Disinfolklore’s Witch Switch
Disinfolklore IX: So this migrant othering works like a dream in triggering our desires to be in the Inner Realm. 100% guarantee! Here’s how modern far-right witches switch our witch switches.
There is another aspect to populist politicians attempting to capture the sovereignty function in an Indo-European culture by promoting anti-immigrant discourses. It has long been held that, as Sylvia Perera wrote, a human who aspires to being monarch in a Celtic culture must be
“conscious enough to face the ugly, pain filled reality of the outer world … they must be strong as a warrior, productive as a farmer, and wise as a druid.”
By modelling willingness to drone bomb or drown prospective immigrants populist politicians are staking a claim for rightful sovereignty. In dealing with the Chef of Disinfolklore in later chapters we will return again and again to Indo-European culture’s tripartite conception of the qualities sovereigns need to qualify for leadership - warrior (Security), farmer (Fertility), druid (Sovereignty).
Either way, invoking border struggles (the Witch Switch) stirs, provokes, and trolls into being controversy, which is the energy ambitious aspirant troll queens and kings feed on.
By invoking mythical separation points, in the guise of an actual physical border, they are projecting physical spatial division into our minds into which they can consign one category of human beings - Mexicans, pregnant Small Boat People, immigrants, Nazis, Others.
It is a story structure that becomes a cognitive structure. It is immanent in the first færy tales we ever encounter. Just because the story is told on the news, and not in a Disney film or Ladybird book or text justifying a piece of legislation, we approach the tale as if it is more real than a story about a princess and prince trapped by an evil king in a castle being rescued by a rescuer of damsels-in-distress such as Sir Launcelot (who, incidentally, is a reflex of the Indo-European God Lugh / Lugus / Lear referred to earlier). In essence though what shines through such mean-spirited populism is its quality as Disinfolklore.
This is how the American conservative commentator David Frum assesses the Congress’s legislative proposal about bombing Mexico to stop migrants:
“Contemporary conservatism tells a fable about virtuous middle-Americans beset by alien villains. Apply that fable to the fentanyl crisis, and you arrive where Fox’s Gutfeld did at the conclusion of his December monologue: “So that’s my plan, bomb the supply, reduce harm among the demand by availing safer, clean alternatives.” Compassion for us. Violence for them. But even if bomb-Mexico talk is intended only to shift blame—to redirect anger toward politically safer targets—the talk carries real-world political dangers.”1
Frum is unconsciously integrating a Counter Disinfolklore perspective to his Republican colleagues’ bonkers Bill - we know this because we identify in Frum’s tone, the Mana of his enterprise. Frum is, as I am doing in Counter Disinfolklore, offering us a Way of Seeing Crenshaw’s crazy “Bomb. Mexico” legislative bill through the lens of Disinfolklore.
As you know by now from reading this far, when I take examples from the Ukraine Domain any information unit whose Mana is “protect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and the life of its people from Russian aggression” I am engaging in counter Disinfolkore. You have an intuitive sense of what is right and what is wrong in this case.
Genocide is wrong, and any arguments whose Mana is somehow defending or promoting genocide is necessarily Disinfolklore. Likewise, here, we know that bombing Mexico to prevent Americans becoming addicted to a drug is a bad idea. It is Disinfolklore. And Frum, despite being the American conservative who coined the term “Axis of Evil” to justify invading Iran, is at least for once now on the side of the angels here.
Frum elucidates how in explaining his mad legislative bill to “Bomb. Mexico” Crenshaw is defining into existence an Inner Realm community (“middle America” “Conservatives”) against another (“Mexicans” “Drug cartels”). This Inner / Outer Realm homology should immediately alert us to the potential for Disinfolklore. Frum then highlights using the word “fable” and through his dismissive tone that is communicated using the term “alien villains” how ridiculous Frum finds Crenshaw’s bill.
I think the process which is going on here is what I call the Witch Switch. As far as I’m aware this term was first coined by Peter Jukes and used by
in a piece2.
For Counter Disinfolklore purposes I am going to broaden the meaning of the term to include this sense: in the manner of a light or railway track switch, certain tropes have the effect of switching our mood by manipulating our Mana (the well from which all of our intentions and motivations flow).
In effect, stories about migration penetrate the part of our minds where we manage our constant Inner / Outer Realm redemarcation / re-identification mental processes.
