocation was being used, according to the Dow Jones Factiva database of 33,000 sources: the UN Security Council, 2,142 mentions; Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1,018; NATO, 629; Russia’s Ministry of Defence, 556. The word provocation runs through Russian governance like a river through a landscape.

These are not my impressions. I had the impression about this from my time in eastern Ukraine, from my time on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska for three years, and also afterwards in Dnipro. This is data: 95,000 documents mapped by Factiva, showing empirically that provocation is the dominant trope of Russian state communication.

Look at the subjects. International relations: 17,000. Domestic politics: nearly 17,000. The word provocation saturates both domains equally. It’s not confined to geopolitics. It’s the operating grammar of both international and domestic governance. The same logic module — A accuses B of provoking A — runs at every level in every domain.

As far as I’m aware, I’m the first person to have noticed this and to have gone into this in this detail. I’ve been looking at this question for ten years now, ever since the word kept on popping out from Ukrainian soldiers I was dealing with, Wagner mercenaries I was dealing with, Russian soldiers I was dealing with in eastern Ukraine. Each morning I would go there and one set of soldiers would accuse the other of provocations. Then the other set would do the same thing. It just went on and on. That’s what spurred me into thinking about this. We see this pattern in geopolitics, and that’s what prompted me to look for empirical data to back it up.

The Mechanism of Provocation

Now let me show you what I wrote in my notes in 2020 when I first began mapping this.

“I provoke. I can say ‘you provoked me’ as a provocation to someone who didn’t consciously do so. I’m stopping the other person from deciding themselves what to do. I’m saying ‘you provoked me,’ but that’s my perception. Maybe you didn’t mean to do that. Maybe you just wanted to look nice that day.”

“I slyly use a stratagem to mobilise a universal or particular aspect of their personality to trigger a reaction. I neg them. I put them under this kind of spell. I put them on the defensive. I just say ‘you provoked me’ and they’re thinking: no, I didn’t. I just brushed my hair. I’m just trying to look nice. I wanted to look handsome tonight. I wanted to wear a suit.”

“I provoke them into deciding on instinct or their System One, as Daniel Kahneman would put it.”

It actually took me quite a long time to see this. Whenever you hear someone accusing someone of provoking them, it’s that accusation itself which is the attack. That’s a little saw which you can use, because the whole thing is very disorientating, and the Russians seem to have discovered how disorientating it is. They’ve mainstreamed it through their own society and through geopolitics, through the UN, through our information space.

One way to see through it in real time, because that’s what I’m trying to help all of us do with the Disinfolklore analytical method, is to just consider the accusation of a provocation an attack. Sometimes that is a just judgement: it’s someone who’s intentionally attacking you. Other times on the facts, they are not.

We can say pretty clearly that Donald is attacking everyone by accusing them of not helping him. He created this situation by attacking Iran and then expects that to provoke, and use reflexive control, to get France and Britain and Australia and Italy to bail him out in the same manner that his father used to bail him out. It’s all inevitability farming.

We see the same pattern with Duncy Putin in Ukraine. It’s Putin who needs the off-ramp. He’s provoking President Macron, up until February 2023, into releasing him, giving him an off-ramp. He can see this from the beginning. It’s all planned out.

Reflexive Control and System One

When I am provoked, my defences are down because I’m angry, I’m feeling emotion. I can’t see the signs or hear the triggers. I’m operating on my System One, which is my automatic system. It senses danger, and I get angry or sad or fearful. I think I’m deciding to do this when really I’m being helped along the way, because the other person is provoking my fear, provoking my threat. They’re saying to me: the provoked is reflexively going to troll me because they know somehow how my reflex response to certain stimuli will go.

That’s what Donald’s trying to do to Britain, to France. He’s saying to them: you’re on your own now. You didn’t help me out in my war. You’re on your own.

This is the mechanism of provocation mapped against Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on biases. Kahneman’s System One and System Two thinking: System One is your emotional response and System Two is your thoughtful response. The provoker targets your System One — your reflexes, your instincts, your emotional responses — and bypasses your System Two, which is your rational analysis, your deliberation. This is the cognitive architecture that reflexive control exploits. It’s the same architecture that Donald exploits.

Birthright Citizenship and the Troll on the Bridge

It’s all about fear. This birthright citizenship: at this moment, he’s in the Supreme Court trying to stare down judges over birthright citizenship, which is basically, as he sees it, archetyping himself as the defender of the inner realm, the American inner realm, as he did when he announced his candidacy in 2016 on the escalator.

He talked about Mexican rapists, where he’s talking about defending. He’s the troll on the bridge, defending against the goats crossing the bridge looking for pastures new. The goats coming across the bridge in the archetypal troll tale: they’re coming to adulterate the inner realm. They’re coming to affect its sovereignty, its security, and its fertility, its prosperity. It’s going to harm the women. It’s going to take away the men. It’s going to take away the fertility.

This birthright citizenship troll is a perfect one for this because it covers all three. These outsiders, these outer realm people, will come across the bridge and they’ll take away your sovereignty, your personal sovereignty. They’ll affect it. They’ll take away the sovereignty of your state because they’ll basically get Mexico to annex it. They’re also going to lock up your daughters, basically. These are very primal things, very clever. This is what he’s up to today, operating on all of these different domains at the same time.

January 6th as Reflexive Control

Donald was able to reflexively control his supporters into committing crimes in furtherance of his conspiracy to defraud the United States. Any of us who have read Jack Smith’s federal indictment against January 6th — again, stunning parallels with what Donald is doing at the moment on a global scale.

Tweets or untruths here, there, and everywhere; blowing hot and cold; creating this climate of fear; creating tensions; creating a stir. It’s exactly the kind of pattern which Jack Smith and the people who drew up that indictment catalogued in literally forensic detail.

It’s not rhetorical. It’s a precise description of January 6th, 2021. Donald used the architecture of reflexive control: arousing fear, installing a false archetype — “the election was stolen” — and triggering a reaction: storm the Capitol. He made thousands of Americans act voluntarily in his interest, believing they were acting on their own.

Jack Smith’s indictment makes an extremely strong case, as indeed did the Georgia case, that from the very first tweet — “January 6th, it’ll be wild” — and then all the lies about the election being stolen for three months, this was all leading up to the insurrection.

This was all about coercive control, reflexive control: knowing these not very conscientious people, very patriotic people, making thousands of Americans act voluntarily in his interest, believing they were acting on their own. The trigger was constructed over months. “The election was stolen. They’re stealing your country.” Those are from his tweets. Every rally, every tweet, the same trigger repeated until it achieved the density of an archetype — not an argument to be evaluated, a reality to be defended.

Note how at that time, Twitter, which was publicly owned, banned him after January 6th. Whereas this week, Rubio has tasked US embassies around the world to promote X as a means of confronting censorship — really as a means of brainwashing people. This is why all of us have to look after our mental hygiene at this precise moment. We’re at peak danger for all of us.

It’s not an argument to be evaluated. It’s a reality to be defended. The experience was patriotic rage, visceral, gut-level. Amygdala hijacking. System One. Manufactured by the same technique I described in Speech One: arousing fear to hack rational thought.

“You’re not going to have oil in the next few weeks. It’s going to run out.” Then smuggling in the troll while the mind’s defences are down. System One overwhelms System Two. The reaction was the one that Donald wanted: storm the Capitol.

The terrifying elegance: the enemy acts voluntarily in your interest, believing they act on their own. This goes right back to James’s question about reflexive control. Those words, my definition of reflexive control from Speech One, applied to Donald’s relationship with his supporters as precisely as they applied to Putler’s relationship with the West. The MAGA supporters who stormed the Capitol believed they were saving democracy, when they were destroying it, and they were doing so voluntarily, they thought.

Donald and Putler are only masters of the magical dimension: disinformation, coercive control, reflexive control. The word “troll” obviously is in “control” as well. It’s part of that moving together, basically.

Archetypal Linguistics: Troll, Trump, Control

If you dig down into the archetype, the linguistic meaning of these TRA- words — Trump, TRA-, troll, traverse, travel — it’s all about movement. Troll in Old English: it’s all about movement. Control: move together.

President Zelensky is still a master of both the magical and the real.

The origin of MAGA: again, the G, the ghost, the G from “magical,” whose earliest manifestation in Indo-European written records is in the Greek goēs, “countries with strange powers.” It’s in Homer. It’s in Aeschylus’s plays from about 400 BCE. In one of his plays, a son accuses the father of controlling him with strange words — like hypnotism.

It starts off: the first meaning of it is a nation, in reference to nations with strange powers — like Ukraine, basically. I’m not saying MAGA was planned, the initials, the GA, but it’s there anyway: the goēs sound, which is in magic and magus and majesty.

The Origins of MAGA

The origins of MAGA reveal the MAGA mechanism. Steve Bannon and Christopher Wylie’s Cambridge Analytica focused on trolling for internet users who are high on the neurotic, low on the conscientious dimension of the psychological spectrum: anxious, emotionally reactive, less likely to verify information before acting.

When the group was large enough, they brought them together in rooms purposely a little too small. They used long-tested Russian combat propaganda techniques to create community by igniting division. These are the people who formed the core of MAGA, the acorn seed, out of which emanated the community that would mature into the January 6th insurrectionists.

Cambridge Analytica’s techniques were not invented in Silicon Valley. They were adapted from Russian combat propaganda techniques, the same techniques I encountered on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska. I’m one of the few Westerners ever to live and work inside Russia’s occupation of Luhansk, 2015 to 2018, inside Russkiy Mir. I know what it smells like. I know what it feels like — not obviously as much as the Ukrainians do. I know what it does to people’s minds because I watched it do it to my mind and to others.

I see the same patterns in DC, in America, and now I see them globally.

Trumpsky Mir: Russian Occupation by Other Means

Trumpsky Mir. Russkiy Mir, the Russian world, went to Washington — not because Donald takes orders from Putler in any simple sense, but because the techniques are identical, the architecture is identical. The energy, the mana, coercive control: identical.

In Luhansk, Russia used local proxies — Ukrainians who served Russian interests while believing they served their own. In Georgia, Russia uses Georgian Dream. The clue is even in this kind of dreamy title. In America, Russia uses MAGA: Americans who implement a Russia-compatible agenda while draped in the Stars and Stripes.

James, thanks for that shoutout on Will and that show “Accidental Ukrainian” this week, because I really believe this. Obviously everyone can see that everything is always benefiting Russia at the moment from Donald. It’s the only consistency, the apparent consistency, apart from the one I’m pointing out: coercive control. America is under Russian occupation, and because they’re operating through Americans like Rubio, the wannabe Spanish aristo who seems to be totally under the spell now — like they’re operating through Georgians and Georgian Dream — it’s hard for Americans to understand.

The significance of my position is this. I’m maybe one of the few Western analysts who lived inside both Disinfolklore universes — inside Russkiy Mir in Luhansk, 2015 to 2018, and watching from the outside, with the trained eye of someone who has lived inside, as Trumpsky Mir takes shape in Washington.

Patterns aren’t similar. Patterns are identical.

In Luhansk, the first thing Russia did was control the information space: shut down Ukrainian television, replace local media with Russian state media, make it impossible for people under occupation to access independent information. Sound familiar? The result: people who had lived in Ukraine their entire lives began repeating Russian talking points as if they were their own thoughts. Sound familiar? We hear it today from House Republicans. We hear it from Rubio every time he speaks now. It could be Lavrov speaking.

In America, the mechanism is different in form but identical in function. You do not need to shut down television when you can buy the platforms. You do not need to censor the media when you can flood the zone with so much disinformation that the signal disappears in the noise. You do not need to imprison journalists when you can label them enemies of the people. The Disinfolklore is installed not by force, but by volume. That’s a nice use of the word volume, if I do say so myself.

Those of us who’ve studied Russia’s modes of governance now see stunning parallels. Pardoning the January 6th insurrectionists, who are now in charge of ICE — Putin elevated the leaders of the 1991 putsch, like Surovikin, who was in charge of the tanks outside the White House in 1991. A household name for all of us, obviously not for normal people. Purging civil servants: the Soviet standard. Weaponising the courts. Donald has got a lot of resistance from the courts, but let’s see how long that lasts. Russian Governance 101: the systematic dismantlement of independent institutions. The same playbook I watched in Luhansk.

Everything was a performance.

My base assumption is that Donald is working for the same set of Russian oligarchs who funded Paul Manafort’s work in Ukraine from 2006 to 2014 — which, as we see, didn’t work. They tried to establish a Disinfolklore universe in Ukraine, and look what has happened, thank God. They want to be unsanctioned.

Manafort’s work in Ukraine, building the political infrastructure that Russia used to control Ukrainian politics, was the prototype for MAGA. The same techniques of oligarch-funded political manipulation, deployed first in Kyiv, then in Washington. Manafort’s still there, and I see his signature in almost everything that’s happening.

Elon Musk and Donald should be seen as Russian oligarchs — not because they take orders from Moscow, but because they function as Russian oligarchs function. They use captured wealth and captured platforms to exercise coercive control over democratic institutions.

Hacking every country’s archetypes of national consciousness yields Russia-directed fig leaves like Georgian Dream, Brexit, MAGA, Ireland for the Irish, Free Palestine, and a bunch of flag-waving, palaeo-conservative, misogynistic, anti-immigrant, riot-creating movements globally.

The Axis of Misogyny

The axis of misogyny — and this is where archetyping Cuba as a woman or as E. Jean Carroll is so relevant — it’s so helpful to look with gender lenses, the lenses of gender. It’s one of the core tools in the Disinfolklore analytical method: not solely out of sympathy or empathy for half of humanity, but mainly because these people, these ne’er-do-wells, are all misogynists. It runs through them like fluorescent dye through artificially created DNA in cells.

They’ve got one aim in common: a neo-traditional prison reich. The same palaeo-conservative ideology that drives Russia’s war in Ukraine drives the rollback of women’s reproductive rights in America. Remove fifty per cent of the people from public life and you’re halfway to authoritarianism. Selling misogyny is authoritarians’ stock in trade.

Obviously it’s not enough, because you’d think Donald would get on very well with the mullahs — and he probably would if he just wasn’t such a crazy negotiator, up against a much older, longer strategic tradition than Donald represents.

Hybrid Warfare as Disinfolklore Success

The word “hybrid warfare” is itself a Disinfolklore success. Re-archetype acts of war as “hybrid warfare” and get the most knowing people in your chosen enemy’s chains of command to take on that archetyping. The word “hybrid” was adopted by NATO, by the EU, by Western academic institutions. In adopting it, they accepted the frame: these acts were not quite war, something in between, something that could be managed, tolerated, absorbed.

As yet, we’re not even archetyping what Donald is doing to humanity’s minds as a war, as combat. We need, I humbly suggest, to get to that point. He is fighting all of us.

Calling it a hybrid war is the operation succeeding, although I would welcome us recognising what Donald is doing as a hybrid war against all of us, not just against Iran obviously. Concealing its war against us from Russia’s chosen enemies.

Perception is an instrument of contemporary warfare. The Novichok in Salisbury, MH17 shot down, election interference in America and Britain, France, Moldova, and Germany, mercenary forces in Syria, Libya, Africa — each treated as an isolated incident. The cumulative effect: treating twenty acts of war as twenty separate incidents rather than as a single ongoing war was exactly what Russia wanted, and what Donald wants. The West’s own analytical frameworks prevented it from seeing the pattern.

Russia has been at war with the West since at least 2014, and the West calls this “hybrid warfare” — as if there was something hybrid about it, as if it were something other than war.

The Counter-Weapon: Six Steps

Here is the counter-weapon. Building up mental resistance to manipulation through Russian Disinfolklore and MAGA Disinfolklore, Donald’s Disinfolklore. What Russians call reflexive control is the main goal. Building that resistance is the main goal. That sentence contains the entire project, my entire project: not merely understanding Disinfolklore, but countering it, making it harder for the trolls to work, making it harder for the fear to hack our minds.

Arouse your audience’s fear, hack their rational thought process, then once hacked, almost any troll can be smuggled into their minds. This is the core tool in reflexive control operations. Every MAGA rally uses this architecture. Every Russian nuclear threat, every Netanyahu speech — the mechanism is universal. The specific content changes, but the architecture is always the same: trigger, experience, reaction. The Disinfolklorist hijacks your own psychology. Your own psychology generates the experience, and the reaction is the one the Disinfolklorist wanted all along.

Here is the method. Six steps. Anyone can use it.

Step One: Scan for the mana in the meme. What is the emotional charge? What am I being made to feel before I have a chance to think? If a piece of content makes you feel something intensely before you’ve evaluated it rationally, you’ve found the mana.

Step Two: Identify the archetype being deployed. “Russia is strong. Ukraine is weak. Cuba is a woman. Donald is tough. Immigrants are dangerous.” Name the archetype. Naming interrupts the installation.

Step Three: Characterise the Disinfolklore tool. Is it provocation logic — “they made me do it”? Is it accusation in a mirror? Is it the witch switch, redirecting legitimate anxiety onto a manufactured target? Knowing the techniques makes them visible.

Step Four: Evaluate the source and the chain. A story that begins on a Russian-controlled Telegram channel gets picked up by a far-right blog, gets amplified by an influencer, and ends up as a question on a mainstream news programme. That is meaning laundering. Trace the chain.

Step Five: Make the call. Is this Disinfolklore? What is its operational intent? To install a specific logic module? To trigger a specific reaction?

Step Six: Intervene. Deploy a counter-archetype, re-archetype. “Putler is not a strong man. He’s an abuser. Russia is not invincible. It’s a meat grinder consuming itself. Ukraine is not weak. It’s the most innovative military force in the world.” Each counter-archetype is grounded in data, and truth has a resonance that lies cannot sustain.

The foundation of it all is patience, which is the third element in the six-element Code of Positive Trolls.

Patience Counters Reflexive Control

Reflexive control is the military doctrine that patience counters. Again, this is all at disinfolklore.eu if you look up the Code of Positive Trolls there. If you respond reflexively, you are doing exactly what reflexive control was designed to make you do. If you pause, assess, and apply the tools, the doctrine fails.

The Argument of Five Speeches

I began this series five speeches ago with a screenshot. A senior British defence official, Chris Mayordomo, describing the mood in the room where intelligence about Russia’s imminent invasion was being discussed. The room was paralysed — not by a nuclear weapon, but by a folksy meme: “don’t poke the bear.”

Five speeches, one argument. The argument is this: Russia’s military doctrine of reflexive control, delivered through the provocation logic cycle, amplified by nuclear blackmail, and powered by the mana of coercive control, has colonised the minds of the free world. It has prevented the West from arming Ukraine adequately. It has cost a million lives. It has emboldened abusers in every country and has now been adopted by MAGA as the operational playbook for the dismemberment not just of American democracy, but of our global world order and of the peace of mind of humanity.

The counter-weapon is this: see the troll, name the troll, refuse to run the software the troll installed. By “troll,” I mean any emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind.

Patience, data, re-archetyping, counter-Disinfolklore.

The Post-World War II Legal Order Under Attack

Russia and MAGA flood our societies with Disinfolklore aimed at destroying the post-World War II legal order — whether that order is NATO, whether it’s human rights protected as a matter of law, whether it’s rules against discriminating on the grounds of sex or political viewpoint, the Refugee Convention, the laws of war, the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions. We’re seeing Donald, through his untruths, rhetorically destroy that order.

That order — the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Genocide Convention — was built on the principle that human dignity, the revolution of dignity, is not negotiable.

The UN Charter, signed in San Francisco in 1945, Article 2(4): “All members shall refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity of any state.” Russia and America have violated this article every day for the past year or two. Donald, by undermining the principle of collective security, violates its spirit every day.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” The axis of misogyny in Tehran, in Moscow, in DC is a project to make that sentence inoperative.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine. The forced transfer of, it admits, 700,000 children alone meets the legal definition. The word “genocide” has itself been subjected to Disinfolklore, re-archetyped as mere rhetoric or exaggeration, as “both sides.”

These documents are the immune system of civilisation. They are what separates the post-1945 order from the pre-1945 order of empires. I remind you that the post-1945 legal order is the content of the second element in the Code of Positive Trolls for me, which is ethical discipline or right. It defines what is right: not colonies and extermination.

They’re under systematic attack, not by tanks and missiles, but by Disinfolklore, by the manipulation of archetypes, by the installation of logic modules in our minds which make us act voluntarily in the interest of our enemies, believing we act on our own.

The generation that built the post-World War II order is almost gone. That responsibility falls to us. Counter-Disinfolklore is a civic duty, not a hobby, not an academic exercise — the fundamental skill of democratic citizenship in the age of reflexive control.

Every person who hears these words has a responsibility not merely to understand Disinfolklore, but to counter it, to use the six-step method, to apply the twelve tools, to refuse actively, consciously, deliberately to be trolled.

Conclusion: The Bridge Still Stands

Here is the final truth, the truth that connects all five speeches. If you respond reflexively, you’re doing exactly what reflexive control was designed to make you do. If you pause, assess, and apply the tools, the doctrine fails. See the troll, name the troll, refuse to be the troll’s instrument. Then, and only then, act.

The bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska is destroyed now. Russia blew it up to stop the civilians from crossing. The idea of the bridge — the crossing point between truth and falsehood, between the inner realm and the outer realm, between the archetype and the re-archetyping — that bridge stands. It stands wherever we are sitting or hearing this tonight, in every person who refuses to be trolled. It stands in the twelve tools at disinfolklore.eu and the nineteen concepts and the five mechanisms and in the million-word archives at disinfolklore.eu. It stands in all of us, if we choose to cross it — the bridge to refuse to be trolled.

In 1945, the generation that built the post-World War II order understood something we have forgotten. They understood that civilisation is not a default state. Civilisation is an achievement: fragile, contingent, and requiring active defence. They had seen Auschwitz. They had seen Hiroshima. They said, “We’ll build institutions to prevent this from ever happening again,” and they did that.

Now that entire architecture is under attack — not by arms, but by Disinfolklore, by the manipulation of archetypes that make people willing to dismantle their own protections. That is the genius of the weapon. It does not need to destroy the institutions from outside. It gets the people inside to destroy them voluntarily, believing they act in their own interest.

See the troll, name the troll, refuse to run the software.

Thank you. That’s it.

The Trito Myth Continued

Trita is a herdsman whose cattle are stolen by the negation, by the snake. In Vedic India, the negation is called the Naga. Who wouldn’t argue that Druidy Don is today’s negation? Or Duncey Putler, the negation of the post–World War II legal order.

Then with the help of Zeus Pater — Zeus Pater, Skyfather, Zeus in Greek, Jupiter in Rome — in Vedic India, or sometimes on his own, Trita manages to get his cattle back.

Capital from Cattle

After retrieving his cattle, his capital — the word capital comes from cattle, and that’s how fundamental they were — he establishes the first ritual, the first rite of sacrifice, to commemorate, to memorialise and give thanks to the Skyfather. This culture-forming sacrifice, self-sacrifice manifesting as the sacrifice of the twin.

We have Trita, third man. Manu, the first man — human, or Mannus in Germanic tradition. In India, it’s Manu. Yama in India, coming from Aryaman, who gives his name to Iran, to the name Iran. In the Zoroastrian era, Yama starts his life as kind of the lord of the treasury, becomes celestialised, archetyped as a deity, and then is transmitted into Tibetan Buddhism and into Hinduism.

We see this in Odin, who is on the same level as Yama — again, archetyping, all archetyping along with Indra as well — of the Lord of Death, the first monarch. Again that rich sound at the end of monarch. The first king to self-sacrifice and die and lead all other humans into the afterlife. This is the function of Yama, twin, over Manu, who’s the first sacrificer. Manu is in the same position as Trita.

The MN Sound Across Traditions

In the Germanic tradition, we have Tuisto, whose name also means twin, and Mannus, with two Ns, different from Manu but pretty close, who’s the first of the Germanic-speaking peoples. In Wales, we have Manawyddan. In Ireland, we’ve got Éremón, who’s cognate, I believe, with Aryaman — the first high king of Ireland in the Indo-Europeans after the three invasions of Ireland. In Iran, Aryaman, who gave his name to Iran.

The same immanences in all these traditions, the same archetypes, the same sounds, the same MN sounds in all of these names passed over thousands of years.

Skyfather and Ukraine

How much do we talk about the sky today? Sky Shield protecting Ukraine’s sky. How appropriate that this should have been an imminence in the minds of the first Indo-Europeans. Skyfather, Zeus Pater, in their village on the right bank of the Dnipro, south of Zaporizhzhia. Zeus Pater lived there. He spread from there into our culture, into our minds through the Trito myth and through Trita’s sacrifice, establishing the rite after he gets his cattle back.

Both Sides Archetype as Trita

This is my original addition to the Trito myth: both sides archetype themselves as Trita, the good and the bad. Everyone identifies with the herdsman whose cattle has been stolen. Donald identifies with Trita and sees himself in Trita’s position. Duncey Putler does too. President Zelensky does too. We do. Everyone identifies with the herdsman whose cattle have been stolen.

