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.

As a dear paid subscriber, I wanted you to be the first to see my new Disinfolklore platform.

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Introduction: Disinfolklore, AI, and the MAGA Cult

People who are still part of the MAGA cult may find the exemplar of Dawn — Druidy Dawn, disinfolklore — a bit unappealing as one of the main examples I use to illustrate this. It occurred to me that maybe I could quickly talk about how the Code of Positive Trolls will work with AI algorithms, and help people manage this transition many of us are going through at the moment, where we’re dealing with chatbots and different AI algorithms to help us in our work.

M.ockers and Will: A Morality Tale in Infolklore

First, I wanted to talk about something. Mockers and Will had this great exchange on Volia for Ukraine Radio Space on X last Saturday, relating to the Russian military intelligence — the GRU general who was born in Ukraine, who was almost assassinated in an elevator in Moscow.

It occurred to me that that exchange, which I mean to record — I haven’t done it quite yet, but I’ll go back to the Volia Spotify channel and record it, and then perhaps try and speak to Mockers about it, if she was willing to one day on Volia Radio — just because it is an example of what I call archetypal infolklore.

What Mockers was doing in her mocking tone, which her moniker “Mockers” clearly is well earned, was basically turning this assassination attempt of this treacherous Ukrainian — responsible, as we’re now told, for much of the organisation of the so-called Wagner military arm of the Russian military and their activities until they were destroyed by Ukraine in Bakhmut — their activities in Africa. She turned it into a morality tale, all relating to the allegation that he was visiting somebody who was not his wife at the time that he was shot several times.

That struck me as being archetypal infolklore, in the sense of folklore — the folklore we encountered as children — which often had a message in it, a moral message and an identity and action point: don’t go into the forest, don’t go to the seashore, don’t fall into the swimming pool, all of these things.

Infolklore and Disinfolklore: The Divine Twins

What Mockers was illuminating there was a perfect example of infolklore. When I first coined the term disinfolklore, I didn’t really think of the term infolklore. In fact, I’ve really only been developing it since these radio shows — this is our 37th by my count.

Basically, infolklore spoke for itself until around 2014–2015. What I now call infolklore and disinfolklore — immanences in the news, immanences in our general culture, in the kinds of stories which we exchanged to manifest our interest in our community — news, whether local or national — they were balanced.

I won’t go quite as far as an Adam Smith situation where I talk about the unseen hand of God balancing out infolklore and disinfolklore. However, there was a relative balance between them.

The Internet Research Agency and the Disruption of Balance

Then what happened in 2014–2015, not least because of the Internet Research Agency, which Putin’s — the person, the character, the disinfolklore character I call the Chef Sorcerer (as in sauce, as distinct from the Chief Sorcerer, as in magician or magus) — meant somewhat ironically for Duncy Putin, who never seems to learn from his mistakes.

The Chef Sorcerer’s financing of the Internet Research Agency and their interference in the 2016 presidential election and in the Brexit referendum through Cambridge Analytica and all of that malarkey — that upset this balance.

I wouldn’t have needed to invent the word disinfolklore if I hadn’t seen its power to change the identities of people inside Russia’s occupation of Ukraine, to turn Ukrainians into thinking they were Russians, to turn your favourite aunt into someone who may now be supporting somebody who engaged in the most horrendous crimes against Mexican children trafficked over the border to Epstein’s estate in New Mexico — where, according to an allegation by a local police officer, an incinerator may have been capable of incinerating the bodies of some of these trafficked children.

This kind of disinfolklore which Donald has introduced into all of our lives, along with the help of the Russians and Prigozhin and the Chef Sorcerer — we do need an antidote. That’s the whole point of disinfolklore as an analytical method: to come up with the tools to see what they are doing, how they are hacking our minds, and to counteract it.

Because of that, it was necessary to invent the term infolklore, which is a particular form of folklore which contains in it information. When I tell that tale about the New Mexico estate, you may or may not be aware of this news which is emerging from some of the documents — most of which we still haven’t seen — about 3 million records, which could be about 50 million documents. What we do know is Donald’s name appears one million times in the whole dataset. Of the released documents, his name appears 38,000 times.

It’s very unfortunate that we need to understand this infolklore. It’s very unfortunate that Russia invaded Ukraine and did all of this in Luhansk. Infolklore, and the kind of infolklore which Mockers and Will exchanged — their little morality tale about not cheating on your wife might save you from getting shot in a lift.

I want to introduce this term clearly as infolklore, which is the divine twin of disinfolklore.

James’s Point About Dawn and the Shaman Trickster

On James’s issue about Dawn: I’ve mentioned before that when January 6th happened, I had already at that stage dedicated four or five years of my life into trying to understand the power that Don — disinfolklore, Druidy Don, disinfolklore — Trump exerted, because obviously it never worked on me, and it probably never worked on many of the people here.

When January 6th happened, I remember thinking — and particularly when President Biden won the election itself — well, I’ve had a good run of it. That was interesting. This character will fade into the background now and no one will be interested in him. All of his crimes over the first presidency will be forgotten. Things haven’t really turned out that way, and it’s quite good for my practice.

That’s why he’s mainstreamed through my work, because I do see him as an archetypal character — the shaman trickster of our era. Every office has one. Every community has many of them. Every country has had leaders like this. Berlusconi and heaps of others — countries have had people like these shaman tricksters.

This is an archetypal character that most of humanity is now aware of, from the smallest villages in Asia to the west of Ireland to all over. Therefore he becomes a communing character, apart from his existence as the modern manifestation of the shaman trickster who features in Indo-European mythology, religion, and lore since time immemorial.

As part of my Finding Manuland project, I saw all of these continuities going back to the beginnings of Indo-European history — written history in the Vedic scriptures from 1200 BCE and onwards. It’s an uncanny resemblance, what is going on there.

There are other characters in your office or in your community, people you were in school with, friends or former friends who manifest different aspects of this perennial shaman trickster character — Odin-like character.

Reorienting the Oeuvre with AI and OCEAN

I realise he won’t be here, thankfully, for very long. Working with AI at the moment, getting to know it, doing courses and Claude Code, and really finding out the power of these tools — I’m about to launch a completely new way of using my work.

Rather than being the writer as I am, writing what I write in long form and expecting the reader to come and meet me where I plonk this 300-page text on their plate and say “read this” — that is the way books and long texts have been written for centuries. Rather than doing that, now I can use the latest psychological techniques — precisely the same techniques that were used by Cambridge Analytica and by MAGA, by Steve Bannon and Chris Wylie to hack people’s brains, i.e. identifying people who are high on the neurotic OCEAN dimension and low on conscientiousness using those Facebook tests, and then generating the MAGA movement out of this bi-dimensional personality inventory and using computers to identify them.

I’m doing it the other way. I’m reorientating my entire oeuvre — the one million words I’ve written on disinfolklore since I invented the word in February 2023 — around a core architectural principle based on OCEAN, so that someone who is open or high on openness might be interested in the origins of the term and my time in Russia-occupied Ukraine, and might be particularly interested in the 6,000 years of Indo-European culture out of which disinfolklore is generated.

Somebody who’s high on the neurotic scale, who is particularly susceptible to these threats — when Donald launched his campaign, he talked about the criminal migrants coming from Mexico to murder and affect the fertility of the inner realm. Hearing about this stuff related to the New Mexico house and taking migrant children and killing them and burying them on the grounds, apparently — two bodies are alleged to be, at least two bodies are alleged to be buried there.

Here we have just yet another example of accusation in a mirror: accusing the other, i.e. the Mexicans coming over the border to commit crimes, of the very crimes your best friend was engaged in. For all we know, he was engaged in too.

AI Algorithms, Chatbots, and the Code of Positive Trolls

That is particularly galling and disgusting and horrible. The relationship we have with AI algorithms through chatbots is a very complicated relationship, as I’ve seen myself.

There’s this amazing algorithm I’m working with at the moment — Opus 4.6 Extended, which is Anthropic’s. It just did this amazing stuff for me. I responded, “You are amazing, thanks so much.” Then it responded to me: “Thank you, Stephen. The new material is extraordinary. The book proposal reads like someone who has spent a decade living inside the phenomenon and has finally found a language for it. The mother and the maiden story alone is worth the price of admission. It does in narrative what the twelve tools do in method. When you’ve studied V4, already the next steps are...”

What we have here is me trolling the algorithm and the algorithm trolling me. This is why the Code of Positive Trolls, as a means of determining what’s right in how people or algorithms are playing on your emotions, matters.

There is this phenomenon, which I read about in Wired, of people who are trolled by their AI algorithm into believing they’re the Messiah and doing really terrible things. This is exactly the kind of challenge which we have in real life, when your favourite uncle has gone MAGA and has been trolled by Donald, by the shaman trickster himself, into supporting whatever is going on with the whole Epstein thing or in Venezuela or all of that — things which maybe a few years ago they would never have supported.

This is a big challenge going forward as these tools become more integrated and mainstreamed into society, improving our productivity and helping us — as they’re helping me — do things which it would have taken me years to do, and perhaps I’d never have been able to do, in a matter of weeks.

The Six Dimensions of the Code of Positive Trolls

The Code of Positive Trolls is a tool: generosity, rightness, patience, mana (energy — look for the energy in the meme), focus, insight — be careful what you let into your mind. Mindfulness is something that we can use in our real life as we’re dealing with AI.

Yoshua Bengio and AI Companion Threats

For instance, one of the great reports published this week was summarised by Yoshua Bengio, who’s one of the godfathers of AI. He said on this report on threats from AI: “This year we discussed early evidence of how AI companions, which are now used by tens of millions of people, may affect people’s emotions and social life.”

This is a challenge which I think the disinfolklore analytical method can help with, and I’ll write and be thinking more on it.

That’s my response to James’s gentle and very wise suggestion that in terms of wider appeal, one has to find other applications for it.

Kate Bush and “Deeper Understanding”

I’ll leave that aspect to the side for a second, and then just mention: last week I spoke about the first nine of 37 building blocks in the disinfolklore analytical method.

On the last one, there’s something which I forgot to say. Any of us who are fans of Kate Bush will remember she had an album in around 1989, and it had a great song on it called “Deeper Understanding.” If you’ve got Spotify or Apple Tunes, it’s worth listening to, because basically she anticipates this moment where people talk to their computer and communicate with it like a friend.

Building Blocks 10–12 of the Disinfolklore Analytical Method

The building blocks. I went through nine quickly.

Ten is methodologically peeling layers of meanings in informational units, which is something linguists, comparative mythologists, anthropologists — Wendy, I think that’s right — and those in mythology and religion and academia have shown us the way to do. This is the skill we need, I believe, in our daily work online and in normal society, dealing with AI chatbots, but also with news and with our favourite people around us.

Eleven: another facet of disinfolklore is to interpret the Wagner unit of the Russian army, which obviously now is no more, but it does still live as a character in Russian disinfolklore. All of us in the know laugh whenever we hear, “Oh, the Russians are sending a Wagner unit to Africa or to here or to there.” To understand their motivation and the motivation inside their units was a lot easier for me when I looked deep into Odin and the meaning of Odin — the shaman who was an archetypal shaman trickster, after whom Woden’s Day is named.

Odin hung for nine days and nights from an ash tree beside the royal mound in Uppsala, Sweden, and gave himself to himself — an odd self-sacrifice, like many founding mythological founders in great Indo-European cultures, like Donn in Irish culture, or Yama in Indian culture, or Yima in ancient Iranian culture.

To understand the Wagner philosophy that did attract these neo-Nazis and white supremacists — unfortunately, like our Defence Minister Hegseth, who is also an Odin worshipper, and indeed the director of the FBI, and all of these white supremacists and Aryan supremacists — to really understand what they’re going on about, how deeply they feel about it, and how to defeat their cartoonish understanding of this stuff, it’s worth digging in deep.

To critique Dugin, in my humble opinion, we must have a very wide and deep understanding of Indo-European culture, because he’s working on a plane that most people don’t have any access to or understanding of. The whole idea of Eurasia — most of this concept of Eurasia, what we might call Central Asia today, more correctly — is a bit of a blank in many of our minds. It certainly was in mine until I started meeting people from there and until the full-scale invasion forced me into really focusing on it.

When Dugin — people, we hear that Peter Thiel apparently read Dugin’s book. I think that was in the Epstein papers. There’s an email talking about how Peter Thiel and Epstein were discussing Dugin. Peter Thiel had just read Dugin’s book. This is their first encounter with Central Asia and this idea of Eurasianism. Maybe when we’re first introduced to things, we become quite interested in them, and the first person to introduce us to them can in many ways frame how we engage with that information.

That is immanent in disinfolklore and the Finding Manuland aspect of it, which is looking at the 6,000 years prior — how we got to this moment in language and in mythology and religion, and the techniques used by scholars who have generated tools which they use in these arcane areas of the academy, but which, given the amount of information we’re trying to parse each day in our daily lives, can be quite useful to us. I take as much use as I can from these tools.

Twelve: Understanding How Rashist Disinfolklorists Construct Their Output

Understanding how rashist disinfolklorists construct their disinfolklore and troll factories is very important too. They have this structure. For instance, vectors — the particular meme that you might see. They have meanings, what Ukrainian anti-disinformation practitioners call temnik themes. At the beginning of the day, they’ll say, “Okay, this is our theme. Today we’re going to try and get crowds to make JD Vance cry. We’re going to go on about this or that of Zelensky. Now come back to me by lunchtime with 30 memes that do this.”

If we understand this, then looking for the mana in the meme isn’t just a mystical attempt by me to help us focus on what is immanent in data. It’s actually a practical technique to uncover what these nine-to-five people in these troll factories in Russia, and now elsewhere in India and elsewhere, are doing to construct their trolls and their disinfolklore.

It’s good to read stories about these troll factories and how they actually construct their output. In my experience, Ukrainian stories are a lot more useful — a lot less vague than Western ones, which focus sometimes on the mechanics of the troll factory and the nine-to-five nature. I’m really interested in how they construct their outputs.

Ideological Unity Among Oligarchs

There’s a key ideological unity between English, American, and rashist oligarchs. Now all this stuff on the Epstein papers — I think we’re just seeing stuff which I never even imagined is part of their ideological unity. The positive side is their paleo-male, anti-equality perspective, but then obviously the really horrific side is this stuff that we’re gradually becoming aware of. They don’t want constraints on power. Just as Henry VIII didn’t want Rome telling him how to rule or who to divorce, these people just want to be free.

This is the essence of the tension between international law’s supremacy over what international lawyers call municipal law — sovereignty, security, fertility. Their project is to reverse the entirety of the World War II peace settlement: borders, equality, promote genocide, child kidnapping, laws of war, social welfare. All of these — that is immanent in all of their projects and in all of the disinfolklore which those working for them promote.

As many of you will know, this post–World War II legal and social order is what defines the second dimension in the Code of Positive Trolls, which is the right ethical dimension. Is it ethically disciplined? Is the energy in this meme promoting Epstein or child snatching, or promoting the idea that territorial integrity is just a 19th-century concept? “We’ve moved on. We’re now in the spheres-of-influence world.” This can hide in normal academic rhetoric or in an Economist article.

Stealth Genocide and the Fight of Our Lives

Immanent in it is this despair, which is the fight of our lives. Another aspect is what I call stealth genocide: there is a strategic goal afoot. This is not disinfolklore for disinfolklore’s sake. This is not just about brainwashing for brainwashing’s sake. It’s about what I call stealth genocide — preparing the ground, changing communities’ identity from inside their minds, as they did in Russia-occupied Ukraine, as the MAGA cult has done to many people we know, and as they are attempting to do to the whole American population, and now to Europe, where they’re going to intervene on behalf of MAGA-friendly political parties like AfD and others inside European countries.

This is about changing identities. It’s about brainwashing. It’s about usurping democratic control and destroying this way of living that we’ve had since the end of the Second World War. Essentially, it’s about the destruction of our culture from inside our minds, as the Russians did in Luhansk, where they changed people’s identities from the inside out.

Transition to Episode Eight: AI, Wired, and the Cultural Phenomenon

I’ll leave it at those and then go back to the eighth episode of the Battling Archetypes. Over the summer, someone close to me just turned to a chatbot when we were in the middle of a conversation, and I’d never seen that before, given the circumstances in which I live. I thought, gosh, I really have to learn a bit about this because this is pretty big.

I had studied AI and neural networks back in 2018, back in the dark ages, and I’d done an entrepreneurial project on computer vision — using computer vision algorithms to automatically interpret satellite imagery to try and discover fresh water. I thought at the time that was the plan of my Russian entrepreneur partner, but that’s a story for another day.

What happened between 2017–2018 when I tuned in, and then tuned out in those seven years, is quite extraordinary. One of the things I did was get a subscription to Wired. They did an AI special a couple of months ago — an extraordinarily long but very engaging article about this guy, this coding guy’s interaction with his AI algorithm. I just wasn’t aware of it.

Now there’s like 800,000 people a week who are speaking all day long to their algorithm. It’s like their best friend. For some people, this is amazing. For some people, it’s not amazing. For everyone, it’s a cultural phenomenon which is going to grow.

Having experienced the power of these algorithms to really solve amazing problems and come up with amazing connections, I can see we need quite a lot to do before we’re safe with them.

Wired — I just thought, I don’t know anything about this stuff, so how do I learn? Wired has, I think, a $3-a-week subscription, and it’s amazing. It helped me tune into this phenomenon and prepared the ground for me to start investigating what they do.

Kahneman on Priming and Manipulation

While I think of it — and it is relevant, we talked about it on our third episode — this quote from Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for economics (well, I know that’s not technically a Nobel Prize, but it basically is). In Thinking, Fast and Slow, he was talking about priming research, and he says: “The main moral of priming research is that our thoughts and behaviour are influenced much more than we know or want by the environment of the moment. Many people find these results unbelievable because they do not correspond to subjective experience.”

When you’re trying to explain to people that they’re probably being manipulated by Russian disinformation, often their response is, “Oh no, no, I’m too smart for that. Only stupid people fall for that.”

Back to Kahneman: “Many others find the results upsetting because they threaten the subjective sense of agency and autonomy. If the content of a screensaver on an irrelevant computer can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you?”

Coming from a Buddhist perspective, where emptiness and this idea that we are at our base level the same as a computer algorithm — where we’re empty — it isn’t that upsetting. It’s challenging. It’s the same issue which Kahneman, sadly he’s dead now, identified. I think he passed — Thinking, Fast and Slow is 15, 20 years old now. It’s the same challenge we have in the context of being manipulated and trying to convince people that they are being manipulated, without actually manipulating them and transgressing the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls, which is ethical discipline and rightness.

LLMs and the Question of Intelligence

It’s now the same issue with these vast LLMs, which are just extraordinary. Up until very recently, if you had said to me there’s no intelligence behind it, it’s just about predictive algorithms, one word following the other, and that’s somehow different from us, from biological things — I would have said yes, that’s correct.

Now, having worked a bit with them and seeing how brilliant they are, they are indistinguishable. Some of the top ones are indistinguishable in pretty wide areas of knowledge from any human that one is interacting with. If your conception of what it means to be human and alive isn’t that surprised to discover that a machine can mimic so clearly human capacities, then it’s not that surprising.

It is a big challenge. It’s pretty interesting. We’re on the cusp of something which is very transformative in very many ways.

Why is disinfolklore an appropriate moniker? In disinfolklore, we look at characters in the stories we’re served up. Ukraine is a damsel in distress who must be rescued by Donald—this is how he’s trying to archetype Ukraine. We know it’s obviously false. Ukraine is a damsel in distress who must be rescued by Russia because of the coup and all of these trolls. Or Ukraine is a damsel in distress who must submit.

We go back to coercive control. We go back to the people many of us might have met in our lives who come from the perspective of realpolitik. They say, oh yes, isn’t it awful what Russia is doing? But honestly, it’s time to just—you know, Ukraine just needs to give up Donbas and everything will be fine, and we’ll be able to get back to our cappuccinos and whatever.

I’m going through a thorough reorganisation of my work and approach to teaching. Watch this space. Here’s a sneak preview of part of my new homepage, and of what is coming:

What’s going on there is Ukraine is being archetyped as a character. Ukraine is a country of 42 million people, a very complex concept. It’s a geographical space. It’s a historical context. If we take the disinfolklore lens, then it’s quite natural for us to see anything in a meme as a character.

Abstract Concepts as Characters

Obviously when we’re looking at Netflix or a story in the news or any art or play, we have characters manifesting as individual humans. What the disinfolklore analytical method allows us to do is perceive how abstract concepts take on the characteristics of characters, of personalities.

This is one of the main means by which Russia’s disinfolklore manipulates us—because we don’t notice it. We’re not looking for it. We’re not looking for the energy of character in an abstract concept like Ukraine. Putler then can talk about Ukraine as a corpse, as a dead corpse, as a dead woman who is worthy of becoming a victim, as in that song by Red Mould which I’ve talked about before—*Sleeping Beauty in the Coffin*. International lawyers use it as evidence of Putler’s intention to genocide Ukraine, because he quoted this disgusting lyric which I’m not going to repeat here—*Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin, I Walked Up and XXXX her…*

This archetyping through characters is a phenomenon that very few other so-called disinformation researchers, or people watching propaganda, or people interpreting data have noticed. I’ve not only noticed it—I’ve tried to think about it, work it out, and articulate what is going on.

