Four years ago I was scrolling a Ukrainian Telegram channel called Trukha. It is the biggest news channel in Ukraine. Over three million subscribers read it. It carries air-raid alerts, front-line clips, football, discount codes, the lot. And there, in among the news, I kept seeing a phrase: Kosovo i Metohija.

Disinfolklore

Podcast | Outflank Dugin. Don't Rebut (episode 1)

I am going to start two new miniseries today. The first one goes back to what I call the Luhansk Corpus. That is the ten thousand propaganda items from Russia-occupied Luhansk 2015-2018 (the empirical grounding of the Disinfolklore analytical method). These are relatively pithy pieces, though each a part of an entire system of seeing, which can applied and mobilised against any Disinfolklore galaxy, such as MAGA, Iran, Ruschia, Italy, wherever. I am going to read three today…

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11 days ago · 3 likes · Decoding Trolls

Kosovo i Metohija is not a neutral name. It is the Serbian state’s irredentist name for Kosova, the name that says the territory can never be anything but Serbian.

I know this because as a diplomat in the OSCE I often encountered the meme “Kosovo i Metohija” in the minutes of meetings. Often these minutes never revealed which country said what.

However, whenever I saw the phrase “Kosovo i Metohija” I knew the speaker was speaking on behalf of Russia or Serbia - no other member state of the OSCE ever used that meme. Moscow loves that name. It is the frame Moscow borrows whenever it wants to say that borders are negotiable and that some nations do not really exist. And here it was, dressed as news, in the most-read channel of a country fighting for its own borders.

I am not Ukrainian. I read the channel through a translator app. Even so, the meme stood out like a wrong note. That was my first sighting of what I have come to call a Trukha problem. Not just a problem with one channel. A problem with a form.

This week the form became news itself.

What happened this week

Ukraine reshuffled its government, and its defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, left the post. Fedorov then said: that from the moment Trukha was bought by a new owner, the channel began working systematically against him, and he named the parliamentarian Danylo Hetmantsev as connected to the campaign (Detector Media, 16 July 2026: https://detector.media/infospace/article/251248/, and DSnews: https://www.dsnews.ua/ukr/politics/fedorov-zvinuvativ-naybilshiy-telegram-kanal-ukrajini-u-zamovniy-kampaniji-proti-nogo-16072026-463553).

The activist Serhii Sternenko had already published an investigation pointing to a Kharkiv crypto entrepreneur as the likely buyer, possibly holding a Russian passport. The channel’s previous owner was mobilised in June and blamed the minister personally.

Disinfolklore

Podcast | Metanoia or the Reboot?

This is the last episode of my mini-series on Larysa Yakubova’s The Beast from the Abyss…

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18 days ago · 3 likes · Decoding Trolls

Claims like these are easy to make and easy to dismiss. Everyone in a political fight says the media is against them. So I did what the Disinfolklore method always asks: I measured.

What the data shows

Trukha’s flagship channel publishes its full history on the open web. I collected 35,135 posts, everything the channel published from 24 March 2024 to 17 July 2026, and counted every mention of Fedorov by name. There are 126 of them across twenty-eight months.

For two years the channel liked him. As digital transformation minister he appears as a steady good-news figure: online marriages in the Diia app, cashback for buying Ukrainian, 5G tests. When he became defence minister in January 2026 the channel amplified his own framing, often verbatim: his plan for the war. His Ramstein results. Elon Musk replying that he was “glad to help” against Russian drones on Starlink. On 22 January the channel even reported, straight, that Sternenko had become his adviser on front-line drones. In twenty-six months of coverage there is no sustained hostile frame anywhere.

Through May he is almost invisible, and when he appears, the channel praises him. On 18 May it credits him with Ukraine’s first domestically produced guided bomb (”per Fedorov, development took 17 months,” post 137723). On 28 May it reports neutrally on infantry pay talks. Two mentions in five weeks. Both friendly.

Then comes the evening of 5 June, at 20:01. The channel posts this, in its own editorial voice (post 138911, https://t.me/truexanewsua/138911):

“And tomorrow we will tell you about the corruption in drone procurement organised by pan Fedorov. Yes, that one. Don’t switch.”

News channels do not talk like this about their news. Campaigns talk like this. It is a trailer. Someone had decided, before the facts were shown to the audience, that the minister was now a target, and was building appetite for the reveal.

From that post forward, the channel mentions Fedorov twenty times in six weeks.

Eighteen of the twenty carry a hostile frame against him, or defend the channel against the people investigating it. The only two exceptions simply report President Zelensky’s own words after the dismissal.

On 13 June the channel platforms Hetmantsev, the very man Fedorov later named: “We thought Fedorov spent five months preparing a reform, but he spent five months preparing a website.” The full post list, with identifiers and timestamps, sits in my archive and any reader with a browser can verify every one against the channel’s public record.

The most important move in the data is subtler than volume, and this is where the Disinfolklore method shows its power.

The mechanism: real stories, redirected Mana

Ukraine has a real and painful public issue with its territorial recruitment centres, the TCC. Cases of brutality are documented by the country’s own human rights ombudsman. Trukha covered such stories before June, as most Ukrainian channels do.

What changed on 5 June is not the stories. It is the name pinned to them. A man dies in a Zakarpattia recruitment centre: the channel asks when Fedorov will do his job. A detainee in Mykolaiv is found with broken ribs: “When will Mykhailo Fedorov perform his duties?”. “Is this the plan of Fedorov’s ‘genius’ reform?” A TCC officer chokes a woman in Lviv: “this is our reform from Fedorov’s Ministry of Defence.” Yet Federov never had power over these issues. They’re the jurisdiction of the army not the civilian defence minister.

In my framework this is Tool 3, Mana in the Meme. Mana is the energy and intention a meme carries into your mind. An atrocity story arrives carrying genuine moral energy: grief, disgust, the demand that someone answer for cruelty. That energy is real and it is right. The manipulation is in the plumbing. The channel builds a channel-bed for that energy and points it at one man’s name, every time, so that three million readers’ legitimate anger at a systemic problem arrives, drop by drop, as a verdict on one minister.

The stories might be true. The redirection is the payload. This is why sophisticated readers get caught. Checking facts does not protect you here, because the facts check out. You have to check the Mana: where is this energy being sent, and who dug the trench?

And notice the trailer’s other tell. “Don’t switch.” Urgency is Tool 8’s red flag. A channel that has evidence of corruption publishes evidence of corruption. A channel that has a campaign publishes a countdown.

A channel that sounds like truth

There is one more layer, and it sits in the name itself.

To an English ear, Trukha sounds like truth. In Ukrainian the word труха means something close to the opposite. It is the dust of rotted hay. Chaff. What is left when the goodness has crumbled out of the stalk.

Disinfolklore

Podcast | In Defence of "Ancient Ukraine"

We say ancient Greece and ancient Egypt without a flicker, and we call a Bronze Age culture in Kazakhstan the first Aryans — every one of them a modern name thrown back over a people who never bore it. The homeland of the whole Indo-European family is the Dnipro Valley. So, by the rule we already use for everyone else, there is an ancient Ukraine. To withhold the name is not scholarly caution. It is a double standard. And there is a war behind it…

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a month ago · 9 likes · 1 comment · Decoding Trolls

In my Disinfolklore framework, the final judgment on any meme, or any channel, is to proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. The verdict comes out Positive, Negative or Neutral. The central test is Tool 7, Right: is it TRUE?

Power of Mana

The Moon, the Menses, and the Maternal Clock

Your instinct deserves to be met head-on, not smoothed over. The English word mother does not, on its face, carry the M-N- sound. Traced the ordinary way it runs back to Proto-Indo-European *méh₂tēr — the nursery syllable *ma- plus the kinship suffix *-ter that also gives us…

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2 months ago · 3 likes · Decoding Trolls

And here is what this case teaches about that question. Sentence by sentence, Trukha passes. The guided bomb was real. The pay talks were real. The recruitment-centre cruelty was real and documented.

A fact-checker would clear post after post. Yet the channel fails the proofing, because truth is a property of the telling, not only of the sentences. A telling that selects true facts and lays every one of them toward the same target is not telling the truth. It is telling the target.

That is what the Code of Positive Trolls catches and a fact-check cannot. The proofing does not ask “are the sentences accurate?” It asks whether the Mana is right. Is the meaning generous? Is it patient, or is it a countdown? Does it deepen your understanding of a systemic problem, or flatten it into one man’s face? Ask those questions of the twenty posts and the verdict is not close.

So the name adjudicates itself. Heard from outside, truth. Read from inside, chaff. A channel can be both at once, and that is precisely the form’s power: the truth is in the sentences, and the chaff is in where they are all blowing.

What we found before

This is not my first look at Trukha. Earlier this summer I assembled a corpus of 108,051 posts from four of the network’s regional channels, covering 2021 to 2024, and ran a systematic hunt for conduit channels: outlets inside the network’s orbit that relay despair, defeatism and anti-mobilisation themes into Ukrainian readers’ feeds while wearing the clothes of local news.

That work flagged a set of candidate conduits, and it corroborated what Sternenko’s team had been arguing from their own direction.

The Kosovo i Metohija memes I spotted four years ago were an early, visible symptom of the same underlying condition: a trusted high-volume channel whose relay choices, post by post, lean somewhere its readers have not consented to go.

So when the ownership changed and the tone flipped, I was not starting from zero. I had a baseline, and the flip stood out against it exactly the way a break should.

What I am not saying

Ukraine’s government is Ukraine’s to choose. Whether Fedorov should or should not be defence minister is a question for Ukrainians, their parliament and their president, and for no one else. I support Ukraine. That support gives me no vote and no standing. A foreigner who uses “support” as a licence to lean on Kyiv’s internal choices has misunderstood what support means. I contend nothing about the reshuffle itself.

I am also not saying the mobilisatiom stories are false, or that criticism of a defence ministry in wartime is illegitimate. A free country criticises its ministers. That freedom is part of what Ukraine is defending.

What I am saying is narrower. The data shows a dated, measurable break in one channel’s behaviour toward one man, beginning with a self-announced campaign trailer on 5 June 2026, immediately after a change of ownership that the channel will not explain, in a channel already carrying a documented history of relay choices that serve Moscow’s frames.

Ukrainians noticed it themselves. Fedorov has called for journalists to investigate. The measurement simply confirms what the pattern-literate eye suspected, and puts a date and a number on it.

Every galaxy has one

Here is why this matters far beyond one Ukrainian scandal.

In my work I describe disinfolklore galaxies: the connected clusters of channels, outlets and accounts that share, relay and amplify each other’s memes across an information space.

Every galaxy has a Trukha. Ours too. Somewhere in your feed, whatever your country, there is a high-volume, trusted, useful channel that earned its place honestly: alerts, sport, local news, the daily texture of life. That accumulated trust is an asset. Assets get bought. And when they are bought, nothing on the surface changes. The alerts keep coming. The football keeps coming. What changes is the plumbing underneath: whose name gets pinned to which anger, which real grievances get a trench dug toward which target.

You cannot detect that by fact-checking, because the facts are mostly true. You detect it the way we detected it here. You get your eye in for the wrong note, the way Kosovo i Metohija reads wrong in a Ukrainian channel. You watch for the trailer voice, the “don’t switch,” the manufactured countdown. You ask of each emotive story not “is it true?” but “where is my reaction being sent?” And when you can, you count. A valence flip with a date on it is worth a thousand suspicions.

Trukha’s three million readers are not fools. They are among the most propaganda-hardened publics on earth, and the channel caught a good number of them anyway, for a while. That is the measure of the form’s power, and the reason to learn its shape now, in the one information space where it has just been caught in the act.

The trench is dug before the water arrives. Learn to see the trench.

Stephen Douglas is a writer who publishes on Disinfolklore.eu, Disinfolklore.net, PowerofMana.net, and as Decoding Trolls on Substack and X.

Disinfolklore

Podcast | In Defence of "Ancient Ukraine"

We say ancient Greece and ancient Egypt without a flicker, and we call a Bronze Age culture in Kazakhstan the first Aryans — every one of them a modern name thrown back over a people who never bore it. The homeland of the whole Indo-European family is the Dnipro Valley. So, by the rule we already use for everyone else, there is an ancient Ukraine. To withhold the name is not scholarly caution. It is a double standard. And there is a war behind it…

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a month ago · 9 likes · 1 comment · Decoding Trolls

Exactly one year ago, Ruschia was Delay, Delay, Delay - just fifty more days we need to take all of Donetsk and Luhansk. Donald took the bait.

This year, Ukraine has told Donald it is running a forty day campaign. On 25 June President Zelenskyy approved an операція впливу на державу-агресора. An “influence operation” against the aggressor state. Running 40 days. Aimed at compelling an end to the war. So the Ukrainian state itself files a campaign of long-range and mid-range strikes — refineries, oil infrastructure, the throttling of Crimea — under the vocabulary of influence, the Disinfolklore / Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference lexicon turned outward. The strikes are the vehicle. The declared target is the mind of the Ruschist leadership and public. The clock runs out around 4 August. The detail was kept classified.

Disinfolklore

Podcast | Metanoia or the Reboot?