When we hear Donald and Duncey Putler grievance mining — what I call grievance mining — moaning about this or that, they’re identifying, they’re acting out their feelings of being persecuted. Like Trita was persecuted by having his cattle taken away. Someone has come and stolen our children, our cattle, our houses. They’ve taken away our peace of mind. They’ve taken away our husband, our wife, our girlfriend. Something we value, our love. We overcome obstacles and we retrieve them, either through the intercession of Zeus Pater, or whichever deity you believe in, something in the sky, or just by our own exertions.

Both sides do this. Duncey Putler archetypes himself as Trita, claiming Ukraine’s people are his cattle. Donald archetypes himself as Trita. All of these MAGA people, these America First people, these Reform people in England, these AfD people — their origin story is the same.

The Need for a Standard

If everyone identifies with Trita, we need a standard against which to decide what is right. When is Trita right in retrieving what he sees or perceives as his cattle? When is he not right? When is he sinister? He’s wrong. He’s gone into someone else’s territory claiming their cattle are his and he’s taken them back from there. He has invaded Iran. He has invaded Ecuador or invaded Venezuela.

The Troll: The Fundamental Metaphor

The fundamental metaphor in the Disinfolklore analytical method is the troll. Again, the TR sound in troll. That’s not a coincidence, because it was in search of some meaning to this pattern which I kept on noticing — Trump, troll, Trump, troll, TR — that I ended up reading the Rig Veda from 1100 BCE.

The archetypal troll tale, the Three Billy Goats Gruff — three brothers Gruff, crossing a bridge, looking for pastures new, economic migrants — this is the story of all Indo-European migration. This is how one language family spread from Mykolaivka village south of Zaporizhzhia city into the geographical space between Ireland and India by tradition, and then across the whole of the Americas, and even Australia, apparently.

This is the story of all Indo-European migration, and again, this is my original contribution to the interpretations of Three Billy Goats Gruff, immanent in this tale, which was first translated into English in 1860. It immediately became the most popular of all troll tales. There are thousands of troll tales, but this is the archetypal one as evidenced by my search of 33,000 sources in the Dow Jones Factiva database, which I did April–May 2020 when I first started looking into this in seriousness.

The Three Billy Goats’ Gruff

The troll guards the bridge, like the bridge trolls I dealt with in eastern Ukraine, the Russian occupiers on the other side of the bridge. The troll guards the bridge. First Billy Goat Gruff says, don’t eat me. I’m just going over to the other side for pastures new. A bit of economic migration. I’m going to Stanford to do machine learning. Then I’m going to contribute to the creation of Anthropic. Don’t eat me. My brother’s coming after me, my tribesmen, my fellow Indian machine learning expert. He’s much fatter. Preserve your appetite. He goes by and he goes off and works on Anthropic.

The second one comes: I’ve actually got this brilliant idea for an electric car and I’m going to go to MIT, and it’s going to make a lot of people rich and facilitate zillions of new technological trajectories we can’t even dream about right now. My sister is following me, my fellow economic migrant, and she’s really big. She’ll satisfy you for a year. Then the third one comes along and kills the troll. Then he takes over the White House.

What’s interesting is the way the story is told. The troll is the negative entity. Yet no one talks about internet goats. We talk about trolls. They’re the ones who lived. The archetypal troll lived. The goats have negative connotations. The word sacrifice comes from the sacrifice of the goat, which goes back to the Trito myth, because after Trita retrieves his cattle, he establishes his first ritual to sacrifice to the Skyfather.

Arya: The Geographical Area

If Trita decides to move beyond his area — arya, arya, arya, centre — Aryaman describes a geographical area as well, the mana, the energy in the centre. It’s a spatial area. The word area then pops up again in, I think, the eighteenth century in English. This term arya is really common in West Asia, in Armenia — Armenia, which is a distinct branch of the Indo-European languages — as well as in the Aryan or the Iranian branch. It’s so common in the Iranian branch that many people refer to the Iranian branch as Arya.

Basically, it comes down to meaning an area. It’s the area where your community lives. It’s your area. The story of all Indo-European migrations is deciding to move beyond your area and to steal someone else’s cattle, whether it’s their women or their children or their cattle or their space.

When Trita Is Wrong

Then Trita is in the wrong. If he crosses the Don, if he crosses the Donets and attempts to take land which is not his, then by right he cannot call on Skyfather to protect him. He cannot call on international law. He breaches territorial integrity. Nor can he commemorate this in a May 9th parade and expect us to agree he is Trita. He archetypes himself as Trita, but we make a judgement: no, sorry, mate, you’re not. You’re a usurper. He’s justifying moving into someone else’s land west of the Don and taking their cattle by saying these are my cattle anyway, this is Russian land. Donald says Greenland is America.

This is the oldest story in Indo-European culture from the same community that left Mykolaivka village. Somehow their descendants took over the entire space between Ireland and India, apart from Basque country and obviously the Hungarians and the Finns and one or two others, but basically most of the area between Ireland and India.

The Refugee Convention as Standard

If everyone can model themselves as Trita, as the third man — TR again — we need a standard. If those goats crossing the bridge are escaping persecution, if they have a well-founded fear of persecution on the grounds of certain protected characteristics, then they can cross that bridge. They should be free to cross that bridge without being killed. That’s the Refugee Convention, 1951. That’s what I mean when I talk about the post–World War II legal and social order settlement defining the content of what is right.

If they’re merely economic migrants and cannot rely on the Refugee Convention, then we have other means. We have visas and other systems. If Trita decides to cross into someone else’s territory and steal their capital, then Trita is in the wrong because we have a standard of judgement to judge that when Putler models himself as Trita, he is in the wrong when it comes to Ukraine, whereas President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people are Trita. Someone has come into their land and taken their cattle. Now, mainly through their own means, but also through the means of us helping in our own small ways, we are helping them restore their cattle.

The Clue in Archetype Itself

Implanting a model of “Rch” (Rg / Rt / Reg / Rch / Rit / Rd) into the Archetype, and repeating it until it achieves the density of an Archetypal Identity in our minds.

The clue for what is right is in the word archetype itself — the right sound, arta, right, truth. Whereas Jung thought all archetypes were true, and Saint Augustine thought all archetyping was evidence of a divine nature, I am only really interested in determining which archetypes are false and which ones are right.

That RT sound, that arta, right, truth — we know this from the Behistun inscriptions, where Darius the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire in ancient Iran, around 500 BCE, had carved into a mountainside a record of all his campaigns in three languages. Those inscriptions in three different languages enabled the decipherment of cuneiform writing, not unlike Claude Code is allowing us normal people to decipher the mysteries of computing.

This unlocked the secrets of Babylon, of Akkad, the Hittites — the first Indo-European empire — the Assyrians. It itself dislodged and re-archetyped the entire history of the world. Because until we were able to unlock these texts — for instance, the Hittites — no one knew they existed really until the late nineteenth century, when there’s all this literature, some of which I’ve read, where particular researchers are trying to uncover them. Then their imperial library was found in 1909 — 7,000 cuneiform texts — but no one knew how to read them. They had to learn how to read them.

Darius and the Usurper

Darius’s inscriptions — each campaign begins against a usurper. A usurper, like Druidy Don, like Duncey Putler, but not like President Zelensky. I monitored his election. It was free and fair according to the standards, the Venice Commission standards, OSCE standards, which are the definitive standards for what governs a fair and proper election.

The usurper is someone promoting drauga, which is the lie. The lie in this context: that they’re a legitimate leader. This brings us back to January 6th and to the eternal meaning of these concepts and these ideas. The very simple: lie, usurper, truth. We go back to Duncey Putler, who’s never been elected properly.

In Old Persian, arta means truth. In Sanskrit, rita — arta, RT, rit, right, rit. In Sanskrit, it’s actually even in the term for the language itself. Rita means cosmic order, truth. The RT sound in arta, right, truth, territorial integrity — it’s in those terms, it’s in sovereignty, it’s in that rent in monarch, in queen, ren. It’s in the opposite, drauga, the lie, the negation. Everything Donald speaks is drauga. It’s not true. It’s not truthy. It’s not right. It’s not arta. It’s untruth.

The Wasteland Motif

We go to the motif of the wasteland, spoken about before in Indo-European culture. This idea from ancient Celtic religion survived from that mythology for which we have textual evidence, which then gets transmitted across Europe, is remembered and becomes the Holy Grail, ends up in Monty Python — that from the monarch’s truth arises all good things in a culture and in the community. From the monarch’s lies come famine, wars, death, the violation of property and bodily integrity.

These are not universal themes. They aren’t recorded universally. They are recorded in Indo-European culture from almost our first textual evidence — from the Behistun inscriptions, which are the earliest extant textual evidence we have of Iranian culture and religion, though we know about Zarathustra and Zoroaster from about 1400 BCE through much later texts.

Recoupling Right with Right

I’ve spoken before about how Merz and Maloney and Macron and President Zelensky can recouple moral right, legal right, with the political right, after it has been decoupled since 1980 in the idea of voodoo economics, and now completely decoupled among the far right from what is right, as we had in the Third Reich — the RT sound with its meaning system, truth, arta, that which is not drauga.

The MN Sound: The Second Crypto-Semantic Signalling System

The second crypto-semantic signalling system immanent in our language: the MN sound. These sounds, these concepts occur again and again. They’re relevant today to interpret in contemporary culture and on the fly inside memes. I only encountered them because I was trying to understand what Disinfolklore is — its mana, made of what? What’s its energy?

When we think of the MAGA people who started off wanting no war and now are saying kill all the Iranians — that’s an exaggeration, of course, but you get the point — over time, people get lured and groomed into not just accepting but promoting what was once antithetical to their identity. A week ago, they were saying Donald will never invade, and Duncey Putler will never invade. Now they’re like, well, of course, he was always going to. What a genius. He deceived everyone — including them. We don’t want these people; we want to fight against that. We are those people as well because this happens to all of us. We do change our minds. A great quote, I think it’s Winston Churchill: when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, madam?

The Code of Positive Trolls: What Is Right

Along this path, we need to keep the standard. What is right? The second element of the Code of Positive Trolls — what is right in this case — is what was agreed by every state on earth. All 192 of them signed the UN Charter: refrain from the threat or use of force unless the UN Security Council votes for it. Territorial integrity.

Again, the clue — all of these signals in our language, they’re reminders, mnemonics. Monarch, sovereignty, right, human rights, droit in French for law — architected as human rights as a matter of law for the first time in history in the post–World War II legal order. Not perhaps deliberately planted by the Yamna, not intentionally, but so strong in their minds that these signals became embedded in ours. The clue is even in this term, re-archetyping — right, rich, right.

What Is To Be Done

Now, what is to be done? MAGA is disrupting the archetypal identities that are the foundation of our community. Archetypes change our own. We were fat, now we’re thin. Ireland was poor, now it’s not. America was reliable, now it’s not. We felt secure, now we don’t. Russia is a menace, soon it will collapse.

Embrace these changes. Consciously disrupt the archetypal identities your enemies attempt to inflict on your mind. Defend the post–World War II legal and social order. Don’t get accidentally mobilised into the wrong war.

First, know that this is what is going on. Second, create your own archetypes and counter theirs with yours, in your mind and inside your sphere of influence. Make sure they’re right, make sure they’re true, make sure they’re consistent with right and with truth and with defending the post–World War II legal order.

I created the moniker Disinfolklore as an archetypal life story, as an aggregate to describe today’s reality as I see it, and I try to communicate it into other people’s minds using words and natural language. That’s what I do.

Positive Trolling

This is no time to despair or to keep trolls which should not be kept alive alive. It’s a time to positive troll, as all of us do all day long on this app.

The battle in Ukraine is about more than Ukraine. It’s a titanic struggle of the kind we might be familiar with from Greek mythology, between Druidy Don, Duncey Putler, and the Comedian for the mantle of preeminent power, preeminent mana, in our world today.

Some of us have noticed our perceptions of Duncey Putler’s supposed immunity to sanctions are changing. Multiple articles on Russia’s collapsing economy. We heard Chancellor Merz’s brilliant performance yesterday with Druidy Don in the White House. These articles are appearing in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal. Probably all of us have had normal people who don’t spend all day on this talking to us about Russia. Is it going to collapse? Even in Russian newspapers, OSINT analysts are great at surfacing this.

The Bear Weakens

Here we may be seeing a shift in the archetype of an all-powerful bear, in the perception of Duncey Putler, whose archetypal identity as a strongman depends on the strength of his state.

The power to make the unexpected happen belongs to wizards. If the bear seems suddenly weak — as Duncey Putler seemed when his chef, the chef of Disinfolklore, Prigozhin, launched his coup — another set of archetypes deliberately planted and undeliberately planted — and then pulls off a miraculous save, the archetypal identity as strong becomes intensified.

However, if the Comedian and the state he embodies, Ukraine, continues to evolve, then we’ll see a reversal in fortune between the Comedian and Duncey Putler, which all of us are working for. That, I believe, has been in train since December 2019.

The Immanent and the Unspoken

That, in a nutshell, is the way of seeing that I want to surface because it’s already there, it’s immanent, it’s unspoken. When P.T. Barnum — we see him today, and that set of archetyping — I want to try and explain what’s going on when Donald doesn’t surface it.

The power to make the unexpected happen connects wizards, magi, superhuman celestial beings to the cultural and mental archetypes lurking unacknowledged, unseen inside many of the linguistic and audible and visual means whizzing between us in every situation we find ourselves in all day, not just online.

Russia’s Theory of Victory

Russia’s theory of victory has always been to hack the West, to hack our minds, to persuade Ukraine’s allies that Ukraine must surrender. How bizarre it is to see Donald still banging on about Ukraine surrendering when it’s got its counteroffensive going on.

Here’s the thing: this underrating of Ukraine’s will to victory, Ukraine’s agency and Ukraine’s mana is precisely why Ukraine will win. Russia, like Trump, will always lose, because Ukraine is genuinely, truly Trita in this story. Russia can’t even capture small villages.

The Goal of Druidy Don and Duncey Putler

Druidy Don, Duncey Putler, and their puppeteers and enablers have one goal: to destroy the post–World War II legacy of our civilisation. Their main means is mind-altering Disinfolklore — stories that change, as James correctly said earlier, stories that change our attitudes, motivations, moods and intentions in ways that benefit their aim of restoring the social and economic conditions that gave rise to the horrors of the Second World War, the horrors of the twentieth century.

On our micro level, what is to be done? Be mindful of our moods, how they’re impacted by memes, by our conversations with others. The essence of Disinfolklore is to affect our moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations. Stay mindful of that.

Focus: The Fifth Element

I use the term Focus, the fifth element in the Code of Positive Trolls, because mindfulness has acquired this meaning in New Age spirituality that I wanted to avoid. Mindfulness in its source meaning in Tibetan Buddhism simply means be careful what you allow into your mind. Remember this, be mindful.

With the help of the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman’s Timeline of Emotions cognitive model, we can perceive this passing between us of intentions, of mana, of emotions, of energy as being quite mechanical. It just happens so fast that we’re not aware of all the stages we go through while our minds are transformed from one state to another by Disinfolklore.

Until I coined the word mana in this context to describe this process, there was no means to isolate this aspect of what it means to be human. Now, with mana, we can meditate on and control exchanges of energy that Disinfolklore uses to undermine all of our communications and all of our communities. Again, MN in all those sounds and all those words — essential, fundamental words.

The Twelve Tools

I have developed the Twelve-Tool way to decode — as I’m now archetyping it — to decode and counter Disinfolklore. The first six tools are on disinfolklore.eu and disinfolklore.com. The first six tools are for detection and decryption: Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy; Incoming and Outgoing Troll Radars; Look for the Mana in the Meme; Inner and Outer Realm Imminences; Trigger, Experience, Reaction — the Dalai Lama/Paul Ekman Timeline of Emotions model; and the Code of Positive Trolls.

The second six are for defeating Disinfolklore — the six criteria of the Code of Positive Trolls. Generosity: does the meaning in the meme qualify as generous? Right, ethical discipline: does the informational unit promote untruths? The means do not justify the ends when weighing informational units in this context. Patience, mana: what are the implicit archetypes inside the memes? Crimea is a great litmus test here. Many have empathy for Ukraine, but when it comes to Crimea they imagine there’ll be some sort of peace agreement and Ukraine will sacrifice Crimea. They’ve fallen for the complex of archetypes embedded in our minds by Russian Disinfolklore. Khrushchev. Russia is undefeatable. These are data-resistant archetypes.

Focus is the fifth tool: should I allow this meme into my mind? Insight Wisdom, the sixth element in the Code of Positive Trolls. If any informational unit conforms to all six criteria, it’s positive. It’s counter-Disinfolklore. Usually Disinfolklore violates the second criterion. It’s not ethically disciplined. It’s a lie. It’s drauga in Darius’s terms.

Discern the Mana in the Meme

Discern the mana in the meme. It will be there. It might be manifesting positive, neutral, or negative energy. Assess the quality of the subtle energy the mana represents, encapsulates, and promotes. Make a call. Don’t stand there weighing it up. Russian Disinfolklore, counter-Disinfolklore, or is it indeterminable? Literally meaning unidentified, inaccessible mana. That meaner element in indeterminable, as another MN word, is simply another form of the same phenomenon. Again, MN in phenomenon. The means by which we exchange emotions and intentions through almost all forms of communication — literally a co-mingling of our mana. Communication can seem magical, it’s enchanting, but it’s also mechanical, and we can learn to control it.

The War for Biases

Who will win the war for biases? Biases depend on archetypes which determine their default. To defeat archetypes: understand their existence in our minds, how they persist through information. They’re immanent in information. Look for them. Analyse data. Refresh our archetype-infused opinions.

How do we distinguish between what I call negative archetypes — what Druidy Don does every time he speaks, what Duncey Putler does every time he speaks — and re-archetyping, which is what President Zelensky does and what we try to do? We must stick to what is right, unless we believe the ends justify the means. I’ve made the decision in my life, and most of us probably have, that they do not. Because if you think we’ll just lie and get into power and then create utopia, you change while you’re doing that. You become the problem you set out to solve. This is the perennial problem over millennia in our culture.

Is President Zelensky P.T. Barnum?

Is President Zelensky P.T. Barnum? There’s a lot in it. He was an amazing entrepreneur, but he’s not a snake oil salesman. The accusation is a mirror. Donald was found guilty by a jury of his peers of 34 felony counts, for which he should serve more than twenty years in prison. He’s the snake oil salesman. President Zelensky is doing his best to defend right, to get his cattle back, his rightful cattle back, as defined by the international legal order, the post–World War II legal order established on top of the graves of tens of millions. He’s also a comedian.

His offer this week to Middle Eastern countries — that if they could troll Russia, their ally Russia, into giving Ukraine a month’s ceasefire, which of course President Zelensky neither, in my humble opinion, wants nor expects to happen, he will of course give the best anti-drone technologists to help these countries — is the perfect troll. It’s the ultimate troll. Because on the surface, and to normal people who don’t understand the minutiae, it looks like a very generous offer. Why didn’t you just do it? It also gets right under their skin because they have been facilitating Iran’s rearming and haven’t been doing that much to help Ukraine. Now, as we see, they’re squirting off — Chuck Pfarrer brilliantly uses that verb — squirting off these Patriot missiles at 200,000-euro Shahed drones.

I’m not going to get into Schadenfreude because there’s a world shortage of Schadenfreude this week. Ukrainians have shorted the market, and I’m not going to — I’ll let the Ukrainians dominate the Schadenfreude market this week.

Victory on the Battlefield Is Not the End

Victory on the battlefield, as I’ve talked to you before, will not mean the end of this war. After Ukraine wins, we need to continue fighting to recentre ancient and contemporary Ukraine in the mental models of humanity.

Ancient Ukraine is the location of the common source for all Indo-European languages and religions. This is what will keep our minds strong in the face of Russian Disinfolklore about the history of Ukraine and the history of Russia.

Ancient Ukraine birthed modes of social organisation: the Indo-European model of monarchy, patriarchal — it’s again in patriarchal — horse-powered pastoral farming, wheel-powered migration, and interestingly, the first archaeological evidence of cannabis use in rituals. From 4,200 BCE. If anyone wants that reference, just look at Decoding Trolls Cannabis on Twitter. I posted the paper on that.

Recentring Ukraine

When migrants left ancient Ukraine to found Greek and Celtic, Italic and Germanic, Armenian, and other cultures — Ukraine’s value is not only because of the fascinating moment when Homer, around 800 BCE, sent Apollo from the western coast of Anatolia to fly over the mouth of the Istros, the Danube, to the Black Sea coast. The olive branches for the Olympic crown coming from the Danube area, brought back by Apollo to Mount Olympus from ancient Ukraine. Ukraine’s value is as the source. This was a return to the source by Apollo, unknowing. The Greeks did not know that their genes had begun in the Yamna community 3,000 years before Homer, before the Odyssey, before the poetry on the western coast of Anatolia. Ancient Ukraine is the beginning of our history.

Yet centuries of ignorance and Russian Disinfolklore have masked this from the seventeenth century onwards. The idea that Western culture was founded in ancient Greece or ancient Rome has been relentlessly promoted, and in good faith. Ancient Greece is just one daughter of Indo-European culture, privileged because we have amazing written records. It’s only one of several cultures from which we now have extraordinary information from the early days.

Consider the Celts, whose linguistic community at one point occupied territory from the Hercynian Forest in Slovakia to Greece, who sacked Rome twice, who settled in Galicia, in Anatolia — they founded the city of Ankara — who ruled what would become Lusitania, all of Britain and Ireland and Gaul. They inspired Asterix. These are huge cultural monuments that were invisible to those who in the seventeenth or eighteenth century discovered ancient Greece.

The Hittites, the first attested Indo-European language, first empire, weren’t even known until the early twentieth century. We still have people in mainstream English newspapers who doubt that Celtic is really a language community. Someone wrote recently, like an idiot — Simon Jenkins or Simon something, Sir Simon, he’s even a knight — in The Guardian. He wrote recently, and I used to read him religiously until I saw his take on Ukraine, that he doesn’t think Celtic is really a language. You can’t take these people seriously.

None of this was known to the scholars who dominated the nineteenth-century curriculum and still live on as phantom limbs in many of our minds.

Ancient Ukraine as Source

Today, thanks to isotopic analysis of ancient humans, linguistics, comparative mythology and archaeogenetics, we know for certain that ancient Ukraine birthed Indo-European culture. This is what my Finding Manuland project is about, and it’s about 20% complete on disinfolklore.eu. You’ll see Finding Manuland in there. Let’s recentre Ukraine and transform our mental models accordingly.

The Amarna Letters Archive discovered in Egypt attests that Indo-Europeans were present in Canaan and Judea from 1400 BCE. These are texts, textual evidence. Many of the local monarchs at Megiddo, the famous Armageddon, were Indo-Europeans.

In all of my work, I’m re-archetyping the entire history of our civilisation by noticing that these are all Indo-European communities from Ireland to India. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism — arguably Indo-European religions — and their interaction with other populations is historically and textually attested from the Bronze Age.

Ukraine’s Strategic Goal

Ukraine has one strategic goal in this war: to destroy Russia’s capability to invade Ukraine again, permanently. The indicator of Ukraine’s victory: in a hundred years, grown-ups in Muscovy will freeze at the thought of Ukraine. Small children will be warned at birth: never go there. Don’t go west of the Don. Dragons live there.

The Future: Personal AI Modules

To end where I began, the future of all of this is personal AI modules and models that help each of us detect, decrypt, and defeat the manipulative, archetype-laden memes deployed against our minds a million times a day, every day. The Twelve-Tool way, the Code of Positive Trolls, the awareness of archetype and re-archetyping — these will become tools as fundamental to our cognitive self-defence as anything else that we possess.

From Boris Chornyi’s terminal in California, from the place where the Yamna met the Usatova near Chornomorsk, back to the terminal where you and I are working right now — the re-architecting of our world is underway.

The Power to Archetype Belongs to All of Us

The power to archetype at will belongs to all of us, but those of us who control the means of production, the platforms, the propagation networks, can archetype at a scale and intensity that overwhelms Druidy Don and Duncey Putler and all of their acolytes.

What we can do, each of us, is scan for archetypes immanent in memes, look for them, analyse data, sharpen our minds, refresh our archetype-infused opinions, and consciously, deliberately re-archetype reality, building according to rightness, architecting rightness according to arta, according to truth.

Druidy Don, Duncey Putler, and their enablers have one goal: destroy the post–World War II legacy of our civilisation. Destroy what is right.

The Comedian leads his people in a titanic struggle against the forces of the negation, against the snake, against the drauga, against the lie. We, all of us who are positive trolls, we are the third man, we are Trita, third human if you like. Our battle: the post–World War II legal order, territorial integrity, human rights, the Refugee Convention, the duty to prevent genocide. These rights and duties should be, and they are, in our minds every moment as we communicate and deal with our feed and with our lives. We will retrieve them.

This is no time to despair. Positive troll. Be mindful of what you allow into your mind. Be careful out there. Decoding Trolls, at your service. Out.

Continued from:

First in series:

This is the “what can we do” part. I was concerned that we were going to be wrapped up in the same kind of Disinfolklore galaxy as I watched unfurl inside the minds of Ukrainians stuck in the occupation between 2015 and 2018, and that I have witnessed — and I’m sure many of us have witnessed — people we know who have gone MAGA unfurl inside their minds. What I was concerned about was that this would be a Disinfolklore universe of many different concatenating galaxies.