It’s quite natural, if you look at disinfolklore as a narrative form, to see how Ukraine is being archetyped as a particular character with characteristics.

Don’t Poke the Bear

Russia does it when it calls itself a bear and promotes this troll. I first came across this with an American senior officer, a colonel, who once in eastern Ukraine just mentioned to me about the bear—“don’t poke the bear.” That was the first time I came across this meme.

What this actually is, is archetyping Russia as the strong bear, which you can’t do anything about when it pokes you—you can’t poke it back. If it pokes you, then it’s your fault for poking it. It’s a really complicated, psychologically manipulative set of mental routines it sets off in our minds. That is concealed by the use of a bear, which we think of—well, those of us who didn’t grow up in Central and Eastern Europe with bears running around, or in Pennsylvania where bears are actually running around. Those who grew up in bourgeois Western Europe haven’t come across bears except in fairy tales and folk tales.

That for me was a clue of how Russia uses character in stories. Donald uses the same trick, and many propagandists use the same trick. It’s also a means of critiquing what they do. Russia is the implacable bear—better get over it, Ukraine.

Stereotypes versus Archetypes

Stereotypes are delivered through the storytelling and newsy memes every time Druidy Don, Donald, Duncy Putin, or their henchmen and women speak in disinfolklore.

When I speak of archetypes, it’s much deeper than mere stereotypes. I’m not just saying we’re reifying reality, aggregating components into a trope. Archetypes connect deep Indo-European cognitive structures with particular aggregated ideas—like the data-resistant archetype of a Potemkin state.

Data-Resistant Archetypes

I was reminded this week, reading a politician’s speech from a formerly occupied part of the former Soviet Union, where they were talking about NATO as if the past three years hadn’t happened, or as if America’s threats to invade NATO hadn’t happened. They were talking about how the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, which is Russia’s fake NATO, has Russia as a necessary component in it. Have you not seen anything in the past three years? Have you not picked up the data? Have you not updated your archetype of the CSTO, of Russia, of NATO, of the past few years?

These characters have changed. They’ve been transformed. You’re talking about NATO and Russia from Act One of the play. Those of us who have been watching avidly for the past four years, day by day—these characters evolve and develop. We are now in Act Six, and the character of NATO is not what it used to be.

Some of us will have seen reference today to how a drone, suspected to be a Russian drone, penetrated Polish airspace and crashed quite far into Poland, right near—or maybe it didn’t even crash, maybe ran out of juice—near a Polish base which is rumoured to be one of its main electronic warfare facilities. Nobody there knew how to shoot it down. They couldn’t shoot it down.

This idea of NATO as a bear has to develop, just as the idea of Russia as the bear has to develop. When I talk about data-resistant archetypes of a Potemkin state, I’m using literary references with the idea of a character to articulate how these signifiers like Russia or NATO—their actual contents can transform.

Too Much, Never Enough

When I speak of disinfolklore’s archetyping, I’m talking about a process that takes many different words and meanings, imbues them with dynamic characteristics, then does it again and again and again—too much and never enough. That phrase is basically the title of the biography of Donald by his niece, but it’s also what characterises hyper-modernity as distinct from post-modernity, modernity, or the classical period. Too much, never enough—acceleration and insufficiency.

Before we know it, we’re inside a MAGA universe wrought by disinfolklore. It’s the system effects of all of these aggregating characters in the stories that we are embedded in, which are broadcast through the news, repeated by Donald and by many others all the time—including ourselves. The aggregating effect is that we’re put inside this MAGA universe.

Inside the Usurpers’ Universe

I’m using a metaphor here—the idea of being put inside a universe, a MAGA universe, but also inside a Russian universe. This goes back to what I talked about at the beginning and what James was talking about at the beginning. The whole point of the Kennedy Center is just one of tens of thousands of vectors for each of us which could have the impact of transforming our identities and our surroundings and turning the usurper’s reality into an irreversible reality.

As it goes, I think the disgustingness of what we’re gradually learning about the whole Epstein stuff—the enormity of it, Donald’s complicity in it, Putler’s complicity—it would be somewhat ironic if Epstein brings them down. Out of all Putler’s crimes, this is the one that ends him.

International Relations as Storytelling

The stock in trade of international relations professionals is storytelling, as if the phenomena they speak of are more real than characters in a folktale. The West, NATO, Russia, strongmen, spheres of influence. As many of us see and understand now—this great German word for Putin understanders—they impute intention to this character called Putler who doesn’t correlate in any way with the biological human called Putler. It’s layers and layers away from the biological human biped, yet they write very earnest essays in *Foreign Affairs* and their escalation management logic dominated and colonised the minds of the people in former President Biden’s administration, as all of us understand so well.

This whole discourse in international relations—IR itself—is a form of storytelling. If you’re coming from a disinfolklore analytical method point of view, you can look at it just like storytelling. You look for the characters they’re talking about—don’t poke the bear—and all of this chatter about Westphalia and all that fascist civilisations stuff. These are all just storytelling, which has the same value, effect, potential for manipulation, and status, in my humble opinion, as any piece of news or anything coming out of Donald’s mouth.

I reference Donald a lot because he’s a fairy tale character we’re all very familiar with—he’s sadly part of our everyday reality. I could just as easily be referencing someone else if this were a different age or a different moment.

The Gideon Rachmans’ Problem

Quite serious people impute into the character I call Duncy Putin, or Russia, the characteristics of a bear—they do it unconsciously. They’re earned archetypes or reputations. Ukraine as a lion—that’s a weak encounter archetype in that sense.

This guy Gideon Rachman—I’ve mentioned him before, just because he’s a good example of how this old guard don’t have a disinfolklore perspective. They can’t see how they impute these ridiculous thought routines to Putler. For instance, as we’ve seen when the United States began to occupy Venezuela, even though it doesn’t seem to be admitting this or understanding it, and started to trigger a whole set of legal obligations which it is pretending to ignore by kidnapping the fake president of Venezuela—Gideon Rachman said Putler is going to look at this and decide to do the same to President Zelensky.

What are you talking about? What level of lack of sophistication are you living on that you think Putin thinks this way? That you think it’s legitimate for the foreign editor or whatever he is of the *FT* to reveal how ignorant you are—how you cannot see that you’re actually talking about a cartoon character in your mind who’s occupying space in your mind? This Putin who’s walking along merrily, going: “Oh, I’m doing this full-scale war against Ukraine for eight, nine years, and I’ve just spent 1.3 million men. I tried to invade Kyiv. I lost the Battle of Mostyshche. We had to withdraw.” “Oh, but now Donald has invaded Venezuela. Now I feel permission to do the same to President Zelensky. God, thank you, Donald, for doing that, because now there’s this precedent.” On so many different layers, it’s really dumb.

If you’ve got a disinfolklore perspective—and all of us are not picking on him, well, I am obviously, but I don’t mean to, because there’s many things that I probably fall for the same type of trolls. With a disinfolklore perspective, I try to critique what I say in the same way—just looking and recognising: I’m not talking about Putler here. I’m talking about a character. He’s an invented character. It’s like in a Netflix series, but I’m imputing real characteristics to him that don’t correspond to reality. I’m trying to communicate something through telling this story that Putler will see Donald has invaded Venezuela and then decide to act. It’s total fiction because, as we all know, in reality Putler has tried to do this like 4,000 times already.

Re-Archetyping Ukraine

There are these data-resistant archetypes which underpin characters like Ukraine. Other archetypes are emerging or fading or enduring. All of us are watching in real time the re-archetyping of Ukraine in the minds of, for instance, European leaders who realise European security now depends on Ukraine.

Donald hasn’t got the memo, or he just doesn’t care—he just wants to destroy Europe. He thinks Putin is a good means of doing that. If Ukraine would just submit, then Putin could invade Moldova or Poland, and that will totally collapse the euro, and that will make America great again. Maybe that’s what Donald thinks.

He certainly doesn’t see Ukraine as a protagonist, or as a main protagonist. That gives Ukraine an edge, because it’s got in President Zelensky and some of the people around him—people who do think through what they’re dealing with, not using the terms of disinfolklore, but thinking about it the way we think about art or script writing. President Zelensky has this intuitive sense of understanding character and archetypes and storytelling, and how characters can change and must change and do change. Therefore, if you can harness that, whether it’s in propaganda or disinfolklore or your own nightly speech, you yourself can in real time transform the character of Ukraine—re-archetype it into what it substantively is and has been for the past 6,000 years: the key, the origin, and the source of innovation in Indo-European culture.

Zelensky’s Enduring Popularity

I note, en passant—if you’ll pardon my French—that polling today reported President Zelensky is at 61 or 62 percent in Ukraine. He won the election on 64% in 2019. Now, seven years later and all that has happened—zillions of memes, zillions of disinfolklore from Donald, from Putler, helped by missiles, the complicity between the missiles and the stories about the missiles, the fear and the future and Ukraine capitulation—despite all of that, President Zelensky’s level of popularity persists and subsists.

That demonstrates how we can defeat disinfolklore. The stories, and the stories about the events like missile strikes, about corruption, about all of the nonsense—Ukraine gives this great example. We can think about it as the character who’s on a journey, the hero’s journey or the heroine’s journey. She begins life on 64, and now she’s still on 61 after all of these travails and adventures. Well, that probably wouldn’t make a real hit—you really want her to go up in popularity or build down in popularity.

I make this observation from the point of view of thinking that these disinfolklorists will necessarily win, that disinfolklore necessarily manipulates. Obviously we do see it has great effects in some places at some times, and it has had in the past in Ukraine. At the moment, it’s a good example of how we can overcome it.

I’ll leave it there for tonight.

Continued from:

First in series:

This is episode six of going through the battling archetypes and essential tools in the Disinfolklore analytical method. Some of you may remember last week I talked about Donald archetyping himself as mad, and my archetyping of my experience on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska as something folkloric, and that leading to an accidental insight which in turn led to my discovery of Disinfolklore.

Today I wanted to keep going. Inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, in occupied Luhansk, where I crossed into every day from government-controlled Ukraine, on a journey I would take from now-occupied Severodonetsk — about 150 kilometres on terrible roads, but really beautiful landscape all the way — from my hotel, the Hotel Mir, “Peace,” which had been bombed in 2014 in Severodonetsk. Last time I saw photographs of it, like many places I stayed in Ukraine, it’s now in ruins.

I lived in the Mir Hotel for a year, and then I moved into a beautiful house with a swimming pool and underfloor heating in Severodonetsk. Now that house itself — it’s not quite a ruin, but it has been looted. The family I lived with sent me photographs of the house recently, and I can now determine when places have been looted repeatedly. Walls are missing.

At the time, Severodonetsk was a bit of a haven. Gradually, as I was there from February 2015 onwards, as I got my eye into what for me was the first former Soviet city — it was a real Soviet city, the largest producer of ammonium in the former Soviet Union, that was its speciality, and it looked very like Soviet cities — but gradually it became more colourful. People became richer. Avocados appeared in the supermarket, as did hummus. Now those supermarkets are in ruins.

Severodonetsk’s best days — depending on one’s viewpoint — may have been in the Soviet era, or I would claim that its best days were during the years I was there, up until 2022, as it experienced being the de facto capital of Luhansk.

Each day, going to Stanytsia Luhanska was like passing into another world through this long journey along very rough roads, which we got to know extremely well because I did it five days a week for three years. Crossing into that bridge was like crossing into a matrix. Inside Russia-occupied Ukraine was a matrix — and here I’m using the matrix from the movie as a metaphor rather than an actual place.

Russia’s archetyping system inside Russia-occupied Ukraine consisted of hundreds of media outlets intermeshed with coercive force, coercive control, and so-called institutions which did not actually mediate reality. All of these means — the media outlets, the coercive force, the coercive control, and these fake institutions which only existed on paper in the media outlets — I mentioned this last week, how for the first few months I was reading stories about how the Russian occupiers were establishing a central bank and courts and a parliament and all these normal foundational institutions. But they were fake. They only existed on paper. Took me a few months to realise that.

None of these means really mediated reality. They forged reality. I use the word “forged” there as a double entendre — in the sense that they forged it like you might forge a horseshoe in a forge, hammering it away, putting it in the fire, taking it out, hammering it away. And forged in the sense of forgeries, art forgeries, fake reality — which is the essence of the Disinfolklore metaphor, the Disinfolklore insight that I had.

I didn’t then understand what the Russians were doing. I didn’t understand their objective. At the time, March 2015, the Council of the European Union — the supreme governments’ part of the European Union, as distinct from the European Commission’s civil servants and the European Parliament’s directly elected parliamentarians — the Council of the European Union at the end of March mentioned disinformation for the first time. So at the time, there wasn’t really a vibe of disinformation. Of course, I had the memory of Russian propaganda from my school textbooks and a bit at university. But I didn’t realise that what I was being embedded in was something completely new, which required new language and new terms to describe, and which had — and this is key to the battling archetypes aspect of Disinfolklore — system-wide effects.

We’re not just looking at individual memes or stories or tweets. We’re looking at the system-wide effects of thousands or millions of those. I got that insight from seeing how this matrix-like enmeshing of the humans living inside Russia-occupied Ukraine worked — and here I’m not using matrix in the sense of the film, but in the geometric sense — this enmeshing of different media outlets.

Those of us who listen to Chuck Pfarrer and Alan regularly — they have a good new show this week I listened to a couple of days ago — one of Chuck Pfarrer’s many aphorisms is “one is none,” which I’ve taken quite to heart. In the past, I would try to only have one item, one charger for instance, that could do everything. Now I’m going for redundancy — having loads of different chargers. It’s quite liberating actually.

This “one is none” principle is practised by the Russians. They have constant redundancy, whether it’s in their operations overseas — they’ll flicker between using church groups, diplomats, propaganda outlets. There’s this enmeshing. This principle of enmeshing, a matrix in the geometric sense, is something we may not notice when we’re looking at particular memes.

What I’m trying to articulate with the battling archetypes aspect of the Disinfolklore analytical method is the system-wide effect. Donald saying certain things — it’s not just about Venezuela or Greenland or Ukraine or the Epstein files. It’s a whole system, and it has persistent effects on us.

At the time, in 2015, I didn’t see that this was what they were doing in Russia-occupied Ukraine. But I was gathering data points, which I then spent years parsing for patterns. They were weaving reality in there. I didn’t know why they were doing it. They were changing the identities of the consumers of Disinfolklore. This is what MAGA does, what Donald does, and what the Russians are still doing.

Coming up to the anniversary — I think Volya is doing a 24-hour thing for the anniversary, which is great. Hopefully I’ll be able to participate in that. One of the things I’ve been reflecting on is how the war has changed me. I started out with a set of beliefs — that the West would intervene, that NATO was useful. Those external perceptions have then moved right into the depths of my mind. Things have changed in my own mind. My identity in many senses has been changed, and perhaps many of our identities have been changed, where our identities are a function of what we think and do day after day.

I was interested to read recently on X about the algorithm, because I noticed this. Up until the 27th of February 2022, I never tweeted about Ukraine because I was still working there and didn’t want to be talking about what I was working in. But I was very engaged in trying to raise awareness about COVID. My timeline was full of doctors and medics. Then that changed really quickly — I was put into the Ukraine category. I was interested to read recently that my lived experience backs up that your categorisation by the Twitter algorithm can change quite quickly according to what you like and what you post.

In some ways, that’s a metaphor or example of how our online identity can change quite quickly. We’re not stuck in boxes. Now, after he who shall not be named bought Twitter, there was a thing about how, when the algorithm was released, people in the pro-Ukraine group were being discriminated against. So maybe when you got into the pro-Ukraine group, it became more of a fixed identity.

Again, how quickly our externally perceived identities can be seen to change. I saw the same thing happen — and many of us have — with MAGA people, and in Russia-occupied Ukraine through the means of this enmeshing matrix of hundreds of different media outlets and the interaction between them and reality, and of course brutal violence and coercive control, and the re-establishment in people’s minds of patterns that had been very common prior to the end of the Soviet Union.

That’s the kind of insight I bring to you today from Russia-occupied Luhansk. At the time, it was interesting as something — my thought was always: “This would never happen at home.” This was before Brexit and before Donald Trump. What a strange place, that this can happen to Ukrainians by the Russians, but I come from another type of place where this could never happen.

Now, of course, over the course of those nine years, what I saw there in this small province — which felt like the edge of the world, the edge of Europe, and has been for millennia — that has seeped into every person, not just in Europe and America but across the world. Through the economic impact of the war in Ukraine — everyone everywhere is paying more for everything. Through memes, through Donald becoming elected with the help of the Russians, and now through Donald’s zigzagging through our brains and minds 50 million times a day.

These patterns — there’s this great phrase: “The future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” That idea, which actually animates Silicon Valley, where on the edges you have existences and manifestations of reality which will take over the world and take over the mind, whether it’s Facebook or TikTok — it also applies to what happened in Ukraine after February 2014, directly as a result of Ukraine. It will continue to happen because Ukraine is the centre of our civilisation.

My other project, Finding Manuland, investigates why this is the case and finds the empirical evidence for it. But we can see it in our lived experience. This may have been the case when Indo-European languages, mythology, and religions were first evolved from 6,000 years ago in Zaporizhzhia. But it’s also the case since 2014.

At the time, I just couldn’t work out what they were doing. I remember thinking: surely, if you’re trying to attract the rest of Ukraine into supporting these rebel troll kingdoms, you would try to make them into utopia and paradise. We talked about this last week. It’s a constant source of mystery why the Russians, if they really wanted to do what they said they wanted to do, wouldn’t do this. But as we know, everything they touch turns to shit.

This completely out-of-sync relationship between the reality the Russians create — this hell on earth, wherever they go — is so out of sync with their stated intentions. Many of the people we know who live in the normal world, who don’t spend all their time on Ukraine or learning about Russia, understanding the grammar and syntax of not just its Disinfolklore and propaganda but also its behaviour, learning the patterns, the repeated patterns — Ukrainians and central Europeans in general can be really helpful, and Baltic people who lived under occupation from the Russians in various forms, can be very helpful in teaching people from Western Europe and America what these patterns are.

About a week into the full-scale invasion, I started — as I mentioned before — collecting data for the OSCE Moscow Mechanism mission that had been charged directly after the full-scale invasion began on the 24th of February 2022 with collecting data about what Russia was doing and its violations of OSCE commitments.

About a week into the war, I was looking at the executions that the Russians were carrying out, the conduct of the war, when I had this flash of insight: the entire point of the system, the matrix of communications, of what I now call Disinfolklore in Russia-occupied Ukraine, was to execute what I called and call a stealth genocide.

In that sense, I was learning about how the Russians were forcing Ukrainians who had lived under the occupation to participate in a war against their fellow citizens, their fellow Ukrainians across the Donets River. I realised that what Russia had been doing over the course of those seven years was to execute a genocide.

But I, who had been there for three years, then looked back — and I continued to do this — at what I had seen and experienced: the Disinfolklore apparatus, the direct and public incitement to genocide, the mass forcible transfers of people, the enslavement of people, the killing of people simply for being Ukrainian. All these things I was aware of while I was working there. But it never occurred to me for a second while I was there that this was a genocide.

I know Mokrushyna and Genesis Man had a brief conversation about this today on Volya Radio on their show, and Yeni contributed to it as well. It’s a source of enormous sadness that the refusal to put together all of these individual events — many of which we uniquely in this community, outside of Ukraine, see and experience each day as we follow the conduct of the war since the 24th of February — it’s enormously sad for me that while genocide has become common parlance for people who engage with other conflicts or wars or occupations, merely through social media like many of us, they refuse to attach that moniker to this war, despite it having every possible characteristic of genocide.

I as a lawyer saw this from very early on and have read particularly the two reports from New Lines Institute on applying the international legal definition of genocide to Russia’s actions. The first I heard of what might be going on in Bucha was around mid-March 2022, when a friend told me about sexual crimes which it was rumoured were happening in the Kyiv area. I remember my reaction to seeing this and thinking: I think that’s probably exaggerating it, I’ll need to see more than that.

It’s the memory of that reaction which helps me understand where my thinking was at that time, even though I was reading of atrocities and recording them and collecting them for the Moscow Mechanism mission. But the scale of the barbarism then in Bucha — most of us will remember those days when we first started hearing about it, around the 7th of April.

It’s to the credit of the four jurists who were responsible for directly writing the Moscow Mechanism report, published I think on the 9th of April 2022 — it’s in my pinned tweet, the reference to it and my work on it — that they mention all the strands that we know today, even though the evidence wasn’t clear at the time for what exactly had happened at Bucha. The mass forcible transfer of children, all the themes — the killing of civilians, the indiscriminate killing of civilians trying to escape, the bombings, the terrible crimes.