This is the last episode of my mini-series on Larysa Yakubova’s The Beast from the Abyss…

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16 days ago · 2 likes · Decoding Trolls

Every day arms of the Ukrainian armed forces publish videos of devastating strikes - twenty-seven Ruschist ships disabled in the Azov Sea just in the past seventy-six hours. A successful strike against Ruschia’s largest oil refinery in Omsk 2,500 km from Ukraine. Six drones were filmed crashing into two exploding distillation columns. At least eight Ruschist fighter jets will never fly again. In temporarily occupied Crimea Ukraine having destroyed all the main elements of its electricity infrastructure, it is now moving on to smaller sub-stations serving military targets. Meanwhile, Russians began to queue for petrol in Omsk the day after the strike, thereby showing just how fragile Russian logistics now are.

On the number 40, there are two templates running in opposite temporal directions. The “period at the end of which someone dies” is the second, not the first.

The Orthodox/Slavic сороковини is retrospective: death at t=0. The soul passing the aerial toll-houses (мытарства). The 40th day bringing the particular judgment and final departure. The death is at the start. The forty days are the aftermath. (The East Slavic сорок is itself an anomaly — it breaks the decimal series, тридцять then not “четиридесят” but сорок, apparently from a bundle of forty pelts. Number-magic hiding in the grammar.)

The prospective template — proclamation now, destruction at t=40 unless there’s repentance - is the prophetic ultimatum, canonically Jonah at Nineveh:

“Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”

A designated speaker declares a fixed countdown to a great city’s ruin, conditional on its turning.

Power of Mana

The Moon, the Menses, and the Maternal Clock

Your instinct deserves to be met head-on, not smoothed over. The English word mother does not, on its face, carry the M-N- sound. Traced the ordinary way it runs back to Proto-Indo-European *méh₂tēr — the nursery syllable *ma- plus the kinship suffix *-ter that also gives us…

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2 months ago · 3 likes · Decoding Trolls

That is almost precisely the grammar of a 40-day operation supposedly to compel Russia to end the war. But really probably to freak some Ruschists out, to troll Donald and to impose a plot on this summer where last we spent waiting for Ruschia’s offensive which never got going. This isn’t only Western esoteric projection.

Ukrainian commentary is itself reaching for it. At least one outlet read the 40 as the Flood. Forty days after which a cleansed world begins, i.e. a signal that Russia must be purged of imperial ambition. The symbolism is being consciously activated in the source culture.

Which brings me to the enspelling reading — stronger than it first looks, for one specific reason.

You don’t announce the timetable of an SBU special operation to the enemy if the number is doing operational work. Secrecy is the whole point. The details were withheld. So the 40 isn’t operational. It’s rhetorical. Broadcast because it’s meant to be heard.

It’s an act of archetyping. Taking an open-ended attrition war and imposing bounded, funerary countdown-content onto it. Converting stalemate into a death-clock. The one who sets the clock takes the officiant’s chair.

The prophet who pronounces the term. Whoever names the archetype, inherits its structural power. A defixio dressed as a strategic communiqué. The Crimean state of emergency that followed reads, on this frame, as the adversary entering the vigil. Reacting to the countdown. Acknowledging it.

We can’t prove Ukraine reached for сороковини consciously. Yet again and again President Zelenskyy uses the language and behaviour of the conscious hex. The folklore-like archetype doesn’t need it to be acknowledged.

The folklore-like archetype propagates through the culture’s grammar regardless of intent. This is what makes it folklore-like rather than allegory. What’s unusual is that we have partial evidence the activation is at least semi-conscious.

The source-culture commentariat is openly narrating the biblical 40. So it sits in the productive middle: not a proven occult act, not mere projection, but a number so over-determined in the Orthodox Slavic field that once uttered it cannot not toll. Spoken by a state that then labelled the whole thing an operation of “influence.”

Heavy sacralization of 40 is Semitic-Abrahamic (Flood, Sinai, wilderness, Christ’s fast, Nineveh) flowing into Orthodoxy, whereas core Indo-European number-magic runs on 3, 7, 9, 12 — and the Indo-Iranian/Tibetan 49 is built on 7. So the convergence lives at the level of the archetype — the liminal interval between death and final disposition — not the integer. The 40 points down the Abrahamic-Orthodox channel specifically.

A quieter rhyme worth flagging: quaranta giorni, the forty-day isolation of plague ships, is where “quarantine” comes from — 40 as enforced sequestration of the dangerous and diseased. And the kinetic substance of this operation is the isolation of Crimea, cutting the peninsula off and putting the garrison under siege. A 40-day operation whose literal content is quarantining occupied territory. The number and the deed rhyme, intended or not.

Disinfolklore

Podcast | In Defence of "Ancient Ukraine"

We say ancient Greece and ancient Egypt without a flicker, and we call a Bronze Age culture in Kazakhstan the first Aryans — every one of them a modern name thrown back over a people who never bore it. The homeland of the whole Indo-European family is the Dnipro Valley. So, by the rule we already use for everyone else, there is an ancient Ukraine. To withhold the name is not scholarly caution. It is a double standard. And there is a war behind it…

Listen now

a month ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Decoding Trolls

Here’s why I think this viral Lunin video is staged by Russia’s security services.

I’m not the only one to be sceptical about the provenance and meaning of this video and sequels which peppered Russian and the pro-Ukraine information space today.

Here is another astute analysis of the video’s likely meaning. An archetypal analysis indeed:

Disinfolklore

Disinfolklore (4)

Russia’s intelligence service in occupied Luhansk had sent to my manager’s manager a hand-written letter from a supposed walk-in that told the following tale…

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3 years ago · 4 likes · Decoding Trolls

Disinfolklore

Podcast | In Defence of "Ancient Ukraine"

We say ancient Greece and ancient Egypt without a flicker, and we call a Bronze Age culture in Kazakhstan the first Aryans — every one of them a modern name thrown back over a people who never bore it. The homeland of the whole Indo-European family is the Dnipro Valley. So, by the rule we already use for everyone else, there is an ancient Ukraine. To withhold the name is not scholarly caution. It is a double standard. And there is a war behind it…

Listen now

a month ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Decoding Trolls

I detected the existence of Russia’s use of archetypes in Disinfolklore back in 2015, in Russia-occupied Ukraine — reading the flood of propaganda that washed across the line where I was working. The same characters kept walking through it: the Merciful Sovereign who would protect you if only you submitted, the Bridge Troll who guarded the crossing, the Outer-Realm Monster massing on the horizon. I started cataloguing them. Ten years on, I recognise one of those characters the moment it appears — and the Lunin video is one.

A walk-in is one of the most carefully built characters in Russia’s Disinfolklore apparatus. It has many faces — a soldier, a civilian, a doctor, a defector, the former spokesperson for a president who turns up in an interview with a sympathetic foreign host — but a single structure. Others call it the whistleblower. I call it the walk-in, because the name tells you what it does.

The walk-in is the oldest device in storytelling. It is the stranger who arrives from outside with an urgent message that changes the plot — the ragged pilgrim at the gate, the messenger wolf, the old woman who knocks at the door asking for bread. In every folklore on earth, the walk-in is how a teller hands the audience a piece of news they could not have discovered for themselves. We trust it precisely because it arrived unbidden, from beyond the frame.

Russia has industrialised that trust. Bloomberg’s Stephanie Baker has documented the factory: an operation she traces under the name Storm-1516, which manufactures these arrivals at scale — paid actors, staged testimony, forged documents — and then has them amplified by Western influencers until they feel like something the internet found on its own. The whole point of a walk-in is that nobody seems to have sent it. Storm-1516 is the machine for making sure of that.

Now look at Alexander Lunin. This week a video of a Russian soldier by that name threatening Putin with a mutiny was watched eleven million times in a day. His video walked into our timeline exactly as a walk-in should — the unbidden insider, the man with terrible knowledge, the urgent message that the army may turn its weapons on the Kremlin.

And here the device folds in on itself, which is the tell. Inside the video, Lunin narrates a second walk-in. He says officials from the Defense Ministry and the security services called him into their car and decided to use him to carry a message to the president. A walk-in inside a walk-in: the staged messenger arrives on our feed, and within it the apparatus’s own hand walks openly into the frame and is offered as the proof. We are being shown the strings and told they are the puppet moving freely.

And look at what the messenger actually says (I’m indebted to @HpyNtlya on X for this astute analysis) because the content gives the game away as surely as the form.

This is not, as @HpyNtlya notes, a revolt, and it is not anti-war. Lunin does not challenge Putin, or the war; he begs the Tsar to notice that the bad boyars — the corrupt commanders, the cruel ministry — are sabotaging his brilliant plans.

The message is the oldest one in Russian political life: the Tsar is good; his servants are the problem. Naïve monarchism — the Good Tsar and the Bad Boyars — a pressure-release valve, the old game of letting people blow off steam while the system stays exactly intact. A real mutiny points its weapons at the throne. This one points them at the throne’s enemies, on the throne’s behalf.

The supporting details all point one way. He was not born Lunin. He was born Pustovalov, and in 2023 he walked into the name Lunin. He fought in the Sudoplatov battalion — named for a Soviet assassin — formed by the occupation authorities of captured Melitopol. The man is a product of the apparatus from the start.

Which brings me to the name, and to the part that is hardest to prove and easiest to feel. Lunin comes from Luna, the Moon. And Russia’s security services reach for the Moon again and again, because the Moon is where our oldest words for the mind begin. The reconstructed name for the Moon — méh₁nōt, “the measurer” — is the root of monarch and mandate, mind and meaning, numen and immanent. For six thousand years the Moon has been our master metaphor for the medium that carries meaning. To feel foundational — to sit underneath everything — the apparatus reaches for it.

So Dugin, the Kremlin’s security services actor “philosopher,” declares Cheburashka — a gentle children’s puppet — “a demon of the moon.” So the Kremlin publishes a decree to put a nuclear power plant on the Moon by 2036. And so a manufactured soldier walks into our feed wearing a moon-name. Three scales of one reach, for the foundation-stone of thought.

I cannot prove the casting call. But everything about this video — the unbidden arrival, the insider with terrible knowledge, the apparatus narrated openly into its own story, the man renamed for the Moon — is the shape of a thing I have been reading since 2015. When a character this carefully built walks into the room, name it. And watch for the next one.

Power of Mana

The Moon, the Menses, and the Maternal Clock

Your instinct deserves to be met head-on, not smoothed over. The English word mother does not, on its face, carry the M-N- sound. Traced the ordinary way it runs back to Proto-Indo-European *méh₂tēr — the nursery syllable *ma- plus the kinship suffix *-ter that also gives us…

Read more

2 months ago · 3 likes · Decoding Trolls

Donald Trump fake-explained why Russia failed to take Kyiv at the start of the war as a piece of Russian incompetence: a Russian general, he said, drove the tanks into a swamp because he would not take the highway, and that one mistake turned three days into four and a half years. And on the same day, Russia put guided bombs into the great dam at Zaporizhzhia again. Set the two reports side by side and they are the two halves of the oldest story we have. On that one day we watched one half of it erased, and the other half committed.

Begin with the swamp, because the word is doing quiet work, and there is more than one swamp hiding inside it. There was indeed a swamp in front of the Russian armour to the north-west of Kyiv in the last days of February 2022. It was not there by nature, and it was not there because a general blundered. It was there because Ukrainians put it there, on purpose.

Power of Mana

The Moon, the Menses, and the Maternal Clock

Your instinct deserves to be met head-on, not smoothed over. The English word mother does not, on its face, carry the M-N- sound. Traced the ordinary way it runs back to Proto-Indo-European *méh₂tēr — the nursery syllable *ma- plus the kinship suffix *-ter that also gives us…

Read more

2 months ago · 1 like · Decoding Trolls

On the twenty-fourth of February the columns crossed from Belarus and came south, down the most direct road from Chornobyl through Hostomel, where Russian paratroopers had landed that morning to seize the airfield. The plan was to reach Kyiv in about seventy-two hours. Between the armour and the capital lay the Irpin, a small slow river that runs north to south through a wide floodplain west of the city. In late February that floodplain was frozen hard, and hard ground takes the weight of a tank.

On the night of the twenty-fourth, and through the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth, a small group of Ukrainian engineers and territorial-defence men, working under the authority of their state, demolished the Kozarovychi dam on the Irpin upstream of Kyiv and breached several other structures along the river. The stored waters came out across the floodplain. Under the volume of water the frozen ground thawed, and within forty-eight hours it had turned into an impassable marsh of mud and ice-melt. The armour that had been racing south could no longer cross. The seventy-two-hour plan failed. By early March the columns were jammed along the highway, easy prey for drones and mortars and ambush from the woods, and by the end of March the Russian forces had pulled out of the north of Ukraine entirely.

The man chiefly behind the demolition was, by the documentary record, a Kyiv businessman with demolition expertise, known in the West Point Modern War Institute’s careful account of the Battle of Kyiv by the working name Andriy; his real name is kept back for his own safety. On the morning of the invasion he used a senior contact to win a same-day meeting with General Oleksandr Syrskyi, then commanding the defence of the Kyiv region. On Syrskyi’s authority he was issued close to a tonne of explosives. He drove out with his stepfather and two colleagues to the dam where the Dnipro reservoir meets the Irpin, and he blew it. The floodplain flooded. The advance from the north stalled. Kyiv held. Two minutes of work at a threshold, and decades hang on it.