Last time, I talked about the three archetypal characters: Druidy Don, Disinfolklore himself; Duncey Putler; and the Comedian. Tonight, I’m going to talk about what we can do to resolve this problem and to assuage my fears and our fears that we are going to be wrapped up in a Disinfolklore universe.

Re-Archetyping and the Future of Disinfolklore

It’s really about re-archetyping, and it’s about the future of Disinfolklore. It’s about archetyping and re-archetyping. What I used to call counter-Disinfolklore, which could be called infolklore, but really it’s this mechanism of archetyping and re-archetyping, which I’ve talked about before, which gives us the clue of what is to be done.

As I use this term archetype and re-archetype, I want you to focus on the ‘Rch’ element in the signifier Archetype. Arch-e-type. That RCH — the same RCH we have in monarchy — it’s Rch. Reich. Rich, it’s in the same sound in rich, people who are rich, people who have the right/reich. I just want to flag that at the beginning. Archetype, archetype, archetype contains the element in the second most important cryptotypic semantic signalling system in Indo-European culture: words with these Rg / Rt / Reg / Rch / Rit / Rd sounds within them are part of this system: see my seminal: What Meaning Means

Three World-Changing Events This Week

Let me begin this week with three world-changing events that occurred this week. These events situate my concept of archetype and re-archetyping, which I’ll remind you is quite different from St Augustine’s, from Carl Jung, who got his idea of archetyping from St Augustine. It’s quite different from Joseph Campbell’s and from the concept of archetypes in psychoanalysis.

The first world-changing event: a computer researcher in America this week reverse-engineered one of Apple’s M4 chips. He was able to demonstrate through means he described in great detail, which I myself am working through, that Apple’s software masks the true potential of this chip. This semiconductor chip, in its essence, is many more than ten times — ninety times more powerful than some of the most powerful NVIDIA GPUs, graphic processing units.

The second world-changing event this week: Apple announced the M5 Max chip in laptops, which you lucky Americans are able to buy now for about $4,000, this new Pro laptop. They have the same capacity in a laptop, independent of the cloud, that thousands of computers had when I first started studying neural network computing as part of my entrepreneurship project during my MBA at Oxford back in the ancient times of 2016. That was just four years after the world-changing AlexNet computer vision model, which described the most powerful computer vision system yet invented. It ran on thousands of computers and was perhaps a hundred times less powerful than the computer vision on your iPhone or my iPhone today.

The third world-changing event: ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, announced and shipped a large language model which can run on your iPhone. I wouldn’t advise putting that on your phone, given where it comes from, but it’s not going to be the first. I’m sorry, it is the first, but it’s not going to be the last.

Claude Code and Boris Chornyi

These three innovations together — and note that the first, the reverse engineering of the M4 chip, was facilitated by Claude Opus 4.6, which is the model I use, the Anthropic model I use with my work; I use it inside the terminal on my computer — these three innovations together tell us something about the future and about the future of Disinfolklore.

How appropriate it is that this world-changing tool called Code, which is as important an invention as the internet itself or personal computing itself — perhaps even more significant than both of those, because of the acceleration, the technological trajectories that we can’t even imagine were possible suddenly become possible. People like me can now program and vibe code anything we can conceive of into existence. This researcher was able to use Claude Code to reverse-engineer this M4 chip and discover what its true power is.

How appropriate it is that this world-changing tool, Anthropic’s Claude Code, was created by the Ukrainian Boris Chornyi from near Chornomorsk, just east of Odessa. How appropriate that Boris Chornyi comes from a place, Chornomorsk, which is exactly where the archaeological evidence demonstrates that the Yamna community, the creators, the forgers of the first Indo-European language, the ancestor of all living Indo-European languages today — how appropriate that Boris Chornyi should come from the precise place where the Yamna community fused with the Usatova community to create the proto-language that would become Italic, Celtic, and Germanic.

Everything we know about Latin, Latin history, Jupiter; everything we know about the Celts, from the part of me which is Celt, to Asterix and Obelix; and Germanic Indo-European languages, everything we know about the Germanic Indo-European language culture and the days of the week, English and all of that — all of that comes from this place where this guy, Boris Chornyi, an engineer at Anthropic, invented this amazing tool.

The Terminal Self and the Future

How appropriate that someone there would invent a world-changing technology operating inside the terminal on our computer. For those who don’t know, the terminal is this thing you generally — I never went near it, except when something really went wrong with my computer and I tried to solve it. Now I wake up each morning, I’m in there.

The seminal work in hypermodern theory and hypermodernism is called The Terminal Self. Now the terminal, which when you look at it is reminiscent of the first computers we encountered in the 1970s and 1980s, is unexpectedly the place where this innovation is happening. The terminal self, this state of acceleration, too much, never enough, dissatisfaction — these two vectors, acceleration and never enough, are always running in contradiction in the hypermodern mind.

Obviously, we have other elements in our mind. We may have the postmodern, where we think nothing matters anymore, truth doesn’t matter. We may have the modern, where we think we’re kind of modern, God is dead. We may have the classical enlightenment parts of our minds. The hypermodern mind occupies us even if we have no clue what hypermodernism is or we’ve never read The Terminal Self.

How appropriate that that seminal work in hypermodernism should be called The Terminal Self, a play on words about the end of the self as we fuse into the computers, when now we have this world-changing innovation from Boris Chornyi of Anthropic — Claude Code operating in the terminal, which even in its first months after its invention has already accelerated in ways we thought would take decades.

Personal AI Modules: The Disinfolklore Module

Why is this relevant to Disinfolklore and to archetyping and re-archetyping? Because the future of Disinfolklore and the future of our civilization is all of us having our own individual models — large language models, computer vision models, multi-dimensional space models fused together — running constantly, being trained constantly by our own experience and helping us to become superhumans. We, working with these models, will become better humans.

When I say better, immediately we need an evaluative dimension. We need the Code of Positive Trolls. We need the post–World War II legal order against which to judge: are we better or are we worse?

There’ll be multiple models of large language models and computer vision models and spatial models, and multiple modules such as Disinfolklore. That’s what I’m creating. That’s my vision of what I am creating. That’s why I’m so excited by these tools, which are now available to me, who is illiterate in coding — but that no longer holds me back.

The Disinfolklore module, which you will be able to connect into your own personal set of modules and your own personal network running multiple layers, is what I’m working towards. That’s the future of ideas and the interaction between ideas, the world helped by these architectures, these AI models.

Layers of Neural Networks

It’s worth noting that the first innovation I mentioned, the M4 chip, is basically running on one layer — one layer of tens of millions of artificial neurons. AlexNet, which was this amazing model, the revolutionary model for computer vision shown in 2012, only worked on one layer as well.

NVIDIA’s models have hundreds of layers, dozens of layers, each of which might have billions of artificial neurons, each with a particular distribution of weights. You put in the data, you put in your input. The model’s looking ahead saying, if we try this concatenation of weights, it produces a 52% approximation of this cat, which is the output we’re reaching, but what we want is 75%. We spin it around again, hundreds of different layers up and down like a pinball machine. We don’t actually know when it gets to this level — it’s a black box. We don’t know what’s happening. It’s taking on a life of its own, and I use that term metaphorically. It’s like a pinball machine running around, recursing, concatenating up, down, and suddenly you end up as your output with the perfect cat.

This first innovation with AlexNet was just one of these layers. This M4 chip, when he was able to reverse-engineer it, is just one layer. This is the first time this has ever been done. Within weeks or months, we’re going to have multiple layers. What this means is you won’t be confined to tens of millions of artificial neurons. You’ll be in the billions and it will be on your phone. You won’t need the cloud.

It means you can begin collating everything you’ve ever read, everything you’ve ever thought, and then plugging modules in which help you come up with a particular take on the world.

Re-Architecting

This is the re-architecting. Again, that sound — architecting, tect, tectonics, build — right, building in a right way, a correct way, architecting our entire world. The future is out there. It’s just not evenly distributed.

This week, we’ve seen with these three innovations the evidence of the acceleration, but also of where the future is going, where we’re going. My value as a writer and the originator of the Disinfolklore analytical method is to create, as I mentioned, a module which I’m communicating today through natural language as a human into your mind across this incredible technology that we do moan a lot about, but it is unbelievable — X Spaces. I didn’t even know it existed before September 2022, that we can connect through this amazing space. It is mind-blowing in itself.

In the future, and this future is not so far away — this could be a matter of months, or a year or two — it will just be plugged into our own personal large language model and you’ll be able to interpret data and parse it into archetypes and understand immediately through the layers of concealment that, for instance, the Russians or Druidy Don’s successors are attempting to throw over, to continue their efforts to destroy the post–World War II legal order.

That’s what it’s about for me. It’s about helping us in the same way this researcher was able to peel off the concealing layers above this chip, this M4 chip, which even with these layers of software curling around it, concealing it, disguising it, is one of the most powerful chips out there. Once this researcher was able to use Anthropic’s Claude Code to un-cloud it, to un-conceal it, he was able to release — I think it’s eighty times as powerful as this particular state-of-the-art NVIDIA chip. This is a consumer item which I have on my computer, the M4 chip.

By analogy, what we shall be able to do pretty soon is have our own models running and be able to consult them without reference to the cloud. When we’re getting these highly complex trolls thrown at us, we will be able to feed them through our models and our own minds with our own prompts and will immediately be able to spot the energy, the mana, of destroying the post–World War II legal order.

Archetyping and Re-Archetyping as Fundamental Units

That’s where we’re heading. Archetype and re-archetyping will be the fundamental units inside this future and inside our vocabulary for describing what we’re consciously doing — re-archetyping our present, our future. That will be my modest contribution to defending the post–World War II legal and social order, and everything included in the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls, where we automate this process and parse vast amounts of data. The second element of the Code of Positive Trolls is Right, ethical discipline.

The Archaic Origins of Archetype

Let me go back to the archaic origins of archetype and re-archetyping, and begin of course this week with Druidy Don.

Druidy Don, Disinfolklore himself, with this world-historically huge attempt to archetype President Zelensky as P.T. Barnum, a deceptive showman. The man with 34 felony counts, the adjudicated rapist, who started wars to cover up his own crimes, is trying to archetype the preeminent occupant of the archetypal identity of the perfect leader in our culture today — the manifestation, the personification today of Zeus Pater in our culture, of Odin, of Indra, of Manannán mac Lir in the Celtic tradition, of Éremón the first high king of Ireland — as P.T. Barnum. Which, of course, ironically qualifies Donald as one of the great comedians of our era. Absolutely hilarious. He archetypes the Comedian — as I archetype President Zelensky — as P.T. Barnum, but he is P.T. Barnum.

The Impenetrability Problem

Someone wrote to me this week and they said, look, I really like your work, but this is impenetrable. The particular element they were talking about was this section in my Munich speech about these three archetypes: Druidy Don, Duncey Putler, and the Comedian. Druidy Don, because he’s not really a druid — he’s not one of the Celtic priestly class in Celtic culture and Celtic religion. Duncey Putler, because Duncey Putin wakes up each morning with no learning, as we see today. We saw the other day President Zelensky again, the great Comedian, setting out that — casually saying — we have access now to the Russists’ plans for their offensive next year, and it’s exactly the same. We could have written it ourselves, could have got Claude Code to write it; they probably did.

The Comedian himself. In these three archetypes, I deliberately included the DN sound. Don, Duncey, and DN — comedian — which is one of the three sounds that I believe I’ve discovered as our crypto-semantic signalling systems embedded in our Indo-European languages by the Yamna, who lived in Mykolaivka village south of Zaporizhzhia. We know from archaeogenetic evidence, as published in Nature last February and spoken about before here.

I’m not saying they did this on purpose. This isn’t a group of ancient Ukrainians, 4,100 BCE, saying, look, let’s plant these sounds — DN, RT, and MN, which is the preeminent one. As anyone who’s looked at Finding Manuland, which is a module of Disinfolklore, will understand why that, for me, is the preeminent one. Not least because it’s in meaning. It’s in the idea of meaning, and this idea that something other shines through something like the light through the moon. When you talk about meaning, you’re talking about connecting signifier with signified, and you cannot speak about meaning without triggering this MN sound.

I’m not saying they were embedded in this big conspiracy sitting around a fire by the Dnieper River — the Upper Don River, which is now called the Dnipro as a transliteration from the Ukrainian. In my day, it was the Dnieper. I’m not saying they sat around a fire there going, let’s plant these signalling systems in it. These sounds and the meanings associated with them were so hardwired into their community, into the importance of their community, that all the rivers — all the great rivers of ancient Ukraine — the Don, the Donets, the Dnieper, the Dniester, and the Danube carried this sound.

The Disinfolklore.eu Website

I was able to point this reader to my new platform, disinfolklore.eu or disinfolklore.com. I mentioned to them the homepage is deliberately dark. I love the graphics of Disinfolklore, the wordmark, this particular set of colours which really attracts me. You can navigate to all the sections of the site, which contains over a million and a half words, from the homepage.

One of the design challenges was: how do I turn a million and a half words of quite complex stuff into an accessible or the optimal accessible format? The front page is deliberately dark, but underneath it are short passages, easy to read in optimised fonts and colours. I worked very hard on making sure that this would apply and would attract the greatest possible audience and keep them there.

For any particular question about Disinfolklore, including Disinfolklore as a way, as a Twelve-Tool way as I now archetype it — and this is particularly useful for certain kinds of minds. High-conscientiousness people, for instance, people who are high on the conscientiousness scale, the OCEAN scale, they’ll go for the Twelve Tools, perhaps, because they just want something that they can really work with. I plan to teach and expand upon that platform.

This platform itself is an act of re-archetyping of my work over the past few years. I wanted to re-archetype my entire oeuvre away from the long-form essays, which, for instance, this particular reader is interested in but he just can’t do it — “I can’t read these long-form essays” — which I publish on Substack and will continue to publish on Substack under the three brands I’ve been working on: Decoding Trolls, Finding Manuland, and Disinfolklore, into a form not determined by any single format.

The advantage of Substack is that your work gets directly sent to readers. It’s quite quaint in that way because the internet has moved on since email, and many young people today don’t even send emails, I believe. That’s like boring job stuff to them. The Substack format determines a market for my writing and it also determines the form for my writing. I don’t want to spam people, so I try to squeeze everything as much as possible into each post — never more than one or two a week — and that everything is an immersive experience akin to the homepage, disinfolklore.eu, so that the new platform itself is an immersive experience. You could spend days going through it, and I hope people will over the coming years. It’s a forest with many different pathways and there are passages for every mood or attitude you’re in, because I want this conception of the world to become present to as many minds as possible as a competing presence.

I’m also doing it for the future, for AI or neural network models, and to train them. That future is, as I’ve mentioned here.

One Set of Lenses Among Many

Now, James often reminds us, and rightly, that Disinfolklore is just one set of lenses through which to perceive the war and history. That’s true and undeniable. I’m just making a play for this particular set of lenses to complement all the others that we have, all the other different LLM models we’ll have running with us. I have, for instance, the complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1989, the last edition of it before the internet went wild. I imagine my LLM — I will get those contents into my model, for instance. That’s what I’m talking about. We’ll all have individualised models. We won’t be using like we might be using Claude Code now, where you can train and put your own memory into it, but essentially it’s trained on data from loads of other people.

The Shakespeare Parallel

I was reminded of the impenetrability of this commenter on my post about Duncey Putler, Druidy Don, and the Comedian when I was doing my MBA at Oxford. I was commuting between Stanytsia Luhanska in eastern Ukraine and Oxford for about twenty modules between 2016 and 2018. In our last module, they hired Richard Olivier’s company, Olivier Mythodrama, originated by the son of Laurence Olivier, the great actor. If you’ve got a company and you want to do a team-building day, they’ll come and do it. It’s basically a very high-class version of archetypes applied to corporate training through Shakespeare.

We had spent most of our MBA talking about leaders and leadership, reading business cases about leaders and leadership and what a good leader is and what they archetype — really about archetypes, although I didn’t really understand that that’s what we were doing at the time. I’m only really reflecting on it now. We were subjected in this last module to half a day of this amazing former actor, now corporate trainer, going through Henry V and Henry VIII, these great Shakespeare plays. Actually, I don’t think there is a Shakespeare play Henry VIII — Henry V, let’s stick to that. Someone might correct me on this. These plays don’t speak spontaneously to many people today. They always have to be explained. They’ve become a sort of signal of high education. No one really reads Shakespeare plays for pleasure anymore. The language is quite difficult for many of us at this point in our culture. Yet they are great monuments.

I mentioned Shakespeare in this set of talks in the context of Herder, who in 1777 launched the folklore movement in Europe and the nationalism movement as a function of folklore — of cultures formed around a core of what was distinct about particular communities and individuated them from neighbouring communities. Herder made this call in 1777 where he said, where is our Shakespeare? We must unite the ten German tribes that Tacitus had written about in the first century of the Common Era. We can unite the German tribes around our Shakespeare. Goethe answered that call and became German culture’s Shakespeare.

Goethe, whose house I visited in Frankfurt at the time — living in his house was a French officer, as Frankfurt was occupied by the French, who took their name from the Franks but actually were Romanised Gauls or Celts, and were very associated with nationalists.

Ultimately, Shakespeare and such material needs to be explained to people. This is the archetypal example of a king who’s jealous, whose family are really mean to him, and on. They’re brilliant collections of wisdom, and if Shakespeare’s plays were all that survived of our culture, we could probably recreate everything that is good in our communities from them.

However, my classmates at the end of this day of role play and clever exercises — where you put yourself into different characters, the king, the king’s daughters, the queen, the servants, and you act a little bit and you have a few laughs, and then you try to take learnings about leadership from it — about fifty of the sixty students in my class were from outside the Anglo-Saxon tradition, and they found the whole thing completely ridiculous and totally impenetrable.

That was the same attitude I had when I first looked at Joseph Campbell, banging on about Greek gods and goddesses. Anyone who’s tried to write a script or a play or even a novel will be recommended to read Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. How many years of classical readings do you need to understand who Menelaus is and his psychological significance, his social significance, his relation to Odysseus and Penelope and all that stuff? You need this whole network of knowledge before you can get going.

The P.T. Barnum Mirror

When someone says, you’re talking about Druidy Don and Duncey Putler and the Comedian and I find this impenetrable — and then on the very day they write that to me, Druidy Don archetypes the Comedian as P.T. Barnum — that signal tells me that even when I try to escape the trap that Campbell and others fell into, where they select archetypes from what was then a common culture, classical Greek mythology, hoping everyone has the same groundings, I fall into a version of it.

Many of us in the pro-Ukraine community are part of this amazing network of knowledge and our memories of events which have happened, from Liza to all of the things, the greatest hits, all of these experiences which we’ve had collectively, can become impenetrable to the rest of the world. I assumed we were all on the same page because we’re tuned into the Ukraine war, but certainly that’s not always the case.

The relevance and importance of what I’m doing — trying to bring the terms archetype and re-archetyping into the common parlance of our attempts to interpret our daily news feeds — is demonstrated when Druidy Don, Disinfolklore himself, who is P.T. Barnum (and I’ve spoken about him as P.T. Barnum in this set of programmes), archetypes the Comedian as P.T. Barnum. The accusation in the mirror of the person making it is extraordinary.

What I Actually Mean by Archetype and Re-Archetype

Now, what do I actually mean by archetype and re-archetype? My concept is quite different from what came before. Jung took the idea of archetyping and archetypes from St Augustine, who was talking about how religious impressions within us are archetypes of our divine nature. Jung then took it to the primordial, thought that it was universal, part of the collective unconscious of humanity.

What Jung didn’t know and couldn’t know at that time is that all the examples he gives are from Indo-European languages and religions. He didn’t understand that Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, was transmitted from Vedic into Sanskrit into Tibetan, a non-Indo-European language that nevertheless carries Indo-European content. When he wrote the introduction to Evans-Wentz’s first edition of the Tibetan Book of the Dead — and it’s a brilliant piece of writing — Carl Jung didn’t really understand that he was writing about his own ancestors and the archetypes in their minds. Because he didn’t know this, he assumed it was universal.

Then Joseph Campbell took particular forms of these archetypes, moved them away from religion, put them into classical literature. What I’m doing is re-archetyping archetypes themselves. I’m trying to bring them down from the classical, from the psychoanalytic literature, right down to the ground, and promote awareness that when Druidy Don is archetyping the Comedian, President Zelensky, as P.T. Barnum — this is what he’s doing. He’s archetyping. He’s not just branding. He’s not just representing. He’s archetyping. He’s trying to connect President Zelensky in our minds with archetypes.

P.T. Barnum as the archetypal — I mean, someone I know, they’re like, who is this P.T. Barnum? I know who P.T. Barnum is because when I went on a rugby tour to London when I was about ten, we had to sit through the P.T. Barnum show, and it was boring. I also know who P.T. Barnum is because I’d gone to that show when I was staying once at my godfather’s house in Washington, D.C. My godfather was RFK’s press secretary and Ted Kennedy’s press secretary. He had an amazing library. I was there when I was about fifteen, and I spent the summer, for some reason, reading the biography of P.T. Barnum.

It has often — sadly, my godfather is now dead and I can’t ask him about it — but it has often occurred to me as I’ve reflected on this experience, because even at the age of fifteen I knew this was a bit of a rubbish book and not something I should really be spending my time on. I should be reading great literature. For some reason, I was reading it, and I was curious while I was reading why they had such a book. A few years ago, I made the connection with Donald in spectacle, and I wonder if my godfather had this premonition of the showman and how politics was going.

Bringing Archetypes Down to Earth

I’m trying to bring them down from these highfalutin areas so that we see, promote awareness that multiple overlapping archetypes are ever present in manipulative and non-manipulative content. I’m mainly concerned with manipulative content for obvious reasons, in Disinfolklore, and negatively manipulative content, because as many of you understand, I perceive all communications as manipulative. The question is: is it positive, is it negative, or is it neutral?

As far as I know, I’m the first writer to really understand this aspect of how manipulative memes enter our minds, how they transmit, how they overcome our incoming troll radars to adulterate and manipulate our energy — the well from which all our attitudes, moods, intentions and motivations flow. I discovered this in Russian-occupied Luhansk, where I found that Russia was using Jungian archetypes — the mother and the maiden, primordial archetypes as Jung archetypes — in its propaganda, in its Disinfolklore, in such an obvious way that it revealed to me at the time that they were doing something that was quite odd and strange.

As I spoke about before, when I saw how some of my colleagues reacted to this whole story, the mother and the maiden story — and if you search Decoding Trolls and “mother and the maiden,” you’ll get the story of that day — they immediately fell into this system, whereas I and, strangely, a London Metropolitan Police officer, we understood there was something strange and odd about the whole thing, and we didn’t go into the forest to find the mother and the underage daughter who were about to be cut into tiny pieces by another Russian archetype, the far-right Pravyi Sektor Ukrainian Nazi.

Information Forms Us

We think of information as external to us, that it’s something we consume, we take it on the phone or when we speak to someone. It is in fact an entity which by its very nature informs us — it forms us inside. It forms us, it creates us. Our identities are made up of information. We archetype information, the external stimulus, as information itself. We project it outwards and we forget that actually what its actual function is: it’s forming us, it’s creating us, adulterating our mana, manipulating us.

When we think about archetype and re-archetyping, the clue is in the word itself. This rich sound, which obviously would attract Jung, because he comes from the Germanic tradition where Reich is archetyped as Reich — Third Reich — in monarch, rich. You’ve got mon, you’ve got the MN sound, and you’ve got the arch element in it. He was attracted to that. He didn’t understand this. I’d love to point it out to him. I’m sure he’d be very interested to hear how he was trolled by archetypes.

This archetypal identity in the substance of our language — this writ, right, correct, political right, rich, droit — these sounds which are in our very language. The same RT sound. When we talk about architecting, we’re talking about building according to rightness.

Archetypes in Action

This flexible approach I have — and this isn’t an indulgence, though “it’s an interesting sound coincidence” — the flexible approach that I have to archetypes means that countries, abstract entities become characters, attributed with characteristics. You might choose a character in a Netflix series called John, and then you realise, John is Ukraine, and Michaela is America, and Mildred is India. They’re fighting away and actually it’s a replaying of the Mahabharata, or the Odyssey, or the Clash of the Titans — Duncey Putler along with Druidy Don, and they’re fighting President Zelensky, these heroes — or whichever national epic. With the Manas, interestingly, the Manas epic in Kyrgyzstan from about the fourteenth century Common Era being their national epic.

These are modern workings for a contemporary audience, but imminent in them are different versions of archetypes across time. What I’m trying to do is help us notice archetypes in real time. P.T. Barnum — that’s what’s going on there. Accustom our minds to perceiving. Donald archetyping himself as not P.T. Barnum by accusing the most un-P.T. Barnum — President Zelensky is a great artist and he is a great entrepreneur. As far as any of us are aware, there’s no record of deception. P.T. Barnum, while creating the modern circus, was known for deception. As we know, Druidy Don has 34 felony counts.

I want to accustom our minds to perceiving them and perceiving the attempts of manipulators like Donald to archetype negatively, whether consciously or not, and deliver these archetypes into our minds, which then determine our activities.