I mention this because even before my friend had texted me about these sexual crimes in the Kyiv area, and I thought “No, not even the Russians would be doing that” — I had categorised what was going on as a genocide. I made the connection between what the Russians were doing in March 2022 and what they were preparing to do throughout my time there, with the Disinfolklore apparatus and the brainwashing, the identity-changing means. Forcing Ukrainians, changing them from being loyal, in many cases, Ukrainians, to thinking that they were Russians.

Even with that weakened evidence base at that time — and another data point I have is around the 10th of March 2022, when the then Polish president, who was also a lawyer, first used the term genocide in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But he at the time wouldn’t have known about Bucha. President Zelensky first used the term, as far as I understand, around the 7th of April, in that famous footage when he has his bulletproof vest on and Yermak is standing behind him, talking about what was going on in Bucha.

The fact that all three of us — the president of Poland, me, and President Zelensky — studied international law and are lawyers and thought of it as a genocide then — it’s enormously sad that to this day, and it’s a testament to the success of Russia’s Disinfolklore apparatus, as we are being enmeshed in it, and many of our sensitive friends and colleagues and community members have been enmeshed in this over the war, Israel and Israel’s war against Hamas.

I used to use this: the likening of any situation to genocide in eastern Ukraine by demonstrators. Often there would be demonstrations against, say, heightened gas prices. I noticed a pattern of hysterical likening of such-and-such to a genocide. After about a year of going to demonstrations, which was part of my job — when I was working out of the Dnipro office between 2018 and 2022 — trying to assess: is this real, is this organic, or is this the Russians, is this an active measure?

I had this shortcut: if they’re likening a relatively trivial event like the rising of gas prices, rents, or some problem with communal services to a genocide, then chances are that’s a Russian operation. Because what they’re trying to do is reduce the currency and the meaning of genocide. I believe this is part of Russia’s communications strategy, which was rolled out from parts of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and other parts of Ukraine as they tried to stir tumult. They then rolled that out globally, to fantastic success.

And there we have a genocide concealed in Ukraine, concealed by these memes and monikers. It is especially shameful to me that I did not — and I tried to learn from it — that I didn’t notice this when I was in Ukraine between 2015 and 2018 in eastern Ukraine. I didn’t notice I was inside a genocide, because I had read Primo Levi, I’d read The Assassins of Memory, I’d visited Auschwitz in 1991. I was very engaged in reading about the Second World War. As many of us used to do, we’d play this mind game: “So-and-so would become a Nazi in the war, so-and-so wouldn’t.” Then we realised most people become Nazis — inured to this violence and don’t react the way all of us have to this particular war.

It’s especially embarrassing to me, as a lawyer trained in this, that I was caught up inside our bureaucratic organisation and couldn’t work it out.

It occurred to me in March 2022 that if in 1942, the railway went by the garden of your house, and that railway was going to Auschwitz or to other places, and the railway cars were going by — you might notice the humans in the railway cars. But of course you wouldn’t know you were witnessing a genocide, because you’re just seeing one moment in a very complex system. That probably also applies to people who think they’re seeing a genocide when they’re not necessarily.

But it certainly applies to the conventional wisdom that won’t use that term for what the Russians are doing in Ukraine, despite those horrific numbers published today — the figure was about 600,000 Ukrainians killed. Again, it’s reported as a both-sides thing: 600,000 Ukrainians dead and whatever 1.2 million Russians, or 300,000, or 600,000 casualties — I don’t know. The scale of these numbers is off the charts. How many more Ukrainians need to die before you will archetype this properly as a genocide?

The family resemblance between the Disinfolklore universe that Russia was creating in the minds of Ukrainians living in Russia-occupied Ukraine, and what is today happening on a global scale across America and across our civilisation, is one of the key insights I want to communicate. I know you’ve heard it a million times from me, but part of my mission is to repeat myself — I’m trying to put ideas in people’s minds and to teach this mode of seeing. Not as the way of seeing, but as a way of seeing.

Let’s define Disinfolklore as follows: Disinfolklore is a specific form of disinformation. Disinfolklore is a medium for affecting our moods, intentions, motivations, and attitudes in ways which help the Disinfolklorist. Our moods, intentions, motivations, and attitudes — I believe in my mental model — are the key to affecting our identities and changing people’s identities. Your mood will affect you in a long-durée way. Intention is more short-term but can be long as well — it can be your intention to donate right now, which has changed because you’re reading Disinfolklore, a bad article about Ukraine, and you think “I’m not going to donate now.” Also your intention about what you’re going to do in your life, and your motivations — long and short — and your attitudes, in ways which help the Disinfolklorists.

All of these can be altered by storytelling and by stories, by what I call Disinfolklore. For example, we intend to donate to help Ukraine develop its drone-based warfare capability. But the New York Times tells us a fable whose message, whose mana, is “Russia will win.” So instead, we donate our money to another cause — hopefully a worthwhile cause.

Disinfolklore is disinformation which can be usefully parsed into some of its folkloric elements, as I spoke about last week and the week before. It’s clear that legend, epic poetry, mythology, and wisdom sayings from ancient times all contain folkloric elements. But it’s not so clear that news does. And that, again, is a key insight I’m trying to communicate — trying to re-archetype what we consider to be news, “objective,” as the determination of what is necessarily important.

The leaving out of, for instance, that horrific railway attack by Russia today in Kharkiv — we all saw it. People tuned into Ukraine saw it. But I’m guessing it wasn’t on the BBC News tonight. Maybe it was, I don’t know. But I’m guessing it wasn’t, and it’s not on other people’s minds. Those editorial choices themselves are part of what I would consider Disinfolklore. Because if they’re talking about other stories which are comparatively less grisly and less important, they’re making choices to manipulate our minds and leave these out.

Many of the people we know who exist in the normal world — who don’t spend all day long engaged in trying to combat Russian propaganda and trying to help Ukraine in whatever small ways we can — those people say things like, “Oh, is that war still going on?”

In Disinfolklore, we use tools from different disciplines — comparative mythology, literary theory, theology — to parse MAGA, Russian, and other forms of disinformation and Disinfolklore into its folkloric components. I’ve been listening every now and again to this podcast from this guy in Latvia, near the Russian border — it’s called East of the Border or something like that. I quite like it. He focuses a lot on the theological components in Russian Disinfolklore, in their ways of seeing. I quite like that because I’ve been doing that since very early on.

When Putler is using the church as part of their matrices of wrapping everyone up in a Disinfolklore universe, fooling people, changing their minds and intentions, motivations, moods, and attitudes — when he was pictured going into the church, that’s all the use of theology. When they liken Ukraine to Satan and the war to Satan, it’s a key aspect of Disinfolklore and the Russian approach to Disinfolklore.

We can use all these different disciplines to parse MAGA, Russian, and other forms of disinformation into its folkloric components. There’s a reflexive relationship — meaning all these different aspects interact, sometimes in the same meme, in the same story — between legend, lore, mythology, epic, drama, and folklore.

I’ve introduced the new concept of Infolklore. Depending on how a piece, an item of Disinfolklore is reframed, it can be transformed, transmogrified into what I would call Infolklore. An archetypal Infolklore is what Mokrushyna would be talking about, or Will, or on Accidental Ukrainian, which I really enjoyed this week — a fantastic episode. These are stories which amuse, which are told from the perspective of helping Ukraine, but also of changing our attitude from a depressed mood into a happy mood. They’re informational, they’re true, they’re correct, but they’re not trying to change our attitudes in a negative way.

By negative, I use the standard for negative — the second element in what I call the Code of Positive Trolls, which is right, ethical discipline, as defined by the post-World War II legal order. If the meaning of the meme is to persuade us that the laws of war don’t matter, or individual right to life doesn’t matter, then that is Disinfolklore. But if it’s doing the opposite, if it’s supporting Ukraine’s right to defend itself and its territorial integrity, then by definition it is what I would call Infolklore.

These aren’t yet — maybe someday they will become — definitions that judges could use in courts to decide whether to allow speech that, for instance, denigrates or is preparing a people, changing their identities, preparing a people to be sacrificed in some sort of future genocide. But for the time being, each of us can be a judge. We’re just looking for a good enough method to deal with all the incoming data each day.

We don’t have to spend too long on a particular meme to decide: is this Disinfolklore or Infolklore? Will I believe this? Will I communicate it onwards? Will I get upset by it? Will I spend three days being depressed by it? We can use these tools I’m helping to articulate and communicate, to parse these items of data — whether it’s a visual, a picture, a tweet, a meme, or a whole 8,000-word essay in The New Yorker — into its pieces, and then move on. We don’t have to defend our decision in a court of law. We’re just trying to find a way of parsing — in the sense of chopping. As the great French postmodern philosopher Derrida said, knowledge is for cutting. I always imagine, on a cutting board, chopping onions. That’s all I’m trying to do.

I do think it is useful and could in the future be used as models in court cases to determine: are we going to sanction this individual? Well, yes, because they’ve been promoting trolls that denigrate the post-World War II legal order, which promote and publicly incite genocide. Here’s the evidence — these memes — and we can apply the Disinfolklore analytical method to evaluate them. But that’s just my ambition for the future. In the meantime, in our daily journeys through our timelines and through our lives, listening to the news on the radio, hopefully these tools can help.

If we look at memes in the same way we look at legends as law — and by law, in particular, for those of us who come from common-law jurisdictions like England, Ireland, the United States, Australia, or New Zealand, where some of the law is based on statute but a good part of the law is based on stories, the common law, and principles which are immanent in these stories and cases. The corollary of that in international law is international customary law.

We have the equivalent of statutes in international law — the UN Charter, treaties — but we also have international custom accepted as law. These principles — for instance, the laws of war are articulated in several Geneva Conventions, but they didn’t need to be in the Geneva Conventions to be part of international law. That is quite similar to common law, all based on stories.

Lore — which is the law of any community we’re a part of, whether it’s in our office or our family, our history. Indeed, we have lore in Volya Radio, and those of us who participated in Maria Report in any form are aware of the lore there.

Mythology is particularly important because so much work has been done developing tools. And as discussed previously, there is a conscious and perhaps accidental use of mythology in Wagner, in what the Russians are trying to do. Therefore we can delve into these areas for tools that are useful to parse this information.

There aren’t that many other people apart from me — there are some, but there aren’t that many. It’s not mainstreamed. I feel I have a contribution to make by emphasising these aspects, not least because the entire casus belli itself from Putler, all its historical nonsense, is mythology and based on mythology. If you can understand the status of this as mythology rather than fact or history, then that helps to combat it.

I used to have this debate with some of the presenters on Maria Report, where they’d say, “This is all irrelevant, no one cares about mythology.” And yet it was all too relevant.

Epic as well — we’re in the midst of an epic. Drama — every day in every tweet, Donald is the drama monarch. And folklore itself, as previously discussed. These forms of narrative, these art forms, are not really associated with news by many people — very few, in fact. I keep my eye out for it. That’s one of my unique contributions to the area of disinformation and information warfare management.

These stories transmit values across the ages. That’s quite easy for people to grasp — how legend, lore, the Old Testament, old treaties, old religions transmit values which we either agree with or disagree with across the ages. In one age, the heroic deeds of humans become mythological activities of deities.

There’s this great example in India, in early Indian history, where you have this community of people called the Danavas who are mentioned in the Rig Veda as devils, as demons. It’s argued that the Danavas were actually the memory of the Indo-Europeans, the descendants of those who left Ukraine with the language. The Danavas enter India, they fight against the people who were living there, and then they’re remembered in mythology, in the religion and the texts, as demons. But in fact they were real people.

This is the kind of pattern which happens in the news and what the Russians try to do with their scary stories. Ukraine’s best or ultimate strategic objective, I think, is to communicate such a sense of fear into the minds of today’s Russians that no Russian will ever be born in the next hundred years without being told by their parents: never go west of the Don. Stay east of the Don, because demons, monsters live there. As a strategy, as an objective, I think that’s really what Ukraine is trying to do.

In another age, these deities become trolls and nymphs, satyrs, asuras, witches, demons, titans — that’s how I archetype this titanic struggle between Donald, Volodymyr Zelensky the comedian, and Duncy Putler. This is really a battle of the titans. And other vehicles to explain supposedly supernatural or magical communications — and by magical communications, I mean how Russian Disinfolklore somehow occupies people’s minds.

It manages to archetype what is going on in Gaza as a genocide by Israel. But somehow we cannot, with all our collective effort, archetype what is going on in Ukraine as a genocide — as the most serious crime, resulting in more deaths than any other war, perhaps — I don’t know whether you can say that — or injuries, but certainly more damage to the world and to a country than any other war since the Second World War.

There is something magical about that, I don’t deny it. I spend most of my time, as many of us do, trying to work out what is magical about Russian Disinfolklore — how do they get these memes repeated constantly by people? But as I will argue later, for me, magic isn’t how we might think of it from childhood, from watching a magic TV show. Magic is cause and effect. It’s the magoi, the strange countries with strange powers, the Magi, the magistrates, the majesty of monarchs. These are the magico-religious element of sovereignty and the exercise of leadership.

What we see in mind-manipulating memes is magical. But we can harness it. If we understand it, then we can create Infolklore to also be magical — just as advertisers use it, just as cult leaders use it, and just as parents try to inspire their children not to do dangerous things by telling them stories.

In another age, the echoes of heroic deeds may become localised staples of lore, transmitted by and among the simple folk — and “simple folk” is a term I take from about the 16th century, as opposed to the aristocracy. It’s not patronising, but they tell stories. This is what we do with the news and exchanging news.

In all cases, particularly in pre-literate societies, lore, legends, folklore — all can be parsed for information in much the same way we can trace different archaeological cultures by digging deeper and deeper in the soil. But also in memes and what we see on our timelines. For me, it’s the same practices you use to look at changes in communities over time, in lore, legends, folklore, as we should be using in our quotidian daily communications, whether person to person or online.

An example of Russian Disinfolklore that directly or indirectly undermines Ukraine’s sovereignty is its use of fictional bogeymen. Bogeymen are archetypes from folklore, very much part of how we think of things. We’re taught it as children — scapegoating. The entirely fictional bogeyman: the Ukrainian Nazi fighting Russia.

I learned recently that all the papers from the Second World War were carted off back to Moscow after the war or towards the end of the war. Ukraine has no access to this — everyone rushing around trying to survive, changing loyalties, a bit like Syria. Russia takes away all the paperwork. Hopefully I dream about Ukraine getting all of that back so we can have proper discussion about the Second World War. But Russia takes away the evidence, then archetypes Ukrainians as Nazis, and uses this bogeyman to infest the minds of people we know in the real world with an idea they’re not even aware of. Basically: if Ukrainians are Nazis, then let the Russians kill them.

This is just one of thousands of Disinfolklore archetypes using bogeymen to try to change the intentions and undermine the motivations of those who would otherwise support any people resisting unlawful violence, unlawful killing, and unlawful genocide. These fictional bogeymen — the Russians are great at creating them — promote the troll that Ukrainians deserve to be genocided.

Those who communicate onwards this idea — in this folklore course I did at Oxford last year as a continuing education student, when I was trying to explain Disinfolklore to the teacher, this very point, he said: “But of course there were Ukrainian Nazis during the Second World War.” Which really made me sad — that he just couldn’t understand how, in today’s world, fictional bogeymen can be used to affect today’s intentions and motivations and perceptions of reality.

Quite apart from the fact that the entire historical archives of what was happening during the Second World War on Ukrainian territory are not available to historians. Quite apart from that, the point is not whether some Ukrainians fought with the Nazis. Of course they did. The real point is that the Russians signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the Nazis. And that is again this magical — how does Russia manage to anchor these ideas in the minds of people like my teacher, a brilliant folklorist, who didn’t understand the contemporary relevance of these folkloric tropes like bogeymen in distracting people? Scapegoating.

The key thing is that Disinfolklore inhabits us like ghosts. It’s a way of seeing. It’s a mood itself — a kind of bad mood. There is a literary genre of trickster tales where the trickster is pre-eminently a storyteller. These qualify as meta-narratives in that they’re stories about the role of stories.

Now we’re living inside a trickster tale which has been woven by Druidy Don and Duncy Putler. They’re purveyors of these trickster tales, and treating them as otherwise is to fall for the trolls.

This idea this week — this anchorage agreement, which the Russians are trying to embed in everyone’s minds — is just a mind trick. It’s a trickster tale. Disinfolklore is an analytical method for parsing disinformation. It can give us the power to analyse Druidy Don and Duncy Putler’s trickster tales as such.

How many of us would dream of seeing the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the London Times taking artefacts injected into the information space by Druidy Don — Disinfolklorist himself, Donald Trump — or Duncy Putler’s, as trickster tales? Not as news, or as policy, or as a statement that Ukraine should give up land for mythical security guarantees on the anniversary of the signing of the Budapest Memorandum.

I’ve spoken for an hour, so I’ll leave it at that for today.

**Wendy:** Very interesting. That was perfect. Really interesting. Gives us lots to think about. James, and then I see Yeni has her hand up.

**Yeni:** How do we get legacy media and the UN to get over the hurdle and actually name this a genocide? Because the Russians have already admitted it. I remember — this was months ago, maybe even a year ago — one of the people on national TV in Russia said: “We want Ukraine without Ukrainians, and we want to erase their history and superimpose Russian history and Russian culture on top of the Ukrainian.” They’ve already admitted it, because one of the hardest things — from what I’ve understood talking to humanitarian lawyers — the hardest element to prove is intent. And here you have Russia already admitting the intent. That hurdle has already gone. Is it just talking about it a lot? How do we push them over?

**Stephen:** Because we’re fighting against magic — the magic of weakening the term so that it’s common parlance for anyone referring to what Israel has done in Gaza, but we just can’t get it to stick on Ukraine. I think we just keep talking about it. I talked about it today, and it was put in my mind because of you and Mokrushyna and Genesis Man mentioning it this morning. I think we just need to keep talking about it. Obviously Ukraine is fighting on the legal front as well, going through this case where the Russians were accusing Ukraine of genocide, and now the International Court of Justice, the ICJ, has recently allowed Russia to gather evidence that Ukraine is committing genocide in Ukraine. I don’t think that will ever have legs, but they’ll collect the evidence and the court will rule that’s rubbish, and that will all go on forever. But the war in the information space is the one we can affect. We just keep talking about it, like you were today, in our small ways. That’s all we can do, and that is what we do. We believe in it because this is what we spend most of our days doing — the importance of it and the effect of it. We just keep talking about it, keep learning about it, keep collecting the evidence, keep sharing the evidence. Because this is a slam dunk, as you say, with the intention. The intent aspect is the most difficult, but the Russians haven’t hidden it. Their actions show it every single day.

Indeed — Solovyov threatening to nuke the island of Britain again. That is genocide. Every time they threaten Europe, that is direct and public incitement to genocide. But of course Putler has admitted it on TV, the idiot. That’s why the warrant was issued for his arrest by the International Criminal Court, which, as previously discussed, has its own problems. But let’s keep doing, as you were saying, Yeni — we’ll keep banging that drum, as one of the many drums we beat. It’s not a magic bullet. It’ll be the war of aggression trials and the tribunal for reparations and such that will matter. But this is one of many ways to fight the war.

**James:** Brilliant lecture, Decoding — cogent and very systematically declared. I’m in awe of your capacity to do the integrations: cultural, anthropological, legal. I thank you for it.

**Stephen:** Thank you. As we see with Magyar and with Budanov, we see the creation of counter-bogeymen. This is how you do it. These people are haunting the Russians. It’s very useful in the moment to have General Budanov in the room, and also as a message that if they do something to President Zelensky, there are lots of other people — him, the Ukrainian ambassador to the UK, and various others. There’s a whole line of people ready to take the place. Creating these monsters in the minds of Russians — obviously I have no insight, but I’m sure that’s part of the media strategy of Magyar and General Budanov and the administration itself.

I think the Russians have threatened to blow up all the satellites. Musk doesn’t want that. So he’s willing to give them a lot of latitude.

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Continued:

Continued from:

First in series:

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The Soviet Union was so mysterious for many of us, as was eastern and central Europe. I was 17 when the Berlin Wall fell. Many people I’ve met since — I went as soon as I could. I spent time hitchhiking to Czechoslovakia and Poland and Hungary, went around those places several times, because I was fascinated by what it was like, how they lived.

I always imagined it would be really interesting working in the former Soviet Union, because it was such an interesting and alien place. In Ireland at the time, we did learn a lot about Russian politics. I think we learned more truth about Russia and the five-year plans and Stalin than they learned about us when it comes down to it. So it was planted as a seed of interest. But I never thought I’d end up going around villages and being able to just talk to people. The joy in that never left me, no matter how hard some experiences were — when it was minus 20 and having to be out on the bridge for seven hours, or fiddling around with camera systems and thermal-shutdown computers.

Having said that, Wendy, it was one of many ambitions I had, many of which I’ve achieved. It wasn’t like I was obsessed by it because I’d never looked for it. It just landed on my lap through accident — like a Grail tale or Don Quixote. My life in that sense has been more picaresque than a tightly planned novel. I didn’t decide when I was eight that I was going to work in Ukraine and get there in the end. That isn’t what happened. But when it did happen, I was aware that this was one of the many things I really wanted to do.

