Last night I spoke about Donald’s archetyping of America as mediator rather than participant in the Iran-attack and how we can better understand Iran-attack blowback on
, alongside Jen Senko, , Joni Askola, Dietmar Pichler and Dee Batiste. Many thanks to .The idea I'm working most with at the moment is what I call archetypal disinfolklore. So what I'm looking for in any form of data, whether it's on my feed or in a tweet or in a pronouncement by the President of the United States, I'm looking for what is the archetypal identity this person is trying to entrench in my mind?
And so, for instance, today, Donald was trying to archetype himself as peacemaker. He attacked Iran in a breach of the US Constitution, a breach of international law. And then today, he tries to archetype himself very slyly as peacemaker between Israel and Iran when he is a protagonist in the war and he has brought the United States into a state of war.
So because I'm looking for the archetypal identities that the author of such tweets or pronouncements is making, I'm looking for that. And so I find that quite helpful.
And it's the first of 12 tools in this toolkit, which I've created for Disinfolklore. And I see...
Well, I believe I see exactly what President Trump is doing today. And as many of us who may have been online today will have seen, very many astute geopolitical analysts are dumbfounded by what President Trump is doing.
I believe what President Trump and those behind him are doing is extremely clever. And it's precisely what I witnessed the Russians do in eastern Ukraine, where I was between 2015 and 2018. And part of my job was to monitor about 180 ceasefires. And so what Russia was doing there was it was archetyping itself as adhering to ceasefires.
And then every morning I was gathering evidence from Russian occupiers and from Ukrainian soldiers about how the so-called ceasefire had been breached. And this is decoupling the idea of ceasefires from meaning. And what Donald is doing today, and now I look back at his attempts to have ceasefire in Ukraine with wider eyes because he's archetyping himself as peacemaker.
And he's decoupling the idea of ceasefire from an actual concrete absence of fire. And what he's really doing inside all of our minds is exactly what the Russians were doing in eastern Ukraine and elsewhere. And this is where I think he is.
I wrote or I spoke about this in Munich in February 2025, where my big fear or my yeah my fear was what donald did inside MAGA he would manage to do to the entire human race and what we see today is a manifestation of this ceasefire ceasefire Israel Iran and so what I'm looking for is the archetyping, what he's doing, and that's in any text we can see this.
People are archetyping themselves as particular people, with particular ideas, and that's a perfect example from today. So I'm looking for that in the data. What is he up to?
And we see people, a lot of very clever people today are dumbfounded by this. They don't understand what he's doing. They think he's mad. But I don't believe he is. I think this is a very conscious strategy I've seen at work before. And I think we ought to be very wary of it. Well, I think in Europe...
Ukraine is the key. So yourself, Joni, Dietmar, we're all engaged in the quotidian. We're watching the war unfurl, the 1200 kilometer contact line. We're reading Zarina's work in Kherson about first person view drones. We are looking and have been for the past two to three years at the Sha'id drones coming in and watching the nature of warfare change before our eyes in a very granular way. And when I then look at the conversation around the run-up to the attacks on Iran by the United States and chatter about blowback as if we are still in the 1990s where all Iran has and all Russia has and all China has are a few missiles. It does disappoint me because we have a lot of experts, people who get paid a lot of money and who have a lot of traction and a lot of clout, who don't seem to understand, because they are not focused on the granular detail of what is happening in Ukraine, and this is one of the great advantages we have by being enmeshed in this, is the idea of blowback for me is It's drone warfare on the streets of America.
It's accentuating the division which is legislated into existence every time Donald tweets. It's an armed so-called pro-Palestinian movement, so not just the post-October 7th manifestation.
It's a muddle between ICE with their masks, mass deportations of homegrowns and a whole soup.
I mean, we couldn't imagine a better place for a civil war with telegram. created, executed, and run by the Russian security services, TikTok, likewise from China. And that is what I think the lesson for Europe is, if people are watching. But MAGA has successfully archetyped Ukraine as this issue that doesn't matter, or President Zelenskyy as someone who doesn't matter, or the war there as something that doesn't matter. And it's quite disappointing in England. We saw the attacks on Brian. So I wrote a piece last week because this is how I conceive of the blowback.
Iran, China and Russia will be doing this over the last year. As Zarina makes the point, Heerson was liberated in September 2022. And all of us expected a blowback from Russia. None of us expected the blowback to begin a year later in July. We thought of in terms of shelling and the blowback there has been extraordinary.
We've had two years of it. And most of the people we know in real life, you know, people who have normal lives who just tune into the news every now and again, have no awareness that in this part of Ukraine, people are being hunted, humans are being hunted by first person view drones, which cost $500.
And when the NRA discover these and everyone else discovers these. So that's how I see things playing out over the next year or two. And in the streets of England, I mean, well, Europe is trying to distance itself as much as possible.
I note the airplanes came from, I think they came from Missouri for the bombing in Iran. So Keir Starmer managed to keep England out of it. But the so-called pro post October 7th pro-Palestinian movement, I distinguish between people who are genuine and always have been genuine and useful idiots and people who are knowing useful idiots who are part of this giant troll which I perceive was created by Hamas with Russia and Iran to distract from Ukraine. and we will see something extraordinary. We've already seen protests in Times Square, we've seen the daubing of fighter jets in an English base, and now the government has reacted by prescribing a pro-Palestinian organisation.
Nothing I have heard from experts or politicians suggests to me they perceive the threat in the same way that I do. So I'm just doing my best to try and raise this as a possibility. But Ukraine is ground zero in understanding where warfare is today. and how it's changed and how it will come onto our streets.
And it's already in our information space. And sadly, the President of the United States is part of the problem. The key for everything for me runs through Ukraine. Things are going very well there. Sue me, Ukraine has massively defeated Russia, Russian forces there. They're still occupying part of Russia. NATO will give 45 billion this year, Mark Rutte said today, mostly to manufacture different weapon systems inside Ukraine. They have a better analogue than the HIMARS. They have great drones, hundreds of different iterations of drones. So the key to everything, including getting rid of the Russian occupation. And the key to the release of humanity from this curse is in the battle line, the 1200 kilometer battle line in Ukraine. And the more we personally can understand about it, apart from these massive attacks that we see, these spectacular attacks that Russia prosecutes, which have no impact on the battlefield, the more we'll be able to interpret reality and help people in Georgia and other countries, which, and indeed, this is self-defense,
if my horrific prediction comes through over the next year. So that's my message of optimism is in Ukraine and everything that's happening in Ukraine. Out.
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