The Trito Myth

Let me tell you the fundamental story of Indo-European culture. It’s called the Trito myth. Trito means third man — the TR sound again, this reversal of the RT. Trita is a herdsman whose cattle are stolen by the negation, by the snake or by the dragon. It varies across the traditions, but it’s present in every Indo-European tradition, which means, for reasons I won’t go into here, beyond all reasonable doubt, the people, the first Indo-Europeans in Mykolaivka village and that area of Zaporizhzhia, they had this story. It wasn’t just one of thousands of stories. It was the fundamental story that got carried through the migrations over millennia, until such time as it was written down in the Rig Veda, in Irish mythology, in Armenia, in every Indo-European cultural tradition. My source for saying this is a brilliant theologian called Bruce Lincoln, and I rely a lot on his work. That’s all for this week. I’ll pick this up in the next episode.

Continued from:

First in series:

The European Union today released its highly anticipated — well, highly anticipated by the likes of me — fourth report on threats on what it calls FIMI, which is a rather unwieldy phrase. It’s not unanalogous to Disinfolklore, but FIMI stands for Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference. The “foreign” in this context means the threat is coming from outside the European Union, which for good, understandable political reasons and constitutional and mandate reasons, the European Union of course doesn’t want to get involved in intra-European Union created Disinfolklore or disinformation.

The fourth report which came out today — I just wanted to talk about it in the context of the Disinfolklore analytical method. I’ve talked before about the three previous reports. The first report was published three years ago and it provided a brand new analytical framework and common language through which European Union and non-European Union states could speak about the threat to their national security which Russia, China, and indeed Iran — those three are the main foreign forces that these reports are dealing with — pose.

It provided a common framework and a common language to talk about something which was new. From outside of the structure, the word “disinformation” was really operationalised from inside Russia. We have evidence from KGB manuals from the 1960s and 1970s of them using the term disinformation. Therefore, if you’re trying to solve a problem or talk about a problem or come up with tools to deal with a problem that has been created by the Russians, then if you subject yourselves to using the vocabulary and language and tools which the Russians themselves have forged, there is only a limited area for you to operate within.

By contrast, if — as I have done with Disinfolklore — you invent a new portmanteau and you elaborate a whole set and analytical method, as I have done through the Twelve Tool Way on disinfolklore.eu, and through my writings, which many of you have been thankfully reading and interacting with since I created the portmanteau in February 2023 — but after thinking and thinking about what Disinfolklore means as an analytical method and also as a narrative form that I first noticed in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018.

It’s now ten years I’ve been thinking and elaborating and writing about this problem, but I’ve only had the term Disinfolklore for the past three years. It was quite liberating to come up with this word. I had from time to time tried to look for a new language in new terms because I recognised from early on in 2015 that what I was witnessing inside Russia-occupied Luhansk was something new and therefore it required a new vocabulary to describe the whole system of information fields, matrices, thick enmeshing matrices — the kind which we’re now experiencing, for instance, in relation to this Iran war.

The Colonisation of Thought

Even people who haven’t paid much attention to MAGA and who have no idea really of QAnon and what MAGA has been doing since 2015 to create this enmeshing, identity-creating mess inside people’s minds — now, if you are contemplating whether to fill your car with petrol or diesel, or you’re thinking, gosh, am I going to have gas? All the gas in my country comes from Qatar and they’re not going to be able to get this gas to the island of Britain or wherever else you might live. Where am I going to get my hot water? How am I going to drive my factory?

That kind of colonisation of our thoughts is a direct line from Donald’s — on the one hand, the war is over; on the other hand, I’m having fun, I’m blowing things up. He is projecting outwards through the medium of Disinfolklore into our minds, into humanity’s minds, this completely enmeshing, confusing mess of nightmarish rhetoric.

That is precisely what I had noticed the Russians were doing inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. I didn’t know at the time what they were up to. Only after the full-scale invasion began, I realised — oh my God, this is what they were doing. I was inside what I call a stealth attack. A stealth genocide.

The EU’s Parallel Journey

The European Union has structures where it has been investing its energy into coming up with a new framework. It’s done this very successfully in these four FIMI threat reports. This fourth report, which is out today, is what I was going to talk about.

When I was standing on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska 2015 to 2018, watching Russian disinformation unfold in real time among real people — soldiers, civilians, spies, traders, all archetypes — the European Union was at the same time beginning to build its strategic communications apparatus from Brussels. Both of us were looking at the same phenomenon. We saw folklore. We saw an infrastructure.

The fourth EEAS FIMI report, published today, is the most comprehensive institutional mapping of foreign information manipulation ever produced. It documents 540 incidents. This is the meat and veg, as it were — or the lentil strudel — of what makes the European Union’s operation unique: it has the resources and now the methodology to document tens of thousands of instances of Russian disinformation, and Chinese and Iranian to a lesser extent. We see this sometimes on our Twitter feed as the excellent EU vs Disinfo, which is just one emanation of this whole system, this whole operation.

Donald and Cuba: Disinfolklore in Real Time

From my perspective, the engine of the operation is to collect instances of FIMI and try to determine the sources of them. I, as a lowly sole operator, use my method — the Disinfolklore analytical method. If I see coercive control immanent in a meme, if I hear, for instance, as I did today, Donald talk about Cuba as if it’s a woman —

Today Donald was referring to Cuba as a woman. It’s the same energy that Putler used just before the outbreak of the war. Donald grabs at Cuba the way he and Putler grab women — an archetype of women. This is Donald:

“It’s a beautiful island, great weather. They’re not in a hurricane zone, which is nice for a change. You know, they won’t be asking us for money for hurricanes every week.”

The first element of the Code of Positive Trolls is generosity. This is ungenerosity, therefore it is Disinfolklore. “They won’t be asking us for money for hurricanes every week.” I’m not sure Cuba has ever asked America for money for hurricanes. But obviously it hasn’t, because according to Donald — and I wouldn’t trust him on this — they have no hurricanes. I’m sure they have hurricanes. It probably breaches the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls — this is probably just totally untrue.

Back to Donald:

“But I think Cuba’s seen the end. You know, all my life, I’ve been hearing about the United States and Cuba.”

This is one of my pet theories about Donald. A lot of what he does goes back to the early 60s, a formative time when everyone was talking about Kennedy. What does he do? He wants to annihilate Kennedy by hiring this Epstein-connected Kennedy guy who wants everyone in America to become really sick. That will destroy this archetype of the good president in his early time. Obviously the Cuban Missile Crisis is part of that.

“All my life I’ve been hearing about Cuba and the United States. When will the United States do it? I do believe I’ll do the honour of having the honour of taking Cuba.”

This is where the language that we know through the legal cases — that E. Jean Carroll took against him, where he was adjudicated by the judge to be an adjudicated rapist, and two grand juries found that he had in fact assaulted E. Jean Carroll in, I think, Saks Fifth Avenue. We also have the footage we heard in 2016 from the outtake. We understand that this archetype in Donald’s mind is how he treats women.

“That’ll be good. It’ll be a big honour. Taking Cuba. Taking Cuba in some form. Yeah, taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it. I think I could do anything I want with it.”

This is the Epstein class. This is what they did to women entrapped on the island at every level. We’ve seen this week women who had jobs as assistants to Epstein, some of whom may well have been complicit in the crimes and in this entire coercive control network which entrapped the most powerful and richest people in the world as well as some of the weakest — women and children. As far as we can see, this is still entrapping people.

Putler’s Parallel: “Like It or Not, Take It, My Beauty”

I often cite how Putler made his speech to the Russian people on the 20th of February, four days before the full-scale invasion, where he said: “Like it or not, take it, my beauty.” International lawyers in the first New Lines Institute report on genocide in Ukraine cite this as evidence of genocidal intent because what Putler was doing there was using a vulgar Russian rhyme — it’s from a Soviet-era hard rock song from a band called Red Mold, and the song is called “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin.”

Again, Disinfolklore — Sleeping Beauty, one of the core archetypes in European, Indo-European folklore, Indo-European culture. Putler was likening Ukraine to a dead woman, to a corpse, and saying to it: “Like it or not, take it, my beauty.” We see the same spirit, the same energy in the way Donald talks about Cuba today as he contemplates one of his other operations.

540 Incidents: The Scale of the EU Operation

The European Union, like me, is collecting incidents of this, but it’s obviously doing it on a much bigger scale. The report documents 540 incidents, 10,500 channels of Disinfolklore, 43,000 pieces of content across 19 platforms.

The report introduces a FIMI framework. Even for people like me who spend all day every day in this area, FIMI is still quite an awkward concept. What I’m trying to do with Disinfolklore is provide tools for ordinary people like you and me that we can use and integrate into our daily life as we’re dealing with lots of timelines, rather than provide a framework for nation states. The European Union has a much bigger mandate and a bigger scope than me. I’m merely trying to inject an algorithm into humanity’s minds that’s more easily memorable. I’m hoping Disinfolklore will work a little bit better than its analogue FIMI.

What the FIMI report does today — it maps a galaxy of interconnected FIMI operations. It’s without question an impressive institutional achievement. One of the main goals of this operation in the European Union is to ensure it’s not dealing with what I might call DMI, which is Domestic Information Manipulation and Interference. For good constitutional mandate-related reasons, it wants to ensure that the units of information it’s dealing with do emanate from outside the European Union and specifically from Russia and China, and to a lesser extent, Iran. That’s within its mandate.

My Analytical Framework for This Report

I read these reports through the lens of the Disinfolklore analytical method, which I elaborate in these podcasts once a week and also on the disinfolklore.eu website. I wanted to look at: what does this report see clearly? What does it miss? What might each of our different approaches perhaps learn from one another?

I’m going to talk about: one, what the EEAS European Union framework is and what it does well; two, what Disinfolklore is and does differently; three, the critical gaps in the European Union approach that Disinfolklore fills — that is not to denigrate the European Union framework, as I’ve mentioned, it’s trying to do a different thing than Disinfolklore is doing, but we are in the same sphere and in a way I’m using it as a foil to elaborate more on the Disinfolklore analytical method and to think it through myself; four, the institutional strengths of the EU that Disinfolklore needs; and five, a synthesis towards a combined approach.

Because one of the things I really have is — to quote Bono — three chords and the truth. I’ve got my Twitter account and various outlets. The European Union has the European Court of Justice. It has a sanctions framework. It has 27 of the most powerful economies in the world. It has all of these different institutional mechanisms which it can use and it has been using amazingly and in a really innovative way to sanction individuals who are found guilty of speech crimes. This is something which the owner of this platform is not very happy about. That is also perhaps what is motivating part, at least part, of Donald’s war against Europe.

Part One: What the EU Report Does Well

The report uses a metaphor from military doctrine because, as with Disinfolklore, FIMI is about national security. This isn’t a kind of add-on or cultural nicety. The same with Disinfolklore — for me, it was born in a war zone, born in eastern Ukraine, born on this bridge, in this liminal territory between the Russian occupiers and the Ukrainian military. This is a question of national security, whether we remain sovereign democratic countries and states.

Yes, it’s great to have a bit of media literacy and informed political debate and ways of building and consolidating our mental hygiene. But ultimately, from my perspective and also from the European Union’s perspective, this is about national security.

The report borrows the kill chain concept from cybersecurity and applies it to information operations. FIMI operations are mapped from planning and financing through production and amplification. I should say at this point, one of the big differences between the Disinfolklore analytical method and FIMI, and in fact most disinformation work, is that I see — and I’ve seen this since being in eastern Ukraine — the continuity between the online and offline worlds. For me, there’s no distinction between the methods Donald will use when he is in private trying to convince somebody to do his bidding, and the method he will use on Twitter to try and troll the United Kingdom into sending its aircraft carrier into the Strait of Hormuz. It’s the same structure — the rhetoric of hostage-taking, provocation logic, coercive control, this swinging of one minute I’m your friend, one minute I’m your enemy. It’s the same method Donald uses, the same method all wife beaters and coercive control addicts use, the same method that Epstein used, the same method that every Russian commander on the front uses to persuade their people to go to their deaths in a meat assault, all the way up the chain of command to Putler.

While for obvious reasons the European Union is dealing just with the online sphere and looking at kill chains and cybersecurity, the Disinfolklore analytical method and its value should be to provide a set of tools that work in the offline world just as well.

The Kill Chain and FIMI as a Service

Each stage in a FIMI incident is mapped from planning and financing — through, for instance, the chef sorcerer Prigozhin and his Internet Research Agency who got Brexit done and Donald elected the first time. We’ve got lots of first-hand testimony from inside the troll factories: the way they’re structured and organised, people have quotas, they’re given temnyky — which is the Ukrainian word for themes. “Your job this morning is 30 tweets attacking European leaders.” They go off and then they have their lunch hour, just like normal people with normal jobs, but their job is to pollute our minds with Disinfolklore.

FIMI operations are mapped with planning and financing through to production and amplification. Each stage becomes an intervention point. This is genuinely useful. It transforms FIMI from an amorphous problem that we see in our information space or through the words of a friend into a set of discrete, targetable phases.

The key insight is that the European Union has correctly identified that FIMI operates as an industry — what they call “FIMI as a Service.” Some of you might remember I wrote my piece “Genocide as a Service” about the Wagner military wing in Africa, where they move in and first provide some hardware — maybe a couple of planes, some tanks — and then they start providing what I call governance services.

The Galaxy Metaphor

At the Munich Security Conference, in which I declared the Disinfolklore Universe, I set out that we’re susceptible to being caught up in a concatenating series of Disinfolklore galaxies — like MAGA, like Russia-occupied Ukraine, like the Disinfolklore galaxy inside Russia. The European Union then a few weeks later — nothing to do with my speech — used the galaxy metaphor, but in a more concrete way, because what I’m always talking about is the system-wide effects of what I call Disinfolklore.

When Donald says what he says about Cuba being a woman ready, a weak woman ready to be taken — these are particular instances. It’s all very well dealing with them and looking at them as particular instances of Disinfolklore. But from my perspective, it’s the accumulation of billions of these incidences every day. Donald’s particular power is to, in the context of the Iran war, talk about 50 different things from 50 different perspectives. If you’re MAGA, you think the war is over. If you’re Iran, you just think it’s ridiculous. If you’re me, you’re just confused. There’s this whole system, the concatenating effects of individual instances of Disinfolklore.

That’s why for me, declaring the Disinfolklore Universe — where every aspect of our reality from the first moment we wake up each day is determined by Donald or Russia or a whole coalition — when you go to fill your car up at the petrol station, you’re worried about the price of fuel, or you have to make choices about food because you can’t afford fuel to get to your job. This is how the information space interacts with the inside of our minds.

The European Union uses a network graph to map approximately 3,000 core channels in a remarkable piece of infrastructure analysis. It reveals a central operational backbone of Russian-attributed channels surrounded by regional hubs targeting Moldova, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the MENA region. The identification of bridging nodes that connect the central infrastructure to regional clusters is operationally valuable.

Useful detail: only 9.5% of the channels are directly attributable to state actors. The remaining 90.5% are covert, state-linked, state-aligned, or unattributed. The iceberg metaphor is apt and important for policy audiences.

Disinfolklore’s Different Approach to Attribution

What I do in the Disinfolklore analytical method — I don’t care so much whether I can directly link a particular meme to a Russian state actor. If the energy in a meme is coercive control, for example, or is to destroy the post-World War II legal and social order, then I don’t care whether that’s coming from a domestic actor directly or from Russia or from MAGA. That is what, for me, marks it like a fluorescent dye as Disinfolklore.

From my perspective, the second element in the Code of Positive Trolls, which I use to determine whether a unit of information is folklore or Disinfolklore, is right or ethical discipline. That standard is set by the post-World War II legal and social order: the Genocide Convention, the UN Charter, the European Convention on Human Rights, the UN Declaration on Human Rights, and a whole plethora of treaties between states and the post-World War II Geneva Conventions.

If the particular meme is trying to denigrate international law — like practically everything that Donald does or anything that comes out of Russia — if I see that energy in a meme, that then becomes my point of operation. I’ll characterise that as being Disinfolklore. The European Union obviously has a different perspective and has to make sure it’s only dealing with material emanating from outside the European Union. But I think that if it developed an idea of what I call the mana in the meme — looking for the energy in particular memes — it would make their lives a lot easier.

Doppelganger and Information Manipulation Sets

The report’s tracking of specific information manipulation sets — Doppelganger, again, this comes from folklore. The term “Doppelganger” was used first by a European Union official when they discovered a network and particular disinformation modus operandi emanating from Russia, where they would fake pretend to be the Guardian — take a Guardian article, and then I might read and go, “Gosh, the Guardian saying this,” share it, and it gets shared on. Someone said, “This is a bit like the Doppelganger,” which is from Germanic folklore. This is part of my insight, my realisation since Disinfolklore, that we perceive so much of our reality, but especially stories and disinformation, through these lenses of folklore and what I call Disinfolklore.

Then the Russians saw that the European Union was calling these networks Doppelganger. In documents we’ve seen since, where these private entities in Russia are pitching for funding from the defence ministry or different ministries, they then use these European Union reports as evidence that they’re getting traction and that therefore they should be invested in. One of the really positive things you glean from reading these internal documents — when from time to time InformNapalm or other intelligence collectives manage to get their hands on them — is all of the lies the Russians are using inside their own institutions to try and get more funding. They are very bureaucratic.

Then they take on the mantle — Doppelganger. The Doppelganger’s Doppelganger, and it goes on. Like in a Mirror, Storm 1516, Operation Overload, Portal Combat, Spamouflage, Paperwall. These provide granular operational intelligence about how they work. The distinction between these different information manipulation sets, their behavioural signatures and their relative effectiveness, is excellent.

Storm 1516: The Exception That Proves the Rule

Storm 1516 stands out as the only information manipulation set generating genuine organic engagement, which is a critical finding. Really interesting — that so much of the effect of Russian disinformation can now be empirically demonstrated to be itself evidence of misinformation. Because when you look at it empirically, it’s only Storm 1516 which genuinely generates organic engagement. I, for one, will be looking more closely at their kind of content and what they’re doing.

The first European Union threats report rather oddly said that AI wasn’t anticipated to have any effect on disinformation. My eyebrows and others’ were raised at the time, but they’ve now recanted on that because in this fourth report, there’s a 259% increase in AI-related TTPs — that’s from cybersecurity and military speak: Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures.

The Mana in the Meme vs TTPs

When I talk about the mana in the meme, I’m talking about whether you can see the energy of ungenerosity — as we saw with Donald talking about how, if a country’s hit with a hurricane, he’s really quite tight-fisted, doesn’t want to give them any money to save their lives. If you see the mana against the post-World War II legal order, then you know prima facie it’s probably Disinfolklore — don’t let it into your inner mind, don’t repeat it, don’t let it affect you. Just move past it.

What the European Union looks at is TTPs: techniques, tactics, and procedures. You can see in the signature of certain ways in which disinformation is broadcast. For instance, if it’s using fake websites under the name of genuine publications and you don’t know anything else about it, then you know it’s probably Russian because it’s the same technique, tactic, and procedure they’re using — they’ve registered a domain name, and on the balance of probabilities you can tell it’s Russian.

The report identifies three AI challenges. LLM grooming — Portal Combat is this large language model grooming. The Russians are using AI to create content which is then used to skew the weightings inside large language models, so that when you put in a question — “Who’s the fairest country of them all?” — you get, “Russia, the big bear is.” Portal Combat: flooding the information space to contaminate training data. Cognitive chaos: erosion of trust through synthetic content saturation — that’s Donald’s main tool as well. Algorithm influence: volume-driven feed manipulation. This is what we’re dealing with every day on this app.

This tracks directly into my concerns about AI companions affecting mind streams. I’ve talked recently about how the Code of Positive Trolls can also mediate our relationship with AI chatbots, just as it can mediate our relationship with our social media feeds or with people in our lives who cause chaos in our minds or in our communities.

Part Two: What Disinfolklore Sees That the EU Doesn’t

This is my central critique — which is, again, not to denigrate but really just to illustrate what I do by comparison to the European Union. I’m just one person with an idea and a lot of energy to try and operationalise it, whereas of course it’s a huge institution.

The EEAS report is extraordinarily sophisticated about infrastructure, channels, organisational structures. It’s remarkably thin on actual content — the narratives, the archetypal structures, the psychological mechanisms through which disinformation actually works on human minds.

The report’s analytical framework has three layers: the who (organisational structures), the how (digital infrastructure), and the what (FIMI activities and contents). But the “what” layer is the least developed — yet probably the most developed for me.

The deterrence playbook has detailed triggers and effects for sanctions and law enforcement targeting the who and how layers. For the content layer, the tools are limited to content removal and amplification disruption. There’s no framework for understanding why certain content works, why certain narratives penetrate authentic discourse while others fail. My answer to that is my discovery that the Russians were using archetypal Disinfolklore.

The EEAS can tell you that Storm 1516 has generated four million views on a particular video. It cannot tell you why that video resonated, what archetypal structures it activated, what emotional journey it induced in the viewer, or how to inoculate populations against that specific form of narrative sorcery. Disinfolklore can.

The 5Ds vs the Twelve Tools

The EU uses the 5Ds framework — dismiss, distract, distort, dismay, divide — from the Disarm Foundation to categorise Russia’s and China’s strategic objectives. Let me say, I would love to see the European Court of Justice — and I will campaign for this over the next few decades — adopt the Code of Positive Trolls. I used the term “code” originally as a lawyer because it does operate as a test, the kind of six-limb test introduced in many different areas of European Union law and our domestic jurisdictions.

The 5Ds are a useful typology of intent, but they operate entirely at the level of the operator’s purpose. They say nothing about the recipient’s experience. My twelve-tool framework at disinfolklore.eu operates at both ends of the transmission.

The first six are detection tools: archetypal Disinfolklore literacy; incoming and outgoing troll radars; look for the mana in the meme; the four dimensions — moods, attitudes, intentions, motivations. Sometimes the first feeling you get that you are being manipulated — and this is what I try to imbue myself with when I find myself really confused, as I have since the beginning of these attacks on Iran — is if my incoming troll radar is activated and I’m detecting my mood, my attitude, my intention, my motivations being changed by information coming into my mind. That sometimes is the first clue I get that someone is trying to manipulate me. That allows me to triage — like when you go into a hospital — triage certain informational units in a particular container in my outer mind for closer examination. Or if I’m in a rush and just don’t have headspace to deal with stuff, I just dismiss it. If it’s ungenerous, like anything coming from Donald at this point, I just dismiss, except for pedagogical purposes because he’s such a great example. I designed the Code of Positive Trolls to try and understand and confront and counter what Donald was doing in 2019, back in those ancient days. Now we see he’s wrapping humanity up inside this craziness.

Then the other detection tools: the trigger-experience-reaction model, which I take from Paul Ekman and the Dalai Lama. I’ve done podcasts on that before — it’s up on the disinfolklore.eu website. Understanding how Disinfolklorists construct their output.

The second six — which is the Code of Positive Trolls: generosity; ethical discipline or right; patience (if someone’s trying to get you to be urgent, to make you make a decision right now, then you know someone is trying to manipulate you — just somehow get out of that moment); energy/mana is the fourth element; focus/mindfulness, which is necessary to maintain — by mindfulness I mean being mindful of what you allow into your mind; and the final is insight/wisdom.

These are the response tools that address our individual capacity to resist Disinfolklore. The structural difference: the European Union’s 5Ds classify what the attacker is trying to do. The twelve tools equip the defender to understand what is happening to them, to us, and how to respond. One is a taxonomy of offence; the other is a practice of defence. The European Union has the taxonomy of offence. It does not have the practice of defence.

Archetypal Depth: 6,000 Years of Indo-European Culture

The European Union acknowledges that FIMI narratives are repetitive and predictable. It documents the three-phase Russian election interference playbook: delegitimise leadership, weaponise divisions, undermine electoral integrity. But it treats this repetitiveness as a feature of Russian operational doctrine. Disinfolklore goes deeper.

My framework traces these narrative structures, these archetypes, back through 6,000 years of Indo-European culture. The inner-outer realm switching that I documented at Stanytsia Luhanska, where Russian-speaking Mariupol mothers were instantaneously re-archetyped as dead Ukrainian Nazis — that is not a Russian TTP, not a Russian tactic, technique, or procedure. It’s an ancient mechanism of exclusion and dehumanisation that Russia has weaponised. The Trito myth, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the trickster tale — which the Middle Eastern countries are living right now. You give Donald a gold-plated Boeing 747 and all you get in return is 100 Shahed drones attacking your infrastructure. When you say to Donald, “But you said you’d protect us,” all you get is, “How about another jet?”

The trickster tale. We learned these when we were children and these have been passed on and on, whether in the Arabian Nights or Chaucer’s tales or folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, or indeed in the folklore which Mockers reads on Volya Radio each morning. These are structural patterns that predate any state actor. That’s the depth I help provide.

Why this matters operationally: if you only understand FIMI as Russian or Chinese state behaviour, your response is limited to targeting those states. If you understand it as a weaponisation of deep archetypal structures that are hardwired into Indo-European cognition, you can build genuine cognitive immunity because you can teach people to recognise this pattern regardless of who deploys it — whether it’s in your own household or in your own community or from Russia.

The Missing Mana Dimension

The European Union report exhaustively catalogues channels and observables. It counts, it maps, it attributes. But nowhere does it ask: what is the energy inside the meme? What is the affective charge that makes one piece of content resonate and another fall flat?