I want to be careful here, because the truth is strong enough without being stretched. A great many things went wrong for Russia on that northern axis. The forty-mile convoy stalled for want of fuel and food. The airborne assault on Hostomel was thrown back and the airfield denied. Ukrainian ambushes bled the columns in the lanes and the woods. I am not telling you that one man with a tonne of explosives won the Battle of Kyiv by himself. I am telling you something narrower and harder to argue with. The swamp in the story was not a swamp. It was a flood. And a flood is not weather, and it is not a clumsy general’s bad luck with the mud. A flood like that is a thing a people does. Ukraine did not get lucky with the ground in front of Kyiv. Ukrainians released the waters.

That act has a shape, and the shape is the oldest one we know. In the Rigveda, the oldest book in any of the languages you and I speak, the god Indra goes out against the dragon Vritra, who has coiled himself around the waters and dammed them at the source so that the world lies in drought, and Indra kills the dragon, and the waters are loosed, and life comes back. The comparativists who study these things have traced that same dragon-slayer through every branch of the family: Thraetaona against Azhi Dahaka in old Iran, Thor against the world-serpent in the north, Apollo against Python and Heracles against the Hydra in Greece, Lugh against Balor in Ireland, Perun against Veles among the Slavs, Saint George against the dragon in England. And the hero, in the oldest layer of it, is the third. Trita, in the Sanskrit, means “the third one,” the small late-coming actor who wins where the first and second heroes, the great ones, the heroes of sheer power, have tried and failed.

The waters in that story are not water in general either. They are the rivers that still carry the oldest word our languages have for a river, the word the scholars write as Danu. You can hear it now in the names of Ukraine’s great rivers: the Don, the Donets, the Dnipro, Dniester, the Danube. The story was first told on those very river valleys, on the steppe that is now Ukraine, before two and a half thousand years before Christ. So when a Ukrainian named Andriy let out the waters of the Irpin, which is a tributary of the Dnipro, to turn back an army, the oldest story in our languages was being acted out on one of its own first rivers, by a man who happened to carry one of its own oldest names. He had surely never heard of Trita. He did not need to have heard of him. The story is the floor under everyone who speaks these languages, and he reached for it the way you reach for a rail in the dark, without looking, because it was there.

And on the very day the swamp was being explained away as a Russian mistake, Russia was performing the story’s other half. At Zaporizhzhia it drove guided bombs into the DniproHES, the largest dam in Ukraine, the dam whose power cools the largest nuclear station in Europe. It is the thing Russia did fully at Kakhovka in June 2023, when it destroyed the dam on the lower Dnipro and sent eighteen cubic kilometres of water down the river, drowning seventy-six settlements, killing at least fifty-eight people outright, and, as the reservoir emptied, laying bare the best-preserved site of the very people who first tamed the horse on that river. That is the dragon’s move, exact and entire. Not the hero who frees the waters for the living, but the serpent who hoards them and then breaks the wall so the flood comes down on the living. Andriy let the waters go to save people. Russia lets the waters go to kill them.

It is wrong by the oldest law we have, the one the story itself carries, in which the waters belong to life and the one who hoards them and turns them into a weapon is the dragon the hero exists to kill. And it is wrong by the newest law as well, the Protocol we added to the Geneva Conventions once the World Wars had shown us enough, which names three works that may never be made a target, however the attacker dresses it up, because to break them is to loose forces no soldier can call back: dams, dykes, and nuclear power stations. At Zaporizhzhia, Russia reaches for two of the three in a single strike.

Now go back to the swamp, because the way we tell this is not a small thing. To say that Russia failed at Kyiv because a Russian general was a fool is to tell the story with the hero cut out of it. It says that Ukraine did nothing. It says there was no Andriy, no same-day meeting, no tonne of explosives, no waters released on purpose, only a clumsy giant who tripped in the mud he should have walked around. I will not pretend to know what Donald Trump pictures when he says the word swamp, and it does not matter, because whatever he pictures, the thing on that road was a flood that Ukrainians made. And the framing he reached for, whatever he meant by it, happens to be the exact story the apparatus in Moscow most wants the world to hold: that Ukraine is not an actor but only a place where things happen to Russia, that there is no agency on the Ukrainian side worth naming, that Russia, even beaten, is the only one with a hand on events.

It is the same erasure, run twice in one day. In the swamp it takes the hero out of the founding story. At the dam it lets the serpent commit the founding crime while the world is busy looking at a peace plan. And the reason it matters which way we tell it is that the story is how we tell them apart. Take the agency out and you can no longer tell Andriy from the general, the flood that defends from the flood that drowns, the third hero from the dragon. The whole use of keeping the oldest story is that it holds those two apart, and names which is which.

And there is one last turn in that word, swamp, and it is the sharpest. Ukrainians have long called Moscow a swamp, and not only to insult it. The city was raised on marshland, and the thing it houses is exactly what a swamp is: water that has been dammed and hoarded until it stops moving and goes bad. A swamp is the dragon’s own element. It is the opposite of the living flow the hero lets out. So the man who once promised, before all else, to drain the swamp has ended by pointing at the wrong one entirely. He has not drained the swamp in Washington that he named. He will not go near the swamp in Moscow that fills the body bags. The one swamp he can bring himself to see is the one that was never a swamp at all, the bright cold flood that a Ukrainian let out across a floodplain to hold the swamp’s own army back. He has it exactly inverted. The flood was the thing that, for a few weeks on one front, actually drained the swamp.

So let us put the hero back where he stood. The swamp was a flood, and a man the records call Andriy made it, with his state’s blessing and his stepfather beside him, and it bought Kyiv the hours it needed. That is the third hero’s move, performed in our own time on the river where the move was first imagined six thousand years ago. Ukraine has shown that it still knows the oldest task there is. The rest of us who say we believe in Never Again have only to give Ukraine what it needs to finish it, and to refuse, every single time it is offered to us, the comfortable lie that there was never any hero at the water, and never any serpent at the dam.

Disinfolklore

Podcast | The Lie as Binding Agent, the Pickup Artist, Their God Is War, and the Vanished Koshchei

I am going to continue today the series on The Beast from the Abyss, this brilliant book by a renowned Ukrainian historian. Last week, you may remember, I got to her chapter on the deep folk — which is the moniker that the Russist former deputy prime minister of Russia, Vladislav Surkov, used. He used this term, deep folk, to describe, highly ironically, the Russians, and Larysa is basically parsing this troll into its parts and making a play on the words…

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a month ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Decoding Trolls

On 17 June the published a paper by Alexandra Prokopenko, “Loyal but Powerless: The Downgrading of Russia’s Elite.”

It is careful, well-sourced, scholarly — and within a day a second Carnegie fellow, Tatiana Stanovaya, was urging everyone to read it:

“one of the most consequential studies of Russia’s wartime elite to appear since the full-scale invasion,” offering “a remarkably informed view from within the system,” with “insights that are simply unavailable elsewhere.”

Hold on to that phrase. A view from within the system.

We will come back to who is doing the viewing, and why “within” is being sold to you as a credential rather than a warning.

First, what the paper does — because it is worth decoding, not for who wrote it but for what it performs. A troll does not need a liar to carry it. It needs a respectable institution and a plausible word.

The paper’s claim is that the Russian elite did not resist the invasion of Ukraine, and that this failure “is not the result of personal weakness or cowardice.

It is the systemic result of a quarter-century of depoliticization.” The two or three hundred people around Putin are renamed, with a Latin flourish, as nobiles — a Roman aristocracy who had “access” but, we are assured, “access is not the same as influence.” Depoliticization, the paper says, “turned a group of people with resources and intellect into a herd that now simply implements the technical tasks that the regime puts in front of it, seemingly devoid of any agency.”

A herd. Devoid of agency. Nobody is driving.

You have heard this before — not from a think tank, but from the apparatus itself. None of this is on me. I’m a small person in a vast river. I didn’t start the war, I don’t make policy, I just live here. Judge the Kremlin, not me. In our work we call this the Distributed Tyrant: the absolute ruler smeared so thinly across forty million shrugging shoulders that no single shoulder feels the weight. The Carnegie paper is the seminar-room edition of that troll. Same energy, better footnotes.

Now set beside it another book about the very same regime.

Disinfolklore

Podcast | The Beast from the Abyss

The Sovereign Writes His Enemy a Letter…

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a month ago · 7 likes · Decoding Trolls

Laryssa Yakubova is a historian at the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences. Her 2023 study Ruscism: The Beast from the Abyss runs to three hundred pages, and she writes like a prosecutor with a poet’s ear. “There is no great russia,” she hammers, “there is a frenzied barbarian tribe.

There is no great russian army — a criminal grouping of rapists and marauders. There is no great russian culture — a bankrupt cabinet of curiosities of dead memes.” Where Prokopenko reaches for “depoliticization,” Yakubova reaches for a word she had to build. Genocide is not large enough, so she borrows ontocide — “the total annihilation of all that exists, war with being as such.”

Read the two registers side by side and you see the whole problem.

In Prokopenko’s report the word genocide does not appear once. Neither does “war crime,” “atrocity,” “Bucha,” or “Mariupol.” The word structural appears eight times. A paper about the people who ran Russia’s war manages never to name the war’s nature, and names “structure” instead at every turn. That absence is not an oversight. It is the method.

The whole argument turns on one question: did they choose?

Prokopenko’s answer is the keystone of the entire exculpatory architecture: the elite’s conformity

“is therefore not an aberration or down to the individual character of its representatives, but the structural result of institutional design.”

Agency is written out and posted to impersonal design. No one inside the system can be blamed, because the system explains them completely.

Yakubova’s answer is the exact reverse, and she states it without flinching. “One is very mistaken,” she writes, “who considers the people enslaved by the components of this system… The stable 4/5 of the population… are its demographic base and co-author.” Co-author. Not hostage, not herd — author. “Imperceptibly to the russians themselves,” she goes on, “they ‘tied’ themselves with the blood of Ukrainians and made themselves collective accomplices in a crime against humanity.” Where Carnegie sees a structure that happened to people, Yakubova sees people who, choice by choice, built the structure and then loved it: “The people ‘recognized themselves’ in the collective putin. They recognized themselves and took pride. They took pride and loved with sincere love.”

Here is the part that should embarrass the title. “Loyal but powerless” is not Prokopenko’s discovery — Yakubova got there first, and meant the opposite by it. On nominally their own land, she writes, the Putin electorate is “absolutely powerless,” and then comes the line no reader forgets: “To feel themselves ‘supermen’ fell to them only with unarmed Ukrainians.” Same powerlessness. But where the report uses it as an alibi, the historian follows it down to its monstrous compensation — a people impotent at home that discovers its only taste of power in cruelty abroad. She even dates the surrender: “so-called learned helplessness begins already at the 30-year mark.” The powerlessness is real. It is also chosen, and the regime converts it into violence. That is the analysis the report had every piece for and declined to make.

What “a view from within the system” actually looks like.

The report’s evidence is a sequence of confessions, quoted warmly and left unanswered. A deputy minister recalls requisitioning land: “At first, such talk seemed a bit barbaric, but then I got used to it. It’s only a job, at the end of the day.” A technocrat explains why he stayed after the invasion: “I see no job that would offer more interesting work for an economist than the post I hold right now. We’re at the epicenter of a vast structural transformation of the economy.” On the annexation of Crimea, the report records “an enormous amount of follow-on bureaucratic work” — and, in a subordinate clause buried between tax revenues and a new ministry, that “Ukrainian citizens and companies on the peninsula had their property confiscated,” which “did not spark any internal conflict within them, since they were simply following orders.” Simply following orders, written down in 2026 without irony.

This is the Distributed Tyrant in field-notes. Every confession is allowed to stand as data about the speaker’s feelings, never once measured against the man being tortured a few hundred kilometres away. The victims are not disputed in this report. They are simply absent.

Which brings us back to who is doing the viewing.

Tatiana Stanovaya, who told the world this paper was essential, is herself a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center — the same center that publishes Prokopenko, a fellow there and a former adviser at Russia’s central bank until 2022. One Carnegie fellow crowning another Carnegie fellow’s Carnegie paper, and selling you the author’s nearness to the apparatus — “a view from within the system” — as the reason to trust it. But nearness to the machine is the affliction this paper suffers from, not the cure it offers. Carnegie has form here. For years its Moscow Center was directed by Dmitri Trenin, who after February 2022 surfaced as one of the establishment voices articulating the war’s real legal payload — the re-establishment, in his phrase, of “the supremacy of national legislation over international treaties,” which is the whole project in a single clause. A Western institution lent that man its patina for decades. Now its network gathers to amplify the next one.

And here is the part that should unsettle anyone who assumes the danger left Russia with the émigrés. Prokopenko is not a Kremlin mouthpiece. She left; she is in the West; she sits at Carnegie with no security service at her shoulder. Name a meme by what it does, not by what its author feels — and judged that way, this is the more disturbing case, not the lesser one. The apparatus’s own story — none of this is on me — no longer needs the apparatus to carry it. It reproduces itself through people the Kremlin no longer controls, inside the institutions the Kremlin most wants to reach. That is what a deep troll is: not a paid lie, but a frame built so well that free people rebuild it for free.

Yakubova has a name for that kind of “freedom” — the kind that changes the wallpaper and keeps the house standing.

She calls it a reboot, and sets it against metanoia, a real change of mind, “a root-and-branch reconstruction of social practices.” The reboot is the cosmetic kind: “a switching off of the towers, a rewriting of history textbooks,” the ritual repentance “after which there follows neither punishment, nor comprehension, nor atonement.”

“The rebooting of a totalitarian system,” she writes, “has as its consequence that same totalitarian system.”