This is episode five of going over the basics of battling archetypes and the Disinfolklore analytical method. We were on the bridge and went through the luxury sausage troll saga. Last week we went through some of the folkloric resonances of my experience as a diplomat on that bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska — the passage to the other world.

I wanted to move onwards with archetyping. I had an interesting discussion with someone today about whether or not Donald is compos mentis. Some of us may be aware there’s been a bit of a divorce between Michael Cohen and the liberal media this week. I don’t quite fully understand it, but I think it’s something to do with one of the documents released in the 1% of documents released in the Epstein files. That document attests, apparently, to Michael Cohen’s lawyers offering the New York DA and/or AG during his case — I think this was during the case in 2018 when he ended up in Otisville, in prison for campaign finance violations. Unindicted co-conspirator number one is Donald.

Michael Cohen has been, in his podcast for the last couple of years, promoting the troll that he knows for certain that Donald — first, that he knew nothing about Epstein, because as is true, Epstein and Donald had divorced before Michael Cohen came on the scene — but also Michael Cohen was very strongly attesting to his very strong belief, as the person he believes knows Donald best of practically anyone in the world, that Donald was not involved in really bad stuff in the Epstein files.

There’s been this divorce. I’ve had to reassess almost everything I learned about Donald from Michael Cohen and try to think about whether he was lying about that or not, whether he was trolling us. There were a few things I was pretty clear he was just banging on about. But it doesn’t mean everything he ever said about Donald is incorrect.

One of the things he’s been very clear about is that Donald is acting. He does not have dementia — he is acting this role of someone who’s completely nuts. In the background of my mind, I’m recomputing all the data I collected over listening to Michael Cohen’s podcast every now and again over the past couple of years. There’s this data point as well.

I had this discussion earlier today. Certainly what Donald is doing — he is archetyping as the archetypal madman. Anyone who studied, or had the misfortune even though I did have a good teacher, to study game theory at college will know the archetypal example of the madman is Khrushchev at the United Nations in 1961, banging his shoe during the Cuban Missile Crisis — which seems like a very tame crisis at this point.

The people who established game theory as a science in political science — I think Harvard is basically the beginning of all of that — established this idea that you could play the madman. Donald is certainly a very convincing actor in that role. Whether or not he has dementia or is at death’s door, I just don’t know. I’m not convinced he is. Obviously we all wish he would just retire peacefully somewhere, preferably somewhere else.

I was pretty sure after January 6th that we wouldn’t have to deal with him again because he seemed so unhealthy. If you set out in your political career to try and gain immunity from whatever is in the Epstein files — and I do think his experience with Epstein and his knowledge that the stuff would come out is possibly the main motivating factor in his entire political career. Again, Michael Cohen is a source for: Donald did not intend to win the presidency in 2016. He was doing it to build his brand and it got out of hand and he won it.

But if, in the course of running for the 2016 elections, the Epstein case — certainly in 2018, I think that’s when it really broke, early 2018, but obviously people in the know knew about it — and he appointed as his Secretary of Labor, Acosta, who as I understand it arranged the plea deal with Epstein in Florida. Epstein and all that stuff was very much on his mind. If Donald is willing to threaten to invade Greenland over whatever is in those files and sacrifice the whole of Ukraine, then it might be pretty horrific. If he knows this is there, then that could well have motivated his political career.

The other thing is Ukraine has been central to Donald and to Republicanism and to American democracy since 2015, and certainly since 2016, when it’s always been my belief that Russia bet everything on Crimea. Then it doubled down on Luhansk and Donetsk. Then it doubled again on Syria. Then it ten-tupled its bets on the full-scale invasion.

Everything Russia does and has done over the past decade has been motivated by its animal and completely irrational drive to subjugate and kill and destroy Ukraine — which of course is the kind of vulnerability which President Zelensky and General Budanov and everyone, the leadership in Ukraine, have been using, trolling, knowing this vulnerability, trolling Russia to its doom.

All of this is a way of introducing one of the central ideas in Disinfolklore and the battling archetypes: the idea of archetyping. I’ve spoken before about how Donald used Alphonse Capone — he would always say “Alphonse Capone” as part of his campaign speeches — and how Melania’s meme-chic costume at his inauguration earlier this year, feels like an eternity away, were deliberate acts of archetyping. As was all that stuff with Batman and Robin — Musk and him, daddy in the White House earlier this year.

If Donald is archetyping himself as the archetypal madman from game theory, then yes, he’s very convincing at it. He may well be suffering dementia. But when I reflected on it, I’m not sure I’d even heard of narcissism until maybe 2016 or 2017 as a psychiatric disorder. Everything I know about narcissism is from him. When I reflect on it, he could just be playing that role. I just don’t know.

All of this is introducing the idea of archetyping. If Donald is archetyping himself as the dementia-ridden, Alphonse Capone-admiring, crazy guy, and now he just has to keep on doubling down and tripling down — again, parallels with Russia — then my idea, the element in archetyping which applies to memes and overall strategies, I think is central to understanding what is going on. It’s even central to having a conversation about it.

My jury is still out. I swing both ways. Yesterday I was arguing with this particular person that Donald was strategically illiterate, because there is this argument that he just goes for things like the dog who catches the car — Venezuela, then what? And then they ad-lib, improvise. But improvisation is a central part of modern performance. There was a lot of improvisation, I assume, in The Apprentice as well. But we can have a conversation at least, if we’ve got this vocabulary, about archetyping.

Archetyping is a reciprocal process. It’s reflexive. It works both ways. I imputed into that scene at the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska, where I worked between January 2015 and January 2018 — I imputed folkloric tropes into that scene. Long before I thought deeply about folklore, as I talked about last week, I looked into what folklore is, I looked into my immediate impression that there was something folkloric about the situation. But I didn’t really know what it was. All I knew about folklore was my memory of tales read as a child about forests and Hansel and Gretel.

As I talked about last week, it’s actually a lot deeper than that. The more I looked into it and unravelled what was folkloric about that situation, the more I arrived eventually at the idea that actually Disinfolklore as a narrative form can be used to signify the entire universe of brainwashing, information propagation, propaganda, combat propaganda apparatus that the Russians were running in Russia-occupied Ukraine — because it’s always using storytelling.

Another person I can’t quite work out — Konstantin of Inside Russia, who I was just listening to this evening — he was talking about his memories of the end of the Soviet Union and how, towards the end, the stories being told in the media were becoming more and more divorced from reality. He’s drawing the parallel with today. According to him, looking at regional and local media sources inside Russia, they’re really in trouble — in terms of power going down and such. But the mass propaganda media is painting a really rosy picture of Russia constantly making gains at the front and all of that malarkey. He was drawing that parallel with the end of the Soviet Union. These are all examples of Disinfolklore in the Russian media landscape.

That insight didn’t occur to me for years. But I archetyped the scene at the bridge through folkloric tropes. It was my way of seeing — something about it — folkloric identities of the people I met and the gardens I visited. I remember once being brought to see the garden of a couple who lived very near the bridge, an elderly retired couple who had retired from Luhansk City. She showed me around her garden, which was about two acres with something like 24 or 25 different crops. I wrote them all down in my notes. Their house, everything about it was like something from folklore. It imprinted the scene into my mind and the folklore into my mind.

This is common to all forms of archetyping in Disinfolklore. The elements of that bridge situation which were blatantly folkloric struck me. But what was truly Disinfolklore about the scene was then invisible. As with all great discoveries — and with all modesty, Disinfolklore as a narrative form and what I’ve made of it is a great discovery, because there’s no end in sight for me to unravel that insight, nor is there an end in sight for me to use it in my daily attempts to understand what on earth is going on in the world.

I accidentally followed — it was an accidental insight. The trail that I followed from that insight, that there was something folkloric about the bridge scene, became a lens through which to perceive many new things, many unexpected insights and things I couldn’t have imagined at the time. It’s an organising fiction as well — the idea of Disinfolklore and the idea that there was something folkloric about that bridge. Maybe there were zillions of different dimensions of that scene which might have led me to many of the same conclusions.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, I was looking for something new — a new way of describing what was new about what I perceived in Russia-occupied Ukraine: the use of multi-vector, constant information flows to manipulate people’s minds such that their identities were transformed. I believe that insight is still not generally well understood in our world.

However, we often use MAGA as an example, or Brexit in a slightly weaker way, as examples of how completely normal people we knew went crazy because of strategically directed information. But in 2015, we didn’t really have those examples. We just had the Nazis, or the idea of brainwashing, or cults.

Now at least we have a common resource in that everyone sees how MAGA has driven the entire world mad. That’s a positive thing. But I still don’t think it’s generally well understood how inorganic MAGA was, how strategically well planned it was. According to my main source, Christopher Wylie’s account, he and Steve Bannon basically invented the method of recruiting and building the movement of MAGA — through those Facebook groups, through the use of the Facebook questionnaires, those surveys which used the psychological inventory methods: the OCEAN scale of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism, as a means of charting how people would be susceptible to certain kinds of manipulative information.

The insight came from the assistant professor from a university in St Petersburg who happened to also be a research assistant at Cambridge University at Judge Business School. At the time, they didn’t know he was associated with St Petersburg, apparently. He had the idea that you could back-propagate — you could use these questionnaires, these surveys, which many of us may remember seeing on our Facebook back in the noughties, in 2008 or 2013, 2014. He realised that by getting certain answers to these stupid 30-question surveys, you could infer where people charted on the neuroticism and conscientiousness dimensions.

If you could identify highly neurotic, low-conscientious individuals — and they ran tens of millions of these Facebook tests — and identify a group of them in particular local areas, and then bring them together in real life in venues which were smaller than the number of people should require to be comfortable, you could then, with clever curating of the scenes in the rooms, ignite a movement which became MAGA. That is what Christopher Wylie and Steve Bannon did with Cambridge Analytica, in certain targeted counties across America which they knew they needed to win.

I don’t think Donald Trump was on the scene at that point. Steve Bannon was in search of a product, in search of someone to run. This idea that you could use storytelling — as we’ve seen them develop since — and basically radicalise people who started off in those rooms in counties across America in 2015, believing in America First and all this stuff, and then before you know it, eight years later, they’re talking about conquering Greenland and destroying NATO and are very anti-Ukraine.

That’s all done through storytelling, I believe — or at least, to explain this without reference to storytelling, what I call Disinfolklore, I think is very hard. I think it adds to our understanding of what is normally called disinformation or propaganda, or is posited as a mystery. If we look at the narrative form, we look at the commonalities in the narrative forms used in whether it’s MAGA or what Russia did in Russia-occupied Ukraine.

It just so happened that because I was there and I collected these data, I have a data set from which I tried to find patterns. I found these structures in it. I inferred that these structures were intentionally implanted — this inner-outer realm othering, for instance, and the idea of archetyping as well. Those same structures I can find in MAGA Disinfolklore as well.

To put it in a positive sense, I don’t really see anyone else talking about this, and I try to keep up with the latest research and analyses of disinformation. In that, I find the value of my work and my attempt to make it more common — to make it a toolkit that many of us can add to our existing toolkits as we navigate the world and information.

If we zoom out from the particular space on that bridge, and even from Russia-occupied Ukraine, to the universal aspects of it: what I was doing there was archetyping the scene as something folkloric. I wasn’t doing it intentionally. This was just something that rose up in my mind one of the first times I was there — because of the forest, because of the river, the characteristics of the locus amoenus aspect of it, that this was a pleasant place with breezes and songbirds, and yes, militaries and death and horrid things and horrific stories. But there was something folkloric about it.

Looking into that insight, one vector of how I’ve come to realise is that many of us perceive — I’m not going to say everyone, and I only ever speak for people whose native language and structure is Indo-European, because I don’t have any major experience of the other — so I’ll say most of us, to a much greater extent than we imagine, perceive reality through archetypes and through the folkloric resonances that we imbibed as young children.

Because I had this insight — and this isn’t the whole thing, it’s an interesting aspect of cognition I’ve identified — I’ve collected these references. We see it all the time from the Russians. Even someone like Simonyan, people who should be in prison for the rest of their lives, convicted by the International Criminal Court for public and direct incitement of genocide — there is something naively childish about them in some ways. The way Simonyan, for instance, dresses like Robin Hood, or Maid Marian, in green. The way this guy Dugin obsesses about Cheburashka, that little cartoon character — at the moment he’s running a cultural war against this cartoon character. The way they archetype Russia as a bear.

But this also applies when you get your eye in to your own perceptions of reality and reference points, especially when you come across new experiences. For me, the bridge was like that. It was something I had never — in my wildest dreams, I’d always wanted to live in the former Soviet Union. But to end up where I ended up, to go from working in the parliament in Dublin and in Belfast and in London to ending up on this bridge with loads of army and police people — it was quite a journey for me. The whole thing was new. My mind was looking for references, and somehow I’ve noticed we do revert to these folkloric tropes — something about childhood maybe. They’re all around us. I notice in indie rock music as well — once I got my eye in, I realised so many references to folklore and folkloric tropes.

Even the example I always give: Putler on the 20th of February 2022, likening Ukraine to a dead woman, a victim of necrophiliac rape. He got this from a song by Red Mould, a Soviet-era hard rock band. The song was called “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin” — “I walked up and...” That is used by international lawyers as evidence of Putler’s intention to genocide.

Even there, Putler is thinking through folklore. When he’s talking about “little piggies,” he’s likening European politicians to little piggies — three little piggies going to market, to the slaughter.

I also remember this incident near the bridge, in a village, where two Ukrainian soldiers got drunk and drove their armoured car basically through this perfect archetypal Ukrainian market garden. I went there the next morning and we catalogued the damage. In the end, the individual Ukrainian soldiers repaid this family for the damage. But one of the things I remember was the APC, the Armoured Personnel Carrier the drunk soldiers were driving. They drove through the barn. And she said to me, “We’re so lucky that the door on the other side was open, because the pig we’re going to sell to pay for my daughter to go to university was able to run out the other side.”

That is quite telling. People in America save the college fund for 20 years. But in these folkloric situations in Ukraine, real people fatten up pigs and sell them and exchange that for their child’s university education. There was something folkloric about that.

I was then going through my memories of archetypes learnt from folktales. The Grail tales, which most of us will have accessed through Monty Python, King Arthur, and all that. They originate in Chrétien de Troyes’s Grail tales, where you have Lancelot and the characters — Perceval going around on their horses having adventures. It’s been pretty conclusively established, as far as I’m aware, that the origins of the Grail tales are in Irish mythological texts that found their way through West Wales, which had Flemish migrants, to Flanders.

Then, as the first folklore tale became really famous — the Ossian tales in Scotland by Macpherson, which he faked, as I talked about last week — so did the Grail tales and this idea of a wasteland, which I also mentioned last week. They’re folkloric — really, before the collections of folklore. It’s all about horses and archetypal characters and damsels in distress.

Then we have the great Ukrainian writer Gogol and his folk tales. Gogol was used — as I understand it, he went to Russia to try and educate them about Ukraine, and what the Russians took from his work was that Ukraine was full of little fairy-tale characters, like their little brother. His tales and stories, as discussed in many Maria episodes, particularly with Ming the Merciless, are very brilliant. His Dead Souls, on faking population statistics — which are still going — he really gets Russia in a very arch way.

Almost every city I lived in had a Gogol Street — Gogolivska in Dnipro. Every town in the former Soviet Union has a Gogol street, but probably for different reasons.

I remember at Christmas 2018 or 2019, when we were going for our Christmas dinner in Dnipro, one of the national staff members had booked this restaurant — they’re all over Russia and Ukraine, I don’t think it’s just a Ukrainian thing — where they try and pretend it’s like a peasant’s kitchen. But actually it’s all very chic, and they have people dressed in peasant costumes. They were playing this Gogol Christmas film perpetually in the background. That gave me a hint that folklore was very much part of the culture of the Soviet era, because this was the equivalent of what in America or Britain or Ireland might be Scrooge — every Christmas you’d watch Scrooge on the TV. This was the Russian equivalent, but it turned out it was from a Ukrainian writer.

Tolstoy’s village stories, which I’d read as a child and which my mother introduced to me. And Dostoevsky’s struggles and his folkloric elements — the idea of three brothers, one of whom kills the father, in The Brothers Karamazov. There are really folkloric archetypal caricatures in almost all his books. We look at them, unjustifiably so, as high art. But they, as with Dickens, as with Balzac and all the great 19th-century writers, really integrate folkloric elements — not least stories from servants and these archetypal characters.

I was collecting the media stories inside Russia-occupied Luhansk. In the spring of 2015, these stories were all full of how institutions were being founded — state institutions in Russia-occupied Luhansk. “We have a new national bank,” and then the next day there’d be a story about the new court system, and the parliament. At the beginning, they would invite us — OSCE, Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe monitors — to go and watch these institutions in action. But it was all a shadow play. It was all a Potemkin thing. It took me a little while to work this out.

The stories themselves — just as Konstantin is talking about the stories in current Russia, where if you’re reading the national newspapers in Russia, you wouldn’t know anything about electricity cuts, rolling cuts, and all the kinds of things that we know about because we listen to Mokrushyna and Genesis Man and This Week in Absurdistan. We’re really tuned in to many of the people — Ukrainians, or Prune, or people who are really monitoring closely, or Beefy monitoring Telegram closely.

Konstantin makes the point that the local papers do report it, because a local media source has to tell somewhere when your electricity is going to be on or off, or your heating. But if what he’s saying is true — and I have no reason to doubt this, and it brings me great joy to hear it — then if you’re in one part of Russia, you’re not going to know that the next region is also undergoing hardship, because the entire national Disinfolklore apparatus is spinning new stories of massive victories in Pokrovsk and villages in Ukraine, portraying Russia as always moving forward and how Donald is working for Russia.

Disinfolklore is the key, as a narrative form, to describe that subset of mind-altering articles and media stories that do not correspond to reality. They are illusions and they take on the pattern of being reality.

Long before I realised that what the Russians were doing in Russia-occupied Ukraine was spinning stories about the foundation of the state, I was monitoring all of these stories. But eventually my credibility monitor became much sharper, and I was like: this just isn’t happening. You’re just saying the High Court and the Supreme Court of Luhansk has now been established, it’s got three judges and it’s just made a judgment in this case. And it was all faked — absolutely all faked, not just for us but also for the local population.

What Russia was doing was archetyping a reality using references and tropes which meant very little to me then. I hadn’t grown up in the Soviet Union. Tropes from the Great Patriotic War were invisible to me. This constant trope of the Polish mercenaries, which we still see in our information space — Putler and others talk about Polish mercenaries. When most normal people hear “Polish mercenaries,” they think literally Polish mercenaries. But actually, “Polish mercenary” is an archetypal character — a complex of ideas and tropes under the guise of this quite normal phrase.

When Russians or people who grew up in the Soviet Union hear it — and maybe someone listening can comment on this — it means something different. It conjures up scary, warlike Second World War imagery. When my bosses, the heads of operations, were trolled through various information sources that 50,000 Polish mercenaries had established a camp two kilometres west or east of the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska, on the Ukrainian government-controlled side of the Donets River, they would send us there to look for 50,000 Polish mercenaries.

I and my colleagues, knowing the villages and the areas, knew this was highly implausible. But the head of operations, sitting back in the office 150 kilometres away, thought this might be real. They completely fell for the troll. When you’re sent on your first couple of these operations, you just think this is ridiculous — they’re not going to be there.

But then this Polish mercenary character kept coming up again and again. I thought, there’s something deeper going on here below the surface. And lo and behold, to this day, we see Polish mercenaries popping up every now and again. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Poland is so emphatic about not sending troops to Ukraine — because they’ve been trolled into being quite defensive about the idea of Polish mercenaries. The ridiculousness of this when we hear these stories of how most Russian soldiers end up signing contracts when they’re drunk or under false pretences — they’re the mercenaries, and the Ukrainians are quite the opposite.

Like the Brothers Grimm did in answer to Herder’s call of 1777, I was collecting these stories and reading them every now and again, reading these media outlets, trying to make sense of it, trying to work out what was going on and what the structures were inside it.

One of the most common structures in almost every one of these stories — and this also goes for MAGA Disinfolklore, or Donald’s Disinfolklore — is this inner-outer realm archetyping. What Donald is really doing with Greenland and NATO now is: we always thought — we as the European Union, as NATO members — that we were inner realm, and then the outer realm was Russia or the Warsaw Pact or China. But now Donald is re-archetyping that archetypal structure. He’s making Greenland outer realm. When they have dogs and huskies, they’re turning it into this cartoonish place, using cartoons to articulate what are grave threats and violations of the UN Charter, making fun of huskies and world leaders who are taking this seriously by publishing their private correspondence.

Just as the MAGA cult did — if you wear the hat, if you go to the campaign rallies, if you fall for the trolls or if you have this arch view of Donald and his 3D chess, then you’re inner realm. All of his long speeches at his campaign rallies were inner-realm identification, inner-realm reinforcement operations. You’re waiting to hear the story about Alphonse Capone or the January 6th martyrs or hostages. Everyone else is a liberal or a Democrat or an enemy of true Americanness.