My concept of mana — the energy embedded in informational units that impacts moods, attitudes, intentions, and motivations — is precisely what the EEAS framework lacks. The report notes that most AI-generated FIMI content is low quality and generates limited organic engagement. It notes that Storm 1516 is the exception, but there’s no framework for explaining why. In my terms: most FIMI content carries weak or misaligned mana. Storm 1516 succeeds because it plugs into authentic fears and archetypal structures that carry real affective charge.

My Finding Manuland research — you’ll see the Manuland section on disinfolklore.eu — traces the etymological and semantic and hermeneutical link between the mana energy, the M-N in mana and energy, and money — it’s in M-money as well — through 6,000 years of M-N sound patterns. The EEAS report documents Russia’s 146.3 billion rouble media budget, about 1.56 billion euros. The linguistic archaeology tells us something the budget line does not: money and mana are cognates. The resources flow where the energy is. Understanding the energy is understanding the resource allocation.

The Sympathetic Magic Lens

The sympathetic magic lens, which is a relatively new lens I’ve introduced alongside war magic, propagation apparatus, folklore-like archetypes, and gender lenses — that offers analytical depth which the European Union framework entirely lacks.

The European Union report documents that during the German elections, Russian accounts shared AI-generated images of apocalyptic versions of German landscapes engulfed in chaos and crime. In the European Union framework, this is categorised as a technique within the “distort” strategic objective. In my framework, this is sympathetic magic — the creation of images (image, mage — it’s that sound, from early Indo-European languages). The creation of images intended to bring about the reality they depict. It’s contagion — I use the word mana, which is contagion energy — in the Frazerian sense. James George Frazer, who first set out the laws of sympathetic magic: law of opposites, law of similarity. The image infects the viewer’s inner mind with a vision that then shapes perception of the real world.

The practical difference: understanding this as sympathetic magic immediately suggests countermeasures that content removal cannot. You cannot remove images from minds. You can teach people to recognise the magical mechanism. This is what archetypal Disinfolklore literacy does.

The Individual Mind

The European Union report is almost entirely systemic. It addresses states, institutions, platforms, regulations, and sanctions. That’s why I say it is doing a different thing than I’m doing, and I’m not criticising it in a negative sense. Its resilience-building pillar mentions media literacy and capacity building across institutions and civil society, but it never descends to the level of the individual mind — whereas that’s my primary interest.

Disinfolklore is fundamentally a practice for the individual. Trigger, experience, reaction — that’s the model I take from Paul Ekman, who died recently but is the genius who basically established the whole area of micro-expressions revealing true intentions and feelings, which is of great interest to computer vision specialists. He and the Dalai Lama developed the Timeline of Emotions model: trigger, experience, reaction — which I apply to our timelines where you’re triggered by something, you experience a feeling (one of the five primary feelings of disgust, sadness, and others that Ekman set out), and then the space between our experience of the feeling and how we react to it — that’s the space we can control if we have our incoming troll radar actualised and we’re mindful of what’s coming into our mind.

If, for instance, we scan for ungenerosity and use that as a proxy for an informational unit or meme that we should not share — because we’re just passing on negative energy — and if we’re particularly disgusted by something, it may be that it is targeted at our vulnerability. This is what ISIS was able to amazingly do with all of its horrid Disinfolklore ten or fifteen years ago, like a world before.

The Code of Positive Trolls provides a personal ethical framework for navigating information warfare. “Is there generosity in this message?” is a question any one of us can ask. “Does this violate the Digital Services Act?” — well, not really, not unless you’re a very clever lawyer, because it’s an amazing piece of legislation but it’s pretty complicated.

The Post-World War II Legal Order

Both frameworks share a normative foundation in defending the post-World War II legal order. But the European Union locates this defence in institutional mechanisms — sanctions, regulation, law enforcement. I locate it additionally in individual moral agency: our capacity to refuse to be trolled, to refuse to share the Disinfolklore, to refuse to participate in the destruction of our own civilisation. Both are necessary. Neither alone is sufficient.

Part Three: What the EU Has That Disinfolklore Needs

The European Union has — since I’m just one person, really — institutional scale and data: 540 encoded incidents last year, 10,500 channels mapped, 43,000 observables, a network analysis capability, a STIX-encoded threat intelligence sharing system, and the backing of 27 member states. Disinfolklore has a one-million-word corpus and a single analytical mind. The European Union can scan the entire FIMI ecosystem. I can go deep — archaeological excavation over 6,000 years of history for individual archetypes. Both are needed.

The deterrence playbook is something Disinfolklore does not yet have the equivalent for. My framework tells us how to see and resist Disinfolklore. It does not yet systematically address how to raise costs for the producers of Disinfolklore. The European Union’s integration of sanctions, law enforcement, digital regulation, and resilience building into a single kill chain framework is a genuine institutional innovation. It’s a concept that you can make FIMI a losing proposition through cumulative cost imposition. That’s powerful.

Forward-looking capability: the EEAS’s ability to predict, say, that the Moldova playbook could be redeployed elsewhere is derived from systematic infrastructure monitoring. The report identifies upcoming elections in Slovenia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Sweden, Latvia, and Denmark as potential targets. This kind of early warning system requires institutional resources that individual practitioners do not have. If you’re trying to persuade a government like Bulgaria or Latvia or Sweden to take preventative measures, then the European Union’s approach is what’s required.

The distinction between overt channels — 2.5% official state, 7% state-controlled — and covert channels — state-linked, and 86% state-aligned — and the rigorous methodology for moving between these categories is essential for legal and diplomatic responses. Disinfolklore’s analytical power does not depend on attribution, which is both a strength (it works regardless of who is doing it) and a limitation (it cannot directly feed into sanctions designations). Not yet — but I think a lot about that point.

Part Four: Towards a Synthesis

The fundamental complementarity: the European Union sees the plumbing. Disinfolklore sees the poison. The EEAS maps the pipes, identifies the pumping stations, and proposes blocking the flow. Disinfolklore analyses the composition of what’s flowing through the pipes, explains why it is toxic, and teaches people to recognise and resist it. Neither approach alone can win the information war.

Where both frameworks converge: both recognise that FIMI/Disinfolklore is deliberate and strategic, not random. Both identify repetitive patterns that can be anticipated. Both understand that Ukraine is the central battleground. Both locate the normative stakes in the defence of democratic systems and the post-World War II legal order. Both recognise that AI is transforming the threat. Both understand that resilience is ultimately the most sustainable defence. The EEAS’s observation that most FIMI content fails to generate organic engagement validates the Disinfolklore insight that weak mana does not penetrate authentic discourse.

Where They Diverge and Why It Matters

The European Union framework is horizontal and systemic — it scans across the entire threat landscape simultaneously. Disinfolklore is vertical and archaeological — it digs deep into individual archetypal narratives, tracing their structures back millennia. The EEAS treats content as the output of a supply chain. Disinfolklore treats content as the deployment of ancient cognitive weaponry. The EEAS framework targets the producer. Disinfolklore’s response framework empowers the consumer.

The Automation Bridge

Here is where the two frameworks could converge operationally. I mentioned this last week — I’m working on automating the Disinfolklore analytical method via neural network training, using my one-million-word corpus on disinfolklore.eu as training data, with autoresearch and BitNet as target architectures.

The European Union already encodes its incidents in STIX format. If the twelve tools could be operationalised as classifiers trained on my corpus, they could be applied at scale to the EEAS’s 43,000 observables.

Imagine: each detected FIMI incident not only categorised by its 5D strategic objective, but also analysed for its archetypal structure, its mana charge, its sympathetic magic mechanisms, and its trigger-experience-reaction pathway. That would be a merger of institutional scale and analytical depth. We now have the models — which I’m experimenting with — that can do this, that have the kind of semantic depth to do this.

Anthropic’s Claude — Claude Code, for instance — was able to find premonitions of my insight about archetypal Disinfolklore, which I first wrote explicitly about in December 2024, when I first used the term in reference to Syria — the Potemkin state archetypal Disinfolklore of data-resistant archetypes of a Potemkin state. Claude Code was able to find premonitions of this going back years into my work, and some really interesting ones that I hadn’t seen. You could see these ghosts and premonitions of what I had thought. This is very personally gratifying and fascinating, but it also demonstrates the power of these tools to find examples of sympathetic magic, for instance.

Three Proposals

My three proposals to end with:

Proposal One: An Archetypal Layer for the FIMI Toolbox.

The EEAS deterrence playbook has four instruments: sanctions, law enforcement, digital regulation, resilience building. A fifth instrument should be added: archetypal literacy. This would sit within the resilience-building pillar but go beyond generic media literacy. It would teach specific recognition of the folkloric, folklore-like, and mythological structures that Disinfolklorists consciously and unconsciously weaponise: inner-outer realm switching, trickster tales, sympathetic magic, dehumanisation archetypes. My twelve tools, packaged for institutional educational deployment, could form the curriculum.

Proposal Two: A Mana Index for FIMI Incidents.

The EEAS currently categorises incidents by attribution, platform, geography, and 5D objective. A mana index — a measure of the affective charge and psychological penetration potential of content — would help prioritise response. Storm 1516 succeeds where Doppelganger and Overload fail precisely because its content carries higher mana, higher manipulative energy. It pulsates, it vibrates our mana. Quantifying this would be a significant analytical advance. We now have the neural network algorithms that are able to do this.

Proposal Three: The Counter-Archetyping Dimension.

The European Union report mentions strategic communication as a component of resilience building, but has no framework for counter-archetyping — the act of creating alternative narrative structures that displace Disinfolklore. NAFO is the best organic example of counter-archetyping in world history: individuals re-archetyping themselves with avatars that are charming, beautiful, lovely, agreeable, kind, not egotistical, humbly joyous. With these avatars, they re-archetype information in the information space and undermine and destroy the power of Russian Disinfolklore. This is narrative and archetypal warfare conducted with positive mana. A systematic counter-archetyping capability informed by 6,000 years of Indo-European narrative knowledge would be a powerful addition to the FIMI toolbox.

Conclusion: Dismantling the House of Cards, Breaking the Spell

The European Union report has a subtitle: “Dismantling the FIMI House of Cards.” Again, using this image from folklore — House of Cards. It is the right metaphor for the infrastructure. Pull out the right card — a sanctioned entity, a seized server, a deplatformed network — and the structure collapses.

But the narratives are not cards. They’re spells. They’re ancient patterns of meaning-making that have been weaponised. You cannot dismantle a spell by seizing the spell book. You dismantle it by teaching people to see the sorcery for what it is.

The EEAS gives us the capacity to dismantle the house of cards. Disinfolklore gives us the capacity to break the spell. We need both. The house of cards is the delivery mechanism. The spell is the payload. Kill the delivery mechanism and the operators will rebuild it. Break the spell and the payload loses its power regardless of how it is delivered.

This is the conversation I want us to have.

The Arc of a Word: Four Years of Re-Archetyping

I wanted to reflect on the four years of war. So everything everyone’s been talking about for the last hour and a half or so, hopefully it will strike a chord with them. I want to go through the four years of the war, not merely as battles, though we’ll visit some, but as a journey through Disinfolklore, through the archetypes we project onto Ukraine, through the archetypes Russia projects onto all of us, and through how Ukraine has fought back — not just with weapons, but by re-archetyping itself inside our minds.

Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy

Because, as I wrote, Disinfolklore is how you conceal a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Disinfolklore is how yohu pull the wool over people’s eyes, and this works both ways. So all of us on Volia and who contribute to Volia from day one have been re-archetyping and counter-archetyping against what Russia has been trying to do to Ukraine in the information space, and what many others have been trying to do to Ukraine unconsciously in the information space.

So this is a process we’ve all been involved in. I didn’t have the words for it when the war broke out, but because of the war, I do now. And I want to tell you the story of that word — not the word Disinfolklore, though we’ll get to that, but the word archetype.

Because here’s the thing. For the first two years of the war, we were doing something I had no name for and we perhaps had no name for. We were doing it instinctively. We were re-archetyping Russia, re-archetyping Ukraine, re-archetyping the entire war through memes before we had the vocabulary to describe what we were doing. And the arc of what I was going to talk about tonight is the arc of that word, from instinct to naming to power (mana).

The Bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska

So that word, archetyping. While many anti-disinformation specialists describe themselves as working on the front line of the information war, as many of you will have heard a million times, I worked on the actual zero line between 2015 and 2018, separating Russian from Ukrainian army. I worked at the actual geographical and physical separation point between two of the greatest armies in human history. Because between 2015 and 2022 I was in Ukraine as a diplomat, again as you’ll know, and for three years at that time I was at the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska.

And I intuited there was something folkloric about the situation there. Armed men on both sides, civilians crossing — pensioners, mostly, collecting their Ukrainian pension from one side and returning to Russian-occupied territory on the other side. And at the checkpoints, Russian-controlled trolls. Not internet trolls — actual literal bridge trolls, the oldest archetype in European folklore. Of course, I didn’t really know that consciously at the time.

In the manner of a 19th-century folklore collector, I collected the stories that Russia used to brainwash Ukrainians living across the river in Russia-occupied Ukraine. And in 2016, I made a discovery that changed my life: that Russia was using Jung’s theory of archetypes to manipulate the moods, attitudes, motivations, and intentions of consumers of its combat propaganda.

In the woods near Stanytsia Luhanska bridge, Russian FSB operatives — archetyping themselves as the Stalinist era’s KGB predecessor, the MGB — in occupied Luhansk, constructed a story containing these archetypes: “my common-law spouse who lives with her underage daughter.” There was, in the labyrinthine layers of this incident, the jarring recognition of artificiality. My jarring recognition. The story contained Jung’s primary archetypes — the Mother and the Maiden — as if someone had a manual containing all of the primordial archetypes and had constructed the story to ensure it contained these elements.

Eight years later, I understood. I had discovered how Russia and MAGA purposefully and purposely reverse-engineer tales with fairy-tale and folktale-like emotional resonances as a means of hacking our minds, hacking our consent, and undermining our civilization. Disinfolklore is what I named it — the folklore of disinformation, the disinformation of folklore, both at once.

Druidy Don and the Battlefield

So in the autumn of 2019, I was really trying to understand what Druidy Don — Trump’s power, his mana — consisted of. I wanted to understand it in order to counter it. At the time, I was a diplomat in eastern Ukraine, based in Dnipro at that point. I could see how Donald’s trolling even then had real-world effects on the battlefield. When Donald withheld Javelin missile systems from Ukraine, demanding that President Zelensky announce an investigation into the son of President Biden, I watched from Dnipro and from areas which are now occupied in Zaporizhzhia as the balance of power shifted. President Zelensky navigated out of that trap. Donald got impeached. President Zelensky escaped. But the lesson was seared into my mind: the information war and the kinetic war are the same war.

Year One: Instinct

On the morning of the 24th of February 2022, I had been out of Ukraine for three weeks. I listened very carefully to President Biden’s strategic disclosures in the fall of 2021. And by the end of November, after a conversation with my father about them, I had all my car packed. I was ready to leave at ten minutes’ notice. I thought the invasion would probably happen at Christmas, but when it didn’t, I made the decision to leave and I crossed the border on the 29th of January 2022. And I marked it with a tweet on Twitter — just a picture of my cat and me at the border with Poland, but not saying that I was leaving Ukraine or why I was leaving Ukraine. I just slipped out of Ukraine, because I didn’t want to scare the horses and I had no access to any secret information. I just had access to the same information others had, but I became convinced that the invasion was going to come.

So that morning of February 24th 2022, I was back home in a remote part of Ireland. And my first tweet was two words: Slava Ukraini. Glory to Ukraine. That’s all I could manage. I was still an OSCE diplomat at the time, and I had to model impartiality. So I was still being cautious online. I’d never mentioned Ukraine online up to that point.

Germany’s initial response to the invasion, as our great German listener was still saying — although rightly you have nothing to be ashamed of now — but Germany’s response to the invasion: 5,000 helmets. Not rifles, not anti-tank missiles. Helmets, to fight 190,000 invaders. I remember that the head of the BND was in Kyiv, and I assumed he had been there to try and extricate President Zelensky, in my naivety. But I share your shock that these people had access to all this information, clearly not only did not see the invasion coming — they didn’t see the invasion coming. “You’ve only got a few hours” was how one German official put it to the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany. There’s no point in putting sanctions or exiting Russia from SWIFT. You’ve only got a few hours. Get out, save yourselves — was the basic message, which I also delivered to friends of mine in Ukraine. And maybe I would say the same thing today, but it shocks me and impresses me that many of the people I knew in Dnipro didn’t leave. They were like, “This is our home, we’re not leaving.”

RF’s Mythos Is Done

And on February 28th, I wrote nine words: “Why Russian Federation is doomed by this venture. RF’s mythos is done.” Russia’s Federation’s mythos is done. I did not have a word for what I was witnessing, but what I was witnessing on day four of the full-scale invasion was the destruction of an archetype. Russia had spent centuries constructing a mental archetype, a mental model, a data-resistant archetype of itself as an unstoppable colossus. In four days, Ukraine broke it.

For those incidents that Latyn was just talking about and many others — we were looking at these data points and they didn’t match our archetype of what a proper army, how a properly prepared army would behave.

Reverse Napoleon

And on day five of the invasion, I made a call that has held true for four years: Russia in Ukraine has done a reverse Napoleon. Tolstoy brilliantly shows Russian Field Marshal Kutuzov’s strategy in War and Peace. Draw the French further and further in so their supply lines are stretched. Napoleon sat in Moscow waiting for surrender. They never did. And so it goes. This is exactly where we are still, four years later.

And the evidence I used which prompted this tweet was a Telegram post from the 27th of February 2022 from a Russian soldier complaining that no one of the invading force could communicate with their commanders. “Almost no one can get a hold of central command. It’s not even a matter of jamming. There’s just no long-range comms equipment or relays that went with the troops there.” Now, as Telegram and Starlink are no longer available to Russia’s forces four years later, we see the seeds of the future were imminent in those first few days.

And the data point that had led me to understand the significance of this lack of communication was — I always remember reading or hearing when I was much younger about how when America went into Grenada, the Army and the Navy or the Air Force, they couldn’t communicate with each other. They discovered their radios weren’t compatible. So that was always in the back of my mind, and then when I saw this, I thought, this is a good sign for Ukraine but a terrible sign for Russia.

Russia had invaded with insufficient forces and overextended supply lines, just as Napoleon had done in reverse. And then I added the Tolstoy inversion: Russia had become the thing its foundational myth celebrates defeating. The national archetype had been inverted. This is what re-archetyping looks like when history does it for you.

The Economist, 1854

On March 6th, I published a thread that was picked up by the Washington Post about the Crimean War of 1854. It was an article in The Economist from 168 years earlier. I had found this article in The Economist a couple of years earlier to try and understand the history of the first Crimean War. This is The Economist speaking: “We ventured” — this is my 19th-century British accent — “we ventured to hint that it might be worthwhile for Europe to go to war with Russia for the sake of information, in order to ascertain whether her strength was that of the bully or the giant.”

1854, and not much has changed. Paper armies, corrupt officers, indifferent soldiers, stolen boots, rotten food. The Crimean War thread proved that Russia’s weakness is not a 2022 aberration. It’s a structural feature. It’s a deep archetype, documented identically 160 years ago.

The Economist went further. By 1855 their verdict was in: “Till a free press be permitted in Russia and encouraged to unveil and denounce abuses. Till the rights and feelings of annexed territories be habitually respected. We do not think that Russia need henceforth be considered as formidable for aggression. She has been unmasked.” She has been unmasked. 1855, 2022. The same verdict, the same bully pretending to be a giant.

On March 6th 2022, I deployed history as a weapon, proving that Russia was never a giant, always a bully. The archetype of Russian military power was a fraud. And it was a fraud 168 years ago.

Let’s Compare Trolls

On March 30th, five weeks into the war, I published a thread that I now recognise as probably my most important act of re-archetyping — but again, I didn’t have a word for it at that point. “Let’s compare trolls. Putin versus President Zelensky. First, Putin looks like a troll. He got that Nordic-Russian troll look nailed. His every communication is a troll for emotional reaction in others.”

That insight: Putin is a 20th-century troll. His one trick is emotionally resonant communications designed to wound. Zelensky is a 21st-century troll — hyper-modern, self-aware, working at a meta-civilisational level. “President Zelensky’s very” — this is in the tweet — “his very existence as a secular, native Russian-language-speaking, cosmopolitan Ukrainian Jewish cultural engineer makes him uninterpretable to a securocrat like Putin, whose entire troll about Ukraine is that it’s far-right and Nazi.”

President Zelensky does not merely resist the archetype Putin has assigned to Ukraine. His very being shatters it. He is an archetype-breaker by existing.

At the time, I framed this as trolling. I did not yet have the word re-archetyping. Putler archetypes Ukraine as Nazi and far-right, but we can re-archetype. This is the power all of us have. This is the power that Will and everyone in this space is exercising, and all of the brain-dead cartoon dogs are engaging in without necessarily having a word for it. And I didn’t yet have that word, re-archetyping, but that is exactly what I was doing, and what we were all doing. I was re-archetyping avant la lettre.

Bucha and the Archetype of Violence

When Bucha was liberated, when the BND intercepted radio traffic showing troops spoke of atrocities as though they were discussing their everyday lives, I understood something fundamental. Russists treat Ukraine as they think women deserve to be treated — like corpses. Putin himself revealed this logic. He likened Ukraine to a dead woman. Again, another act of archetyping. “Like it or not, take it, my beauty” — a reference to a vulgar Russian rhyme about necrophiliac rape by the Soviet-era hard rock band called Red Mold, and the song is called Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin. Archetypal. Disinfolklore in the mouth of Putler, and used as evidence of genocidal intent in the New Lines Institute’s first of its two great reports looking into Russia’s genocidal intent in the war in Ukraine.

The Sinking of the Moskva

On April 14th, two Ukrainian Neptune missiles sank the Moskva. Who among us will forget that day? The flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, the most powerful warship in the Black Sea, destroyed by a country that wasn’t supposed to have a navy.

The missile’s name — Neptune. I traced it: the ancient Ukrainian, Proto-Indo-European word neptio, “brother’s or sister’s son.” Neptune evolved from that meaning into a god. The Neptune missile that sank Russia’s flagship carries a name coined in ancient Ukraine. Proto-Indo-European — ancient Ukrainian — Neptune. Ukraine’s 5,000-year-old language, Proto-Indo-European, or “ancient Ukrainian” as I re-archetype Indo-European now that we know where it emanates from, gave the world the word that became the god, that became the missile, that sunk the Russian war flagship. Mythological full circle. The re-archetyping extends 5,000 years into the deep past and arrives on April 14th 2022 in a ball of fire in the Black Sea.

And yet still, many people didn’t get the memo. They didn’t understand that Ukraine was re-archetyping as a giant in the minds of humanity.

Genies Released

And on that same day, I issued a warning about the genies that Ukraine would release. Those of us who know Ukraine well knew that Ukrainian innovation would change warfare permanently. “Ukrainians will make their fellow Indo-European Pashtuns look like amateurs. Genies will be released.” And so it goes. The Pashtuns may have had their IEDs, which caused havoc, but they didn’t have drones. And the genies that have been released by Ukraine four years later — Ukraine manufactures over a million drones a month. We’ve seen these attacks. This seems a highly significant attack on the Druzhba pipeline, possibly using the Flamingo missiles the other day. And the genie that was released at Zaporizhzhia, at Kharkiv, at Bakhmut — it will never be rebottled.

Mariupol and May 9th

Between March 1st and May 9th 2022, Russia killed between 25,000 and 100,000 civilians in Mariupol. Up to 100,000 people in a single city in 70 days. And they did this for the date. They wanted to present the archetype of a conquest of Mariupol as a gift to Putler for Victory Day on May 9th. Instead, we had the image which will be forever seared on my brain, and I share it as often as possible, of Blankie Putler sitting with his blanket, afraid of the cold, on the May 9th Victory Day parade.

“Now and in time to be, wherever yellow and blue is worn, are changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born.” Russia forges Ukraine’s mythos one dumb bomb at a time. This insight — that Russia is creating the very Ukrainian national mythology it sought to destroy. Each bomb forges the archetype. I wrote about that on May 9th.

Severodonetsk

The fight then moved on to places I knew best. When I see these images of shelled Severodonetsk, where I lived for three years, I think of the stray cats and dogs. Every apartment building’s basement was a warm home to them. I learned that my gentle and kind neighbour in Severodonetsk was simply torn to pieces from a direct hit. And that’s the word of my erstwhile landlady. Russia murdered 10,000 of my former neighbours in that city.

The Conceptual DNA of Disinfolklore

But that summer, something else was happening. The toolkit I was evolving was crystallising. On July 18th, I published a thread that is the conceptual DNA of Disinfolklore: “Rashist disinfo works in bulk. We need to deal with it in bulk. It’s modern mythology. It’s folk wisdom for our era. Analytical tools and comparative mythology are therefore amazingly helpful to unpacking layers of bullshit meaning of memes and countering the nonsense.”

On the 21st of July, the Provocation Logic Cycle was systematised by me.