The “we were all powerless” story is the reboot’s advance guard — the script for sanctions relief, for the Marshall plan that arrives instead of the reckoning, for mercy extended to people who were, you understand, never really there. A powerlessness paper written from safety and amplified by a Western network is a reboot with footnotes.

Same inheritance. Opposite choice.

Russians and Ukrainians came out of the same Soviet wreckage. Carnegie says that inheritance produced a herd with no agency. Then explain Ukraine — and here Yakubova’s prose lifts into something the report could never reach. She describes “Berdiansk-folk, Melitopol-folk, Kupiansk-folk and Sumy-folk, not rarely women and villagers,” who “stop enemy columns, expelling them from their own land without weapons.” A mother stands one-on-one at a Russian checkpoint, her children in the car, and reads the occupiers the Constitution of Ukraine. “This is an epos!” Yakubova writes. “The epos of the nation in the fullness of vital force!” I have stood in one of those squares. In Dnipro, as an OSCE monitor, I watched perhaps a thousand ordinary citizens convene a veche — the old people’s assembly of our shared inheritance — and burn a white flag of surrender. Vitaliy Oleshko (callsign: Sarmat), a veteran who would not stay quiet, was shot dead for it in Berdiansk in 2018. A Moscow technocrat who objected risked a dacha. Oleshko paid with his life.

The agency was always on the shelf, at every price up to and including death, and Ukrainians bought it. The Russian elite looked at the same shelf and chose acquiescence — and the choice of acquiescence is still a choice.

So we are being short-changed, and it is worth saying plainly. The Western reader is handed the insider’s managerial frame, amplified by Carnegie’s own people, while the historian who actually names the thing — ontocide, co-author, the lie that binds dictator and people into one “symphony” — goes untranslated and unread. One book studies how the managers of a genocide came to feel comfortable. The other mourns the Greeks of Mariupol, “a unique people… being wiped from the face of the earth,” and asks what is owed. Yakubova puts her whole ethic in two sentences:

“One will have to call things by their names. In order to give a meager chance for at least someone to exit from the mirror hall of perfected evil.”

That is the opposite of finding a new word for complicity. And it matters now, because the bill is about to come due. As I write, Ukraine is besieging Crimea — not with an army on the isthmus, but by strangling its supply routes, a siege “in the modern sense,” isolation that is already draining the peninsula’s fuel. In March 2022 I made a prediction: as Ukraine moves closer to retaking Sevastopol, Crimea, and the bridge across the Kerch Strait, “anti-imperialist” and self-declared “leftist” voices will cry Versailles! Versailles! That chorus is tuning up, and “Loyal but Powerless” is its sheet music — the scholarly proof, filed in advance, that nobody on the Russian side could have done otherwise, so nobody on the Russian side should have to answer.

Read the other book. Yakubova does not run a country across eleven time zones, and she does not need a new word for what its rulers did — she has the right ones, and she uses them. The powerless do not bomb maternity wards and draft the next decree before the rubble cools. Agency that can do all of that can also stop. The mother at the checkpoint knew it. Oleshko knew it, and died of it. Carnegie knows it too — which is exactly why it needed a new word.

Disinfolklore

Podcast | The Lie as Binding Agent, the Pickup Artist, Their God Is War, and the Vanished Koshchei

I am going to continue today the series on The Beast from the Abyss, this brilliant book by a renowned Ukrainian historian. Last week, you may remember, I got to her chapter on the deep folk — which is the moniker that the Russist former deputy prime minister of Russia, Vladislav Surkov, used. He used this term, deep folk, to describe, highly ironically, the Russians, and Larysa is basically parsing this troll into its parts and making a play on the words…

Listen now

a month ago · 3 likes · Decoding Trolls

⚡️The week the dragon set fire to its own temple

Overnight on 14–15 June 2026, in the heaviest barrage on Kyiv in a fortnight — dozens of drones and at least fifteen ballistic missiles — Russia set the roof of the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra ablaze. The Lavra: founded in the 11th century, a UNESCO World Heritage site, the cradle of all Eastern Slavic Orthodox monasticism, the single stone on which the whole “Holy Rus” claim is supposed to stand. Its reserve’s director says it is the first time a structure of the monastery has been hit since World War II.

The state that says it fights to defend Orthodox civilisation set fire to the holiest roof in that civilisation.

The dragon burned the temple it claims to guard.

And the night before, Ukraine took down one more of the last crossings onto occupied Krym.

Two acts. The arsonist, and the surgeon. Watch the second one.

Disinfolklore

Podcast | The Beast from the Abyss

The Sovereign Writes His Enemy a Letter…

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2 months ago · 7 likes · Decoding Trolls

⚡️Why this is NOT Troy

In my forthcoming book on the Kremlin’s captured philosopher I make a careful discrimination, and it matters this week more than ever.

The fall of Mariupol in 2022 was Troy. A walled city, a fused population, the largest defenders the side could field holding the last citadel at Azovstal — siege, then surrender. The substrate (the civilians) could not be separated from the shield (the soldiers). No small actor. No release. That is the Iliad pattern, and it has its own iron logic: the city falls, and an age ends with it.

Crimea is the other myth entirely.

Crimea is Indra-Vritra.

⚡️Crimea is the dammed water 🔱

Here is the thing the surface-reading never sees. Crimea is not a citadel. Crimea is water held back.

The oldest story the Indo-European family ever told is the storm-hero — Indra in the Rigveda, Trito at the trident, Inara against Illuyanka in Hittite — slaying the serpent that has dammed the cosmic waters, so the rivers run again. The serpent’s whole nature is the hoard: it coils round the flow and holds it.

Now look at what Ruschia actually did to Crimea. In 2014 Ukraine closed the North Crimean Canal — the channel that carries Dnipro water down to the peninsula. So in February 2022, the first engineering act of the full invasion was to blow the Ukrainian dyke and seize the canal back by force. The dragon dammed the Dnipro substrate, then coiled itself round the water it had taken.

Vritra is not a metaphor here. It’s the operational order of battle.

⚡️The bridges are the dragon’s coils

If Crimea is the hoard, the Kerch bridge and the road-and-rail crossings are the coils — the structures by which the serpent keeps the stolen waters sealed, supplied, and unreleased.

So watch the instrument doing the cutting. Not a great fleet. Not a hundred-thousand-man front. A swarm of uncrewed Magura sea-drones — small, cheap, sovereign-sanctioned — that have already put the flagship Moskva on the seabed (two Neptunes, April 2022) and chased “the World’s Second Biggest Navy®” out of the western Black Sea entirely.

Small actor. Sovereign assent. Severing the coil to release the flow.

That is the Trito signature, exactly. The smallest available force restoring the substrate — not the Troy pattern of force-on-force surrender. As I wrote when the first drones hit: there’s a new sheriff in town.

⚡️I sat by this water for four years

Let me authenticate this, because I’m not theorising it from a desk.

From 2018 to 2022 I was an OSCE environmental-security adviser based in Zaporizhzhia, on the lower Dnipro — the exact stretch of river the Kakhovka reservoir backs up and the North Crimean Canal draws down. My actual job, for four years, was the security of water: who holds it, who can weaponise it, what happens downstream when someone upstream decides a river is a weapon. I watched the canal dispute up close, from the Ukrainian bank, before most Western capitals could find Krym on a map.

So when I tell you Crimea is the dammed water and not the besieged citadel, understand that I am describing a thing I was paid to monitor with my own eyes. The water is the whole story. It always was.

⚡️The cathedral is the tell — Accusation-in-a-Mirror

Now bring the two acts of the week back together, because they are the same move.

When Ruschia blew the Nova Kakhovka dam in 2023, the draining reservoir uncovered the best-preserved Yamna-predecessor site on earth — it exposed, in the most literal mud, the steppe substrate the apparatus claims to be recovering. The dragon destroyed the substrate it said it was defending.

This week, the same grammar, on holier ground. And here is the detail that should end the argument: Yuriy Dolgorukiy — the prince who founded Moscow — lies buried on the grounds of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, at the Church of the Saviour at Berestove. The state that wages this war in the name of Russkiy Mir set fire to the cathedral standing yards from the grave of Moscow’s own founder. Ukraine’s culture minister Tetyana Berezhna called it “one of the gravest crimes against world cultural heritage” — and it is, squarely, an attack on enhanced-protected property under the 1954 Hague Convention’s Second Protocol.

Eurasianism is being refuted by the topography of its own war. You cannot bury your founder in Kyiv, call Kyiv the cradle of your world, and burn the roof above his tomb in the same week — and expect the claim to outlive the smoke.

The dragon always burns the thing it guards. 🙄

⚡️Crimea Kompromat — the hoard that kills the hoarder

I called this on 1st March 2022, and I’ll stand on it.

“Crimea, like Rasputin, has hypnotised Russia into remaining long enough to suffer complete defeat.” Crimea Kompromat.

That is the deep cruelty of the Vritra pattern, and it is why this is the most important siege in a hundred years. The serpent cannot let go of the hoard — the hoard is its whole identity — so it dies coiled around it. Every bridge severed tightens the bind. Duncey Putin cannot abandon Krym without abandoning the one trophy the entire 2014 myth was built on; so he will feed an army into a sealed peninsula to keep it.

The hypnosis is the mechanism. The hoard is the trap.

⚡️The Black Sea always settles this ⚓️

The historians among you already heard the echo. The last time the world decided what Sevastopol was for, it took the siege of 1854–55 and the Treaty of Paris in 1856 to neutralise the Black Sea by law. Before German guns, before Ruschian ones, the Allies sat outside that same harbour. The greatest siege Sevastopol has seen since was 1942 — eighty-four years ago, near enough your hundred.

The Black Sea is where this empire’s overreach has always been adjudicated. It is being adjudicated again, and this time the verdict is being written by drones the size of a rowing boat.

Pattern recognition.

⚡️Run both acts through the Code

People ask how you can call one act of war righteous and another criminal when both are violence. You proof them. The Code of Positive Trolls® gives you the six criteria — Generosity, Rightness, Patience, Joyous Perseverance, Focus, and Insight — and you ask of each act whether its energy honours the underlying flow or violates it.

Proof the arson of the Lavra. Generous? It destroys a thousand-year inheritance belonging to everyone. Right? It is a strike on protected sacred ground by the side that claims to defend it. The Mana is contempt dressed as piety. Verdict: Disinfolklore. Negative.

Proof the severing of the bridge. It carries no civilians, opens no graves, claims no metaphysical destiny — it simply unseals an occupied peninsula so its deported people can come home. Patient, focused, proportionate, sovereign-sanctioned. Verdict: Counter-Disinfolklore. Positive.

Same week. Same word, “war.” Opposite Mana.

That is the whole method in two strikes. You got the decode.

⚡️The law, and the waters coming home

Strip the myth and the law says the same thing the myth does.

Severing the supply onto occupied Crimea is lawful self-defence to restore occupied sovereign territory — UN Charter Article 51, the bedrock of the post-1945 order. The burning of an 11th-century monastery is a strike on enhanced-protected cultural property under the 1954 Hague Convention and its Second Protocol, sitting beside the deportation of Ukrainian children (ICC warrants, March 2023) and the Genocide Convention thresholds the apparatus has been crossing since 2014. The dragon’s whole campaign is a charge sheet; the surgeon’s drones are a defence brief.

And under the myth, the verdict is older than any treaty. The serpent dammed the waters. The hero severs the coil. The waters run.

When the last coil is cut, Crimea does not “fall” the way Troy fell — it is released: the Tatar deportees come home, the North Crimean Canal runs as a river not a weapon, the sea-lanes reopen. The substrate returns to its proper flow.

Mariupol was Troy. Crimea is Indra-Vritra.

The dragon is going to die guarding its hoard. 🔱🇺🇦

Disinfolklore

Podcast | The Beast from the Abyss

The Sovereign Writes His Enemy a Letter…

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2 months ago · 7 likes · Decoding Trolls

1. Disinfolklore.eu website: https://disinfolklore.eu/Disinfolklore/Mechanisms/Archetypes/Mother-and-the-Maiden/01-The-Walk-In-Story/

2. Externalising how I parse Russian and MAGA Disinfolklore by training an artificial neural network (NN) algorithm to itself train a large language model that will parse the Mana in Memes in data into Disinfolklore/Infolklore.

   I ran a Bloomberg pice on Disinformation through my partially trained artificial neural network training algorithm.

   It responded thus:

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

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

As my dedicated readers (and some of you fund my/this frontier work through your generous paid subscriptions), I wanted to keep you posted on what’s going on, under the hood as it were. Beneath the public posting. More soon. In the meantime available on every major podcast platform of via the link here:

Disinfolklore

Podcast | Merciless Sovereign Goes Hungry

The Archetype Series: Recap and Context…

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3 months ago · 4 likes · Decoding Trolls

Luhansk Corpus Archetypes 4-7

⚡️80m Ruschists head to Red Square.

After President Zelenskyy declared Red Square tomorrow only place in Ruschia safe from Ukrainian strikes, Ruschia’s entire population plan to attend parade and remain there ever after.

⚡️A government which exchanges Mana / energy by dancing together stays together. Great Omen. Russians have lost everything.

⚡️The map of future Russia.

Russians need to accept the ‘loss’ of Crimea, otherwise they need to prepare to live only inside the borders of Leninhrad and Moscow.

There’s no mention of ‘losing’ Crimea anywhere in any of the doom-laden messaging.