Immigrants as an Other are the fundamental (along with Trans (it’s the meaning ‘Transgressors’ that is smuggled into our minds inside trolls about ‘Trans’ and gender neutral toilets, etc, I believe)) Outer Realm invaders coming to steal our personal, family and community life’s
1. Sovereignty (Immigrants will gain political power and punish us. Ironically, in trying to deal with with chimera of the Immigrant Menace countries’ sovereignty is weakened in the attempt: Congress dissolves into a shambles, Brexit weakens Inner Realm England’s Sovereignty, Security, Fertility (economy, sustainability));
2. Security (Criminals/Warriors/Soldiers); and
3. Fertility (lock up your daughters! branding Mexicans as r*apists, photos of mostly dark males - invading to steal our bloodlines, our daughters, our wives).
Farmers’ protesting because the food supply is threatened, or poisoned:
So since as we now know from archæogenetics, archæology and linguistics immigration is immanent in our genes, I believe its traumas - from being the migrant / community receiving the migrant infinite times in our pasts) are immanent in our minds (our karman) too.
This is why the Witch Switch is able to trigger our fear mechanism every single time it uses the Immigrant Switch.
So this migrant othering works like a dream in triggering our desires to be in the Inner Realm. 100% guarantee! Here’s how modern right witches switch our witch switches:
And as long as the Right uses immigration to hack brains to win power Ruschia will provoke the migrant flows through indiscriminate bombing. It’s a Closed loop perpetual motion machine powering those self-described Rightists today, which I call Ruschian Kompromat for the “Right” Everywhere:
“Stir up anti-immigrant fervour and we’ll provoke the immigrant flows. Then, you win power, by holding your country’s Good Governance to ransom over 1m Syrian refugees we provoked into flowing into the EU by carpet bombing civilians, displaced Guyanaians flowing over America’s borders, 8m Ukrainians flowing into EU, Libyans, ….” Rinse and repeat.
The Right who obsess about incentivising bad behaviour are Ruschisms best friends. They’re compromised by this irresistible offer from Ruschists.
An offer the Right can’t ever refuse. Yet they must learn to discern the Mana inside this meme.
P.S. In “Sovereignty” is the element *Reg, which is a term that appears in every Indo-European language and culture - in English the Mana of *Reg is these sounds:
“Right,” “Reign,” “Writ,” “Authority,” “Regime,” “Foreigner,” “Realm,” “Reich,” the “Rch” of “Monarchy,” “Sovereignty,” “fertility,” “Security,” and “Regulation."
This means that these sounds are cognate with the *reign element in the English word “Sovereignty (see too https://x.com/decodingtrolls/status/1717382064641597661?s=46).
And the so-called Right (note the ‘Rt’ sound in SoveREIGNTy, SecuRITy, and FeRTility), without understanding why, sees a mechanical means (in raising immigration of immediately transferring Us and them between Inner and Outer Realm). Once we’re maintained in that state of fear (flight or fight) that they trigger through this rhetoric in our minds they then can hack our consent, our rational thought processes.
It fascinates me that the Writ / Right / Rite / Rch then attacks Disney, which does more than anything to help us learn to navigate smoothly the Inner / Outer Realm switching through its folktale-based art (the Outer Realm Black Californian princess marries the Inner Realm prince. And although she is expelled from the Inner Realm of England, along with her Inner Realm Prince Charming, well they live happily ever after in the Outer Realm):
I warned de Santis against taking on Disney. Disney is our world's top content provider for the folklore-embedded cognitive structures across the entire Indo-European cultural zone. One wave of a Disney wand, and his potential voters will notice the Emperor Wears No Clothes.
Brexiteers also attack Disney. A far right English minister ordered the painting over of a Disney mural in a reception centre for asylum seekers.
Attacking Taylor Swift, whose supposed wholeness and great art (songs) also help us navigate the Inner / Outer Realm switching in our personal lives / mind is similarly dumb.
That Bannon and co’s scripts allow them to attack Disney and Taylor Swift demonstrates they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t understand why this Witch Switching works or why specific triggers (Immigrants / Marking out Transgressors of the Inner Realm’s supposed rules (dROIT)) works, but they do understand THAT it works to provoke certain personality types into a fever.
That lets them smuggle in their Bad Policies and covers up their incompetent governing with chaos.
I guess the drivers of this trolling learned early in life that they’re congenitally incompetent but that by creating chaos they can cover this up and compensate for it by Othering: Trump, Putin, all of them are so incompetent really. You and I can see that clearly, until suddenly we’re entranced with fear and they act as our saviours…
What I’ve set out here is the engine of Counter Disinfolklore.
To be continued…
Continued from:
First in series:
For orientation purposes: This is the IX episode of Chapter Two of Disinfolklore - a new analytical method for parsing Disinformation:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/mexico-republican-bill-2024-election/674553/