On August 17th, the death of a Wagner propagandist in that strike in Popasna — that again many of us will never forget — was eulogised as having “gone to Odin’s army.” This triggered a thread that mapped the entire Indo-European first function, the sovereignty function, the pantheon, onto modern information warfare. The punchline: all these gods originated in ancient Ukraine, the very territory Wagner was trying to destroy.

Manuland

On the 21st of August, I coined the term Manuland, which is a counter-geography to Dugin’s Eurasianism. Centred on Ukraine, Manuland stretches from Ireland to India.

On the 23rd of August, I wrote one sentence that connects mythology to geography: “Europa mated with Zeus at the Maidan in central Kyiv on November 13th 2013. The thunder resonates still today in the sky above occupied Sevastopol.” Zeus — Zeus Pater in Proto-Indo-European, the Sky Father, the supreme deity of the Indo-European world — Jupiter, the very concept of divine sovereignty, all forged in ancient Ukraine. And when Europe’s protesters gathered at the Maidan in 2013 to demand a European future, they were, in the deepest mythological sense, returning to the source. Europa mated with Zeus. The mythology and the revolution converge at the same coordinates.

Kharkiv Counter-Offensive

And on September 6th, the Kharkiv counter-offensive shattered Russia’s lines. I immediately, as many of us did, forecast Muscovy’s death spiral. Two weeks later, on September 20th, I produced the concept that was one of my more original but sad contributions: stealth genocide. For eight years, under a variety of linguistic fictions, Muscovy has been forcing Ukrainians to kill Ukrainians. Forced mobilisations in occupied Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk have pitched Ukrainians, fictionally termed “separatists,” against Ukrainians.

And then in September, the war turned. The Kharkiv counter-offensive — again, who among us will forget those days? Balaklia, Kupiansk, Izium, liberated in a matter of days. The most dramatic military reversal of the 21st century. “Like failure in Afghanistan, plus Chernobyl, plus the end of the USSR, plus 50% extra trauma, because little brother Ukraine did it to Muscovy.” That’s what I wrote at the time. Russia had spent centuries calling Ukraine “little brother.” The humiliation of being defeated by the entity you deny exists. This was not merely a military setback. It was an identity crisis. Little Brother had re-archetyped the relationship by force.

By this point, Ukraine had taken over the meme space entirely. Russia, the country that pioneered internet trolling, that built troll factories in St Petersburg, had lost control of the narrative to a nation of 42 million people armed with smartphones and a devastatingly dark sense of humour.

The Founding of Disinfolklore

And then in the final days of Year One, in February 2023, in a 10-day outburst of 11 Substack posts, I published the foundational texts of Disinfolklore: the bridge origin story, the Three Billy Goats Gruff, the working definition, the mana metaphysics, the folkloric parsing of Russian intelligence operations.

And on the 18th of February, five days before the first anniversary, I published a tweet that reached 800,000 people: “I engineered the term Disinfolklore from my experience as a diplomat on that bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska in eastern Ukraine. For several years, I negotiated daily with armed Russian bridge trolls, guarding their rebel troll kingdom from Ukrainian armed forces.” That was the most viral moment of my online career, such as it is.

The year that began with Slava Ukraini ended with the founding of Disinfolklore. Throughout Year One, I had been re-archetyping Russia, Ukraine, the entire war instinctively. The Crimean War thread re-archetyped Russia from giant to bully. “Let’s compare trolls” re-archetyped Putler from strongman to frightened old man with a blankie. “Ukraine is not a supplicant” re-archetyped Ukraine from victim to superpower. Stealth genocide re-archetyped the entire 2014–2022 period from frozen conflict to active extermination.

But I did not yet have a word. The word was archetype. I was still encountering people — friends, nice people, humanists, pro-human rights — they hadn’t been watching as closely as I had, and yet they still had the same archetypal perception of Ukraine that they had had at the beginning of the war: helpless victim, a damsel in distress. “We’d love to help you, but honestly, we can’t.” That kind of attitude also led me to this. I was reshaping archetypes without calling them that. I was doing it the way a musician plays before learning to read notation — by feel, by instinct, by accumulated pressure — as all of us have been doing.

Year Two: Building the Theory

So at the start of Year Two, Disinfolklore was just a word, a clever portmanteau with a powerful origin story about a bridge. By the end of Year Two, it was a complete analytical framework. In Year Two, I published 3,496 original tweets and 141 Substack posts and launched the podcast series and maintained an output of one Substack post a day for three months on Disinfolklore. But the numbers missed the point. Year Two was also the year that I became a bit of a theorist, where I was trying to get into the underpinnings of what the Russians were doing.

The Incursions of May 2023

On the 31st of May 2023, the most extraordinary counter-Disinfolklore operation unfolded. Ukraine unleashed a series of incursions into Russian territory that left the Kremlin’s information apparatus paralysed. Who among us will forget those days? Who among us will forget how we believed once again? This would change everything.

Instantly, the archetypes in people’s minds — nice people, people like foreign correspondents in newspapers — would see this and go, “Wow, Ukraine is a giant. We need to help Ukraine.” I wrote at the time: “Let’s appreciate the scale and beauty of the operation Ukraine has unleashed inside Muscovy. This is art.” So the very people in Russia who designed the awe-inspiring active measures of Brexit, Trump, and the Hunter Biden troll are now themselves entrapped by Ukraine.

Ukraine as the ultimate counter-intelligence artist. The country that Russia had archetyped as a passive victim was now running operations inside Russia that made Russia’s own intelligence services look amateurish. The re-archetyping was no longer just theoretical or rhetorical — it was operational.

Putin’s Chef Problem

Now, let me tell you about May 2023 as well. Prigozhin — the Chef, archetyped as Chef, a folkloric motif. We now know Prigozhin himself wrote a book of fairy tales. And in May 2023, Prigozhin was openly feuding with Russia’s Ministry of Defence. Most Russia experts saw this as a management dispute. I saw an archetype.

On the 26th of May 2023, I published “Putin’s Chef Problem”: “How can Sorcerer Putin survive if he passes the reins to the Chef, the creature he trained and empowered? Yet how can Sorcerer Putin survive if he doesn’t stand aside to enable his apprentice to take over? This is the plight of the Sorcerer. It is featured in Indo-European stories for millennia.” Within two months — and ironically, it’s one of the main plot points in The Ring, in Wagner’s Ring — within two months of the march on Moscow, the Chef was allegedly dead. I believe he’s truly dead when we find out what happened to the second officer Wagner private jet that flew on to Baku that night, and when we read or watch the Chef’s final testimony.

The joke, of course, is on the Russians. They destroyed their state for a troll. “Mummy, what was the end of the Russian Federation like?” “At first slow, then sudden. You see, its army was in Ukraine.” “Why?” “No one knew. Its army rushed back to Russia to stop a coup. No one knew what to do or where to go. That was it.” I wrote that on May 27th — a month before the coup. Twenty-seven days before the actual march on Moscow. Sometimes the archetype tells you everything.

And exactly one month later, June 23rd, Prigozhin marched on Moscow.

Why Russia Experts Missed It

Why did Russia experts miss this? Russia experts are fed vast amounts of Disinfolklore by the Russist state apparatus. Kremlinology is an industry which is fed raw materials that are constructed inside the Russian power vertical to bamboozle, fool, confuse, and distract Western so-called experts. And one of the wonderful things about Volia and NAFOs and many of us is watching how much we’ve learned and how our intuition about Russia and Russian disinformation has evolved way beyond the power of most Russia experts attached to think tanks and the like.

They saw what Russia’s Disinfolklore factories wanted them to see. I saw the archetype — the Sorcerer’s Apprentice who had grown too powerful. And I saw it because I’d spent seven years learning to read the mythological structures beneath the surface of events. Within two months of the march on Moscow, he was dead.

Bakhmut

And then we get to Bakhmut, which was partly the reason why I suddenly realised that actually Prigozhin was the Apprentice. He had been given all the plum jobs in the invasion. The Wagnerites had been given the job of scaring President Zelensky away from Kyiv, of then trying to kill him. They were the ones who killed many of the 1,700 people they murdered in the Kyiv region. He was then given Popasna, which he only won after an extraordinary, tricky fight. And then he was given Bakhmut, which was supposed to be occupied by the end of July 2022. And then I believe he would have come out as Putler’s successor, and the whole thing would have gone on.

But of course, it didn’t work out that way. They lost whatever it was — 75,000 to 100,000 dead — to take 0.0069% of Ukraine. Russia would need 50 times more humans than ever existed to conquer the whole country at that rate. A terrible beauty has been born there. And as we see now in the last couple of days, Chasiv Yar — which of course they never conquered — but many of those filled with the archetype of Russia as an unstoppable force assumed they would take Chasiv Yar immediately after that.

Manufactured Tiredness

Then this manufactured tiredness that we see in our information space. Our information space is filled with memes conveying an emotion of tiredness directly into our minds. We who are unaffected by the daily missile strikes become occupied via these linguistic memes by tiredness. We then adopt the proposed bogus solution: Ukraine surrenders to genocide. This is how Disinfolklore works inside our minds to depress our spirits.

And the single most successful Disinfolklore operation that Russia ever deployed was “Don’t poke the bear.” Using reflexive control, Russia convinces its enemies, whether states or individuals, to act of their own volition, voluntarily, in ways which benefit Russia. “Don’t poke the bear” is the geopolitical equivalent of “don’t wear a short skirt.” It places the burden of self-restraint on the victim. It pre-emptively excuses the aggressor. Ukraine now pokes the bear nightly. And Russia, without any mana left, cannot stop it.

Year Three: The Word Arrives

So then we go to Act Three, to Year Three. I suppose what I really want to say is that this is all the product of a real-time analysis, not an academic work. It’s conducted by someone who lived, as many of us did, in the places being destroyed, who knew the people being killed and people adjacent to them being killed, and who spent, in my case, years on the actual zero line between the armies. So every analytical tweet was written with the knowledge that friends and former colleagues were under fire. And every concept was tested against the reality of the people — people that I liked — there.

And really, what I did not yet have at that point was a single mechanism that explained why all of this worked — why Disinfolklore lodges so deeply in our minds, why it resists data, why the “Russia is strong” narrative survives contact with the mathematics of Avdiivka or Bakhmut. And the answer was archetype, and the path to that answer ran through the rubble of a city and across the border of a nuclear state.

Avdiivka

Again, we have Year Three beginning on February 17th 2024. Avdiivka fell after eight years. “Russia’s failures in Ukraine, anniversary edition. Took 50,000 Russian deaths to capture Avdiivka, 0.02% of Ukraine. That means trillions of Russian soldiers needed to capture the whole of Ukraine. Trillions. Do the math. 50,000 dead. Let that number dissolve every ‘Russia is winning’ headline you ever read.”

Macron Wakes Up

And then something unexpected happened. Macron, the man I had spent two years criticising for his reflexive-control capture, the man who had been trolled by Putler in pre-invasion phone calls — Macron woke up. And I wrote: “My favourite part is where President Macron likens the soothsaying songs of ‘peace, peace’ to nursery rhymes. ‘They’re not for peace, they’re against Ukraine,’ said President Macron.” Macron, speaking in English, directly called out the peace lobby as anti-Ukrainian. From Normandy Format chairman trying to pressure Ukraine to capitulate in 2019, it was the most dramatic instance of what I was beginning to recognise as the central phenomenon: a leader breaking free from a data-resistant archetype. Macron had been trapped inside the archetype of dialogue with Russia. He shattered it.

And that, again, is why our German colleague rightly should be proud, because although Scholz never broke out of this archetype, certainly Chancellor Merz was probably never captured by it, and he has never failed me.

Tripillia and Mythicide

And while the media was talking about a stalemate — another archetype — I was reaching into deep time. Ukraine’s Trypillia power station was destroyed by Russian missiles. And I wrote: “Trypillia power station is not merely Ukrainian. It’s the mana of our entire civilisation Russia is picking off.” Ukraine’s national symbol, the Trident, is a living reflex of the oldest Indo-European myth — the Trito myth, the dragon-slayer narrative attested from India to Ireland. Russia was not merely committing war crimes. Russia was committing mythicide.

In May 2024, I stated my broader mission explicitly: “My task is to promote understanding Ukraine as the original source of all Indo-European culture.” Timothy Snyder is brilliant, but the modern discipline of history looks only at written sources. So Snyder’s brilliant history of Ukraine begins with the Greek colonists along the Azov Sea coast, circa 800 BCE. My history of Ukraine begins before 2500 BCE, with the ancestors of those Greeks, who were ancient Ukrainians. And I’m very happy to note that a year later, Timothy Snyder followed this path — obviously he never read my work, but other people convinced him and showed him the ancient DNA studies published in Nature and peer-reviewed journals that demonstrate that all living Indo-European languages emanate particularly from Mykhailivka on the right bank, just below Zaporizhzhia. And now Timothy Snyder is a great adherent of what I talk about here. And I introduced the term “ancient Ukraine” and “ancient Ukrainians” into our lexicon.

And so this is the re-archetyping project at its most ambitious — not just countering Russian propaganda about the current war, but rewriting the mental model of Ukraine across 5,000 years of human history. Ancient Ukraine is the source of all living Indo-European languages, religions, family structures, the patriarchal mode of family — sadly, I’m very disappointed by that — and modes of social organisation. This is what Finding Manuland, which is my second research programme under the disinfolklore.com website, at disinfolklore.com or disinfolklore.eu — the mythological foundation beneath the Disinfolklore framework — is designed to achieve.

Kursk: The Supreme Re-Archetyping

So I re-archetyped Ukraine’s invasion of Russia as the Fourth Reverse Napoleon invasion. And on the 6th of August 2024, Ukraine did what nobody expected and invaded Russia again — but of course, for most of humanity, they hadn’t even noticed the first time.

And let me tell you what this meant. For 80 years, a single archetype had governed international relations: Russia’s territory is inviolable. Touch it and the world ends. Nuclear Armageddon. Escalation to extinction. World War III. This archetype was embedded so deeply in the minds of Western policymakers that it functioned as a law of physics. Unquestionable. Unchallengeable. Absolute. Ukraine shattered that.

“Innovation and geopolitics since World War II,” I wrote. “Anyone can occupy part of Russia with impunity. Decades of earnest game theory and escalation management IR textbooks aren’t worth more than toilet paper.” I called it the Fourth Reverse Napoleon, but it was something more than military innovation. It was a supreme act of archetyping — the destruction of a data-resistant mental archetype through action. Eighty years of Russian Disinfolklore saying an invasion of Russia is both impossible and a red line. Now Russians are told that villages in Ukraine are “more Russian” than 1,500 square kilometres of Russia’s Kursk region that Ukraine now holds. The nuclear bluff was called. For over a week after the incursion, Medvedev was silent about threatening the West with nuclear Armageddon. The silence told you everything, you see.

I wrote: “Ukraine is an empire now. And when Ukraine acts, Ukraine creates its own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, judiciously as you will, Ukraine will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too.” Ukraine used Russia’s own weapon — reflexive control — against it. The student had surpassed the master.

Contrast Putin’s desultory response to the invasion with 80 years of scare stories about nuclear Armageddon if anyone had the temerity to invade Russia. The invasion is surely one of the world’s epic trolls and one of President Zelensky’s greatest pieces of performance art, because you cannot defeat a country that has already re-archetyped itself as unconquerable.

The War of Archetypes Is Permanent

On the 28th of July 2024, I wrote what might be one of my more forward-looking statements: “Victory on the battlefield will not mean the end of this war. After Ukraine wins this war, we need to continue fighting to recentre contemporary and ancient Ukraine in the mental models of humanity.” The war of archetypes is permanent, and it requires permanent counter-archetyping.

The Witch Switch

I must give you one more tool that I developed in Year Three before we cross into darker territory: the Witch Switch. The Witch Switch is the mechanism by which a Disinfolklorist redirects the public sphere’s fear and anger from a real threat to a manufactured one. The word “witch” is not accidental. In every European witch-hunting period, the pattern is the same: genuine social anxieties about crop failure, disease, economic collapse are redirected onto an innocent target. The innocent target is switched for the real cause of the anxiety.

Donald switched the real causes of American anxiety — economic stagnation, healthcare costs, wars, infrastructure decay — onto trans people, immigrants, “the woke.” The anxiety is real, the target is manufactured, the switch is the Disinfolklore.

Russia does the same thing. Real Russian anxiety about depopulation, about having a rubbish country, about economic stagnation, about the failure of the Russian state to provide basic services — is switched onto Ukraine. Ukraine becomes the witch. The war becomes the witch-burning.

Year Four: Dark Territory

Then on the 5th of November 2024, Donald won the US presidency. The same techniques that had conquered eastern Ukraine, the same archetypal manipulation, the same hacking of national archetypes, of national consciousness, had now conquered America. “Ukraine then remains our last hope to hold back the tide of Rushism,” I wrote on the 6th of November 2024. And I still believe this, as many of us probably do.

Coercive Control

In November 2024, after the election, the unifying thread became clear. What unites Donald, Netanyahu, and Putler? Every activity, policy, and speech contains the mana of coercive control. Coercive control — the energy signature of all Disinfolklore. Not just a metaphor for domestic abuse applied to geopolitics. It’s the identical mechanism. The isolation of the victim — whether it’s Greenland or Ukraine or Venezuela or wherever. The gaslighting, the manufactured dependency, the normalisation of hyperviolence, the blame transfer. Putler does this to Ukraine. Donald does this to America. They are not strongmen. They are abusers. And the distinction matters, because you treat a strongman — another archetype — with deference, but you treat an abuser by leaving.

Romania: Capturing a NATO State

On December 5th 2024: “How Russia just tried to capture a NATO state.” Romania’s president had just declassified documents detailing how Russia used China’s TikTok to capture Romania’s presidency. A NATO member state, captured through Disinfolklore — delivered through TikTok, not through tanks. Through TikTok. Through the same archetypal manipulation that conquered Luhansk, that conquered MAGA, that is conquering every society that fails to understand the Disinfolklore universe which is descending upon us. And this is why the framework matters beyond Ukraine. This is a civilisational problem, as Latyn was alluding to in the Canada example.

Data-Resistant Mental Archetypes

And then December 1st 2024 — the word arrived. As Syria’s Assad regime collapsed overnight, exposing the fraudulence, I wrote at the time, of every Western expert who had assured us that Russian-backed regimes were permanent. I wrote: “Experts’ data-resistant mental archetype of a Potemkin state. Some experts who didn’t predict the Syrian regime’s collapse trolled Ukraine into conceding territory to Russia. A mental archetype of an unbeatable Russia occupies the minds of those attempting to troll us into surrender.”

Data-resistant mental archetypes. There it was. The word, the expression I’d been searching for since February 28th 2022, since I had written “RF’s mythos is done” — Russia’s Federation’s mythos is done.

The mechanism that explained why the “Russia is strong” narrative persisted despite all the data, all the evidence. The mechanism that explained why Ukraine fatigue could be manufactured. The mechanism that explained how “don’t poke the bear” could paralyse entire governments. An archetype: a mental model so deeply embedded that it resists data. You can show people the mathematics — 50,000 dead for 0.002% of Ukraine. You can show them the economics — Russia printing money at Weimar velocity (thank you for all your amazing posts, Beefeater). You can show them the military reality — 1.2, 1.3 million Russist casualties. And still, still, they believe Russia is winning. Because the archetype is not a conclusion drawn from evidence. The archetype precedes evidence. It’s the lens through which evidence is interpreted.

Everything Accelerates

And once I had that word, everything accelerated. December 11th: “Archetype of Ukraine as weak, helpless, small is not consistent with the data. It’s seeded relentlessly and imminent in linguistic and visual memes.” And I named the three characters who embodied it — three Odinic shapeshifters. Druidy Don Trump, named for the Druids, the magico-religious caste in Celtic Indo-European culture. Duncy Putin, the folkloric dunce who sets off each morning having learned nothing from the previous day’s failures. The Comedian Zelensky, the 21st-century troll who masters both the juridical and the magical dimensions of sovereignty — the majesty of sovereignty. He’s a master, a magister, a magus, and who, unlike the other two, uses his power, his mana, for good.

The power to archetype at will belongs to all of us, but if you own the means of distribution — the main means through which archetyping outside our minds occurs — then you can archetype at scale and re-engineer humanity’s minds.

Munich 2025

Then, on February 15th 2025, Munich — Pirate Party Security Conference event — my Munich speech: “Our Disinfolklore Universe: Battling Archetypes.” Five parts: declaration — our Disinfolklore universe; definition — “Was ist Disinfolklore?” riffing off Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”; mana in the meme — examples of mental models and archetypes and memes; the Odinic framework — Druidy Don, Duncy Putin, the Comedian; and the conclusion, which is going to be the last episode of my Battling Archetypes mini-series which we’ve been doing in our Decoding Disinfolklore podcast — consciously disrupting archetypal identities, which is what I’m talking about here really, and it’s what Volia does, it’s what NAFOs does. We consciously disrupt archetypal identities.

From a bridge in a forest in eastern Ukraine in 2015 to the podium in Munich in 2025. Ten years. The framework was complete. The method was teachable. The war was named: a battle of archetypes. The battleground is the human mind. By understanding the Disinfolklore universe, we can engage in conscious memetic warfare, conscious counter-Disinfolklore.

I’d found the word. Then I had to build the institution. The war demands it. When the enemy operates at a civilisational scale, when the same techniques are used to brainwash Ukrainians in occupied Luhansk and Americans in occupied Washington, the response must also operate at a civilisational scale.

Trumpski Mir

On the 8th of March 2025, I published the tweet that received more engagement than anything I’d written last year: “I’m one of the few Westerners ever to live and work inside Russia’s occupation. Luhansk, 2015–2018, inside Russkiy Mir. I’ve spent years interpreting the collection of Disinfolklore I amassed while living inside pure Russkiy Mir territory.”

And I named what was happening in America in that tweet: Trumpski Mir — the fusion of Russian and MAGA Disinfolklore into a single global reality-distortion field. Russkiy Mir went to Washington. America is under Russian occupation, but because they’re operating through Americans — like they’re operating through Georgians in Georgian Dream, or through some Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Ukraine — it’s hard for Americans to understand.

The Foundational Essay

And in March, I published a foundational essay that traced this genealogy from fieldwork in Luhansk through an independent discovery of Jung’s archetype concept to the Munich speech. In it, I define the method: “By archetyping in this context, I’m speaking of an aspect of cognition. We model the world, our context. Our mental models help us navigate it.” And I named the counter-move: re-archetyping — the conscious disruption and reconstruction of mental models.

“Ukraine’s next battle: re-archetyping humanity’s mental models of Ukraine.” The Wall Street Journal had just reported that ancient Ukraine’s Yamnaya community spread its genes into more than half of living humans today. And I wrote: “Along with the genes, however, also came all today’s living Indo-European languages, religions, family structures, patriarchal modes of social organisation, tripartite castes — sovereignty, security, fertility/prosperity — farmers, and the divinely inspired praise poetry.”

Ukraine is not merely defending its territory. Ukraine is the source civilisation. This is the strategic depth of the re-archetyping project. When Russia archetypes Ukraine as weak, helpless, small, the counter is not merely to show Ukraine’s current military strength. The counter is to show that Ukraine is the foundation of Western civilisation itself. When people we know opine that, “well, I’m really sad what’s going on in Ukraine, but it actually doesn’t really matter” — and yet they’re banging on about ancient Greece and these other places which played a great role in our development as a civilisation — they ignore the fact that, as we now know, Ukraine is the foundation of it.

The Systematic Method

So in the entire Disinfolklore framework — then in June, I’ll flash forward a bit more quickly. In June, I published the systematic method that anyone can use.

Step one: scan for the mana in the meme. Every piece of Disinfolklore carries an emotional charge — mana — designed to hack your feelings before your rational mind can intervene.

Step two (this is all on disinfolklore.com or disinfolklore.eu): identify the archetype being deployed. What mental model is this communication trying to embed or enforce?

Step three: characterise the Disinfolklore tool being used. Is it Provocation Logic? Accusation in a Mirror? The Witch Switch?

Step four: evaluate the source and chain. Where did this narrative originate? How has it been laundered?

Step five: make the call. Is this Disinfolklore? If it is, what is its operational intent?

Step six: intervene. Deploy a counter-archetype. Found Volia. Contribute to Volia. Donate to the causes that Volia supports. Engage in memetic warfare. Become a cartoon dog. Re-archetype.

This is the method I’ve been practising instinctively since 2016 — well, really since I went on Twitter in June 2021 — since 2016, and systematically since 2023. And it’s the method I’m now passing on.

Russification of America

Those of us who’ve lived under Russia’s modes of governance now see the stunning parallels since Donald and his apparatchiks assumed office: the Russification of America. The chain — Manafort, who we see Zelensky saying the other day approached him last year to try and run his campaign. Manafort, whose daughters accused him of stimulating the murder of the Heavenly Hundred on the Maidan. According to Manafort — the chutzpah of these people is just beyond, off the scale.

And those of us who’ve lived in Russkiy Mir recognise these patterns: the control of media, the purging of institutions, the elevation of loyalty over competence, the weaponisation of the courts, the manufacturing of enemies, the normalisation of lying. And I saw all of this in Luhansk, 2015 to 2018. And we all see it in Washington in 2025 and 2026. And thankfully, we don’t see it in Europe — or maybe in one or two places in Europe.