Therefore, the war will continue, until the Russian ‘ethnos’ as Putler calls it is confined to borders probably even shorter than those of Russian Soviet Socialist Republic: 1672 borders would be acceptable.

Everything else is noise.

Shehbaz Sharif

@CMShehbaz

X.com

Violations of ceasefire have been reported at few places across the conflict zone which undermine the spirit of peace process. I earnestly and sincerely urge all parties to exercise restraint and respect the ceasefire for two weeks, as agreed upon, so that diplomacy can take a lead role towards peaceful settlement of the conflict.

@realDonaldTrump

@JDVance @SecRubio

@SteveWitkoff

@SEPeaceMissions @drpezeshkian

@mb_ghalibaf

@araghchi

This was not In addition to other communications. This is how the ceasefire violations are being certified. While a diplomat monitoring and reporting on Russia’s violations of the Minsk ceasefire Agreement in eastern Ukraine in 2015-2018, I dreamed of such instant karma. Instead I would certify violations. My line manager would counter sign. The certification would go up the chain of command and never be seen again. Meanwhile, in the public sphere, the impression was: ceasefire holding.

⚡️Iran War: Analytical Failings

Both Israel and the United States, I fear, looked at Russia’s imbroglio in Ukraine and ignored how much of what caused it will effect their quaint 20th Century armies:

Disinfolklore

Podcast | The Corpus and the Elephant in the Room

This data set of 10,000 propaganda items, which I collected in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, is the basis of Disinfolklore. It is the basis of my insight about archetypes. I had not really systematically gone through it to take out all of the main archetypes and sub-archetypes from this corpus, as it were. I have done this now, and I have quite a number of individual papers on it, which I thought I would go through…

Listen now

4 months ago · 3 likes · Decoding Trolls

hubris, old fashioned weapons systems, democratisation of warfare, asymmetry in ‘existential’ war asymmetry, damage to the rear aggregates.

The fact of Iran already having at least hundreds of thousands of Shahed drones as well as foreseeable millions of First Person View (FPV) drones means:

Gulf states and perhaps even Israel can became uninhabitable. Sure, America thinks it can make Iran uninhabitable too: yet that’s the problem:

For Iran, the war was and is existential. For Israel and America the war was a choice.

Yet, now because of the essential asymmetry of warfare, pioneered by Ukraine, David has the means of smiting Goliath.

Watching Ukraine disassemble Russia over the past 18 months has been a lesson US and Israel’s war mongers should have learned. Deceiving their respective people into a war they cannot win and which will, potentially, as has happened to Russia destroy them is a terrible error, morally and analytically.

This data set of 10,000 propaganda items, which I collected in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, is the basis of Disinfolklore. It is the basis of my insight about archetypes. I had not really systematically gone through it to take out all of the main archetypes and sub-archetypes from this corpus, as it were. I have done this now, and I have quite a number of individual papers on it, which I thought I would go through…

⚡️Syria and Ukraine: President Zelenskyy in Damascus.

Russia doubled-down in Syria from September 2015 onwards. Carpet bombing Syria was a successful attempt by Russia to provoke refugee flows into Europe. Out of that human mystery Russia strained the EU, created the Brexit campaign for English ne’er do wells, got Orban and Poland’s law and justice re-elected.

Most of all, Russia created geopolitical capital after the sanctions that followed Crimea, Luhansk/Donetsk and MH-17.

A classic Putler turn-over-the-table move (this Russian habit is why we cannot discount a move on Estonia- though Russia’s trolling of Donald into attacking Iran probably strains Russia way beyond its current bandwidth).

Ukraine however has turned the tables on Russia: Ukraine destroyed the Wanger Nazis Russian army corps which began life as the Slavic Corps in Syria in 2013. Destroying the Wanger Nazis in Bakhmut drove the Chef Saucerer who got Trump elected in 2016 and Brexit done mad. Then Ukraine helped Sharaa’s forces expel the Russians from Syria.

Today, Ukraine’s power projects south from Crimea accords Anatolia into Iran, Mesopotamia, and the Nortb African coast and into Sudan.

⚡️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…

Disinfolklore

Podcast | The Corpus and the Elephant in the Room

This data set of 10,000 propaganda items, which I collected in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, is the basis of Disinfolklore. It is the basis of my insight about archetypes. I had not really systematically gone through it to take out all of the main archetypes and sub-archetypes from this corpus, as it were. I have done this now, and I have quite a number of individual papers on it, which I thought I would go through…

Listen now

4 months ago · 3 likes · Decoding Trolls

⚡️Donald’s Robo Pen Untruth - War Crimes Defence?

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Broge Day, all wrapped up in one mIran There will be nothing like it!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or yout be ling in Hell-SUST WATCHI Praise be to Allah O esidenDONALD J TRUMP

I see Donald’s latest Untruth is published genuinely on his Untruth Social site.

But it’s not Don’s normal modelled ‘voice.’

This is like some tripping to wow in Jane Austen’s style, but ending up with Jay McInerney at his most gross - it’s that jarring a code switch.

I’ve never seen that voice under the Donald brand before.

I don’t know what it means: His voice is so easy to mimic (see Gavin Newsom’s tweets below).

I find it very odd whoever wrote that Untruth wasn’t bothered to write the scripted Unttuth in Donald’s ‘normal’ online voice.

Again, I don’t know what this means.

But it does mean or indicate *something *🤷🏾‍♀️

⚡️Don’s Ceasefire Trolling.

In Don’s fake Ukraine peace talks we became used to Don’s ceasefire soap opera dramas.

Same trick Russia played between 2015-2022 with its fake ceasefires in Ukraine - I was there I witnessed thousands of ceasefire breaches nightly by Russia on the contact line.

Yet, “Ceasefire” offers an alibi to minds Ben need by the blowing hot, blowing cold Coercive Control Mechanism Donald (and Russia) use to control us.

Wife-Beater Logic is the governance method: threaten civilisation map annihilation, then soothe the pain with a mythical ceasefire.

⚡️Real Iran Deal: Don’s Unified Reich, Ceasefire Trolling and Coercive Controlling Humanity

1. Mad Don and the Mad Mullahs share a vision for humanity: Handmaid’s Tale.

Landing zone for Iran-MAGA deal was always: Don lets Iran prosper, subjugate freedom and women, while MAGA America continues to spread Handmaids Tale community everywhere on earth.

Sure, this is a mess. But the effect is the same:

Don’s Unified Reich IS unity with CCP, Iran, Russia and N Korea’s Axis of Misogyny.

If Vance, Don, CCP, Putler and the Hungary guy get their way: mass deportations of anyone who won’t submit and mass submission of the female half of humanity to Handmaid’s Tale.

2. Archetyping War as “Ceasefire” and War as “Peace” is the troll Russia been using ever since the Minsk Agreements in Ukraine. For three years on the frontline in eastern Ukraine (2015-2018) as a diplomat I monitored the “Ceasefire.” Not one day went by without Russian trolling artillery bats he’s and heavy machine guns and snipers targeting Ukraine defenders. I certified these violations yet to the governments guaranteeing Minsk, the ceasefire held.

Those who’s watched Don model his “Give Ukraine to Russia” strategy as “peace talks” for the past two years find it maddening the same troll is now being used with Iran. Last July: same troll. Don attacks Iran then unilaterally claims “Ceasefire” and “War is over.”

3. Effect of this whip-lash: “end to civilisation” v “ceasefire” / “peace in our time” is same as Wife Beater Coercive Control logic applied to the whole of humanity.

Don is wrapping humanity inside a cult: I love you/I hate you. Yesterday I hit you because I love you/today I kiss you/tomorrow you’ll do everything to please Daddy.

It’s the Mana / Energy of Coercive Control: the Epstein Class, CCP and Mullah’s preferred mode of exercising control.

Every cult does it. Mad Don’s ambition, today successfully being realised, is to wrap humanity inside his cult.

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…

Disinfolklore

Podcast | The Corpus and the Elephant in the Room

This data set of 10,000 propaganda items, which I collected in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, is the basis of Disinfolklore. It is the basis of my insight about archetypes. I had not really systematically gone through it to take out all of the main archetypes and sub-archetypes from this corpus, as it were. I have done this now, and I have quite a number of individual papers on it, which I thought I would go through…

Listen now

4 months ago · 3 likes · Decoding Trolls

Disinfolklore

Iran, Inevitability Farming, Reflexive Control

Munich Speech Forecast…

Listen now

4 months ago · 1 like · Decoding Trolls

Now that Putler’s reign is ending, his last throw of the dice is to turn Donald up to 11.

While you’re sitting there marvelling at this or that nonsense from Donald or his crew, your mind is being trained.

Iran, men wearing fake boobs, Rubio’s latest howler, whiskey Pete’s war crimes…

These are all just means (and memes) to addle our minds and to wrap us up inside a Disinfolklote Universe (see disinfolklore.eu/About/The-Well…).

Now that Putler is about to be forced from power, he’s trying to model his usefulness by turning the Don Dial up to 11.

You see, whoever in the Ruschist power vertical controls Donald controls Russia.

The oligarch coup plotters are being bought off by sanctions relief and Donald’s monstrous actions by destroying America, Americans’ minds and ours.

⚡️America’s Existential Iran War

America is dealing with two Russias (Putler’s Russia and that of the oligarchs who will succeed him).

These two Russias are simultaneously fighting America and seducing America.

Donald, confusedly, is trying to negotiate a truce between them and with them, simultaneously.

White House (WH) sources cite Iran shooting its aircraft as its pretext to escalate.

Yet, Russian satellite data allowed Iran to destroy one US AWACS eye-in-the-sky command centre and injure four others.

Why would a patriotic America not also use that as a pretext to escalate against Russia?

Instead US has release oligarchs from sanctions and every one of its moves benefits Russia.

What can explain this inconsistency?

Famously, without coordination, two different Russian spy agency accessed Podesta’s Democratic Party emails inbox in 2015 in their campaign to get Donald elected.

Here we go again: uncoordinated America meet Uncoordinated Russia: simultaneously seducing and destroying America. Coercive Control incarnate.

Manufacturing pretexts is what Donald and Putler always do: in doing this they sow the seeds of their own destruction. And tragically, of America.

By abandoning its commitments to its Middle Eastern allies (and by already abandoning and failing to defend at least 11 of its bases), US has lost its gloss.

Facing 100s of 1000s of one way attack drones, watching as Iran makes Middle Eastern countries uninhabitable, and the millions of refugees American action will create:

This is an existential war for America.

⚡️America Abandons Middle Eastern Bases to Use Civilian Hotel Guests as Human Shields.

For millennia retreat from your bases meant defeat.

Not for mad MAGA Don Disinfolklore, America’s answer to Comical Ali.

America fighting on towards the abyss.

Iran’s collection of 200,000 Shahed drones just itching to get going.

Watching the War Against Iran is like watching one of Russia’s knock-offs of, say, HBO’s Chornobyl.

Hearing talking heads who haven’t been watching Russia’s annihilation in Ukraine, daily, for four years opine on America’s progress in Iran is like hearing Russian milbloggers’ prescriptions for Russian ‘success’ 1,000km east of Kyiv after losing 1.3m men failing to capture Pokrovske.

Always one more disastrous last doubling of the bets at a craps table where the House (Iran and Ukraine) has already won the jackpot.

A slow-motion car crash of a teenager (US) making the same mistakes its parent (Russia) made and is still making.

A dizzying reversal of roles worthy of a Kvartal95 sketch that ends up siting Iran and Ukraine in the same position vis a vis their would-be respective annihilators: David vs Goliath.

Russia and America, both senile former superpowers, babbling nonsense as their leadership dissolves in plain view.

⚡️Zelenskyy Succeeds Prighozin

In the months before his coup, NYT, Wash Po, FT, etc began to quote Prighozin as if he was THE truth teller about Russia.

I noted how the Chef’s character was changing in Western media from Putin’s Chef to Chief Prophet, Putin Rasputin.

That helped me forecast Prighozin’s coup a month before it happened: the Apprentice Saucerer was ready to succeed the Master Sorcerer Putin

Today, a similar character change is occurring.

In American and Western media: Zelenskyy is suddenly ALWAYS being quoted as a counter weight to Donald or Putler’s latest trolls.

Changes are afoot.

Revolution in America and Russia are not far off.

Characters as Ideas

You see, in Disinfolklore we look at how characters develop not just in-themselves, but in the perception of humanity.

In folktales, characters are generally stereotypical. They act out ideas. Druidey Don and Duncey Putin are essentially the same characters they were in the nineteen eighties: losers posing as winners.

President Zelenskyy by contrast is wholly on a hero’s journey - in himself and in our minds.

Characters like Right Sector in Russian Disinfolklore are only there to move the plot along. After you have finished the story, you understand everything about the character: they are extremist. Radical. They harm weak women and children.

If you meet the character again in another story, they will always perform as expected.

Over the course of this series of Disinfolklore we will meet these Russian Disinfolklore Bogey Men again and again.

They always perform the same function: they exist to frighten Ukrainians under Russian occupation into thinking they’re better off submitting to Russian occupation.

The Disinfolklore Analytical Method is not merely descriptive or defensive — it is predictive.

The ability to forecast geopolitical events through archetypal structural reading is the method’s most compelling proof of validity.

25+ validated predictions with timestamps, many made when mainstream analysis was consistently wrong. The strongest cluster (March–October 2022) produced 10+ validated predictions in 7 months.