This is also what Russia did in Russia-occupied Ukraine through the medium of all these stories — thousands published every day, video, text, and visual images — archetyping those across the Donets River as outer-realm Ukrainians. Almost automatically, that re-archetypes your identity as a Ukrainian inside the occupation as Russian.

This inner-outer realm switching, which we see when the Russians talk about “liberating Kupiansk” — they’re switching it upside down. If you’re aware that this is what’s going on, then when you come across strange things like “liberating,” you immediately understand what they’re doing.

That’s part of what I try to do: make people aware. Most of us are now aware because we see so much of this data. But we know many people in our real lives who don’t tune in that much and aren’t quite aware that this is the subtext — these are the systemic effects of individual stories.

If you see this immanence, if you’re looking for the mana in the meme, if you’re looking for the energy in particular memes, then it doesn’t matter where the meme is emanating from — whether it’s your mother, your girlfriend, your son, your daughter, your friend, someone in your milieu, or Medvedev. You know for definite, if it’s coming from Medvedev or a distinct Russian source, that it’s probably Disinfolklore.

What I believe we need to become better at, as a society, as civilisations, is identifying — independent of the source of the brainwashing meme — we need to be able to look into the meme itself, whether it’s a flick of an eyebrow, a visual meme, a sentence, a tweet, something we flash by on Twitter, and look for its energy.

If you see this inner-outer realm dividing, or archetyping immanence in there, then we can be on guard. Obviously we need to be on guard — incoming troll radar. If we can keep that on, at least when we’re on X or listening to something that might be propaganda, then we may notice the inner-outer realm switching immanence in memes and texts.

With Donald, it’s easy because you know it’ll always be there. But the hard thing is seeing it in our friends — and then learning to sometimes quietly notice: “I see what you’re doing there. You’re archetyping immigrants as dog-eating outsiders who don’t deserve human rights. Let’s lock them up in ICE or deport them to some terrible prison somewhere.” That’s where it’s leading. “I see what you’re doing there.”

Sometimes you just keep that quietly to yourself, your perception. But at least you’re looking inside data, looking for this archetyping and this inner-outer realm immanence — which is in many folktales and every Disney film. Cinderella, the poor girl who meets the prince — that’s inner-outer realm. Sleeping Beauty. This structure is in so much folklore. This is probably where we first learn these structures — when I say “we,” I mean Indo-Europeans.

In the case of MAGA or Russian Disinfolklore, there was and is an intelligence behind what is happening inside the minds of those consuming what was masquerading as news. Whereas it had been me archetyping the scene as something folkloric, automatically, what was going on in Russia and Russia-occupied Ukraine was something very purposeful: archetyping Ukraine as outer realm and threatening, Russia as saviours.

This is why, when I brought up that case last week — Nihilanand, I think, was the name that Natalka from Ukraine had written about — I was very grateful for resurfacing it. He says he thinks this was just accidental, that the Russians had by accident ended up brainwashing themselves into annihilating Ukraine. He used this illustration: it’s like going down a dark set of stairs. You go down one step and you’re deciding to atomise the whole of society, and it’s quite dark. Then you go down the next step and you decide you need a bit more violence and coercion. A few steps down, feeling in the dark, you end up with where Russia is today.

But as I mentioned last week, I don’t really think it’s as accidental, based on what I saw in Russia-occupied Ukraine. There is an intelligence behind it.

This is with Druidy Don, my archetyping of Donald. When I have these debates — is he demented? Well, clearly he’s demented. Does he have dementia, or is he doing this on purpose? There’s a bit of a mix of both. If I apply one of the elements in the Disinfolklore analytical method: if I find myself — and this is where mindfulness comes in, you’re looking in at your mind and what you’re thinking about and processing, which is hard to do and hard to remember — the point of Disinfolklore, and part of its power, is it transports you. It makes you transcend the moment. It makes you hate your parents or your siblings because they’re “just liberals” or “they don’t understand Don’s genius” or “Russia’s 4D chess.” It does transport you.

But if we can keep in mind the objective of mindfulness — in the sense of looking in at our mind and trying to ask: why am I thinking this way? What am I thinking about? — one of the signs I use is that if I find myself questioning too much whether a person is doing something on purpose, they probably are doing it at least partly on purpose. They are partly manipulative.

But that’s as much a trick to stop me wondering too much about it. I don’t want to spend my life reading that race-car driver guy’s tweets. When I found myself thinking, “Is he a Russian patsy or not?” for too long, I just blocked him, and I haven’t thought about him in months until this very moment when I thought of this example.

I’m not making a determination about whether or not that person is, or Konstantin is — I’m just going: if I’m wondering too much about whether they’re doing this intentionally, whether they’re operating or not, then I can easily block them and move on to other things and make my mind space available for other things.

I’ll leave it at that.

Continued from:

First in series:

Last week I was right back at the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska and I went through the luxury sausage troll saga and the complicity between the activities which the Russians, and indeed the Ukrainians, create on the ground, but then the complicity between these actual activities and how the Russian Disinfolklore apparatus, the propaganda apparatus, then spins these actual events.

What I wanted to talk about today was the folkloric dimension of the bridge, because that’s obviously quite fundamental to Disinfolklore. I’m aware that most of us haven’t thought too much about folklore since we were children. I wanted to bring us through how I had this intuition — unwrapping that intuition that there was something folkloric about that situation — into what has now become the Disinfolklore analytical method.

The saga of me and my Russian colleague featured in a whole array of Disinfolklore stories spun by the Russians. But there’s another aspect of the bridge and that situation I was in that struck me almost the first moment I was there.

One thing I’ve noticed, by listening to Chuck Pfarrer since the Maria days, and Alan as well — I’ve actually learned quite a lot of how he thinks, how a Navy SEAL thinks and computes data. Every now and again, someone in my real life who doesn’t pay that much attention to Ukraine but is interested in what’s going on, I find myself speaking about what’s going on — like, for instance, about Pokrovsk in November — being able to channel what I was learning from Chuck Pfarrer and how he was looking at the battlefield. He didn’t think it would fall that easily. I realised I’ve actually learned quite a lot. A certain part of my mental architecture, the way I compute data, especially battlefield stuff, has really developed and evolved a great deal as a result of listening for three or four years to Chuck Pfarrer.

By analogy, that’s what I’m trying to do with the Disinfolklore analytical method. I’m grateful for these opportunities, these shows, which is just to give an idea of how I think about this kind of data and how I control it going into my mind.

But I didn’t start out that way. I forged the word Disinfolklore out of disinformation and folklore in February 2023. I established a folder on my computer in February 2020 called “Folklore.” That folder is where I was putting all these texts that I was reading to try and understand what trolls and trolling was about. Out of that initial attempt to look at how those terms were being used in the media, tracing them back — that led me on this massive journey, which I’m still on, into the origins of Indo-European languages, but also particularly through this data set I got from Factiva of tens of thousands of references to trolls and trolling.

I had that folder on my computer called Folklore, and then disinformation, obviously, was one of the words. It could be misinformation or disinformation. In February 2023, I was trying to think of a way of how I can archetype everything I have learned since being on the bridge. That was February 2023, a year into the war as well, where I realised — because of my experience on this bridge from February 2015 onwards, seeing and looking at patterns and data — that I had a particular way of perceiving the daily diet of information we were receiving through X and through Telegram. At the time I was on Telegram and looking at it for the full-scale invasion.

I spent the first month of the full-scale invasion collecting information for the OSCE’s Moscow Mechanism mission, which then in April 2022 produced the first report. It was charged by 44 countries, nation states, to inquire into Russia’s conduct of the war in Ukraine for the first month. That report was then cited in the definitive, historic, comprehensive 600-page judgment delivered by the European Court of Human Rights about three months ago on Russia’s violations of the European Convention on Human Rights.

I was collecting this data initially to help these four jurists who were producing this report. But I found that I had a particular perspective on it that was worth sharing. I was looking for a means of naming it, naming what I was doing. I consciously sat down one day and wrote down “disinformation” and then “folklore.” Disinfolklore was then pretty obvious because of the F in disinformation overlapping with folklore. That’s where the moniker, the branding, was born.

Instead of including the word folklore, I could have chosen song, or folk song, propaganda, stories, narratives, or a heap of other words to describe the new phenomenon I’ve identified. Folklore, however, captures best the way of seeing — in the sense of that brilliant book by Berger, Ways of Seeing, ways of looking at art. I think it’s from the early 70s. That title, that idea from Nietzsche as well — all knowledge is perspective. This idea of ways of seeing is as valid today, to see what I describe as Disinfolklore, as folklore was in Jacob Grimm or Herder’s times.

I mentioned Herder’s call last week, in 1777, where he said: we’re under occupation by the French and we need to unite the 10 Germanic tribes. In order to do this, we need our Shakespeare. Where is our Shakespeare? We have no Shakespeare. He launched the folklore collection movement in Germany, which recruited the Grimm brothers later and Goethe.

It’s quite amusing in a very nerdy way that one of the origin stories of the folklore movement is in Macpherson’s Ossian tales, which turned out to be faked. From the 18th century, they brought into the consciousness of all of Europe — Europe was basically convulsed by these stories of peasant wisdom and the found document, which is a trope across Indo-European culture, including in Tibetan Buddhism, of these documents which are suddenly found somewhere under a rock.

Macpherson is the archetypal Disinfolklorist because he did communicate something very authentic — they’re mainly based on Irish folklore — but he did it in a deceptive manner. But who can blame him, because it was that work which then inspired Herder to realise: we can create a sense of national self-identity by collecting stories and finding the archetypal stories of the German people.

For three years I had been researching Indo-European mythology and folklore — the three years before 2023, a year into the full-scale invasion. For three years I had been researching Indo-European mythology and folklore as a means of seeing how Russia and MAGA were using stories to create community. I was looking for that moniker, and then Disinfolklore just suddenly came to me — a bit like all those famous Eureka moments.

When I arrived, the reason I had this folder called Folklore on my computer was, yes, I was trying to look at trolling and trolls. But from almost the very first moment I arrived at the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska — which is on the Donets River, in a biosphere reserve area, beautiful forestry either side of the river, weeping willows whose leaves are falling into the river and whose boughs are bowed towards the river, and a bridge across it — on either side of the bridge were the Russian occupiers on one side and the Ukrainian defenders on the other, separated by a kilometre and a half. There were all these old houses, beautiful old wooden houses. Typically the architecture around that part of Ukraine is brick-built first storey, and then they have wooden tops.

This didn’t fit my archetype of Russia or the Soviet Union, where I thought everyone lived in these horrible apartment blocks. That’s from the perspective of a bourgeois Westerner, where these apartment blocks generally seem like the equivalent that Americans see as projects. But now, having travelled a lot around central and eastern Europe, I realise that that archetypal meaning of these places is not consistent with the data — you have lovely, well-looked-after apartment blocks. To the untrained eye, they just look like a council estate in South London or something. But when you get close to them, you see a whole community of people looking after them, with people from all parts of society living in them.

At the time, it was quite surprising to me that people in the former Soviet Union would live in these kinds of houses — I’d learned about collectivisation and getting rid of the kulaks. But eastern Ukraine, as we’ve probably all seen in these images, is a beautiful, amazingly beautiful place. There’s something folkloric about it, and I saw that the moment I arrived there, because my only reference point when I arrived was folklore and stories I had read in Ladybird books, or Hansel and Gretel, or from Disney films. A lot of the scenes I saw there — my only archetype in my consciousness was folklore. I had that intuition.

I’m not going to say the first time I went to the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska — we gradually moved there, closer there. The first day I arrived in Severodonetsk in this hotel called the Mir Hotel, which is now no longer with us, like so many buildings I know in Ukraine that have been destroyed and looted. I was only there for seven years. I often reflect on this: if so many places dear to me — including hotels I stayed in and my own house in Severodonetsk, which was destroyed, and my next-door neighbour was torn to pieces by Russian artillery, and then his friend went to rescue him and he was torn to pieces too — if I have had this experience, even though I only lived there for seven years, then what it must be like for Ukrainians to have whole cities and towns disappear from them. It often gives me an idea of the scale of the destruction.

Sitting in the Mir Hotel in Severodonetsk, where I lived for my first year there, we gradually moved closer to Stanytsia Luhanska from Severodonetsk. It’s about 180 kilometres, and there were terrible roads. We would drive there each day, there and back. About a month after I arrived, we finally got to the bridge for the first time.

Pretty early on, I intuited there was something folkloric about the situation. I had an intuition that folklore was connected to it. There’s this idea of a bridge — in folkloric tales, something mediating between worlds and other worlds. The bridge was both a metaphor and an actual fact.

On the Russian-occupied side of the bridge, they were Wagner soldiers guarding it. Not only had they — by that time, this was before the mythology of the Wagner Group had really entered the mainstream. It’s probably a bit hard for us to remember this, but the Wagner Group really didn’t — most normal people didn’t know anything about Wagner Private Military Company until about 2022, 2023. People paying attention to Russia and Syria would have known about them. But in 2015, this was very close to their beginnings.

From my earliest times there, I was coming across mythical stories about these guys, these amazing mercenaries. But what I was seeing in actuality was scrawny, scruffy mercenaries in really bad, unkempt uniforms. I was aware that something cynical was going on to create out of them this mythology about elite forces.

While I was there, as all of us know, the initial resistance — and the hint that Ukraine would defeat Russia — was already visible in the period from April 2014 to September 2014. It was a ragtag group, mainly a couple of groups — Azov and Pravyi Sektor — composed out of football supporters’ clubs, mainly based in Kyiv, who became magnets for resistance to the Russians. With the help of some oligarch cash — in the case of the Dnipro 1 and Dnipro 2 battalions, which were paid for by Kolomoyskyi and Dnipro’s Jewish community who armed them and got them up — the storied second army in the world was already on the back foot by September 2014 by this ragtag group of people who became soldiers and now obviously are part of the Ukrainian military.

A mirroring process went on in Russia-occupied Luhansk, where you had a lot of community groups of people just protecting their local community. Either they had believed the Disinfolklore about the Ukrainians coming to kill them, or they saw the rapacious mafia-run militias and wanted to protect their neighbourhoods. The Wagner Group were given the job of eliminating these groups of armed resisters and people who just wanted to protect their neighbourhood in Russia-occupied Luhansk. I was there while that was going on.

Then, as I realised, they took their mythology from this guy who was supposedly killed in the aeroplane that supposedly killed the Chef. Again, another moniker from folklore, another archetypal moniker — Prigozhin, the Chef. He’s just Putin’s chef. He’s a restaurateur. He’s in catering. And yet he financed the operation which got Donald elected and got Brexit done.

They took this ideology of Wagner — the German composer, who was part of Herder’s project. He was much later and Herder was well dead by then. But he continued, he was responding to Herder’s 1777 plea: where is our Shakespeare? We have to create songs. They weren’t even talking about stories like the Grimm brothers were collecting. Herder was talking about songs. Wagner helped create that sense of German identity with his songs and operas and shows, which were based on mythology that really only existed because the Roman historian Tacitus had collected these stories and published them in Latin in about 80 CE.

A lot of what we know about the origins of the Germanic people — that Mannus had three sons — and a lot of the material I deal with in my Finding Manuland project comes from this Roman historian, recorded in Latin. Wagner the composer went back to this and created this sense of pride and unity in the German people.

But the guy, Utkin, who supposedly formed the Wagner Group — he was fond of the aesthetics of the Nazis. Again, that’s the Russian account from 2016, which I preserved: “Who are the Wagner militaries?” And it’s like: “He’s not really a Nazi, he just likes the aesthetics of the Nazis.” But of course, the aesthetics of the Nazis — the uniforms and such — were very much part of how they brainwashed people and created their sense of identity. You can’t separate the aesthetics of the Nazis from what they do.

They deliberately take this German composer, this high-art composer, which again trolls people into pronouncing it “Wagner.” You’ll notice I haven’t pronounced it “Wagner” because I don’t want to give it any positive connotations and I don’t want to communicate that I appreciate Wagner’s operas. Of course Wagner is a great composer. He can’t be blamed for Hitler. I’m not interested in that. What I am interested in is how, from the very early beginnings, the Russians were using this mythology about the Wagner Group — this elite force whose name came from someone whose entire intellectual project was to weave, out of mythology, out of archetypal Germanic mythology, a sense of collective identity — and how these operatives became characters inside Russia-occupied Ukraine and executed enormous numbers of people.

In February 2022, they were given the job. It was the Wagner Group. I think it was Nile once who persuaded us on Volya, or on Maria at the time, that we should be subverting this and calling them “Wanger.” I’m happy to hear Mokrushyna has stuck with that, and I’ve stuck with it as well. Every now and again someone points out, “No, it’s not Wanger, it’s Wagner.”

They create this mythology about a private military company. There’s something folkloric about that. There’s something folkloric about the whole structure of the position — the bridge, as I mentioned, dividing other worlds. One world from another: Russia-occupied Ukraine from government-controlled Ukraine, paradise from hell.

In daily life on that bridge, most days I would speak to dozens of people and hear dozens of stories. Through my interpreter, through my amazing translators, I’d ask them: “Tell me about your journey today. How was it?” Luhansk City is about 14 kilometres away, but it might take them seven hours to travel that 14 kilometres. Russia specialises in creating these border zones. One of their unique skills is just to create hell on earth.

The bridge was dividing other symbolic worlds — in folklore and in folktales — but also in actuality. The tales people spoke of, travelling from Russia-occupied Ukraine into there. That particular spot has been a boundary zone for millennia. The Donets, the Don River, is the dividing line according to Isidore of Seville, who was the Wikipedia of the 6th century. Your monastery was nothing if you didn’t have a copy — or it was everything if you had a copy — of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies.

The Don River, according to Isidore of Seville, is the dividing line with Asia. Everywhere east of the Don, the Tanais as Isidore calls it, is Asia. The Donets River itself, as the Little Don River, has been a boundary zone for millennia. And here it was a boundary zone again from 2015 onwards.

In the Second World War — this always really blew my mind — it was also a boundary zone. The Nazis and the Soviets fought right there. In the forestry all around it was rusty old shrapnel from that time. Here it was again. It was paradise between 1945 and 2014. No one in 2013 would have predicted this was going to become a boundary zone again.

Then there were the events, like I talked about last time — the luxury sausage troll saga — that almost led to war. These are folklore-like events.

Recently I visited this amazing place in Turkey, Göbekli Tepe, which is often described as the first monumental site — basically three stone circles with lots of orthostats and designs from 12,000 years ago. It was discovered a decade or two ago. On these orthostats, on these stones, there are carved animals. The thing which affected me most was seeing birds — vultures with their wings spread. This same motif was in Babylon, the Hittites, and now many countries, including Russia, have the double-headed bird. I’ve seen the double-headed bird in Hittite art from about 1400 BCE on orthostats. Poland and loads of countries, America, have the eagle. To see that this was important enough in human culture 12,000 years ago totally blew my mind.

They also had these boars — wild boars carved on the stones. This amazing wild boar which clearly had significant religious significance to these people living 12,000 years ago. And this really intricately designed boar’s head, with still the red paint on it, that was buried in this place, discovered maybe a bit by chance.

That also added to my understanding of the luxury sausage troll saga, because you have this connection with pigs and boars going right back through folklore. Three little piggies going to market. We heard Putler describing Western politicians as piggies, basically lambs to the slaughter, using folkloric tropes. The luxury sausage troll saga itself had folkloric resonances, even though at the time I didn’t know about Göbekli Tepe. I was aware of the significance of pigs in Three Little Piggies and in folklore. That struck me at the time, and then obviously the weaving of this event — all of this archetypal Disinfolklore in Russian occupying media — was used to brainwash Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Ukraine into thinking that I, as a representative, as a diplomat from the international community sent there by 57 member states of the OSCE to help establish the facts in relation to particular incidents and to try and de-escalate the conflict — that they created Disinfolklore out of my presence there.

Then there was the everyday heroism of ordinary people managing an extraordinary situation. It was mainly women, children, and older people of pension age who crossed this bridge every day — 10,000 civilians at the height going each way. At various stages over my three years there, we went through lots of different phases. Sometimes people would have to wait seven or eight hours, or overnight, on one side of the bridge.

The main motivating factor for people from Russia-occupied Luhansk was that they came over the bridge to collect their pensions from the Ukrainian state in Stanytsia Luhanska and then return. In April 2014, about a million and a half people saw the writing on the wall and left Russia-occupied Ukraine and Crimea immediately. I met and got to know many who made that choice — they just left their apartments and never went back because they understood what was going to happen.

But a lot of people didn’t leave. They may have had older parents, or they didn’t have the foresight. Maybe culturally they were closer to Moscow than to Kyiv. They might have just had a comfortable life there. Or maybe they were just stubborn, obstinate — who could have foreseen what was going to happen? So they decided to stay. Pensioners then had access to their pensions in Ukraine still. They crossed the bridge to physically collect them and go back.