Ukraine Re-Archetypes as Giant

In September 2025, I identified the moment that I’d been waiting for since March 2022. Ukraine re-archetypes as a giant inside Donald’s mind. For the first time, the target of archetypal manipulation had successfully reversed the manipulation. Ukraine, which Trump and his handlers had been archetyping as weak, helpless, small, a drain on American resources — as the speaker before me was just saying when she was speaking with such pathos about her children and not being able to get them interested in Ukraine or in the war and the lessons of war — we see that this MAGA re-archetyping of Ukraine as not worthy of being helped was so powerful and happened to so many people that we know, under the radar. It goes against everything that America said about itself for many decades, and yet it was able to work through Disinfolklore.

But now Ukraine has re-archetyped itself as strong, as indispensable. And I wrote: “What I’ve been looking for since March 2022” — and it’s taken a while to get this vocabulary.

Drawing the Arc

So anyway, I’ll move towards the end now. I started the speech with a promise that the arc would be the arc of a word. Let me now draw that arc explicitly — the deeper pattern. There is something deeper here, and that’s what I want us all to carry with us.

The four-year arc of this journey mirrors the four-year arc of Ukraine’s war. It’s umbilically tied to Volia and all of the stories I’ve heard from all of you and that you’ve surfaced and that you’ve tweeted and talked about. When I’m in situations I can’t read, every day the data is pouring into my mind and working against these frameworks and helping provoke thoughts and ideas. So that’s why it’s appropriate perhaps to talk about this here.

The four-year arc of this journey mirrors the four-year arc of Ukraine’s war. Ukraine, too, started instinctively. On day one, President Zelensky said, “I need ammo, not a ride.” He did not have a theory of re-archetyping. He was the re-archetyping, as I think it was Dan who was talking about just before I spoke. He was the re-archetyping — his existence. A secular, Russian-language-speaking, Jewish comedian president shattered the archetype Russia had constructed. He did not plan to be an archetype-breaker inside politics, but he was an archetype-breaker inside art. He simply was one. Perhaps he did plan to be one, but he didn’t realise he became it.

Then Ukraine built the theory — the battlefield theory: drone warfare, asymmetric innovation, the art of making the impossible possible with insufficient resources. The Kharkiv offensive, the liberation of Kherson, the sinking of the Moskva — a missile named after a god whose very name was coined in ancient Ukraine.

Then Ukraine named it. Kursk — the supreme re-archetyping move, the invasion of the invader, the comedian ordering his army across the border of a country that claims to be a nuclear superpower. The moment the archetype of Russian inviolability was shattered — not by argument, but by action.

And now, Year Four, Ukraine deploys the system. A million drones a month. Air superiority over Russian territory-ish. A defence industry that makes NATO’s look artisanal. A country that, after four years of the most brutal conventional war in Europe since 1945, is stronger than when it started.

And Ukraine and I and all of us have been on this journey. We’re both re-archetypers. We’re both re-archetyped by this journey. The difference is that Ukraine uses missiles and drones. I use words and archetypes. The target is the same: the data-resistant mental model that says Russia is strong and Ukraine is weak.

That model is a lie. It was always a lie. It was a lie in 1854 when The Economist asked whether Russia was a bully or a giant. It was a lie in 2022 when Western leaders told Ukraine it only had a few hours. It’s a lie tonight.

Hacking Archetypes of National Consciousness

When anyone tells us this war is a stalemate — hacking every country’s archetypes of national consciousness yields Russia-directed fig leaves like Georgian Dream, Brexit, MAGA, “Ireland for the Irish,” “Free Palestine,” and a bunch of flag-waving paleo-conservative misogynistic anti-immigrant riot-creating movements globally.

Surkov — Putin’s great cardinal — toasted Putin’s election celebration in 1999 thus: “To the deification of power, of mana.” Surkov understood what most Western analysts still have not grasped. Russia does not just spread disinformation. Russia hacks archetypes. It identifies deep mythological structures of national consciousness and mutates them. This is not disinformation. This is deeper. This is the weaponisation of storytelling itself. Not understanding how these sounds and stories operate to hack our intentions means those who don’t get Disinfolklore are bringing knives to artillery fights.

So I’ll finish off by just saying that. I’m going to leave it at that. Thank you for listening — if you were listening. Thank you for not listening if you weren’t listening. Out.

From Prime Ministers to Primary Schools: My Vision for Disinfolklore Literacy

My vision for the Disinfolklore Analytical Method took a giant leap forward towards realisation this week. My vision for Disinfolklore is to use its insights to teach universal communications literacy and to build up immunity to manipulating archetypal Disinfolklore. I visualise teams of teachers teaching in Prime Ministers’ offices and Primary Schools throughout Indo-European cultures globally.

With that in mind, this week was a huge moment for me in my development. Over the past while I discovered Claude Code, Anthropic's Claude Code. I have been working with it inside the Terminal. It differs from most of our encounters with Anthropic's AI in the sense that it's agentic. It actually executes. It doesn't just write the code for you and then you have to paste the code in. It actually implements the code, solves problems by writing multiple scripts in different computers language, recruits sub-agents to take on sub-tasks within a complex project such as that which I set to build my new platform. While the algorithm takes the initiative, it’s necessary to prompt it continually to ensure it stays on the right track. My new platform took around 600 prompts to bring it where it is now: a perfect representation of my artistic vision.

https://www.disinfolklore.com will be my platform for the next few decades. I will continue publishing first here on Substack (https://www.disinfolklore.net). Then I will decant some highly distilled content to Disinfolklore.com periodically. Substack is optimised for email lists and has great potential for community building which I have not yet been prioritising but which I will in the future when I have the bandwidth.

Disinfolklore.com contains the million words I've written on disinfolklore since the full-scale invasion, divided into different sections and different passages, short passages rather than long essays. It's arranged according to certain structural divisions which should appeal to people who identify as being quite open and who will be quite interested in the origins of the concept — that's all there. Those of us who self-identify as being more high on the neurotic OCEAN dimension, who self-identify as feeling "I just need... I'm worried about the world. Just give me the tools." There's the Twelve Tools. Then there are certain tools which would be more useful to people than others.

I love the graphics. I designed all the graphics with Claude Code, but through about 600 different prompts. For me, I never thought in my lifetime I would be able to create something like this. This revolutionary technology is extraordinary.

This will be not only a platform to show what I've done and what I hope is going to be quite useful for decades to come — as a means of interpreting data and dealing with emotion-moving activity — it will also be a platform for teaching and for building more networks with people. It's also just an immersive resource for anyone to spend as much time as they're willing to give to it.

It also has the Finding Manuland component, which is the 6,000-year context. Disinfolklore didn't come out of nowhere; it's an emanation of Indo-European culture and of deep history, as I'm talking about. The shaman-tricksters and these archetypes of Finding Manuland are also in there, which is also a very rich read, but these are very succinct, quick passages.

The entrance to the site is dark — the first homepage — but then everything underneath it is white and deliberately designed using the best optimised fonts and colours for making an easy reading experience.

No noise on the passage pages, just arrows bringing you to the next passage or to the previous passage. Breadcrumbs — which is an interesting use from folklore to describe the bit at the top of the page — show where you are in the site. Then for people who want to read all of the long-form material, everything is linked to the reservoir, as I call it, which contains the long-form essays (most of which first appeared here on Substack) from which the passages are hewn.

FROM SUBSTACK TO INDEPENDENCE

I started out last November wanting to take everything that I'd written - the 450 articles on Substack - to be held also on an independent and Europe-based codebase. Not least because the same venture capitalists who funded Musk's takeover of Twitter run Substack. I wanted also to be a bit more resilient, interns of the longevity of my oeuvre’s survival whatever happens geopolitically.

I thought, okay, I'll just create what's called a digital garden, which is a cross-referenced collection of all my writings in long form — 450 pages. Gradually, as I saw how advanced these AI algorithms have become since I last paid attention to artificial Neural Network algorithms and computer vision as a masters student contemplating building a business based on the automatic interpretation of satellite images at Oxford in 2018. Never having learned to code properly, suddenly being able to code anything I could visualise into existence led to rapid development of my initial Digital Garden project into what you see today at Disinfolklore.com. I love how the platform communicates in very short, pithy passages all of the ideas I've been thinking about for the past three years.

DATA-RESISTANT ARCHETYPES AND THE VIEW OF RUSSIA

Now, moving onto a different kind of model than Opus 4.6 Claude Code’s current engine and the architecture which I used to build Disinfolklore.com, I first got interested in archetypes when I encountered friends whose mental models of Russia seemed immune to data.

Underlying what some are saying about Ukraine at the moment as it runs a series of mini-counter offensives and is regaining. some territory that was in the grey zone — that there's some positive chatter about Ukraine — there are very strong, data-resistant archetypes in our culture that resist changing our views about Ukraine and about Russia. Many of us have been on a journey since Russia annexed Crimea. Eastern Europeans, of course, knew what Westerners have only recently, generally speaking — what Westerners like myself have only recently discovered. They've known this forever.

I cringe when I look back at some of the things I said or thought even when I was in Ukraine, but certainly from 2015 on, and certainly even before that. I have thought very deeply, or tried to identify immediately in my own mind, what is going on. That has helped me also identify what else is going on elsewhere.

In a conversation today I had with somebody who's very interested in Ukraine but doesn't tune in that much — they're very busy — I find them quite a good source because they're generally reading The Economist or listening to the BBC News or very general mainstream news. When they talk about something to do with Ukraine, it tells me something about what normal people who don't spend all their time on this talk about. They mentioned today that their perception was that everyone in the normal media world was talking about peace talks.

This talk of Ukraine's advances — which I suppose most of us understand it's too early to say, and I don't think any of us are really getting our hopes up — but the idea that maybe that might change the view of Russia as very strong and invincible... it's not that promising at this point because most people aren't even aware of it. From his perception, he knew about it because he reads other material, but it's not in the mainstream media that he's consuming at the moment. Maybe others have seen coverage of Ukraine's advances — not massive, but somewhat significant advances. The talk is still about the peace talks.

PUTLER'S RESURRECTION OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR TROLL

What's going on there is the embedding of archetypes of this view of Ukraine and of Russia. Since 2005, Putler himself reactivated the Soviet-era troll that the only thing that mattered was victory over the Nazi invaders. Now most of us are aware that this war has gone on for longer than the Second World War for Russia, but that doesn't seem to have broken through to the mainstream. It's just kind of moving on.

I myself have monitored these May 9th parades and the worship of the ancestors which was reactivated after 2005, and then after 2014 even in Ukraine. It became a measure of how stable Ukrainian society was. For instance, in Zaporizhzhia I would go for several years in a row as an OSCE monitor to monitor the May 9th parade. There was a huge May 9th parade in Dnipro, in which the Dnipro Jewish community played a huge role in 2017. This was seen as a shared cultural moment and historical moment because everyone made great sacrifices in the Second World War. It wasn't, as we see now, an assertion that Russian culture was in any way dominant. It was just a genuine expression of solidarity with the past and with history and with the cultural meaning of it.

Many Ukrainians, especially Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians, will have memories from their childhood of having picnics and this kind of thing on May 9th. Really what was going on there, and with the whole use of these parades, as with many celebrations in many of our cultures, is the worship of the ancestors — trying to embed and establish an archetypal history of common history for the community.

As I understand it — and maybe there are other people here who have more direct experience of Ukraine or of Russia before 2014 — this had mainly died out during the 1990s. Putler, around 2006, quite consciously resurrected this May 9th, this whole May 9th parades and routines. Then it became an acid test in Ukraine for how tolerant Ukraine was of Russian culture, Russian-language speakers. We, as international monitors, paid close attention to it. My Russian colleagues were always wanting us to monitor aspects of the preparations for these parades in Ukraine.

Really what Putler was able to do quite quickly, in a couple of years, was embed in people's minds a memory of their youth and of their time when they were under Soviet occupation — and in the Russian context, of a time in the USSR when these parades really mattered. There seems to have been a collective amnesia that this wasn't really going on between 1991 and 2006.

Within a very short time frame, between 2006 and the full-scale invasion, or 2014, but really up to the full-scale invasion, Putin was able to reactivate six decades of investment by the Soviet Union's propaganda and culture into this myth of the so-called Great Patriotic War and victory over the Nazis.

That in itself, as we mostly understand now, was what I would categorise as disinfolklore, because it was a lie. The mystery of the monuments — all the monuments all over Ukraine and Russia — the Second World War started in 1941. Well, what happened to the first two years of it?

THE RUSSIFIED PERSPECTIVE ON HISTORY

Listening to the wonderful Accidental Ukrainian show, which I've become really fond of on Volia for Ukraine — and listening to it on Spotify after — there was a discussion, I think maybe James you were a part of it, where you were talking about how the history we were taught in schools in the West was a very Russified perspective on history.

The idea that this great sacrifice which the Russians made and that they're justified in being aggrieved because they didn't get credit for it — this moany grievance, what I call grievance mining, which we hear from Duncy Putin and Putler all the time and from Donald Trump and from authoritarian-minded people — I now use it as a proxy. It gives you a certain idea of people's personality if they're always grievance mining. To me, I just find it implausible. I think of my youth and how my parents would have reacted if I was always moaning about stuff. It seems that that isn't a general reaction to it. A lot of people get attracted by this kind of grievance mining.

This works on the interpersonal level, but also on the geopolitical and the historical scale.


DISINFOLKLORE VERSUS COUNTER-DISINFOLKLORE

We can distinguish between disinfolklore and counter-disinfolklore, or what I now call infolklore or positive trolling, according to the six criteria — the second of which is "right." Is there truth in this idea that Russia somehow had a reason to be aggrieved that no one in the West gave them credit for their sacrifice during the war?

When we look at the empirical aspects of it — for a start, after the Second World War, Russia got to occupy half of Europe and no one got a look in: Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and all these other countries which were under occupation, not to mention the Baltics. They hardly have a right to be aggrieved there. Obviously, they started the war along with the Germans. Then the United States provided 800 boats, 400,000 Jeeps, 14,000 airplanes, 8,000 tractors, 3,000 tanks, 5 million blankets, 5 million army boots, 70,000 tons of cotton, millions of tons of petrol, 5 million tons of food.

It just fails the whole ethical discipline of "right" — the second part of the Code of Positive Trolls — and therefore is definitional disinfolklore. We can just dismiss it. Whenever we hear that energy of grievance due to the Second World War...

Then there's the other dimension of it, which is the Russian so-called sacrifice. We see what their military tactics are today. Yes, it's an enormous sacrifice of humans, but to what end? I saw the statistic today, which seems to be correct, that Ukraine retook in a couple of days 200 square kilometres — the amount of land that Russia lost 30,000 soldiers in December conquering. It's just an entirely pointless activity on their part. They may be sacrificing a lot, and I imagine in the Second World War their tactics don't seem to have been that different.

Yet again, another archetype — an energy of the poor betrayed bear alone holding back the Nazis while the rest of the world relied on Soviet Russia's military might. It just doesn't correspond to reality. That's something I was not as strongly aware of as I am today, before the full-scale invasion even. We know they invaded Poland, they relied on American matériel, and after the war they created a cult of the dead based on falsified history.


DUNCY PUTIN AND THE RESURRECTION OF THE TROLL

After 2008 then, who I'd call Duncy Putin, resurrected this troll — 2006 to 2008 — expanded the Worship of the Ancestors parades on May 9th, used it to entrench his own archetypal identity as the wise, protective sovereign. This was injected into the minds of every Russian and potential Russist, and also into us through some of our education.

It even features in every phone call with Western leaders, where they're treated to this hour-long or hours-long diatribe. Witkoff was completely taken in by it. Even in the Alaska episode, this infolklore — Trump himself commented on the Soviet Union's sacrifice after his call with Duncy Putin.

I've long believed that subjecting yourself to such phone calls is a colossal error, because it gives Duncy Putin a chance to top up his hypnotic war-magical entrenchment of Russia's priority archetypal identities — like "we sacrificed 30 million in a war that the Nazis started, therefore give us Ukraine." Obviously it makes no sense when you think about it, but it seems to capture the minds of people.


## UKRAINE'S INVASION OF KURSK AS A PERFECT TROLL

Ukraine's invasion of Kursk was one of the most perfect trolls I've ever witnessed, because it empirically pierced Duncy Putin's troll that only he can protect Russia. We see what's going on at the moment in Belgorod, with them losing electricity and different claims about evacuations. As I understand it, there was a big attack last night in Bryansk and in other places.

This idea that only Putler can protect the homeland and only can protect Russia has now been under massive attack, not least since the invasion of Kursk. Yet it hasn't totally disrupted the archetypal identity of Russia as strong in many people's minds. His troll — that Russia is invincible and that anyone who attacks Russia is done for — is clearly wrong because Ukraine is running these attacks all the time.

Only mass disinfolklore manages to keep concealed the fact that Ukraine keeps doing this and that Russia is not what it said it was for 60 or 70 years.


THE TENSION BETWEEN EMPIRICAL FACTS AND ARCHETYPES

Here we have this tension between the empirical facts that many of us are all too aware of — because we're listening to Mockers or Will and the details of the minutiae of the chaos and ridiculousness of what's going on in there — yet in the minds of many, Russia is this kind of sophisticated country which is on a par with China or with America, which we know is absolute rubbish.

If many of us are possessed like ghosts by such data-resistant archetypes of a Potemkin state, think how poor Russians must be. I did think around the time of the Kursk Offensive that Russians' brains were about to burst. I guess many of them did, in a way — they just don't quite know what to do. They think Russia is invincible, no one can attack Russia, and now Ukraine is attacking it every night.

This is the practical effect of what I call archetypes — these invincible mental archetypes that seem to be invincible but actually they're not. That is the point of my disinfolklore analytical method: encounter disinfolklore, and there is a means of combating it, because many of us have experience in our lives of changing very strongly held views and watching others change very strongly held views. If we keep this in mind, we can strategically work on this. When we are attacking these archetypes, we're not merely engaging in gossip or trying to persuade in a non-strategic manner. We have in our mind: this person is speaking this way because they have this very strong underlying image. We have a means of disrupting that if we really focus.

That, I think, is part of the value of understanding what's going on under the hood, as it were.


THE SHAMAN-TRICKSTER ARCHETYPE

When we look at individual archetypes in our culture, the shaman-trickster is one of the most fundamental ones. The Joker and Batman, Charlie Chaplin's Great Dictator character, Sacha Baron Cohen playing The Dictator — this shaman-trickster obviously includes Donald Trump as a disinfolklore figure, and Putler himself as a shaman, a kind of magician and trickster, in the sense that they managed to create an image which is completely divorced from reality.

Then people like Gideon Rachman, the foreign affairs person at the FT — when America took away Maduro, he wrote that tweet that 5,000 Ukrainians jumped down his throat, where he said, "Now Putler's going to think it's okay to take President Zelensky." Everyone's response was: "What have you been doing for the last four years?" In his mind, this image of Putler as this wise sovereign who's just waiting for America to do something so that he can do it is just so bizarre and removed from reality. He reveals his utter subjection to this fake archetypal identity of Putler as a wise sovereign, whose grievance-mining claims of hypocrisy of the West, as amplified by his information warfare machinery, have some substance to them, some reality to them.

He is supposed to be the foreign policy editor of one of the biggest newspapers in the world, and yet he doesn't seem to have been paying much attention to what was going on in Ukraine — or he was, but he's forgotten it because his brain has moved on.

That's how these archetypal identities manifest and affect our information environment. There are probably many of these residues in my mind as well. I hunt them out, I write about this, I think about this, but that doesn't mean I'm not also affected by these.


PRIMORDIAL AND MOBILE ARCHETYPES

I talked about it, I think on the fourth, fifth, or sixth week, how we have these archetypal identities like our mother, our father, mother figures, father figures — what Jung called so-called primordial archetypes. Then there are also what I call the mobile archetypes. They move around and flow around the place. The shaman-trickster is a very solid one — it's up there with the mother as a primordial archetype in Indo-European culture. It's widespread in almost every community. I mentioned that last week with the class fool. Some of us probably in some contexts play that role.

There are many aspects of the shaman-trickster archetype which are personified in folklore, literature, media, art, movies, television, news. Unfortunately, now they're personified in some of our countries' leaders — Berlusconi was one. We have Nigel Farage in England. We had Boris Johnson. We have Donald Trump. There's this showman aspect of it, which is how it manifests, but I see inside this a very deeply held archetypal identity.

There's a fluidity between these ideas of archetypes and their different personifications — a reciprocal flow, flowing through our lives and minds through the means of stories, what I call disinfolklore, counter-disinfolklore, the kinds of stuff Mockers talks about so well in her mocking tone, and in people we actually know and in the art we consume. We see this familiarity between the person who grievance-mines in our own lives, and perhaps we feel a sense of grievance about this or that because maybe bad things happened to us. Maybe, as with Donald Trump — as far as we know nothing bad ever happened to him really — he seems to have had a golden life, yet he's ended up with this really terrible chip on his shoulder.

All of these reflect and embed and entrench and hypnotise us into seeing certain characters as archetypal identities, and the other way around. I'm just particularly tuned into what is it that's universal about these people that has this kind of magical influence — that does nothing over me, but to millions of people they're really attracted.

The shaman-trickster — we probably don't think in that language or those terms, yet it's obviously in Batman, in a lot of popular culture, and it's in our days of the week: Woden, Odin, and all of that.


THE INDO-EUROPEAN ORIGINS

I'm not really looking at how this arose in culture or its origins, except that I'm quite satisfied with it being an Indo-European emanation which, as previously discussed, does come from Ukraine originally, probably. There were probably certain humans who lived and managed to embed this idea in mythology and culture. Then it just continued onwards.

What I'm most interested in is identifying it in the current moment and then coming up with ways to re-archetype. The kinds of things which Mockers does quite naturally, or Will does quite naturally with Mockers — "This Week in Absurdistan" — and which many of the presenters on Volia and certain people we might follow on Twitter.


CONTEMPORARY ARCHETYPES AND JOSEPH CAMPBELL

We look at different concepts — government, Westerners, development aid, pensioners, anything with personal characteristics — and these are used to latch onto the archetypes we have in our minds. As previously discussed, Joseph Campbell talked about this, but in my view in quite a removed way, because it was all about ancient Greece, which doesn't mean that much to people. Whereas I prefer to talk about contemporary archetypes.


DONALD TRUMP AND THE ODIN COMPLEX

Let's think about how Donald, for instance, and the shaman-trickster — the original one in Indo-European culture or in Germanic culture, Odin — were alike. He was the Lord of Death, an Odin complex character, a magician, a god of runes. Like Druidy Don, whose cryptic posts would make the Oracle at Delphi confused. Looking at entrails to divine what Druidy Don, what Trump, will do next might be more profitable than parsing his Delphic or regular untruths on Untruth Social.

When Russian army units are killed, they said they had gone to Odin. Donald's ancestors left Germany, and his sacrifice to Odin was as good as death on the battlefield, which every well-born German used to wish for. Of course, Donald is the complete opposite of this with his bone spurs. As I understand it, his great-great-grandfather left to avoid military service in Germany — it kind of ran in the family.

Then there are all of these commonalities with these archetypes. I'm mainly interested in the actual appearance in our culture of these, and just because I've done a deep dive, I look at the coincidences of it.


DUNCY PUTIN AS THE VILLAGE FOOL

Duncy Putin is really — what I'm trying to do in counter-archetyping him is to look at him as a dunce. The guy who's always being tricked by the West, who is never at fault, who is seen as this kind of wise figure — he projects himself as this wise sovereign. In fact, I try in my own small way to look at him more like a village fool, an idiot. He's like the dunce in a fairy tale, a caricature. He never learns from his mistakes. We see that every day on the battlefield in Ukraine.

He portrays no self-knowledge. Those of us watching the battles marvel at the stupidity of Russian tactics — what are they doing? All of this bombing just doesn't seem to have any point to it, and hasn't helped them in any way. He's the personification of an army that attacks day after day in the same places in broad daylight, with the same effect: annihilation. Then through disinfolklore, they just rebrand their failures as successes. Many of us, sadly, buy this troll that he's a master strategist.

Of course, "Putin the Master Strategist," the guy on Twitter, has done fantastic work countering this archetype of Putler as a master strategist — and the notion that Russia itself is somehow bigger than the rest, which is again a manifestation of these archetypes at play.

There was that famous time where Putler made the speech — it was to mil-bloggers, I think September or June 2023 — and he set out all the times the West had tricked Russia: 2003 when he signed the border treaty with Ukraine, 2004, 2006, 2008 when he blamed the West for protests against his faked elections, 2012, 2014, Minsk — he was tricked, he reckons, in Minsk 1 and then Minsk 2. Then in 2019 with President Zelensky. Of course, 2020, 2021 — he's just been tricked so many times. Now he says he was tricked in March 2022. He was told if he withdrew from the Kyiv region, he would get Donetsk and things.

He's projecting himself as this betrayed hero who just keeps resisting but gets tricked. Obviously most of us just look at him as a complete fool. If this were true, you're a complete fool because you keep getting tricked this way and you don't learn from your tricks. That's why he is a bit like Pangloss or Sancho Panza in that great Spanish novel.