⚡️US regrettably has sprinted into a 21st century war with 20th systems, materiel and leadership.

Pentagon should have prepared already for a years long ground invasion of Iran by now.

Then, while it prepared, decided it was impossible.

Middle East, including Israel and Red Sea shipping, will be hit by hundreds of thousands of Iranian sea and air drones.

US troops, regrettably, won’t be able to defend themselves against millions of cheap FPV drones operated inside Iran.

⚡️Helium’s Last Laugh

Silicon Valley’s Apartheid-era South African PayPal mafia paid for Vance and Donald to get elected.

Now they’re getting their payback - Karma is not mysterious.

The effect is ALWAYS concordant with its cause.

The AI bubble their wealth now depends on is about to burst.

No helium means no AI chips means global stock markets will crash-

All cos Donald, their client, wants to cover up Epstein Island with Kharg Island.

⚡️Why America’s Infinite Patience with Russia Violates the Code of Positive Trolls

Let’s take the US’s claim of merely being patient (the third element in the Code of Positive Trolls) at face value.

Patience / Forbearance are the third elements in the Code of Positive Trolls - the means we use to distinguish Positive from Negative Trolling.

The method we employ to distinguish whether the energy/mana in a story is Infolklore or Disinfolklore.

Therefore, we might think that Patience is ALWAYS a good thing.

If you are Patient, you necessarily conform with the diktats of the Code of Positive Trolls.

How then can the Code of Positive Trolls help us see through the concealment of Donald’s regime’s pro-Russia stance?

Every one of the Code of Positive Trolls’ six elements applies, when we are interpreting data through the prism of each one of its six elements.

Here’s what I mean:

The use of patience to describe the US’s infinite forbearance of Russia - for example, Russia is helping Iran kill US troops in the Middle East.

Yet Donald and his regime host sanctioned Ruschist lawmakers in the House of Congress on the day Iran, with Ruschia’s help, destroys several US tankers and injures dozens of US troops on a US airbase in Saudi Arabia.

Let’s run the idea the US is merely practising forbearance (as distinct from the actuality of America’s capture by the Russian security services) through the Code of Positive Trolls.

Does the value of the US’s

generosity (the Code of Positive Trolls’ first criterion) towards Russia (allowing Russia to murder it’s troops, just as it allowed Russia to pay the Taliban bounty for every American killed in Afghanistan) outweigh the cost to Ukraine, to American service men and women?

To the middle-eastern states who paid for protection in the form of tens of billions in military hardware purchases, investment in Russian mafia fronts Witkoff and Kushner and Don Disinfolklore’s families’ crypto and investment fund scams?

No.

Is the US’s patience with Russia’s murder of its troops ethically disciplined? Is it Right (the second element in the Code of Positive trolls)?

Remember, our standard is the post World War Two legal order, which guarantees Ukraine and Middle Eastern states’ territorial integrity. Their security.

USA (and Russia) guaranteed Ukraine’s security in the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 in exchange for Ukraine committing to give up its nuclear arsenal.

US’s infinite patience towards Russia is a breach of its commitment to Ukraine and the Middle Eastern countries it also provided security guarantees to.

Therefore America’s claim that its infinite ‘patience’ towards Russia is consistent with the Code of Positive Trolls falls.

This infinite patience by the US towards Russia in violating even one of the elements of the six element of the Code of Positive Trolls (whereas in fact as we’ve seen it violates the first two elements) means it fails to pass the test set by the Code of Positive Trolls.

Therefore, Rubio and the rest of his pro-Russia/Russian kompromat compromised war criminal Russian mafia surrogates are Negative Trolls and are engaging in Disinfolklore.

Don’t let their trolls into your Inner Mind.

⚡️Iran Back in the Stone Age and Don’s Jan 6 Indictment.

In Iran’s ancient Avesta it is said of the future Lord of Death Yima (who corresponds to Odin in Germanic cultures - for whom our Wednesday is named):

“For a long time Yima holds the ‘sovereign empire over all the lands,’ and his reign, of untold prosperity, is protected by the

*x’aranah, that mark of divine election which guarantees and expresses the legitimacy of a king. But one day he commits a sin. According to the single passage that mentions it in the remaining Avesta, the sin is lying: his extraordinary prosperity, Yast 19,33 says emphatically, lasted until ‘he lied,’ until he ‘began to think the lying word, contrary to truth.’”

Etymologically “truth” corresponds to what “is. That which exists, is positive and not illusory.”

“Rtá” is opposed to “drúh” in the ancient Indian Vedic language.

“Arta” is opposed to “druj” in the ancient Iranian Avestan language.

The idea and form of the signifier “Art” as that which is created which reveals truth stems from this.

In the language of Darius the Great, Iran’s founder of the Achmenid Empire’s inscriptions, drauga, the “lie,” is essentially the attitude of rebels, of usurpers or potential usurpers who deceive the people by pretending to he “king” in place of Darius himself (Darius I (522–486 bce) founded the Achmenaid Empire that ruled Judea, Greece, and other lands for 300 years).

Now in Trump Jan 6th insurrection indictment, paragraph 2:

“...for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false. But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway—to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election...”

Paragraph 4:

“...Each of these conspiracies—which built on the widespread mistrust the Defendant was creating through pervasive and destabilizing lies about election fraud...”

In the ancient Indian text known as the Mahabharata the Sovereign who would become Indian culture’s Lord of Death had ruled entirely justly.

After death, though, Indra trolls him into a mental boast about how he the king had ruled more justly than any other king.

For that prideful lie the dead king was immediately expelled from heaven.

⚡️Bombing Nuclear Plants: Ignoring Nuclear Crimes

I’ve chronicled the only occupation of a nuclear plant in world history: disinfolklore.eu/About/The-Well…

Russia has been bombing and occupying Europe’s largest nuclear plant since 6 March 2022.

Using it as cover, Russia has murdered thousands of civilians, including nuclear engineers divers. Yesterday, Russia used the nuclear plant as cover to murder 5 civilians in Nikopol.

If you’re suddenly worried about nuclear plants being bombed, why?

You didn’t understand the new world Russia has ushered in?

The first occupation of a nuclear power plant in world history.

Contemporaneous reporting by a former OSCE Environmental Security adviser who personally visited Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant before the occupation. Every tweet dated and preserved as a primary historical record.

425 tweets. 39 months.

https://disinfolklore.eu/About/The-Well/Case-Studies/Analysis/ZNPP-Enerhodar-Chronicle/

⚡️Iran War: Analytical Failings

Both Israel and the United States, I fear, looked at Russia’s imbroglio in Ukraine and ignored how much of what caused it will effect them:

hubris, old fashioned weapons systems, democratisation of warfare, asymmetry in ‘existential’ war asymmetry, damage to the rear aggregates.

The fact of Iran already having at least hundreds of thousands of Shahed drones as well as foreseeable millions of First Person View (FPV) drones means:

Gulf states and perhaps even Israel can became uninhabitable. Sure, America thinks it can make Iran uninhabitable too: yet that’s the problem:

For Iran, the war was and is existential. For Israel and America the war was a choice.

Yet, now because of the essential asymmetry of warfare, pioneered by Ukraine, David has the means of smiting Goliath.

Watching Ukraine disassemble Russia over the past 18 months has been a lesson US and Israel’s war mongers should have learned. Deceiving their respective people into a war they cannot win and which will, potentially, as has happened to Russia destroy them is a terrible error, morally and analytically.

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…

Disinfolklore

Podcast | How to Slay the Disinfo Dragon in Real Time (Part 2)

The Trito Myth Continued…

Listen now

4 months ago · 1 like · Decoding Trolls

⚡️ Paradoxes: “We Will Believe Opposites”

Disinfolklore systems are structurally paradoxical. They require populations to believe opposites simultaneously: that Russia is both invincible and victimised; that Trump is both a strong man and a persecuted outsider; that vaccines cause the disease they prevent.

These paradoxes are not bugs — they are features. Yet they also contain the seeds of the system’s destruction: the contradictions in Ruschist Disinfolklore will eventually jam up Ruschism itself.

Again, it’s so absurd. There is this strange effect in our brains that we will believe opposites / paradoxes if there’s some sort of similarity in it.

I had been trying to understand the pattern that I had already noticed in data: that the more opposite the truth is, the more likely certain minds will believe something. How the Russians achieve this! Donald and MAGA do it as well. Where the completely anti-intuitive thing like it’s the vaccines cause the harm, not the virus take hold of our minds.

This is the Law of Similarity from Cultural Psychology / Sympathetic Magic: if two things share a surface resemblance (virus/vaccine), cause and effect can be reversed in the mind. The paradox is the mechanism, not a flaw. War Magic exploits these cognitive vulnerabilities…

https://www.disinfolklore.eu/Disinfolklore/Mechanisms/Sympathetic-Magic/Paradoxes/02-Believe-Opposites/

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.

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.

I suspect that Ruschia’s new leader will instantly model themselves as a ‘liberal’ by restoring access to Telegram.

That this is the true purpose of shutting it down.

The ‘revolution’ will be branded ‘The Telegram Revolution’. To mimic the true belief of Russian security state operatives that Ukraine’s Colour Revolution of Dignity was a CIA plot.

The Disinfolklore has already been written. Durov will be made minister for communications or defence. Ruschia’s attempt to copy Ukraine.

A new Russia will be archetyped. Through Disinfolklore. Cue breathless articles in western media about how a New Order has been established. The millions of Russians who participated in the murder of over a million people in Ukraine are as innocent as the people they murdered. Yaddah, yaddah.

KGB with its stash of Epstein Kompromat affecting MANY countries but mainly Israel and America. KGB will remain in charge, of Russia, of America, of Israel. Through their Kompromatted cut-outs like Kushner (pater and son masking his succession of Epstein with his ‘investment’ fund protection racket that doesn’t provide any protection. Just ask Qatar, by the way Don needs a second gold 747 which Qatar will provide. That’s how protection rackets work.), Witkoff, Bessent, Donald,…

Anyone who tolerated honey-trapping Epstein Kompromised leadership today.

Same families of Chekists/KGB been in charge of Ruschia for 200 years. Same genes. Same memes. Communism, Empire, Russkiy Mir: old wine, new bottles.

Kompromised leaders like Donald and his entire cabinet will campaign to let Ruschia back in to the community of nations. Its people have suffered enough. Yaddah. Yaddah. Paul Manafort has already made a presentation on the campaign to brainwash us.

Look at its new generation of iPhone wielding Telegram using non-complicit population!

It was all Stalin, I mean, Putler’s doing!

The war wasn’t our fault!

We didn’t mean to murder all those Ukrainians!

We was forced to!

By the way, we’re keeping Crimea (note to file: No. You’re. Not)…

I could write the script myself.

How?

Just as I used the Disinfolklore Analytical Method to telegraph the upcoming Chef Saucerer Prighozin’s coup five weeks in advance, here once again I’m using deep knowledge of the mythology structures inside Russian Disinfolklore to predict regime change in Ruschia.

https://www.disinfolklore.eu/Disinfolklore/Mechanisms/Archetypes/Prigozhin-Coup-Forecast/

Same troll every new leader for the past 200 years. We can already see its structure in the Disinfolklore about burning peasants cows alive in Siberia, ‘dissidents’ in mental hones for criticising the czar, excuses for ‘fake’ revolution.

Characters like ‘shutting down Disinfolklore-spreading/propagating Telegram’ then new characters’ liberal credentials established by ‘unshutting Telegram down.’ a new Russia… Yaddah, Yaddah… Regorms. Reformer.

Russia is a One Trick Pony, I mean, Donkey.

Heaps of people (though hopefully not our leaders) will fall for the troll.

Russia’s still thinking it can then continue its murder, genocide and war, while Donald says Ruschia has suffered enough.

This last gasp plan will fail.

Even Donald and America does not have the power/Mana/resources to save Ruschia.

Then, there’s Ukraine which I am quite certain will not relent until this dragon is utterly smited. So that Ukrainians’ children’s children do not have to face this again.

⚡️Podcast | How to Battle Archetyping Disinfolklorists.

Re-Archetyping and the Future of Disinfolklore.

Three World-Changing Events This Week.

Claude Code and Boris Cherry.

The Terminal Self and the Future.

Personal AI Modules: The Disinfolklore Module.

Layers of Neural Networks.

Re-Architecting.

Archetyping and Re-Archetyping as THE Fundamental Units.

The Archaic Origins of Archetypes.

The Impenetrability Problem.

Disinfolklore Website.

One Set of Lenses Among Many.

The Shakespeare Parallel.

The P.T. Barnum Mirror.

What I Actually Mean by Archetype and Re-Archetyping.

Bringing Archetypes Down to Earth.

Information Forms Us.

Archetypes in Action.

The Trito Myth…

Available wherever you get your podcasts, and here:

Disinfolklore

Podcast | How to Battle Archetyping Disinfolklorists (Part 1)

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…

Listen now

4 months ago · 1 like · Decoding Trolls

⚡️Who’ll Inherit Epstein Kompromat After Putler Dies?

300,000 Russians emigrated to Israel in 1991. Only jobs they could get were in the army. So, Israeli Army became a facsimile of Russia’s.

Meanwhile, in New York, Kushner (pater), Witkoff and Donald operated as fronts for Epstein and the rest of the Brighton Beach Russian mafia.