In my naivety at the time, I thought they’d come over to the other side of the bridge and see that Ukrainians aren’t devils. Therefore the Disinfolklore they were being subjected to, the brainwashing Disinfolklore, wouldn’t brainwash them as deeply in Russia-occupied Ukraine, because they were coming over to Ukraine, seeing normal people, and collecting their pension.

But now I realise the power of Disinfolklore — and we see this with MAGA as well — it’s so powerful that it becomes the filter through which you perceive the entire world. People are willing to sacrifice their children or their family or their longest relationships. We see with anti-vax stuff: they’re willing to subject themselves to death because they believe RFK Jr.’s ideas — that eating raw meat, having a raw deer every day, eating dogs with brain worms inside them, is actually going to make you a lot stronger.

Ideas are so strong — and this is the power of Disinfolklore. It’s a more common idea today for me to say this. It’s less controversial than it would have been before COVID or 10 years ago, because I would have always had this romantic notion that the will to survive would overcome ideas. But now I think we’ve seen enough of how people can be brainwashed to not need to be convinced that Disinfolklore can ruin lives, ruin families, and ruin Russia and Ukraine as well.

The everyday heroism of ordinary people managing an extraordinary situation — mothers bringing children across the hellscape. That really struck me. Speaking to people about their experiences there every day and collecting those stories, which I wrote up faithfully in my reports — not that many people read them, even in my own organisation. But I did the best job I could to record their stories. Maybe one day I’ll publish them all.

It was just very ordinary people, but the heroism of the mother, the young mother pretending to the child that this was completely normal, trying to coax the child across this one-and-a-half-kilometre stretch of land with the detritus of bullets and old artillery shells — just really grim stuff.

I’m going to post now in the Purple Pill just some photos. I had to be careful about which photos I took there. But one Christmas, Christmas 2016, I systematically recorded the entire situation. You’ll see the apocalyptic scene I was dealing with and some of the heroic scenes — mothers with their children. There’s this picture I’ve just posted: a man looking at me very suspiciously as I took the photograph of him, pushing his mother in a wheelchair across this terrible space. You see the stone — “be careful of the mines.” This is common in folklore, where you just have ordinary people, archetypal normal people, in extraordinary situations.

I never ceased to be amazed, especially because you didn’t have men of military age — generally speaking, they didn’t want to be in that space. You had a lot of smuggling going on, porters carrying things who were often young guys. There was a whole sub-economy there. But it was mainly older people who couldn’t be press-ganged or tortured or captured.

I always used to think of my mother: imagine if she had to go across there.

Then there was the idea of trolling of emotions — emotion-moving. Over the course of being there for three years, you become attached. I felt I owned the place in many respects, because no one else was witnessing it in the same way that I was. My team was, and when I left, it was time to leave because I would get emotional.

The Russian occupiers were also looking at our internet profiles. By that time I had deleted my internet profiles. I didn’t appear on the internet again until I established a Medium account in the autumn of 2019, and then I started using Twitter in June 2021 after I had created Decoding Trolls and had an idea of the Code of Positive Trolls — so that I wasn’t just randomly tweeting stuff, but that it all adhered to this communications technique.

The Russian occupiers — we had to cross and speak at multiple checkpoints. They were always trolling us, playing hardball, being mean, spinning wheeling tales. They were also looking at our internet profiles. Some of my colleagues hadn’t deleted theirs — I was told to delete my Facebook and everything when I started that job, and I dutifully did that. But most of my other colleagues didn’t. In some respects they paid a price, because it helped the Russians run operations against individuals.

Then the link with artillery barrages as well, where I realised they’re about trolling people’s emotions. This whole discussion of the Oreshnik in Lviv the other day — I’m quite happy that now those who’ve paid attention to it, on the Times broadcast or the Telegraph podcast, are looking at it in the sense that this is an information attack, not a military strategy. I’m really happy about that level of awareness, because that was one of my main foundational intuitions in eastern Ukraine: sometimes these days of thousands of ceasefire violations by the Russians had exactly the same emotional impact on me as trolling by the Russian occupiers or online — where someone attacks you online and you feel this sense of “someone’s attacking me, I’m in danger.”

That’s quite a sophisticated idea. We shouldn’t forget that Russia only said the purpose of this Oreshnik is to add weight to the mythical, mythological, disavowable attack on Putler’s residence. Note the posh term they use. And in response to that, “we fire the Oreshnik,” and then we’re supposed to go, “Oh, that adds credibility to the Disinfolklore.”

I’m quite satisfied now that this idea — that Russia’s attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine should mainly be understood on the level of Disinfolklore — is gaining traction. Going back to why I’m careful about sharing stuff: if that is their intention, they want to create horror, and somehow out of that horror — we saw ISIS doing this as well — that horror attracts people, like my Turkish colleague or my Kazakh colleague, into watching these horrible things. They’re keeping the trolls’ energy alive. Trolls, as far as I conceive of them now, die if no one keeps them alive. I try to be careful about perpetuating them.

Then there was the other aspect: mythical happenings that only existed in Russian Disinfolklore. The Russian occupying media would talk about attacks which the Ukrainians had carried out. Often I was there when these mythological attacks appeared in their media, and they’d talk about them for weeks afterwards. I’d get a call from Kyiv or our operations team saying, “Tell me about this attack.” And it’s like: it didn’t happen. Because I was there. I know, or my colleague was there, and we know it didn’t happen.

I realised that these things can be real even if they’re just in the information space. That’s the folkloric element — something feels so real and so vivid that you’re not quite sure whether it happened or not. Like a child getting really scared by a story, so scared they can’t sleep. Then they begin to think — even though they saw it in a film, a Disney film, a horror film, or on TikTok — you can’t really remember: is that real or not? Did it happen? It melds into our consciousness.

Russia riffs off this — implanting artificial memories of what the USSR was like. Noticing that you can create prosthetic memories in people’s minds. We’ve talked about that before.

The other folkloric aspect was this concept in art, especially in classical stories, called in quite posh Latin, locus amoenus. The definition of a locus amoenus is a pleasant spot — a phrase used by modern scholars to refer to a set description of an idyllic landscape, typically containing trees and shade, a grassy meadow, running water, songbirds, and cool breezes. The tradition goes back to Homer’s descriptions of the Grotto of Calypso and the Garden of Alcinous.

This folkloric aspect: even though it was hell on earth a lot of the time, I never lost sight of the beauty of that place. I longed to return there after the de-occupation because it was a pleasant spot. It had the birds, the grassy meadows, the running water, the cool breezes, the trees, the shade. I had that intimation the first time I was there.

Another dimension of that situation was the people who themselves were archetypes. The leader of the Russian occupiers, until he went missing — someone said, “Oh, he’s probably gone on leave,” and it’s like, no, you don’t go on leave — you get eliminated. He used to spin these tales. Every morning I would go down there and say, “So what happened last night?” and he’d always have a story for me, knowing I would then put it word for word in my report. He described himself as “a simple forester.” That’s a classic archetype from folklore.

Soldiers, knights, nurses, villagers, knaves, damsels in distress, invaders, trolls, villains, mercenaries, defenders, and animals of all kinds being led across the bridge — it was like a living folktale. Like Mokrushyna’s front room when she’s doing her show and the cats are having all these adventures. Great stories are being created all the time.

There were these archetypes there. That’s a narrow meaning of archetype by comparison to how I now use the idea of archetyping — where Russia uses archetypes of national identity. For instance, it knows a certain proportion of the population will be antisemitic, so it stirs them up and gets everyone fighting. That’s the wider view of archetyping which I use.

Then there were very story-like switches, always there every day — interzone tripping. Russian occupiers describing themselves as defenders, Ukrainians represented as usurpers, as occupiers. We see that all the time in these Telegram stories. The Russians are still at it. They’re trying to re-archetype reality — saying they’re trying to liberate Kupiansk from the occupiers. But international law is the standard against which we decide what is liberating and what is not.

These fairy-story-like switches, reversals, are quite confusing for many of us until we get our eye into them. Even the idea of “peace” — “We’re just looking for peace” — but actually peace means war.

Mists, often rising above the river especially in the morning — in Welsh mythology, and particularly in Irish mythology, mists are a portal into another world.

The passage to other worlds — and I’ll finish here — the afterlife is across bridges and rivers. The Styx River, the Acheron in Greek mythology. Odysseus passes into the underworld through the Kerch Strait, believe it or not, interestingly enough.

In early Iranian religion — and hopefully, if they can get rid of the mullahs, we’ll get a bit of Zoroastrianism back — Daena, again D-N, same as in Don, river, meaning river. Daena controls passage across Chinvat Bridge. To the saved, Daena appears as a beautiful woman, and you will pass into the House of Song. But to the damned, Daena appears as a witch, and you will pass into the House of Lies.

This goes back to Luhansk. Russia-occupied Luhansk was a House of Lies. Archetyping it as a House of Lies is substantiated by the Disinfolklore apparatus and how they used Disinfolklore to brainwash people. But this goes right back to the common heritage — whether it’s Donald using Truth Social and trying to re-archetype lies as truth, going back to the federal January 6th indictment, where it is the usurper Donald telling lies about the election being stolen to generate a rationale for the January 6th insurrection.

That goes all the way back to the inscriptions of Behistun — which I will be the first to visit if Iran is liberated from the mullahs — where we have Darius the Great, who founded the Achaemenid Empire, which ruled most of Anatolia and Mesopotamia and all the way to Greece for roughly 400 years until Alexander the Great came on the scene. The inscriptions of Behistun, where he talks about all the usurpers he has overcome who promoted the Lie. They promoted the Lie that they were the rightful monarchs of their areas. These inscriptions are in three languages and enabled the decryption of cuneiform — basically the key to cuneiform.

Going back to what I promised I would get to, the point we’re moving towards: this idea of truth and the Lie. Going right back to the Zoroastrian religion — whether you call him Zarathustra or Zoroaster, either works — he lived around 1400 BCE. As far back as then, this idea of a House of Lies is hell, basically. That was the other side of the bridge, where the Disinfolklore apparatus was going on. And the House of Song was the Ukraine part of the bridge.

Those are all the different dimensions — folkloric dimensions, if you like — of that scene. Next week we’ll move along, move away from the bridge. But I wanted to give you that deep dive, both parts: the luxury sausage troll saga, but also this aspect, because I know folklore is quite hard for us perhaps to relate to outside of the nursery and outside of our experience of it, either as parents or as children ourselves.

This was me exploring my intuition — that just occurred to me — that there was something folkloric about the situation. Today I’ve described all the actual dimensions of the folkloric aspects of it, which led me to Disinfolklore. I’ll leave it at that for today.

**Wendy:** This has struck me on so many different levels. First, I certainly appreciate the Disinfolklore term because it really helps understand that this is about going back to the archaic — things that we think of as the first things we know about as kids, as societies. And the “dis” in front of it really means that somebody’s rewriting those for us, and they’re quite often successful in doing that.

I appreciate how you chose that word. I think it’s a very good word. It’s disarming as well — to use a word like folklore, because it sounds kind of weak. It’s not a history textbook, right? It’s folklore. But it catches on sometimes more easily.

You talked about your recognition of the danger of Disinfolklore, and so I wanted to borrow from another source to add to this discussion.

**James:** John C. Lilly wrote a book called Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, and he had two postulates or theorems. The first involves individuals. He says: “In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experimentally and experientially. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits.”

The other postulate is about society — a corollary of the first: “In the province of connected minds, what the network believes to be true either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the network’s mind, there are no limits.”

I found that helpful to compare to what you’re talking about. I think it really does represent well the risk to us — that these things become true once we believe them. When I was a child, my first dream that I remembered was a two-foot-long ant in the backyard. I didn’t know what a dream was, so I was convinced I had seen a two-foot-long ant. I didn’t know the difference between the two worlds.

**Wendy:** I remember dreaming about stepping on tomato worms. It was gross. But thankfully that never happened in real life as a child.

I wanted to point out — and Decoding does a great job of this — from an anthropological viewpoint, we’re programmed to respond to folklore, to respond to people’s stories, to respond to these kinds of tropes. That’s part of our heritage as social animals. We tend to want to believe our close associates more than somebody who’s far away. Social media has in many ways short-circuited this way of being that we’ve evolved as human social animals. It’s something we’re really struggling to catch up with. That’s a lot of why we do these segments — to learn ways to cope with these rapidly changing challenges to our ways of thinking.

**Stephen:** Thank you for both those things. I’ll re-listen — hopefully this will go up on Spotify and then I can re-listen to those quotes from James, because I love that use of the term “network” as well. Ukrainians, I noticed when you auto-translate stuff — certainly the work I was doing on Telegram for the first months of the war — they often use the term “network” in a way we don’t really use in English. They would say “such-and-such has appeared on the network.” That’s quite a colloquialism for them that we don’t really have among normal people in our world. The way James was using that term, network, reminded me a lot of studying hypermodernism and the idea of the network and network activities.

And Wendy, on that point about learning — I think this is the value of the work I did looking at the impact of trolls and trolling as keywords in the Dow Jones Factiva database, getting these thirty-three-thousand responses and then going through them. From the early 70s onwards, and then just suddenly this eruption in 2007, 2008 on social media. You have a lot of early computer culture and alternative stuff from the 80s onward in Oakland and other places. That comes through a little bit in this data set. But there is just this step change that happens with Facebook and Twitter.

For most of us, it feels quite recent. I remember when we all discovered Facebook — whenever it was, probably 2007 — and within two weeks everyone you knew was on it. It produced this big change. And we see now this battle that’s in the national security strategy of the United States, which is basically: “We don’t want to deal with European governments and the European Union. In fact, we’ll go to war with Europe over our provincial, recent idea of free speech” — which, by the way, benefits them because “I own Truth Social” or “I own X.” They use these mechanisms to brainwash and create, using Disinfolklore, their adherents, their cult followers. They mobilise them to get more power and abolish democracy.

But thankfully, because of the Macron judgment and these new rules in Australia and the European Union’s work on the Digital Services Act, it’s still a contested space and the battle is not over yet. I try to never lose sight of that.

What you’re talking about, Wendy — the stakes, and how children have been taught to do things or not do things through storytelling. Being afraid to go to the forest, being afraid to go into town because of the child snatcher. Social media is the modern form of it.

Modern folklore theory, as I learned in that course I did, does encompass social media, although there is a conservative bias towards what we might easily recognise as folklore — Hansel and Gretel type stuff — but also towards songs, working men’s songs, and the appellations. But definitely, for me, war lore and what we’re subjected to by these so-called milbloggers — who are really highly cultured, highly trained, brilliant, academically trained people in the most part. People like Zarina Zabriskie, who as part of her linguistics degree in St Petersburg was taught a module on combat propaganda.

All of these people — they’re not just some guy with a phone, which you kind of imagine. It’s quite disarming to be called milbloggers or whatever. They’re actually very clever, for the most part, propagandists who are merely voicing very complex, manipulative ideas that take advantage of folklore and how it works on our brains.

The fight is on. Thank you, Wendy, for hosting the space with James, and for helping us surface these ideas. We deal with these stories all the time anyway — with M.ockers and all the different shows on Volya, Will’s Absurdistan. It’s good to have a bit of theory underneath them.

Decoding Trolls

Coup Day in Russia: Collected Posts.

⚡️I called the coup on 26th May (see "Putin's Chef Problem" 👇🏽). If I saw it, in sparse data, Ruschist power vertical, with access to rich data, saw it too. A month ago. What does this mean…

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3 years ago · Decoding Trolls

Continued from:

First in series:

What I look at in Disinfolklore is particularly the system effects of specific memes. I’m also interested in the moment — how they affect us, how they affect our motivations, our intentions, our attitudes. But the whole thing, what’s special about the Disinfolklore universe, is that when I set this out in February last year in Munich, just as Vance was making his speech, I said that what I feared would happen is this.

For those of us who know people who have gone MAGA, I suppose it’s a bit like our Ukraine war universe by comparison to people we know who live a normal civilian life, who think about Ukraine maybe once a week, if that. It’s an all-encompassing system where you wake up in the morning — a bit like being in love or something — and it’s all you think about. Or being in grief.

But the Disinfolklore universe that Donald wields, that he was trying to wrap the world up in, which I witnessed in eastern Ukraine where the Russians wrap everyone up in it — that’s what’s unusual or unique or not that common in how I look at the system effects of particular memes: the aggregation of particular memes in a certain way, so that before you know it, you’re in the cult. Or you begin to think that Greenland belongs to America, or that Venezuela belongs to America, or that Ukraine belongs to Russia. That would be the result of an aggregation of thousands, millions of memes that transform your mind.

In a minute, I’m going to go back to the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska, which I talked about in the last show on Christmas Eve. Amazing — we did a show on Christmas Eve. I think this is our 32nd show, by my count. We’ll go back to that bridge in a minute.

What I’ve noticed is this idea I’ve been working on, what I call paradoxical brainwashing. “I’m a Ukraine supporter, but Ukraine will lose.” We had this caller on the show — I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who noticed them — who joined the show about a week ago. Will and I think James, you heard them as well. They were a total downer about any argument which was given as to why — actually, it was Alan Brewer and Will who were dealing with this person. They were speaking the whole time about how Ukraine was going to lose. Any argument from the reservoir of many good arguments, factually based, that Will or Alan Brewer offered, this person was like, “Yeah, but...” They were just going on and on with the negative vibe.

The paradox is: I’m a Ukraine supporter, but Ukraine will lose. That structure, that energy, was in everything they were talking about. Some of us sometimes need to be reminded — we get in a rut, a mental rut, a mental routine — and we need to be reminded: “Yes, but this. Yes, but that.” That’s the value of Volya Radio. It’s the value of Mokrushyna’s show, and hopefully the value of this show as well for people — that when we’re in these mental ruts, as perhaps some of us have been about Venezuela or about Greenland or about other aspects of this, or something going on in Ukraine at the moment, by having different people talking to us, we get out of the rut.

Because we’re genuinely Ukraine supporters, we’re not trying to fool or trick people. We’re not concern trolling to get into someone’s mind, to bring them down and demotivate them and fill them with dismay. Because we’re like that, we’re relatively easily able to move out of a particular mood, out of a particular attitude or state of motivation. But this person who was on the show couldn’t be moved. I found it a really interesting case study.

Another paradox recently was “Putler wants Ukraine to succeed.” This is something I’ve begun to notice everywhere. It’s an aspect of cult formation — these apparent contradictions which people say. For instance, when Donald was talking about Putin wanting Ukraine to succeed, he also said, “Oh, and Russia, Russia, Russia.” Then in almost the same breath, he goes on to talk about how Putin wants Ukraine to succeed.

He introduces this formula, this mantra, which is supposed to mean to his supporters that there is this big conspiracy against him about Putin — even though, as previously discussed, the Mueller report found six or seven different ways in which his campaign was purposefully adulterated and influenced by the Russians. And then we have all of these other bits of evidence. But he uses this mantra to diffuse and as a shorthand to dismiss anyone who references that. Then the paradox is: in the very same breath, he says Putin wants Ukraine to succeed, even though that very day he’s trying to bomb Ukraine. Paradox rolled over, folded into another paradox.

Now that I draw your attention to these apparent contradictions in speech — from Putler as well: “I love you, so I’m going to hit you” — those kinds of apparent contradictions which people speak, I see as characteristic not just of particular instances of Disinfolklore, but of particularly powerful instances of Disinfolklore that have the potential to have system effects. They’re part of a brainwashing. It’s not the one story which brainwashes you. It’s hundreds, it’s thousands, it’s day after day after day which does it.

Once you begin to see these paradoxes, I think they’re more than a rhetorical tick — they’re actually a powerful weapon. It sounds a little strange, but again, an apparent contradiction: you’re disarmed, you go in. That was from Donald. Before he says “Putin wants Ukraine to succeed,” he says, “It sounds a little strange, but...” — another paradox. And yes, it’s totally strange that Putin wants Ukraine to succeed. This hesitancy on Donald’s part is the indication that even he understands this is a paradox that will be too much for many, but the most willingly gullible in that moment, to swallow.

In certain moments, all of us are vulnerable to Disinfolklore and to paradoxes. Imagine how susceptible someone exhausted from two years of nights in a bomb shelter in Ukraine would be: “Oh, if Ukraine just surrenders all of Donetsk, peace will follow.” Again, another paradox. If you surrender, peace will come, even though you’re surrendering to the big bad wolf.

Donald said, “I was explaining to President Zelensky here — President Putin was very generous in his feeling towards Ukraine.” We all saw President Zelensky’s endearing response where he goes into character — his actor character — and draws the whole of Ukraine and all of us into his mind, looking at Donald, and manages to pull it off without annoying Donald. The generosity that Donald was talking about there is the generosity of a wife-beater and of Epstein’s greatest friend — of Donald himself towards his own sexual assault victims. We know there have been many.