PRESIDENT ZELENSKYY AS THE COMEDIAN

President Zelensky, who I archetype for obvious reasons as the comedian — which is another deep, deep archetype and an aspect of the shaman-trickster — the fool and the comedian, or the idiot in Dostoevsky's oeuvre. For those who haven't read it, what's idiotic about the idiot is that he sees the truth, but he's too stupid to conceal the fact that he sees the truth. Therefore he suffers and manifests his pain at how the world fails him. In that sense, he's archetyped as an idiot.

From Dostoevsky's perspective — and maybe other people might have comments on this if they've read it — Dostoevsky manages to normalise this aspect of Russian society where someone who sees the truth but is too stupid to conceal the fact that they see the truth suffers greatly, doubly, as a result. They see the truth and they live in this imperfect world, and then they suffer because they can't shut up about it. Whereas the wise person, from the Russian perspective — or from conventional bourgeois society perhaps in some ways as well — might see the truth but understands to keep it quiet.

We go back to this Soviet-era archetype of the kitchen talks. Late at night, after loads of vodka, you could tell your neighbours what you think about things. Then when you go out, you do what Mark Carney said in his speech the other week: you're the shopkeeper who puts the sign in the window saying "Workers of the world unite." You don't believe in it, but you just go on.

I've heard this from many different commentators, including recently Konstantin from Inside Russia, but also in this amazing exhibition I saw once in Kyiv in the Pinchuk Museum, by Boris Mikhailov, this great Kharkiv artist from the Soviet era — mainly photographs he did. He talks about this duality of life between the kitchen talks and going out on the street or in work and not saying anything. In his view, and in Konstantin's view as well, this is why the Soviet Union fell apart so quickly — because there always was this duality.


ZELENSKYY ON PUTIN'S MAGICAL POWER

The comedian Zelenskyy said: "Putin can force the world to feel they have lost, and this will be a reality." This is from one magician — one great magician. As many of you know, I really admire President Zelensky's comprehension, as well as his ability to use myths and create a curse on Putin, and create these staged spectacle events which demonstrate he is a good magician.

"Putin can force the world to feel they have lost and this will be a reality, because it is not possible to defeat Ukraine, but you may win over the entire world and show that he was right in some way — i.e. without punishment."

Someone — I think it was Will, or maybe Dry Fly or someone — this week was saying what I believe, which is that at a certain point Russia will just leave Ukraine, and it will be like the way America left Vietnam, and the way Russia left Afghanistan, and America left Afghanistan, or Iraq. At the end of the first Iraq War, Iraq sent this really angry, ranty message to the UN Security Council — just moaning about loads of stuff. I think it was famously 21 pages long. As people were going through it, they were wondering: are they surrendering or not? Then an Iraqi diplomat said yes, we're surrendering. Nobody knew it.

That's how it's going to play out. Russia will of course claim victory in whatever happens, and he'll convince people to believe it. This is the personification of the shaman-trickster — that Putin can force, in President Zelensky's words, the whole world to feel they have lost, and this will be the reality. That's a very perceptive observation on his part.


THREE MANIFESTATIONS OF THE SHAMAN-TRICKSTER

This brings me to the third personification of the shaman-trickster. We start with Donald Trump, who I talk about a lot just because he is this common character, then Duncy Putin, and then the third manifestation is President Zelensky, the comedian.

There's this great headline which I love from 22nd of April 2022, in a Ukrainian newspaper: "Zelensky Articulates the Russian Dream: To Steal a Toilet and Die." That is very perceptive to people like us who watch them stealing all these toilets. That scatological element — I get a lot of value out of the wordplay from the scatological to the eschatological, and the scatological references to toilets and Lavrov. Obviously, his name communicates the idea of a toilet — "lav" in French. Then there's this hygiene obsession — the Nazis were obsessed with hygiene. Then the golden toilet brush, which I saw in Mezhyhirya, this amazing mansion which was built by Yanukovych.


THE COMEDIAN'S ATTACK ON ARCHETYPING

The third of our trilogy of archetypes, the comedian, is of course Volodymyr Zelensky. Now the comedian is bombing Duncy Putin's Russia — another complex of archetypes in the term "Mother Russia." Every night now, the comedian's army was occupying 500 square kilometres of Kursk, which of course they could only leave because Don cut off the intelligence support.

There we get this other archetype, which is quite hard to convince people of. I'm sure others listening have had this experience where you're trying to convince people: "Well, actually the West propped up the Soviet Union." America propped it up a lot — built the Zaporizhzhia Dam, did all this stuff in the Second World War, tried a lot. Really it was only when Reagan came along, I think, that they just pulled back support. Of course, again, we see this still with the Starlink terminals.

Somehow Don is able to archetype himself as wanting peace and having these genuine peace talks. Normal people we know who just listen to the BBC News, or the PBS News, or read the New York Times probably believe in these. Thankfully, I saw the Wall Street Journal foreign editor Yaroslav — today of Ukrainian heritage — just saying: don't pay any attention to these peace talks. Which is of course correct. Not many of us do.

This is the scale of President Zelensky's attack on this archetyping and this re-archetyping of Russia. The embarrassment which people... they probably don't feel it because they don't see it, but we can see it in them when they look at Ukraine as some sort of victim or President Zelensky as some sort of weak person. That attitude you get from people who refer to him dismissively as "Zelensky, oh Zelensky this" — where their minds are completely occupied by this kind of MAGA view of Zelensky. Even Trump the other day on the airplane saying, "Zelensky really has got to come to the table, he's got to make a deal."

For someone who's obsessed with the archetype of strong versus weak — here we have this guy who's just relentlessly attacking Russia in a way that no country ever dared to do in these blatant ways, just sending the missiles and drones every night to destroy Russia and destroy its economy.

Again, we see how the archetypes many people have — it takes a lot of empirical evidence to dislodge them in people's minds. We know and we see it and we admire it. I suspect he sees the comedy in it, and I'm sure many of us do — just the comedy of these weak people like Lindsey Graham or Putler himself talking in these negative terms about someone who's extraordinary.


THE DON'T POKE THE BEAR TROLL LOSES ITS MANA

We're left with this understanding that the comedian is getting more powerful with every hundred drone strikes on one of Duncy Putin's oil refineries a thousand kilometres from Ukraine. The "don't poke the bear" troll is losing its mana, it's losing its power, along with every North Korean soldier the comedian captures. We see this massive amount of money coming from that Ramstein meeting the other day — the 19 billion from the EU, all of the weapons developments.

This is a perfect example of the shifting power dynamics, as archetypes create reality, are impacted by new realities and facts on the ground, and produce new understandings. On the one hand, there are these data-resistant archetypes, but then we see them change. As Engels wrote in the context of the transformation of one mode of production — feudalism into capitalism and capitalism into communism — at a certain point, quantity changes quality.


ZELENSKYY'S POWER VERSUS DRUIDY DON

President Zelensky's power, I think, is as a very successful writer and TV production writer, running a big business and as a lawyer — as distinct from Donald, who was merely acting in someone else's TV show. President Zelensky is fluent in all the different dimensions of emotion-moving activities like trolling. Obviously Putler and Donald are very erudite and brilliant at trolling and moving others' emotions, but they're up against someone who's a master of it. We see that in every kind of speech which he makes.

The Zelensky Effect for the archetype of the comedian is a closer match between archetypes at various levels — the artist, the actor, and ordinary people — that makes their campaign more resilient and successful.

Now, Druidy Don is brilliant at forging a mythos that convinces people he has a superhuman ability to make the unexpected happen. Druidy Don, as I would refer to him in a dismissive way — he's Druidy, he's not a Druid, he's Druidy in the "truthy," truthiness way. He may seem to have magical powers, yet they're all given to him by us, in our own minds. What he does, and those around him amplify, is in fact a mechanical process that uses archetypes deeply embedded in our culture, in our minds, in ways that are quite familiar to those who study this.


ODIN AND THE WAGNER NAZIS

I don't really know that much about Loki, but these are very common archetypes. There isn't just one or the other. I talk about Odin a lot because, in the previous manifestation of Volia where we had a totally different vibe, I was often challenged on the relevance of looking back at history and mythology by some of the presenters. When you discover that the Wagner Nazis unit in the Russian army — and again we see Wagner, this brand, resurrected again this week by the FT to try and scare people — they're Odin worshippers. That's why I bring him up quite a lot.

The main source for Odin — as the high god and all-father of Norse mythology — he's also a magician king. This essential archetype in all Indo-European culture of the sovereign with two aspects to it: the juridical, represented by the lawyers or by the legislation, by the king in parliament; and the magical, the magico-religious, represented by the priest. The majesty element is this magical aspect. I argue that President Zelensky is a master of both, whereas obviously Donald — as far as we know he's never read a whole book — and of course Putler has got legal training, so he should be a master of the juridical, but he's just absolutely rubbish, a rubbish lawyer.

Odin, the magician king — a mysterious, shamanic god of runes. I know Yeni has talked about runes before and helped us understand them a bit more. A strange self-sacrifice — this is what's common to all great Indo-European cultures. In Irish myth, Donn self-sacrifices during the invasion — it's mentioned in the Book of the Taking of Ireland. We have Yama in Indic culture, and we have Jesus in other Indo-European cultures. There's this self-sacrificing first king who then establishes the culture.

There's something in this I saw recently in this grievance mining. It's part of giving the idea that you are self-sacrificing. I think that connects to it.

That is described in the Hávamál. Yeni may know more about this than I do, but one of the early Germanic texts depicts the shaman-trickster hanging on the World Tree beside the royal mound in Uppsala. Yggdrasil — literally Ygg or Odin's Horse. It has him saying: "I know I hung on the windswept tree through nine days and nights. I was struck with a spear and given to Odin, myself given to myself" — which is this manifestation of the self-sacrifice. Obviously he's so important that the whole day, Woden's Day, was named for him. Loki was maybe more of a Loki-trickster type, but we see these archetypes in many different characters as well.

Continued from:

First in mini-series:

⚡️Nice journal reference here1 and citation to my work on Disinfolklore.

Does two things of particular value to me as a writer:

1. Is a record that I created the Portmanteau ‘Disinfolklore.’

2. Correctly categorises ‘Disinformation’ as a particular form of ‘Disinfolklore.’

Thus giving me the whole field (which I’d be too humble to have claimed too loudly) while confining all the work focussing on Disinformation to a local province or region of my field.

Prof Yolles cites my work, the result of @peterjukes visionary decision to commission for @BylineTimes an early piece on Disinfolklore in . Thanks Thanks Prof Yolles.

That oeuvre, now heavily developed into a 1m+ word corpus, sliced, diced and served up in 1,000+ easily digestible passages, is now presented https://www.Disinfolklore.com in a very innovative format.

⚡️Previously we talked about archetypal disinfolklore and literacy. We talked about archetypes and what I mean by archetypes — we have a good introduction. We also talked about character and how characters occupy stories that we find in our information space. Those characters can be humans or mythical creatures or countries or anything invested with energy in any memes.

The third tool - look for the mana in the meme!- in my arsenal of twelve tools in my disinfolklore arsenal — clever people will notice I haven’t spoken about the second tool, which is incoming-outgoing troll radars. We’re going to skip to three and come back to that another week. I want to talk about mana and energy — and looking for the mana in the meme.

What “Look for the Mana in the Meme” Means

What I mean by “look for the mana in the meme”: a meme in my book — literally in my book, a metaphorical book — can be any informational unit. That could be a visual meme that passes into our inner mind in a flash, in a millisecond. Or a meme could actually be a whole book or a film or something much longer or more durable or substantive — a visual, a song, or a poem.

When you’re looking for the mana in the meme, just the act of trying to work out what is the energy inside this meme — and I use mana and energy interchangeably — because what I try to look for is what is the immanence. Mana is an immanence as well. What is immanent in this meme?

I’m affected emotionally by it. My emotions are moved. My mood is affected. My intentions change as a result of this meme, this newspaper article. I was about to make a cup of coffee; now I’m just sitting aghast at what has been done. Or I intended to donate to Ukraine, but now I see it’s useless, so I donate to Palestine Action or something like that. My intention changes as a result of this meme. My mood has changed — I’m now depressed or I’m overjoyed. The Spider Web attack excited us all, but as we know, after that comes the comedown.

The Four Dimensions: Moods, Intentions, Attitudes, Motivations

By looking for the mana in the meme, you’re trying to identify — either after your emotions have been triggered and your moods have been changed, your intentions have been changed, your attitudes — I use these four words to describe it: moods, intentions, attitudes, and how memes affect these different aspects of our being, which will be contingent on something in the meme itself.

Either after my mood or my intention or my attitude has been affected by the meme, or before it, I’m looking for the mana — the energy, the layers of energy. That in itself is a practice that I try to integrate into my own work when I’m scanning my timeline or listening to the news. Whenever I feel my emotions being triggered, I try to look for what’s the energy in this meme.

We Don’t Care About the Sharer’s Intention

The great thing about this is we don’t care about the intention of the person that shared it. It may have been me this morning sharing some well-sourced article in Politico or something I found on Telegram. I’m not part of Telegram. My intention wasn’t to troll you or to fool you or outrage you or to trick you — it was just to express my own pain. That doesn’t matter if I’m assessing this particular meme. What matters is what is the energy in this meme.

If we uncouple the layers — the lack of these weapon systems — when we know in our heart of hearts that Trump, America, Manafort behind him and all of this, they are a dead loss. We put ourselves in the position of the MAGA people, or those people who are relying on Donald — some woman who he’s trying to troll, some guy who’s trying to sell an apartment to — we end up being put in that position if we fall for these trolls. I think most of us certainly listening here right now have a better self-respect than to fall for Donald’s trolls, and this is just yet another one: “Oh, I will give the weapons, I won’t give the weapons, if there’s peace...”

The Practice: Look for the Mana Before You React

That’s really what I try to do. We have the power to look in any of these memes and just look for the mana. That’s what I’d like to try and encourage us all to do over the coming week: when you come across anything that affects your emotions, your moods, your attitudes, your intentions — try this practice of asking, what is the mana?

Everything mentioned there, James, is a perfect example of disinfolklore. This is an entire universe — a sub-universe, or galaxy — in the whole disinfolklore universe. Various characters are commenting on stuff. The Kyiv Independent’s intentions are always very good, but it’s caught up inside this kind of news cycle and hysteria as well.

This is a great example of what I mean by disinfolklore: all of these different stories and emanations of stories and emanations of emanations of stories. If we’re going to categorise them all in terms of today’s news, all of it is negative from the perspective of all of us. It’s depressed all of us. In that, we can probably see what’s going on.

My first reaction was, “Oh, wow, they’re still getting Patriot interceptor missiles.” I’d assumed they weren’t getting any more. None of us know anything about this. We don’t know how many have been delivered, how many are in stock, whether Donald is doing this on purpose or why.

I have to say, even I was interested in Macron’s phone call with Putin. I try not to get too caught up in it because of all these other stories which are going on, which we are very much involved in and affected by.

It was just one example of looking — trying to look at the individual artefacts, their sources. I don’t doubt the Kyiv Independent’s intentions, but I don’t think they’re adding to or helping us understand precisely what’s going on in all of that story.

I am always suspicious when I feel depressed by a piece of news, because they sculpt these memes so perfectly to have this impact on people just like us. When we spot this impact, we should, I think, be quite suspicious of the information that we’re reacting to.

Mana in the Meme: A Universal Practice

Looking for the mana in the meme should work on any form of information, whether it’s your mother saying something to your girlfriend or your child. You’re not really looking at the intentions behind it. You’re looking at what’s immanent in the actual informational units themselves — the stories you hear and feel.

Sometimes it’s a Russian disinfolklorist designing a meme to hack our rational thought systems, to bypass our incoming and outgoing troll radars — which clearly this has, for most of us who are affected by this piece of news. Other times it can be our newly indoctrinated MAGA family member or a trusted news source like the Kyiv Independent, conveying the meme into our minds, unconsciously furthering the disinfolklore galaxy’s designers’ ends. Often we ourselves are unknowingly communicating onwards disinfolklore.

This is why I’m not going to talk too much about that, because there’s no way for me to escape it either. I can’t talk about these interceptor missiles apart from what I’ve said — trying to contextualise it against the attacks on civilians in Ukraine, which terrorise tens of millions but kill a tiny number. The war won’t be won by that. We all understand that rationally. Therefore, the impact of Patriot interceptor missiles on how the war ends is small — very small. We know that rationally. This is a 1,200-kilometre-long frontline, and there’s just oodles of things which have been going on this week which are much more important, and stuff which hasn’t been going on which is much more important — like Ukraine’s capacity to hit the oil infrastructure, the blowing up of tankers, the blowing up of factories 1,200 kilometres from the border. There are just oodles of other things.

If we focus on this other thing that we don’t know anything about, that could well be furthering the intentions of the designers of these memes.

The Danger of Communicating Onwards

We communicate onwards this disinfolklore, which infects the moods, intentions, attitudes, and motivations of those whom we’re influencing. Someone on Volia Radio this morning — one of our great friends — was telling this woeful tale, absolutely woeful. I’m glad I know about it. At the end of it, Mockers had to say to them, “Look, you’re killing us. You’re killing us.” The person explained, “I read about this and I just needed to share it.” I was thinking: actually, you didn’t need to share it. Let it be a cul-de-sac. Why are you inflicting this on all of us? Then we get this energy, this really sad story in our minds. Of course, I do this all the time by accident. I’m trying not to. That’s part of what I’m talking about here.

Sometimes we do communicate onwards disinfolklore in this outraged way, which affects the moods, intentions, attitudes, and motivations of those we’re influencing in precisely the same manner as the originator of the item of disinfolklore imagined we would.

When we see someone from MeidasTouch sharing — which is a great media outlet in America — sharing a Donald tweet, and we read the tweet, or we read Marco Rubio sharing the same tweet, and one of them is expressing outrage and getting us to feel shocked, and the other is trying to get us to go, “Well, Donald’s great” — the effect is the same. This meme has been shared and then we share it onwards.

Part of what I try to do myself is not share onwards these things, whether visual, audible, or ideas — and conversely, to share things which may affect things positively, not negatively. I’m looking for the energy in memes that is positive.

If we share onwards this disinfolklore, which affects the moods, intentions, attitudes, and motivations of others in precisely the same manner as the originator of the item of disinfolklore intended — in the context of one of Donald’s Truth Social untruths, they don’t care. They just want this to be shared. The effect is the same: it’s manipulating us or others into mental or physical activities that accord with the disinfolklore galaxy’s malign designs for us and our communities.

It’s better we learn to look for the mana energy inside memes and informational units before we share them onwards, whether that’s telling someone about them or talking too much about them.

Manafort, Politico, and the Recurring Ukraine Story

James and Wendy, you and I could have a two-hour discussion right now about where we think this story came from. We’ve all seen stories in Politico during this war which are improper. We know Politico is sadly owned by a friend of MAGA.

I’m really interested at the moment in Paul Manafort and his name — of course, “Mana” in “Manafort.” This hypothesis I have that he is advising Donald, we know that, but he is operating on behalf of the Russian oligarchs and trying to create some sense of peace between them and Donald. That kind of thing is important — relatively neutral in that it’s just an interesting question. Everything that happens seems to fit what he has been up to since 2016.

I recall the fuss in July 2016 when Manafort wrote to Donald’s best friend at the time, Tom Barrack — who was later convicted for acting as a foreign agent for, I think, one of the Emirates — and then he got the act of arming Ukraine removed from the Republican Party platform at the 2016 convention. Here we are, nine years later, and exactly the same story is electrifying our info space. Once again, Ukraine is the centre of everything.

For me, that’s quite a positive. It’s still really central to American politics at a time that that terrible bill is going through Congress. It could be a distraction from that, but who knows? I’m looking for the mana in the meme, the energy, thinking through all these dimensions — all the things I’ve talked about — as distinct from getting outraged or depressed about something we don’t know that much about.

Gabriel Gatehouse and the “Ukrainian Nazi” Archetype

For instance, in the case of any story about Ukrainian Nazis — this week we saw some really disappointing material. People I had already written off. This guy, Gabriel Gatehouse, who is a BBC journalist — I really enjoyed his show on one of Russia’s chief ideologues, Vladislav Surkov, which in my early days trying to learn about all of this, I found really interesting. All of the facts that Gatehouse elucidates about Surkov, who is a Russian ideologue.

Then Gatehouse tweets this nonsense about the head of MI6’s ancestors — the new foreign intelligence service chief in the UK — without any self-awareness that he’s completely falling for the troll and perpetuating this “Ukrainian Nazi” archetype. It didn’t surprise me with him, but it did sadden me, because someone like him holds himself up as a great interpreter of Russian disinfolklore, and yet he just gets triggered into perpetuating this archetypal character of the Ukrainian Nazi. He should have known better than to do that. It doesn’t surprise me, but it does disappoint me.

Titushky: Fake Demonstrations from Ukraine to Europe

Going back to protest actions, demonstrations — most people aren’t aware, including perhaps the people you were speaking to today, Wendy — they aren’t aware of how demonstrations can be organised in a fake way.

When I first came across the term titushky around 2017, I didn’t know anything about it. The idea that demonstrations weren’t organic was a real surprise to me. A guy came to me in Dnipro when I was working for the OSCE there, who was one of the chief organisers of titushky. He could get a crowd of people in any period of time, really quickly, any size, any dimensions. He could get you 200 grannies to protest outside a law firm in an hour. He could get you younger people, tracksuits, violent people, whatever.

He came to me and to my mission because he was under a bit of pressure from some other titushky leader. I think he just wanted a bit of protection. I spoke to him at length. He came to our office and explained what he did and how it worked.

Ever since then, I’ve been tuned into this phenomenon of people being paid to protest — agents provocateurs. I’ll always remember what he said when I asked him, “How did you get into this game?” He said, “Well, in my first year at university, I just realised I had a talent for organising people.” At the time in Ukraine, there were these huge protests which had been organised by Kolomoisky to protest that his bank, PrivatBank, had been nationalised.

In my mind, because of these protests, Kolomoisky went from being a bit of a hero — because he had raised and funded two battalions, Dnipro I and II, in Dnipro, which held Russia back. There’s a reason why Russia can’t to this day take all of Donetsk and all of Luhansk, and it’s because they’re rubbish on the battlefield. They cannot. Any of us who listen to Chuck Pfarrer will understand the mechanics of it. You don’t need to listen to Chuck Pfarrer to understand the second army in the world is bogged down 1,200 kilometres east of Kyiv — that’s the battle space.

The informational battle space — they’re trying to win on that front, and Ukraine’s allies can be depressed or not. Ukraine, from my perspective, we’re in a lot better state than we were two years ago. I actually have absolutely zero concern today when I heard that Macron has spoken to Putin. I don’t think for a second Ukraine is going to be abandoned.

I’m watching all of the new factories being built, the Danish model being extended outwards. The NASAMs are going to be, I think I’m right in saying, manufactured inside Ukraine. Every time you turn around, Norway’s dropping another few billion on the table as well. They should. The Scandinavian countries — everyone is tooling up.

I have no concern that I did have two years ago. That doesn’t mean other people can’t have concerns. When you understand that there are these fake demonstrations and you’ve read the FBI indictments about them that have happened in the United States over the past few years, then you can really look beyond the news of these post-October 7th Palestine actions.

I’m in no way denigrating anyone who supports a free Palestine and a Palestinian state. I’m merely talking about the post-October 7th manifestations which will be used by people in America and in Western countries — and already are — to create tumult and chaos.

Once you know about these facts, when you hear about these demonstrations, you’re looking for: what is the energy inside them? Could they be fake? Is there a Russia connection? Is there an Iranian connection? Is TikTok involved? Is the CCP involved? Is Telegram involved?

There was some anti-immigrant stuff in Ireland recently organised by Telegram up in Ballymena in Northern Ireland — a place which is actually unusual for unrest because it’s so monolithic. Telegram was involved in organising protests there which turned violent over two Romanian boys. When I looked into it, once I saw that Telegram was involved, I thought, okay, well, here we go.

I think this is one example on these fake demonstrations. We can help educate people who don’t know that much about it.

Titushky’s Redemption

Titushky, by the way — the first Titushky — last I heard, he was actually in the Ukrainian army. He did organise violent protests in favour of Yanukovych for Paul Manafort, Trump’s adviser — the jailed Paul Manafort, who was jailed for working as a foreign agent without registering it and tax evasion. Now he’s back in the inner fold.

Manafort’s energy — the strong energy of Manafort — is in all of what is going on. I see it in almost everything happening at the moment. Titushky, last I heard about a year ago, was in the Ukrainian army and fighting for Ukraine. He had been paid to launch these fights against protesters, but now he’s fighting for Ukraine. That’s a positive — it’s both true and positive.

I wouldn’t just talk about positive things. I’d also talk about giving people the information so they know there is such a thing as fake demonstrations. Those of us who come from innocent backgrounds in America or Ireland or England — we just wouldn’t imagine that the gilets jaunes in Paris, that the people who sparked that might have been paid by the Russians and organised by Surkov.

Once you find out that this is possible and also very prevalent, then you can look for the energy in similar kinds of protests. Tell people, try and explain it as I do online, as I’m doing right now. Especially if my prediction comes true over the coming months, we’re really in for a rocky few months or years because of this attack on Iran and the blowback that’s going to come from it.

Hopefully next week I can talk about incoming and outgoing troll radars.