Kushner (pater) now, disgracefully, US’s ambassador to France even served time for honey-trapping his brother-in-law.

To be clear: Russian mafia are in control of Don’s America, Israel and, for the time being, Russia.

The nuance is: When Putler dies, Don’s afraid the Epstein kompromat that drives him and his cabinet to ever more War Crimes will be up for grabs.

In ancient times, x v ’ranah / Chrism / the Rod belonged to the rightful sovereign.

In Ruschia, it’s possession of the Epstein Kompromat.

The joke, however, is on the Russians: even though they own America, own Israel, own Russia, they still can’t conquer tiny villages 1,200km east of Kyiv.

⚡️ When Putler dies: Silicon Valley, Russian ‘Liberals,’ and Liberation of Crimea.

Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists will panic - how many criminals will arrive to take control of Putler’s trillion dollar takings? How many funds will they need to unwind. Who are the legitimate heirs of Putler’s bad fortune? Metaphorical blood bath central.

Ruschist elite will select their chosen successor: a ‘Liberal’ who will model their ‘acceptability’ to the West by using an iPhone. Telegram will be switched on. The ‘revolution’ will be archetyped as ‘The Telegram’ revolution. Donald will play his assigned role: ‘time to make peace with the Ruschists. They’ve suffered for too long.’

Ruschia will use all its information resources to attempt to keep Crimea. We must not fall for this troll.

Westerners will be tempted to fall for the troll. Again. Just as we fell every time a new czar, new Party Secretary, new President was anointed. The previous one scapegoated.

The murder, genocide, pillaging, invasions would continue, as they have done for centuries, if we fall for this troll again.

Here’s the thing: Ukraine will not relent until ALL Ukrainian land is retrieved from the genocidal monster regime east of the Don. Bank on this.

⚡️Mapping past work unto our AI present - case to include artists.

@mbrendan1’s mockup of how would @AnthropicAI’s new labor automation chart would’ve looked 200 years ago.

Importance and immanence of the poet/artist/writer maintains its steady importance over time. I built Disinfolklore.eu with ClaudeCode inside terminal.

It’s a means of moderating all communications online and (as poets/artists have done in Indo-European societies since the beginning 4,100 BCE) offline. A fusion of the legal/priestly/religious functions in your chart.

Think of each Irish monarch needing a poet to ensure defence against satirical attacks by competing monarchs’ poets. Ridicule undermines sovereignty as Hegseth and Donald are/will finding out.

⚡️Huntington divides a number of Indo-European traditions (Western, Islamic, Sinic/Confucian (Buddhist, Communist, Mongolian, Tarim Basin Indo-Europeans), Hindu, Japanese (Indo-European Buddhists), Orthodox/Slavic (Indo-European), Latin American (Indo-European), and possibly African (non-Indo-European)/Buddhist (like Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity-archetypal Indo-European religions)).

Having set up his random categories of great Indo-European peoples (leaving out Greeks, Celts, Iranians, etc), he then offers anti-humanist neocons a perfect excuse to scapegoat those professing one of the great Indo-European religions (Islam) for wanting to annihilate adherents to another great Indo-European religions (Christianity).

Then those promoting America’s hegemonic suicide today Like Rubio (grandson of an illegal migrant who self-identifies as a Spanish aristocrat use Huntington’s provincial troll to attempt to hack European democracy and troll Europe also into committing hegemonic suicide.

See Finding Manuland:

https://www.disinfolklore.eu/Finding-Manuland/

⚡️Ruschia’s latest ‘anchoring’ Anchorage troll.

Kahnman won a Nobel prize for demonstrating how anchoring effects work to manipulate our identities unconsciously.

Ruschia’s latest Archetyping of nothing as the ‘Anchorage Formula’ is another masterful use of language to conjure into being mere spectral fever dreams.

Tool 1: Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy

The first tool in the arsenal. Disinfolklore, as an analytical method, enables us to perceive how those seeking to manipulate us use archetypes immanent in ordinary-seeming stories to create contemporary legends masquerading as news or political speech. Learning to see archetyping is, for us mere mortals, a superpower… https://www.disinfolklore. com/Disinfolklore/Twelve-Tools/Detection/Tool-01-Archetypal-Literacy/

⚡️Wife-Beater Logic of UK Defence Ministry Guy

UK defence ministry guy, years later, modelling his caution by telling UK journo that in the run-up to Ruschia’s full-scale invasion:

“We had to make sure we weren’t going to do anything that gave them an excuse to invade.”

Same troll that possesses the mind of @FT foreign correspondent @gideonrachman when he opined after Madura was forcibly disappeared by US:

“Now Putler will use this as a precedent to seize President Zelenskyy.”

You see, what Ruschia does is plant mental routines in the minds of well-meaning Westerners that lead them to self-deter and imagine our actions have any influence on Ruschia’s plans to annihilate us.

This Provocation Cycle routine (which I write about here https://www.disinfolklore. com/Disinfolklore/Case-Studies/Provocation-Logic-Cycle/) is one of Ruschia’s main means of Reflexively Controlling us.

You can call it Wife Beater Logic: Look what you made me do?

The beaten (like this UK defence ministry guy or Rachman) think themselves into stasis while Ruschia executes its plans to annihilate us, then blame us for Ruschia’s own long-term plans for us.

Know this, Ruschia will destroy everything it can get within artillery range of. Everything.

There’s no action we can do to dislodge or encourage this intention (mens rea). It’s perennial. Has lasted centuries. Has nothing to do with what we do. What we need to do is defend ourselves, not Putin Understand with IR baloney like escalation management or wife beater logic.

Even four years after the full-scale invasion this UK defence ministry guy still hasn’t reflected enough to understand when he thinks his way he’s encouraging Ruschia to destroy us.

Disinfolklore

Podcast | Four Years: The Arc of a War, of one Word

The Arc of a Word: Four Years of Re-Archetyping…

Listen now

5 months ago · 2 likes · Decoding Trolls

⚡️FIMI and Disinfolklore

I’m going to talk about:

1, what the European Union anti-disinformation framework is and what it does well;

2, what Disinfolklore is and does differently;

3, 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;

4, the institutional strengths of the EU that Disinfolklore needs; and

5, a synthesis towards a combined approach…

Available wherever you get your podcasts:

and here:

Disinfolklore

Podcast | Can't Dismantle a Spell Only by Seizing the Spell Book!

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…

Listen now

4 months ago · Decoding Trolls

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 Economistspeaking: “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 Natureand 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 Economistasked 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.

Podcast | Two Shaman Tricksters (Don & Putler) vs. The Comedian

DECODING TROLLS

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20 FEB

From Prime Ministers to Primary Schools: My Vision for Disinfolklore Literacy

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

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There’s a key core module in the disinfolklore analytical method which is what I call the Code of Positive Trolls. It has six elements. The second element is ethical discipline. The first element is generosity.

When a generous person—or when M’ockers is telling a story, what I might call Infolklore, on Volya 4 Ukraine radio space on X Spaces or Spotify —this is ethically disciplined, in the sense that it’s true. They’re not misleading us. As we all know, those of us who listen to M’ockers, she’s very careful about what she believes and what she lets be said. It’s ethically disciplined.

The standard is set by international law, ultimately, from my perspective. Territorial integrity is sacrosanct. Laws against discrimination on the grounds of certain protected characteristics, the Genocide Convention—one of the most agreed-to conventions in human culture—and a whole plethora of legal instruments which are the expressions of ethical standards. I use that standard, the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls, to distinguish between Infolklore and Disinfolklore.

Disinfolklore

Podcast | What's 'Folklore' about Disinfolklore?

I forged the word Disinfolklore out of disinformation and folklore in February 2023…

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6 months ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Decoding Trolls

On the fly, when you’re in your real life and dealing with people—you’re doing a deal, you’re talking about drones, you’re trying to get components, you’re a teacher in school with students firing stuff at you and you’re just trying to work out what’s going on—is this person in good faith?

The first element of the Code of Positive Trolls, which I find particularly useful, is generosity. If I’m picking up genuine real generosity in the other, then I know it’s probably not intentional misdirection. It’s probably infolklore, not disinfolklore. When you pick up a lack of generosity in, say, Donald or others, then you can brand it disinfolklore.

Archetyping Bad Faith

That’s the span between trying to decide in your immediate life whether this is true or not. The definitional disinfolklore is anything Donald says, anything MAGA says. Obviously, until you’ve archetyped them as bad, as not in good faith, you might be confused by little instances. Whereas now we know practically everything he says is bad, yet we still fall for the trolls.

I was watching someone today who always talks about the Ukraine war and the battlefield. They justifiably go off on one and complain about this thing I’ve just spoken about—I skipped over it because I didn’t need to hear them say it as well—where Donald talks about the week and the ceasefire and all that stuff. Then the next story they’re talking about is Donald and the Indian oil deal. We have to try and maintain our consistency between these two manifestations of Donald. If you’ve archetyped him as bad and in bad faith and a con man, then when I find myself falling for one of his trolls—tomorrow he may say, oh, I’m thinking about sending the Tomahawks to Ukraine—we just have to resist falling for this.

We know that everything he says basically is disinfolklore. We don’t know that with other people in our lives, and we’ve all probably experienced situations where you gradually discover someone you relied on and liked and thought was actually in good faith is really spinning lies or tricking you. Then you realise that everything they’ve said is probably what I would call disinfolklore, because it’s not ethically disciplined. It was untrue, it was falsities, it was manipulative—not manipulative in a positive way.

Infolklore Versus Disinfolklore: The M’ockers Example

As Bill Terrier says on Volya4Ukraine Radio, the stories which M.ockers is telling are manipulative—stories on multiple layers. The way she tells them, however, the way she frames them, transforms them into infolklore. When she’s telling a tale of woe of some Ruschist mil-blogger who has published a story on Telegram to manipulate people in Russia into sending him money, or like Gherkin forever trying to persuade Russia’s government to do a full mobilisation—that is definitive disinfolklore, and these are the kinds of stories she’s telling.

We can talk about those stories in a conscious way that transforms them into infolklore. We’re certainly manipulating each other by telling these stories, yet we’re not doing it with mean intent. We’re doing it out of generosity—a bit of light relief in the midst of the pain. We’re also raising money. I noted Wendy’s matching in An Accidental Ukrainian, which I very much appreciate.

Re-Archetyping and the Kennedy Center

We are moving towards an answer to a question posed by Scouts and indeed raised by Ioana about what is the truth. What James alluded to is that the truth, in inverted commas, is at risk of being defined by Donald and Donald’s attempts to re-archetype the Kennedy Center and indeed annihilate Kennedy, this hero of his youth that he wishes to destroy. It’s not enough to have RFK Jr. absolutely annihilate the Kennedys from the inside. I note all of the Kennedys’ letters and warnings to Congress not to allow their father, their uncle, their cousin, their brother to become health secretary.

I’m a little bit more optimistic, however. It was a Ukrainian on the series of Ukrainian TV stations that I just recently discovered—and I know Lexicon has as well—broadcasting in English or AI English. There was a Ukrainian academic at an American university I saw this week. He was very certain, and it lodged a nice germ in my mind about how temporary all of this is.

Of course, as James alluded to, it may not become temporary. This may be this attempt to re-archetype reality and turn the world upside down, to turn falsehood into truth for the usurper—the literal and metaphorical usurper Donald. January 6th, whatever happened in the 2016 and 2024 elections with Russian help—the usurper is attempting to turn the world upside down.

The Reformation Parallel

I’ve alluded to this before. I studied in great detail the early transmission of ideas in the early German Reformation, 1518 to 1530, and the world turned upside down. Sebastian Brant’s late fifteenth-century book, The Ship of Fools, played a really big part in the re-archetyping of the Pope as Antichrist and the use of memes and cartoons to re-archetype the church in a certain way, done by the leaders, the oligarchs.

They succeeded in some ways, yet the Catholic Church is still around and there still is truth—there’s truth in all of our lives. I’m quite optimistic. At the moment we’re in the endgame.

I do note the Kennedy Center and what’s going on there. For those who don’t know: he inexplicably tried to fire the board almost immediately upon getting into office. They resisted. In the end, like a steamroller, he got rid of them. Then he attempted unlawfully to rename it the Trump Kennedy Center. He got all his patsies in there—basically the spouses of all his Epstein-connected cabinet members and lawyers and various people are on the board. He controls the board and performers. This Kennedy Center, as I understand it—correct me if I’m wrong, Wendy or James—was established by an Act of Congress to memorialise and commemorate JFK. That’s its sole purpose. It washed its face and made a surplus of something like $40 million last year. Already Donald has tanked it, as he’s tanked absolutely everything he’s ever been involved in.

I do believe underpinning all of this, along with RFK, and all his other motivations, is this idea of annihilating this golden boy of his youth that perhaps someone he hated in his life talked about. He just wants to annihilate all that is good. I don’t believe he’ll succeed. I don’t believe any of them will succeed at this in the end. The end is coming near.

6,000 Years of Indo-European Truth

Part of my confidence in that actually is my perspective from 6,000 years of Indo-European history and the triumph of right and truth. It’s in our language, it’s in our words, in almost every sentence. The repeated attempts, as memorialised in stories about the devil or the snake or whatever, in every culture going back literally for 6,000 years that we have records for—it’s embedded in our language. The word in Hindi and early Indian languages for snake is nāgī. It means negative. This is what Donald and the devil and Satan and Putler and all of these horrific oligarchs, whom the Epstein system has given us a window into, are trying to do. They are the neg, they are the anti—yet I don’t believe they’ll triumph. We’ve got Ukraine, we’ve got President Zelensky, and we’ve got the truth on our side. We’ve got the disinfolklore analytical method and the disinfolklore perspective.