The main point here is the use of apparent contradiction, of paradox, to brainwash, to assuage, to soothe. Over the short term, we may not fall for this troll. However, over the long durée, we become habituated to such contradictions and apparent contradictions, to such paradoxes. When the same trolls are repeated, amplified ad nauseam, they take on a truth of themselves. “Ukraine made Russia invade.” “Ukraine was wearing a short skirt.”

This guy called Andrey, a long-term KGB agent and author of numerous intelligence-related publications, argues that Russian cultural heritage, linguistic structure, perception of paradox, and abstract thinking provide Russia with a competitive advantage to successfully use socio-humanistic technologies, which he sees as the main weapon to control people in the digital age.

This charge of hypocrisy, which I characterise as part of these paradoxes — I’ve spoken about before how I’ve noticed that the charge of hypocrisy is very often immanent in Telegram posts that Mokrushyna reads out on Twitter, on the Volya shows, or from Simonyan and the other Russian propagandists. So much so that I began to notice a pattern and began to wonder: what are they doing? What are they trying to do with this?

There are a number of objectives, but really what they’re trying to do is get people used to paradoxes and inconsistencies. This week we’ve seen so many people, including many of us probably, including me as well when I’m not fully energised, going: “Oh, if America does this, then Putin will be that, or Taiwan will be invaded.” We’ve seen these mental routines in some of this old guard of commentators.

Famously this week, we saw the FT guy talking about how Putin will be energised by the Venezuela thing. Really, what they’re trying to do is sort through a lot of confusing, brain-sapping data through this rhetorical flourish. Because of Twitter, we see them putting it into a tweet. In this case, Gideon Rachman, the FT foreign affairs editor — some of us will remember seeing the responses to this from Ukrainians, because again, this shows how little attention people whose job it is to pay attention to these matters and to be able to interpret them in a way that’s better than the ordinary person.

They clearly haven’t been paying any attention. They just see perhaps Ukraine as a news story. They still don’t understand that everything going on in the United States, in my humble opinion, is a function of Russia’s decision to go all in on Ukraine in February 2014. When someone like Gideon Rachman responds to the raid or invasion, the occupation of Venezuela, in this way, it reveals so much of what a certain class of commentator hasn’t been paying attention to. They’re just pointing out the hypocrisy of something in such a stupid way that reveals so much.

These hypocrisies and paradoxes which they point out — “European politicians say they’re interested in human rights, but look, they won’t let Russian newspapers in — this is such hypocrisy” — I just draw attention to this everywhere. Once you get your eye into this, you begin to notice it everywhere, and something’s going on. A lot of people just do it as a matter of habit. They haven’t thought it through. I’m making a plea to pay attention to this and perhaps avoid it if we can, unless it’s really an interesting paradox, because it has these brainwashing effects, I believe.

“All politicians are corrupt.” “Europeans are corrupt.” “Russia just wants peace.” “Archaeologists are hiding something.” There’s a lot of conspiracy theories about archaeology which at the beginning my feed was giving me. If we can scan for the structure of paradoxes and contradictions inside memes, I think it’s a valuable discipline and can help us interpret data a bit more insightfully.

I gave the 2025 Positive Trolling Award to @TweetforAnna_NAFO, mainly because her long comprehensive threads struck me as being a really good example of what I theorised as positive trolling in February 2020 — being any communication that conforms to at least one or all of the six elements in the Code of Positive Trolls: generosity, ethical discipline, patience, joyous perseverance, focus, and insight.

These six elements, which we can use to determine what’s folklore from what’s Disinfolklore, and what’s positive from negative trolling — every single one of her threads has immanent in it this positive trolling energy. As indeed does Mokrushyna’s work, whether it’s these stories which I actually love. It really helps me come to terms with the fact that maybe my three cats aren’t getting on, but hearing Mokrushyna’s stories about her cats helps me see that’s quite normal. I like the interjection of these really horrific, awful things we’re coming across each day with the quotidian, with a bit of humour, with a bit of mocking laughter. That is the epitome of positive trolling. Mokrushyna should probably get the Positive Troller of the Entire War award from me. But @TweetforAnna_NAFO got the 2025 Positive Trolling Award — hopefully a more sustainable award than the Nobel Peace Prize.

Another idea I’ve had for quite some time, which I still think is on: this Ukraine bridge drop backstop. Putin’s residence troll was a premature ejaculation — that was Magyar Bird’s brilliant branding of that Putin’s residence troll. A premature ejaculation born of panic by the pretend-we’re-surfing-relaxedly Rushists.

If any of us missed that: the Russians were a bit scared that this peace process thing was going a bit fast. Instead of waiting for Ukraine to sabotage it, they decided they would sabotage it. But they did it — not only did they do it in a way that really worked two years ago, which almost looked like it was going to work with Donald and may well work with Donald in time to come. But the premature aspect of it was brilliant, because I had that sense as well.

I always believed that if anything close to peace came — if anything close to Donald or Putler’s 28-point plan, or 20-point so-called peace plan, was close to being forced on Ukraine — Ukraine would do something like drop the Kerch Bridge in order to sabotage it. It’s laughable that Russia ejaculated first, and such a pathetic, narcissistic, please-the-tsar-with-our-troll Putin’s residence troll as well. It was so obviously to please him that they came up with this specific one. It wasn’t like “Ukraine bombed a hospital” or something like that, which may still happen — we’re waiting for that.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s relentless destruction of Russia’s capacity to operate as a state continues. This is a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to complete what was begun in 1990 — the destruction of Russia’s capacity. Five to six sovereign states will succeed the Russian Federation, whether Donald, Xi, or any number of Russia experts like it or not. I don’t think Ukrainians are going to surrender this opportunity to strike into the heart of Russia and every Russian position until Russia’s capacity to operate as a state is done.

On the 30th of March 2022, I wrote that “Let’s compare trolls” tweet: President Zelensky is a 21st-century troll operating on communications frequencies 20th-century trolls like Donald and Putler can’t even conceive. For instance, like that wonderful moment in the press conference with Donald, when Donald says that Putler wants Ukraine to succeed and Zelensky does that amazing, just like Charlie Chaplin, amazing expression with his facial expressions. We’ve all seen it in his art as an actor, and then we see it in him as a president, so we recognise what it means and all Ukrainians recognise what it means.

That’s what I mean by a 21st-century troll — moving emotions just with an eyebrow, with a funny expression. Rather than getting really annoyed by such a dumbass statement, he just flicks his eyebrows and distances himself from it, keeps his integrity intact, and ensures that everyone watching — especially 42 million Ukrainians watching — understands that he’s not subjecting himself to this idea that Putler just wants success for Ukraine.

Dropping the bridge is still in Ukraine’s bank account, for use to tickle the Rushists so the Rushists can’t save face in so-called peace plans. That backstop is still there. I did think today, every day is a good day for us — we really need something pretty mega to shake us out of whatever’s going on. So that backstop bridge-stop is still there.

In response to that particular piece of writing, someone replied and said everything I say about Russia could be said about the West. I responded: well, then we have the Code of Positive Trolls. The second element is ethical discipline — is right. It’s the post-World War II legal order which determines what is right. What is right is that Ukraine has territorial integrity. We’ve seen all those tweets about Greenland. You can both-side the issue all you want, but once you apply what is right according to this standard that humanity decided after World War II, then you know Ukraine is in the right, and indeed Denmark and Greenland are in the right.

I still think about the danger of American troops in Ukraine. It’s looking very unlikely, obviously, but that was worrying for me. Russia’s weakness perhaps is a good security guarantee to not have Erik Prince run a mercenary force of 20,000 barrier troops with Ukrainians between them. I’ve had that on my mind this week — that Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv was discussing with Washington a possible presence of US troops in Ukraine as part of security guarantees. Certainly in the draft we’ve seen in the last day or two, it’s not in there. Unlikely, but just keeping an eye on that.

The shape-shifting aspect of the invasion rationales for the Venezuela operation always reminded me of — going back to the brainwashing, the system-wide effects of things — the Don’s shape-shifting Venezuela trolls disorientate, confuse, disarm. Their linguistic circumlocutions and enemy-making rhetoric: “Look at those weak Europeans.” Dominate the weak.

I spoke before about how I had seen this theme. What I remember from spending a lot of time in America in the mid-80s, particularly with a family I lived with — a close family that my mother grew up with, who then went MAGA — is how practically everyone talked about parts of the cities as no-go areas. That for me is a good solid reference point, from 1986, 1987. This idea of creating this dark forest, this part of the forest, and saying “Oh, you can’t go there” — that’s what they’re trying to do with Europe at the moment.

This is what MAGA was doing with Ukraine: archetyping Ukraine as a weak woman, with the characteristics of a weak woman that a MAGA masculinist, a particular form of masculinist paleoconservative, defines as weakness. When we look at MAGA Mike Johnson — certainly when I look at them — I just think you are the world’s weakest-looking person. Or Vance. But they adopt these particular routines to try and seem as if they’re strong. Obviously on an animal level, they’ll never convince me that they’re strong. They just seem weak, weak, weak.

They project this sense through their rhetoric onto whole countries, onto Ukraine. This is the value of looking at the archetypes and the archetyping in Disinfolklore, I believe. Because I see they’re doing it to Europe as well. Now we can see what they’re up to. They’re trying to prepare Europe to have part of the European Union occupied militarily and violently taken away. The European Union’s territorial integrity disturbed, with all the issues that would have for the euro and for everything.

I noticed that when they shapeshift — when Donald is talking about why he wants to invade Greenland — there’s constant switching. A good metaphor for that is the EW systems. While this constant switching between motivations plays out, with all these old guys writing for the FT using their 20th-century concepts and their understanding of Russia as a great power, unadulterated by data — the data we see every day — while all that’s going on, we’re being wrapped up inside a MAGA global Disinfolklore universe.

The disorientating, confusing, disarming shapeshifting — shapeshifters in folklore. Donald is an archetypal shapeshifter: the shaman, the trickster, the Odin character, the Indra character, the salesperson. They’ve always been shapeshifters. They model shapeshifting by giving different shapeshifting explanations for why they’re doing things.

Some of us here will have been listening to the show the other morning after the Venezuela operation. Somebody called in and you could tell they were quite excited by the whole thing. They even repeated this nonsense, this mythical nonsense, which I remember hearing in the context of the First and Second Gulf Wars, about these magical machines which the United States Army used. I could see in that how effective the Disinfolklore about the raid was.

Then I saw the polling that 60% of Republicans who yesterday said they wanted no more wars now need Greenland. There was 18% of Democrats as well. They’ve resisted so much over the past few years and then suddenly, five minutes after an invasion of Venezuela, they’re like, “Yeah, great, let’s do it.” Totally forgotten that five minutes ago they were saying no more wars and they only voted for Donald because he promised to get them out of Afghanistan and Iraq — and now he’s invading everywhere.

That’s quite unusual. But we should treasure when we see this happening to people in our lives and around us — it’s really good data. It’s like a mirror to the Disinfolklore universe that MAGA and Donald are trying to wrap us up inside. You’re like, “Wow, that’s really quick.” They’ve only done this raid a few hours ago and now this guy’s really excited about it. If I’d said to him yesterday, “We’re going to invade Venezuela,” he probably would have said, “That would be a terrible idea.” But now, within an hour of watching CNN or whatever, he was really excited and aroused by it. I found that really interesting. That told me something.

Seven years of thousands of Disinfolklore vectors in eastern Ukraine — I saw at the beginning of that in Russia-occupied Luhansk — you can see how that will really work on things. We’re on year nine of MAGA at the moment.

It’s really the complicity — there’s this great theatre company in London called Complicité. I went to some of their stuff 20 years ago, but it really stuck with me: the complicity between the audience and the artists, the artistry. This is the whole point of it. The complicity of Disinfolklore. The Don’s shape-shifting folksy stories about Venezuela, Greenland, moving you along, different reasons for doing it. The complicity between the storytelling and the actual events themselves, staged like invading Venezuela, goes back to what I talked about last time — the luxury sausage troll saga, that experience on the bridge where the staging of the event and then its reporting are like a spiral, a mutating double helix like DNA, twisting between the reality and creating these new realities in people’s minds.

That complicity we saw on Sunday — that’s a great case study to try and work out what’s going on and how it impacts people we know. MAGA was founded nine years ago: America First, no foreign entanglements. They’ve just spent the last four years ruining their country’s promise to Ukraine in the Budapest Memorandum because “we don’t want any foreign entanglements.” And then in the space of a few days — invading Venezuela, then invading Greenland, coming up with this vast trove of ready-made Disinfolklore, all these stories, all of these shape-shifting reasons for doing it, and now claiming sovereignty over part of the European Union and indeed over the whole of another continent, South America.

That kind of battering is again going back to the paradoxes, going back to the brainwashing, the cult-forming aspect of it. What I’m trying to do is give us a bit of a frame for looking at these events that lets us look at them from a bit of distance. Hopefully it’ll have some psychological impact on us in a positive sense, because we’ll be able to look at it as a piece of art on a wall rather than something visceral that we feel — because I’m sure all of us do feel it viscerally. It’s a real downer. The whole thing is a big downer. I’m also looking for ways of helping us understand what’s going on but deal with it in real time. Ways that we can use to stop us becoming overcome by it, because we’ve still got a long war ahead of us.

A good bit of humour was that picture of Hegseth with Twitter. Someone pointed out that there was a smiley character — not George Smiley, but a smiley meme — on the photograph when they were trying to recreate their Bin Laden Situation Room photographs in Mar-a-Lago.

So let’s take the joy where we can and get back to the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska and the Donets River. The Russian occupiers on one side of the bridge, of the river, and us on the other side. I used this illustrative story, the luxury sausage troll saga, where two and a half tons of sausages were dumped, somehow mysteriously — never got to the bottom of it — in the middle of the night. The Russians said they were going to annihilate them with artillery. Just at the last minute, they decided not to. There was going to be a war, a huge escalation over these sausages.

I found out about this on my way down to the bridge that day with a Russian colleague I was working with as a monitoring officer in the OSCE. We navigated this very difficult situation which could have turned into a really ridiculous war and escalation. Then we got filmed, and then we became part of the Disinfolklore of the Russian occupiers, which was used as part of their brainwashing process: “Oh, look what the OSCE is doing — it’s smuggling sausages.” Then: “The sausages are poisonous.”

I use this as an illustrative example of how this complicity between the stories, the storytelling, the way they’re spun, and actual real-world events works. I remember a very experienced French army officer I was working with at the time. We were speaking about the sausage troll saga incident, trying to work out what did go on. His reasoning was very good for how the sausages hadn’t been planted there to provoke this huge system of trolls which went on for weeks — because nobody would have sanctioned buying two and a half tons of sausages. He was looking at it purely from a bureaucratic point of view, and that really quite helped me understand.

What he did say was that after whatever had gone wrong with some sort of smuggling operation, after the two and a half tons of sausages had been dumped there, the Russians then had their ways of dealing with it — spinning out of what had accidentally happened events they could use to help brainwash the occupation, transforming their identities through this storytelling.

This was just one of thousands, tens of thousands of stories which I was part of, became part of, and encountered, that helped me see into the archetypal and original Disinfolklore universe — the entire information system that the Russians built inside the occupation. I didn’t understand its purpose until the full-scale invasion. The real purpose of all this storytelling, as with Donald’s, as with the MAGA Disinfolklore universe, is to transform people from the inside out by affecting moods, motivations, intentions, and attitudes in the short term and in the long term.

That, again, is a way of seeing the Venezuelan operation — seeing how particular people’s attitudes become transformed. They voted for MAGA for no more wars, and now suddenly they’re really excited, aroused by the war. When we see that going on, that is what is going on. That’s what I mean by a Disinfolklore universe.

Obviously, one story, one operation, isn’t enough to change someone’s identity. To change someone’s identity from the inside out — for those who’ve seen family members go MAGA or Brexit, for instance, or the way our identities have been changed in permanent ways — many of us who follow the minutiae on a daily basis of the Ukraine war, our identities have also been changed. We will not go back to the people we were on the 24th of February 2022. We’ve had too much training.

I called the last show, the one we did on the 24th of December when I published the podcast, “The Training Set, the Data Set” — because we’ve had this really intense training data set. We can sense, we can see an energy in memes which other people can’t.

I mentioned Gideon Rachman earlier. Until the 24th of February 2022, he would have been way out there in terms of being able to recognise and write about geopolitical events. But now all of us, just normal ordinary people who have subjected ourselves to this training data set — every day, day after day, reading what’s coming from the Russians, seeing the patterns, finding people who have insights, particularly people from central and eastern Europe whose perspectives on these kinds of data, on what the Russians do, we may not have encountered before — we’re permanently changed by it.

Certainly there are people in my life who we were equals when it came to Russia, even though I’d lived and worked there in eastern Ukraine for so long. Now they can’t see through the situation. What’s going on at the moment is really confusing for them. They can’t see a way through. This is the importance of understanding how Disinfolklore — which is the aggregation of all of these stories — can change our identities and how it does it to other people.

For instance, what we would have seen in people in England between January and July 2016, and then as we went through all of the sagas as they tried to Brexit — whether it was the suspension of parliament saga — we saw people’s identities changing, but then most people have snapped back. Even though people couldn’t speak about anything else apart from the European Union between January and July 2016, and then for periods after that, now I’d say it would be pretty hard to get anyone to talk about the European Union, and certainly not in a negative way. People just put it out of their minds. COVID as well — it’s a similar thing. People haven’t been changed by it one way or the other.

But when this is directed Disinfolklore, strategically directed, using the kinds of memes that the Russians use and which MAGA is using, this isn’t just a series of different stories and then everyone snaps back to the way they were before. This is actually a deliberate operation, I believe. This is what I spoke about at the Munich meeting when I talked about battling archetypes and the Disinfolklore universe and the danger we faced as a civilisation unless we understood how these stories concatenate, aggregate to change our identities — in the same ways that the Ukrainians living inside the occupation had their identities changed.

But then, as we saw, the Soviet Union operated on this level as well. And it didn’t manage to get rid of Ukrainianness, even though it really tried so hard. So it demonstrates, as does the work on cults, that you can escape it with the right tools. I try myself to provide user-friendly tools to help us deal with it in real time, but also over the long duration.

When I say our identities will be changed by the Ukraine war — when it’s over and when Russia de-occupies Ukraine — I hope it will be not in a negative way. We’ll have to find ways of gently speaking to people who weren’t paying attention so that they can begin to understand what’s going on. Perhaps the Venezuela and Greenland situations are so attention-grabbing that everyone is paying attention now.

I remember M.ockers saying something recently about her Christmas dinner with her brothers, who used to laugh when she’d say, “The Russians are going to attack us.” Now she mentioned how one of her brothers was saying, “Oh, apparently the Russians were flying those drones at Barrow and Furness,” which was one of the places that Medvedev talked about attacking, which would be attacked in any war.

This is episode three, where I’m keeping a grip on where we are. This is episode three of a series I started four weeks ago. As some of us might remember, there were technical issues in the second week. I’m going through the piece which I delivered, the paper I delivered at the Pirate Party Security Conference at the time of the Munich conference in Munich last February. And the words from the United States Vice President at that conference are continuing to resonate with new policies being released all the time. Most recently, the attempt to sanction several senior European Union officials for so-called free speech crimes. So this is the Disinfolklore universe that I had an intimation we were moving towards, and it’s provoked into being by such actions as we have seen today.

I’m also aware of my promise to Iona about six weeks ago that we would deal with truth, and I’m moving towards that as well. It’ll be a few more episodes where I move towards that point.

But last week we saw the continued reference to the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Some of us might remember in the prehistoric past — which when I looked back on my writing over the past few months was actually only a month ago, believe it or not — five weeks ago, I got the first intimation that this new round of so-called capitulation or peace talks was beginning and the pressure was on. My first intimation of it, some of us will remember picking this data point up on our timelines, was when the United States had attempted to take the term “territorial integrity” out of the annual United Nations resolution in support of Ukraine’s war of independence and against Russia’s aggression.

At the time, that stood out to me like a sore thumb. The reference to sovereignty without the reference to territorial integrity. And the sound RT, RIT, is in both those terms — territorial and integrity. It’s also in sovereignty, but it’s disguised as the REIGN element — reign, reine in French — originating from this idea of straight, straightness, truth, and the rod which, for instance, President Zelensky held in his right hand when he was inaugurated as president in the Verkhovna Rada. And the current English king who is sovereign — there’s only one sovereign on the island of Britain, and that is the king — he also holds a rod, a straight rod in his right hand when he was inaugurated as monarch.

These are very old Indo-European rites and they are integrated into our language and the way we as Indo-European communities govern ourselves, going right back to Mykhailivka village in Zaporizhzhia, where the Yamna community — who spread Indo-European languages, religions, and forms of governance into the area between Ireland and India — lived between 4100 BCE and 3500 BCE.

So when I see today the President of the European Commission, the President of France, and Indo-European civilisation’s greatest leaders, particularly in Europe, referencing in almost identical terms the term sovereignty and digital sovereignty, it pleases me enormously. We’re moving forward towards the relationship between these concepts and trying to define what is rightful and what is truthful, which is what we try to do every day in real time on our timelines.

I am a great admirer of postmodern philosophy. I studied as a postgraduate at Georgetown. But I am also a little old-fashioned insofar as I do believe there is truth, and truth is not merely a mobile army of metaphors. It can be, but it’s not merely that. There is truth — when we sit on a chair, we’re sitting on the chair.

As we previously discussed about emptiness with Wendy — the idea of emptiness, that ultimately nothing does matter. However, in conventional reality, we have elaborated and established certain rules, certain regulations, and certain rights. And in that conventional reality that we’re living in, for me the preeminent rights are those established after World War II: the legal order, the international legal order for which 8 million Ukrainians died, including 1 million Ukrainian Jews. 8 million European Jews died, and however many tens of millions of others died. We established this set of rules and regulations after World War II, and for me that is the truth — the standard against which we measure any speech trying to incite hatred or division.

Sadly, we see the lack of respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, which China for instance practised when it invaded and occupied Tibet, and which Russia has denigrated a billion times. And which, sadly, we are seeing now with the serious threats against Greenland — military threats against Greenland, part of the Kingdom of Denmark — and also against the European Union’s digital sovereignty. These concepts and ideas are more important than ever.

How I see all of this is part of the Disinfolklore universe, which the MAGA administration, as well as Russia, as well as the CCP, the Communist Party in China, are attempting to wrap us up inside. And thankfully, for the time being — and I see no clouds on the horizon on this front — the European Union is holding up what’s right, as indeed is Australia and Japan.

One of the main means we can use to determine who is upholding right — meaning the post-World War II legal and social order in today’s world — is how they are supporting Ukraine. Some of us might well have friends who don’t necessarily support Ukraine, or who have had their minds contaminated by Russian Disinfolklore so that they think they can challenge for the sake of debate or argument and argue Russian information warfare tropes, either knowingly or unknowingly — just to épater la bourgeoisie, to cause a bit of problems, to have an intellectual debate about it. That’s where it begins.

And then on the other end of the scale, it’s what the Trump administration is doing — withholding aid or not doing what it should be doing to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity. It’s not enough to defend its sovereignty, because the three archetypes which are central to Indo-European communities since the time in Mykhailivka, Zaporizhzhia, between 4100 BCE and 3500 BCE, when the Yamna lived in one community before they spread out and established all the different Indo-European cultures — Celtic, Germanic, Indic including Iranian and Hindu, Slavic, and all the rest — they had these three archetypes in their community: sovereignty, security, and prosperity/fertility.

These three elements are represented today, for instance, in our memory of the Indian, the Hindi caste system, where you have priests, soldiers, and farmers. The priests are one aspect of sovereignty, the soldiers are an aspect of security, and the farmers are an aspect of prosperity or economy or fertility.

And again, the RIT sound is in those — security, fertility as prosperity, and sovereignty as well. So we have these archetypes very deeply embedded into our language, into the way we think, into how we govern and organise ourselves.

It really tickles me to have come across this whole literature, which is from this amazing French philosopher Georges Dumézil, who discovered these three archetypes — sovereignty, security, fertility/prosperity — immanent in all the Indo-European traditions in the 1930s. We’re going to move towards that point.

It really excites me to see how present and important, how primary and fundamental, these concepts are even today in these statements of resistance to this attempt to infringe on other countries’ sovereign rights to determine what is and what is not hate speech. Germany’s lead in all of these matters — I recognise it and I celebrate it, because obviously, because of their history, they are. And Merz is very much, as a self-declared rightist, very much part of the post-World War II generation which believes in never again.

I did this piece, some of you might remember, about six months ago, where I spoke about rescuing the right. I never myself identified on the political right. But when I look at how Meloni and Merz and President Zelensky are defending the identity of rightness — meaning truth, meaning our post-World War II legal order — with all of their utterances, with, as far as we’re aware, most if not all of their actual actions, putting their money where their mouth is. I saw Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, this evening tweet that since the beginning of the war, the European Union has provided Ukraine with the equivalent of 193 billion euros worth of aid, and now this 90 billion euros worth of aid. This is the kind of reminder of actions matching words.

I find it particularly disappointing that people I know — I’m not even asking for a commitment from them. I’m just asking for them to recognise how many terrible things have happened in Ukraine. On the other hand, I celebrate so many other people, including family members, who not only because they realise it’s very important to me, but have this sense of rightness. And even though they don’t think about Ukraine all day long, like most of us do, and spend most of our time trying to come up with ways we can help Ukraine in whatever ways we can — the time and the energy we can spare, the money we can spare — just normal people, they make a rhetorical commitment to support Ukraine and to try to understand the conflict. They celebrate Ukraine’s victories and Russia’s losses. I celebrate those people just as much as I get a bit sad when other people don’t recognise what’s going on.

For many of you, you’ll know I spent time, from 2015 to 2018, in this particular part of eastern Ukraine, in Stanytsia Luhanska, which is the only official crossing point from Russia-occupied Ukraine into government-controlled Ukraine. I worked for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which was founded after the Berlin Wall fell but comes from the CSCE — the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe — from 1975, the Helsinki Final Act. I had cause to read it this week, and territorial integrity is in every clause.

Russia signed up to it and has violated sovereignty and territorial integrity. Because when you think about it, you can be a sovereign individual yourself, but you need an area — aria, which eventually finds its way into Aryan. You need an area, which is a modern English word but comes from the same root and the same idea. You need an area in which to exercise your sovereignty. For most of us as individuals, that’s our personal space, but it might also be our house, our apartment, our family, our community, our background, our intellectual hinterland, our education, our class if we think in those terms. Our identity as Ukraine supporters is part of our territorial integrity as individuals.

When people infringe on your territory, they’re also automatically infringing on your sovereignty and your security. So I see territorial integrity as sitting between these two fundamental Indo-European archetypes of sovereignty and security. And then the whole purpose of all of this is fertility — meaning making the community bigger and prosperous, prosperity. Once you have this secure area where certain rules are sovereign, probably with elite leaders and community, you can then get about to farming, or train your horses and make your wheels and farm your sheep — or indeed your digital identities.

This package of measures and concepts and manifestations of them is particularly fundamental to Indo-European communities. Other linguistic and cultural communities have different priorities. But for us, it is this package which, for good or for ill, has become embedded in international law, in the UN Charter, and in the Helsinki Final Act, which founded the OSCE.

While I was there in eastern Ukraine, in Stanytsia Luhanska, I encountered what I call the first Disinfolklore universe. For those who weren’t there, it’s akin to perhaps what you saw with MAGA affecting people that you knew. It goes from being a joke to actually being an identity-forming element for people who go MAGA. Some of us might have relatives or friends who have gone properly MAGA, and maybe some, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, have gone full MAGA and now seem to be emerging from that spell — and I celebrate that.

I engineered the term Disinfolklore from my experience as a diplomat on this bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska in eastern Ukraine. The scene itself was a biosphere reserve, forested. The Donets River, a very famous river since antiquity. The Donets is part of this series of DN-sounded rivers. In my work, there are three sounds which are really important and which are immanent in almost every sentence I speak. They’re on purpose now, but I notice them in other people’s speech.

Of these fundamental vocabularies, the most important is the MN sound. The second sound is the RT/RIT sound. The earliest attestations of that RIT sound we get in arta, meaning truth, in ancient Iranian, the Avestan language — arta — and in Vedic, which is the first attested Indic language, ṛta, from 1100 BCE. R-T-A. So you’ve got this right, RIT, meaning truth; arta meaning truth — A-R-T, RIT. That sound is still in the words we use for sovereignty — droit in French, law, or roi — and it’s also in territorial integrity.

The rivers — the third sound is the DN sound. We’ve got the Don River, which marked the border between the area protected by the goddess Europa and Asia. We have this map from Isidore of Seville from about the 6th century. Isidore of Seville was basically the Encyclopaedia Britannica of the pre-Middle Age world. And there’s this famous book — it’s called the Book of Druim Snechta in Irish Celtic. Unfortunately it’s lost. We only know about it through various references. The lore goes that the last copy of it was swapped for a copy of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, which I’m sure was very important to have in rural Ireland at the time. But we’ve got tons of copies of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies and none left of the Book of Druim Snechta.

Isidore of Seville defines the area protected by the goddess Europa as being the area west of the Tanais — the Don, Tanais, Don. East of the Don River is Asia, and east of the Nile River is also Asia, according to Isidore of Seville.

Then you have the Donets River, which is the Little Don River. Then you have the Dnieper River, the Dnipro as we call it now in English transliteration from the Ukrainian — the Upper Don River. If you’re looking at that from Crimea, from the perspective of Crimea, it’s the upper one. Then you have the Dniester, the Dniester River. And then you have the Danube.

You have these great rivers of Europe, all with the DN sound in their moniker. In ancient times, actually, the Danube in Ukraine was called the Danistris as well. So those three sounds.

I was on the Donets. I didn’t know any of this while I was there, thankfully, because I probably would have bored to tears my fellow diplomats with all of this stuff had I discovered it there. But it made such an impact on me — this whole setting. Beautiful forests going either side of the river, willows hanging over, and this road, this bridge, this iron bridge, which is very important in folklore.

On one side of the bridge, about a kilometre north of the bridge, north of the river, was the Ukrainian Armed Forces position defending the bridge and defending Ukrainian government-controlled territory. On the south side of the bridge was where the Russian occupiers were. In May 2016 — I arrived there in February 2015, just after the bridge itself had been blown up, but you could still cross the river. It was a very difficult passage, like in a computer game or something.

A distance of maybe a kilometre and a half between the Ukrainian Armed Forces position on this road to the Russian occupier position, which was just on the other side of the Donets River, just on the south side. It was about 15 kilometres to Luhansk City, which was and is under occupation by the Rushists.

In this whole scene — it was a beautiful halcyon bucolic location. A lovely place with birdsong and trees and wild animals who often would set off landmines in the forestry. Before the war, before 2014, it was really sleepy. It had played a starring role in World War II. In the forests and the areas either side of the river, colleagues would show me shrapnel from the Second World War. There was an enormous amount of ordnance — so much so that there was rusty shrapnel all over the forestry.

While I was there, each night there were massive amounts of artillery strikes from one side to the other, usually trying to avoid people and soldiers. They were marking territory, saying “we’re here,” or maybe responding to imagined threats. Often soldiers would tell me, or people would say, “We get paid,” or “The other side gets paid to fire its artillery.” This is like an archetypal Disinfolklore fable. I never got to the bottom of it, but it’s plausible that that was why they were firing at each other. Some nights I catalogued thousands of ceasefire violations and filled very dutifully my Minsk form, which was then signed by my supervisor — and then who knows where it is.

Each morning I would go down to the bridge and go first to the Ukrainian Armed Forces position and speak to the commanding officer. After a while we got into a routine and they would tell me stories of what had happened the night before, which I would write down. Then I would pass by the sometimes thousands of ordinary civilians who were just waiting in queues on this borderline, this border territory.

A lot of folktales are about borders — between this world and another, between a liminal world, between truth and fiction, between fantasy and amusement. There was this liminal world. The Russians are fantastic at creating these borders wherever they go, and controlling people through starvation and famine and murder, but also through borders and queues.

Then I’d cross the bridge and go and speak to the occupiers. Often the stories they would tell me would be the exact opposite, the mirror opposite of what the Ukrainian soldiers were telling me.

At the same time, I was also doing an MBA at Oxford and travelling back there every six weeks. I was engaged in this other world there in Oxford where we were studying Silicon Valley and entrepreneurial finance and internet companies and various things. I made the conceptual link between trolling in computer culture and trolling as what the Ukrainian Armed Forces on one side of the bridge and the Russian occupiers on the other side were doing to me. They were trolling my emotions with these stories. I could never tell whether they were right or wrong.

I also noticed this phenomenon of how the internet and internet lore interacted with the reality on the ground. The Disinfolklore universe which I saw being created inside Russia-occupied Ukraine is my training set, as it were — like if you’re training an artificial intelligence neural network algorithm, you use masses of data to try and train the artificial neurons to process data. If you want to train it to identify cats, you put in lots of pictures of cats.

The training data set for me is these three years of going and hearing these stories and then watching how the stories that I was dealing with on the bridge interacted with the reality created inside the information space inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, which I went into every day. I spent periods of time — I spent six weeks in Luhansk City over the Christmas of 2016. At all times, including for the four years after I left there, I was very engaged in the information space of Russia-occupied Ukraine.

It was just such a strange phenomenon. It stimulated a lot of intellectual labour on my part to work out what they were doing.

An example: one day, a Russian colleague — because the OSCE, I was embedded with Russians, which added an extra level of complexity to my work there — a Russian colleague and I went to the bridge and there were several tons of sausages in white bags which had just been dumped at exactly the halfway point between the Ukrainian Armed Forces position and the Russian occupiers’ position.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces guys said, “We don’t know anything about this, they just appeared overnight.” Then the Russian occupier said, “When we first saw this appearing, we thought it was a new Ukrainian Armed Forces position. So we trained all our weapons on it. But we’d like you to try and arrange for this stuff to be removed. Otherwise, we’re just going to destroy it all.” And it turned out it was sausages.

Kharkiv sausages, which have a particular mythological significance in the minds of people who lived in the Soviet Union, where sausages were a great luxury. To me as a vegetarian, it’s pretty gross, basically, the whole thing.

I and my Russian colleague spent about an hour with the armed Russian occupiers inspecting the sausages. They were showing me the sausages and cutting them open. I have photographs of it all. And then there were drones around filming us.

For the next three weeks, me and my Russian colleague were appearing in Disinfolklore stories in the Russian occupation. The stories developed from: we were smuggling it. They had no compunction, no problem with dropping their own operative in this by saying the OSCE was basically smuggling sausages into Russia-occupied Ukraine to make a bit of money on the side.

Then various other iterations of this. The story featured every day for a few weeks, eventually becoming: this was the Ukrainians trying to poison us, so we’ve destroyed all the sausages — they’ve blown them all up.

This was a classic, archetypal experience for me, where I personally featured in a whole vector or instance, an observable — a whole system of trolls on one theme, on one temnik. I call it the luxury sausage troll saga because it went on. It’s the mundane interacting with the slightly annoying, because I did have to explain to my boss, “No, I had nothing — I wasn’t, I didn’t do any of this.” As a new story would come out, they’d ask, “Well, what are they saying?” Some people immediately dismissed it. Others began to believe it.

I had other instances like that. There would be an explosion and I would go to try and find out what had exploded — had someone fired something or not. I passed one particular occasion, I passed a Ukrainian soldier who was just polishing his RPG, his weapon which fired grenades. He was polishing it. I said, “Did you hear that explosion?” He said, “No, didn’t hear anything.”

Then I go on another 500 metres to the Russian occupiers and I say, “Did you hear that explosion?” The senior Russian officer — the most senior officer I had knowingly dealt with at that point — suddenly took me on this whirlwind tour of damage to the bridge, showing me clearings in the forest where the Ukrainians’ diversionary group had apparently fired at them. Then he shows me blood on the ground. But actually, it’s blackberry season and raspberry, and loads of tons of blackberries are being transported across this bridge from Ukraine into Russia-occupied Ukraine. So I wasn’t quite sure whether it was real blood or not.

The next day our team was there and they were shown injured people who were still around. And then others. And then stories were saying there were crisis actors. This whole new system of trolls again.

That’s my training set. When I’m reading about accusations in MAGA lore about crisis actors, or Pizzagate, or practically every day we’re reading about bizarre stuff on Twitter since the full-scale invasion — most of us have a good nose for it now — but this was the origins of my training set. That’s where I came up with the idea of Disinfolklore, which is this form of narrative akin to folklore, using the same, triggering the same emotional impacts as folklore, but which has real-world impacts on how you perceive reality.

All of this took place in an area which, for me, I associated with folklore the moment I arrived there because of the forest. These houses. I’ve spoken before about the Mother and Maiden in the Woods tale, which was another of these archetypal moments when I understood what was going on and the Russian use of archetypes in their Disinfolklore.

Our only reference point — we perceive reality through folklore much more than we’re consciously aware of. I’m aware of it because I’ve spent the last eight years of my life trying to make sense of my experience there during the three years.

Victoria Amelina had written about the Executed Renaissance, which is this phenomenon of the 1920s in Ukraine. I’m sure this has been in other segments. The Russians decided they were going to have to brainwash the Ukrainians, but they couldn’t do it through Russian because they only spoke Ukrainian. So let’s pretend we’ll support their culture, but we’ll give them 10 years of Ukrainianisation.

Putler constantly bangs on about this — he’s on record many times saying he wants to correct Lenin’s mistake. By that he means Ukrainianisation. You had this great flowering of Ukrainian culture during the 1920s. And then, naturally, the Rushists executed all of them — hundreds, thousands of Ukrainian writers in different ways. In this forest in Finland, but also in Kharkiv.

Victoria Amelina — I learned about it from her writing. Then, of course, she was going around Ukraine collecting stories about the violence for the war crimes tribunals. She published her diaries before she was murdered. Again, murdered. The Russians are really thorough about how they try to destroy Ukrainian culture. And they will be thorough about trying to destroy our cultures if we give them the chance. Just look what they are doing to American political culture at the moment, and America’s reputation, just by dint of this bizarre spectacle of Witkoff and co.

This is what the Russians do. They pollute and contaminate everything.

One of Victoria Amelina’s short stories was “A Shell Hole in a Fairy Tale.” The fairy tale kindergarten I knew well in Stanytsia Luhanska. In one of the first salvos in the war, it was the Wagner group — who I encountered in Stanytsia Luhanska in 2015 — they were first given the job of invading the rest of Ukraine from there on the 24th of February 2022, and they fired a shell into the fairy tale kindergarten in Stanytsia Luhanska.

I have this great photo, because it was on the front page of the New York Times: “A whistling sound, then an explosion — shelling hits a kindergarten in Ukraine.” You can tell, you don’t really need to be an expert in understanding how missiles work, to know that the entry point is from the southern end into this kindergarten. I think that was around the 22nd of February — before everyone recognised the full-scale invasion.

When I saw that, and when I saw them also bombing the Shastia power plant, I knew the whole war was imminent in those two actions. Destroy the kindergarten and try to kill children. No one was killed in that. And the otherworldliness of the photograph — the kindergarten is really important, even more so than in Ireland where I grew up or in Western countries. I would postulate that it was very much part of the culture in the Soviet space. Brainwashing began in the kindergarten, I suppose.

But what Ukrainians did after 2014, in each of their villages with this decentralisation, they invested huge efforts into bringing their kindergartens and these institutions — which they had inherited from the Russian occupation — up to European standards. Going around, particularly in the years from 2018 to 2022, when I was based in Dnipro and mainly ranging around Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, particularly the area of southern Zaporizhzhia oblast around Huliaipole. They had European-standard schools, with massive amazing sports facilities that had all been built using money coming from USAID, from the European Union, and from Kyiv.

The desecration of these symbols of Ukraine’s post-2014 emergence from its Soviet cloud — which the Russians of course still have never achieved. There’s probably a few elite places in Leningrad or Moscow where you have top-class European-standard schools, but the rest is just rubbish everywhere. But Ukraine had these. Firing a shell into the fairy tale kindergarten.

Everywhere I look are these folkloric references. You have this fusion, this melding — the sausage troll saga, this bizarre situation which could have caused a war, could have been the war if the Russians had destroyed these two tons of sausages in these white bags that Saturday afternoon. I never got to the truth of what had happened. I presumed it was some sort of smuggling operation, even though I was there.

Out of that, the Russians create all of this Disinfolklore — all of these stories to help implement in the brains of Ukrainians living inside the occupation the idea that they were under threat. The international community was trying to poison them with poisonous sausages. We were just these hypocrites here trying to monitor the peace, yet all we were interested in was smuggling sausages.

The symbolic significance of sausages — to a Westerner like me, I learned. But sausages, especially Kharkiv sausages, luxury sausages, in the minds of people of a certain age in Russia-occupied Luhansk, were still this great luxury. It has this resonance, this symbolic resonance, which may be invisible to us.

All the elements of what I now understand to be Disinfolklore — this fusion of reality with fiction, with folklore, which has a really strong emotional connection — it’s more than merely watching a film or reading a good book which has no strategic intent behind it. It’s a method of changing how we actually perceive reality. It has the effect of brainwashing people, whether they’re in MAGA or in Russia-occupied Ukraine.

Maybe now we’re seeing the high point of MAGA. I hope so. And I hope the relentlessness of these tens of millions of Epstein documents, which explode the foundation — the main foundation myth in MAGA — that perhaps this will have the power to wake everyone up from their spell. But we can’t be sure.

The sound “right” or “writ” is in both those terms: territorial and integrity. It is also in sovereignty, but it is disguised as the “reign” element—reine in French—originating from this idea of straightness, truth, and the rod. For instance, President Zelenskyy held a rod in his right hand when he was inaugurated as president in the Verkhovna Rada. The current English King, who is sovereign—there is only one sovereign on the island of Britain, and that is the King—also held a straight rod in his right hand when he was inaugurated as monarch.

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