Disinfolklore’s Building Blocks

I was first going to go through just a couple of the tools—very easy snack bites—then go back to the Battling Archetypes aspect, these twelve tools, which is more longue durée work I’ve been doing for the last few weeks.

Are You New to Disinfolklore?

If you’re new to disinfolklore—actually, that’s a bit of a trick question, because if you live in an information-rich environment today, you’re already steeped in disinfolklore. You just couldn’t notice it until I coined the term to describe how strategically targeted memes affecting our attitudes, motivations, intentions, and moods pass through our incoming troll radars to transform our identities in unseen ways.

Now I’ve named it disinfolklore—just as the writers in the Book of Genesis named things and have Adam and God naming things—you can get your eye in and begin to move forward. Be more mindful about how strategically we are being manipulated by disinfolklore masquerading as news, gossip, advice, both in your online and in your real-life lives.

I see news as a province of folklore, as is disinfolklore. Disinfolklore describes stories, however delivered, that communicate meanness with a view to altering the moods, intentions, motivations, and attitudes of their consumers in ways which satisfy the strategic demands of disinfolklorists.

Donald’s Ceasefire Troll

Take today’s Donald. It’s just so horrid what he said about this fake ceasefire. He was asked in the White House: you agreed with Putler on a ceasefire, yet yesterday was one of the worst attacks of the entire war by Putler on Ukraine—what do you say to that? Donald said, well, you know, he agreed a ceasefire from Sunday to Sunday, and yesterday’s Monday, so of course he had to do it. These two people have been fighting forever for the past few years. It’s a war that wouldn’t have happened, you know, and all that malarkey.

That’s pure disinfolklore. It’s pure meanness. It’s both-sidesing Ukraine and Russia. It’s telling lies. It’s not ethically disciplined. It’s part of Russia’s information war against Ukraine.

As we heard Donald Tusk refer to today—which many of us have come to over the past few weeks—the Epstein relationship with Russia, Donald’s relationship with Epstein and Russia, and this entire governance system in which the honey traps affecting the survivors and victims in awful ways were just part of this awful governance system. We get a great insight into it through this English fellow called Peter Mandelson, whom English listeners will know through all the disinfolklore going back to the days of New Labour. It turns out there’s evidence that while the world financial system was about to fall apart in 2007–2008, and Gordon Brown literally saved the world and rescued Mandelson and made him into a lord so he could be his minister, Mandelson was sharing private correspondence about the bailout with Epstein. These are all Brighton Beach mafia-adjacent people. They’re all Russian, despite their all-American looks. This is all a Russian mafia operation. He’s sharing papers which are then monetised by them and exchanged for influence and other things.

That little vignette seems to illustrate how these people are trying to corrupt and usurp our world and usurp what is right. It’s up to us to ensure they don’t succeed, as we’re trying our best with the Ukraine example. I just don’t think it will succeed.

Disinfolklore Is Empirical and Descriptive

When Donald speaks like that, he is communicating meanness with a view to altering moods, intentions, motivations, and attitudes. He’s intending to depress Ukrainians. It’s just the most horrible thing. If there are sins—venal sins, the worst sins ever in the Catholic Church—that can be committed through words alone, then Donald commits them a thousand times a day. At a time when Ukrainians are freezing, he tempts them into going out in the street with this ceasefire troll. I’m sure very few of them believe in it, but it’s just horrible.

Disinfolklore

Archetypal Disinfolklore

I first noticed the Disinfolklore Universe now spreading through our neural networks, like triffids rewilding the garden of Eden, when it was in a more primitive form. In 2016, I was a diplomat posted to eastern Ukraine. Russia’s army, cosplaying as Little Green Men, Polite Fo…

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a year ago · 11 likes · 2 comments · Decoding Trolls

If you wonder what disinfolklore is: anything Donald ever says—that is just disinfolklore. News reporting this disinfolklore or any other kind is the main means of creating the disinfolklore universe in which we are currently being enmeshed on an unprecedented scale. This is something I’m offering which many practitioners in disinformation don’t offer: the system-wide effects of not just this particular meme by Donald, but the systemic effects of zillions of them—including the missile strikes, Epstein, Putler, and just the whole mess, this forest of horribleness and meanness that all of us have chosen or been chosen to enmesh ourselves in each day.

We are self-realising through it. We’re trying to help Ukraine, trying to stop the usurpers’ win, trying to help truth—meaning territorial integrity, borders sacrosanct, freedom from being missile-struck, freedom from being enslaved by the Russists and all of the terrible consequences that would arise if the purported annexation of Crimea and all that has happened as a result was allowed to stand.

One: disinfolklore is empirical. This is not a theory. It is empirically based, grounded in data. We see it every day. As James pointed out, you can see a family resemblance between what Donald is trying to do to the Kennedy Center and archetyping, one of the weapons in our arsenal as disinfolklore analytical methodologists.

Two: it’s descriptive. Disinfolklore is meant to depress spirits. It affects motivations in order to entrench in people the idea that it’s useless to resist. Donald himself is very descriptive—his tone, his storytelling technique, switching between third person and other perspectives really confusingly for people, is a really effective storytelling technique. He uses resonant verbal images and props, whether it’s a red cap or other devices. The purpose is clear: to depress spirits, whether it’s the spirits of his cynical followers, oligarchs who seek to benefit, or people like us who are appalled by everything that’s going on.

Disinfolklore as a Way of Seeing

Three: it’s a way of seeing. Once you get your eye in, you can use the disinfolklore lens as a way of perceiving certain kinds of patterns in data.

Four: disinfolklore inculcates rules. It normalises certain mental routines. Don’t go to the forest. Don’t bother supporting Ukraine. You’re not Ukrainian. Cross the river and you’ll be forced to become LGBTIQ. There are all these rules, unknown to us, inculcated in our minds through the means of certain strategically designed, emotionally resonant stories. This is a feature of folklore going back forever. One of its great functions is to teach children: don’t go to that forest, don’t go to the island.

Five: it’s also a description of my project. Disinfolklore is a necessary precursor to understanding what counter-disinfolklore consists of. All of this is about—and I try to remember this in my work—not just identifying or describing something terrible and going, oh, I can’t do anything about it. It’s about acting as well. That’s the counter-disinfolklore. All of us have chosen that path, all of us in this space. In the pro-Ukraine community, those who identify as part of NAFO and Volia Radio—we have chosen to counter disinfolklore, to act against it, not just to be consumers of it and throw our hands up and say, okay, I can’t do anything about it, so I’m not going to bother. We’ve chosen to engage in memetic warfare in lots of different ways.

The Intention Problem: Why Effects Matter More

Traditional definitions of disinformation distinguish it from mere misinformation on the grounds of intention to mislead. The problem here is that the same meme, when spoken by me, if I am being *méchant* and deliberately trying to mislead someone, would be disinformation. If Wendy accidentally believed it and just passed it on to James, it would be just misinformation. Its effect is the same if James then passes it on. It doesn’t matter if I’ve deliberately manipulated James and Wendy has accidentally manipulated James. If James then tells his sister or his daughter or his mother, his wife, a cousin, or says it on the radio—the same meme—it doesn’t matter whether it’s intentionally or unintentionally communicated. It’s still alive, it’s been passed on, and the energy inside that meme stays alive.

If we’re truly most concerned about all of this because of its effects—we’re not just interested in disinformation or Ukraine to pass the time. It’s intrinsically interesting, of course, yet we’re also interested because of its impact on people, on their moods. We see what it does to people. We see how Donald has affected all American and practically everyone’s lives on the planet. The same with Putler’s invasion of Ukraine, whether it’s the price of oil or our depressed spirits or 14 million Ukrainian internally displaced people and 9 million who left Ukraine. These have great effects.

It doesn’t matter in some ways about the intention. We can argue all day about Putler’s real intention, yet that doesn’t really matter. What really matters is the effects. That’s where what I try to provide comes in: look for the mana in the meme. That’s one of the main weapons, tools, and unique aspects of the disinfolklore analytical method. We take units of information and attempt to discern the quality of the mana inside them.

Look for the Mana in the Meme

Power of Mana

Finding Manuland: Episode XXIX

Hi there, I'm Decoding Trolls. This is the Power of Mana podcast and the Finding Manuland branch of the Power of Mana podcast. I've recorded two episodes already of Finding Manuland and we're going to give this the moniker Episode Zero because it's an introduction to the podcast…

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2 years ago · 6 likes · 5 comments · Decoding Trolls

As we get better at this—and the first step to getting better is just thinking about doing it—then whether James communicates this meme to me, passes it through the barrier into my brain, into my mind, to kind of tickle my mind, or Wendy does, it doesn’t matter whether James intentionally is manipulating me or Wendy is accidentally manipulating me. If we’ve got this skill of looking for the mana in the meme, looking for what the energy is inside it and how it is affecting my mood, my intention, my attitude—many of us, because we see the family resemblance between different kinds of memes, like the nuclear threats for instance. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from Medvedev or our friend who’s breathlessly repeating something they read in the *New York Post*. We see the energy in this, which is Russia’s attempt to coercively control humanity and get us to surrender to Russism.

That’s a really powerful aspect of disinfolklore: looking for the mana inside the meme.

Power of Mana

Podcast | Peppercorns, Mana, Early Roman Religion (Numenism), Communism and Seeing Life in Memes

As some of you might remember, I studied law. I worked as a property lawyer in London for a little while. One of the features in English law is this idea that sometimes, for whatever reason, commercial property is let at a peppercorn rent. Generally speaking, in this day and age, no peppercorn passes between the landlord and the person who’s leasing the…

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9 months ago · Decoding Trolls

Disgust as an Incoming Troll Radar

Once we’re looking for it, we can create different tools for identifying the energy inside memes. One of the key tools is actually its impact on us. When I heard Donald say this about the ceasefire—and I hope I’m now passing this on to all of you, trying to wrap it so that it’s not just disinfolklore but more infolklore, it’s informing you, a story to inculcate an idea—my emotional visceral reaction was just disgust. Disgust is, of course, one of the tools that Donald and his ilk use. We’ve spoken about this before, especially in the context of contagion. There’s this work by cultural psychologists about how the emotion of disgust, so it is believed, began as a mechanism we use biologically not to drink the poisonous soup, to puke it out or vomit it out. Then it passes from that into culture, and we begin to project disgustingness or non-disgustingness onto different articles or objects.

MAGA attempts to get us to think of Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton as disgusting—the whole Pizzagate thing. Food is intrinsically involved in all of this. When she’s associated with this dark cabal of child slavery, all located in this pizzeria in Washington, D.C., this gets entrenched in people’s minds through disinfolklore, through stories promoted by Fox and through a million different channels. Then you don’t even remember why she disgusts you, yet you sense or feel that disgust.

The moment I felt that disgust with Donald, that reaction on behalf of 42 million Ukrainians and 350 million fellow Americans, my incoming troll radar was activated. I realised: I’m not going to go with this feeling. I’m not going to go with this disgust. I’m going to use it as an example tonight. I’m not going to allow Donald to impact my mood. I’m going to bank it, put it in a little capsule in my mind, then move on from it. Very little of what he does disgusts me in this visceral way, yet that really did because I’m reading about what Ukrainians are going through at the moment—it’s horrific—and just the idea he could explain it away as natural. He lies about the ceasefire, then says, well, you know, it was Sunday to Sunday, so it’s Monday, so obviously he’s going to send his missiles. It’s probably top three worst things a US president has ever and will ever say.

The disgust I felt alerted me to a troll. Someone is trying to get into my mind and I’m going to protect myself from it. That was wrapped up inside his story about missiles and Putler. Incidentally, this was minutes before he took a dump in the Oval Office—yet again, a public defecation with people around, and they hurried everyone out. That’s good counter-disinfolklore. We cannot resist opportunities for toilet humour, especially when this is one of many times he has apparently done this in public.

The Mana of Coercive Control

The energy of Russia’s disinfolklore is coercive control. The mana energy from the macro to the micro—the words of individual Russist so-called mil-bloggers, Russian guys in the field who hang the Russian mobiks upside down on trees—that’s the epitome of coercive control. The way they treat women. The way Epstein and all of those people, all the people in Donald’s cabinet, treat women. The way Donald treats women and people he others.

That coercive control mana energy is inside the memes, inside what they do, inside the stories, inside the way they treat the survivors, as we see with the latest docs dump.

The mana of Russia’s disinfolklore is coercive control. You can back-propagate from that: if you spot coercive control—which is quite carefully defined in English law because it’s now illegal, and which we might know in different ways, having experienced it in our own lives with partners or girlfriends or boyfriends, husbands or wives—there’s a certain level of intensity of coercive control in relationships, usually male on female, that in English statute law is now outlawed.

If you see coercive control in a meme or in a story—either someone trying to coercively control you, or Donald trying to coercively control Ukraine into surrender by withholding intelligence cooperation (forcing them to withdraw from Kursk and all of this), the “perfect phone call” in air quotes, where he was coercively controlling President Zelensky into announcing an investigation into the Hunter Biden troll in return for $280 million worth of Javelin missile systems which Congress had already appropriated specifically for Ukraine, plus a White House visit—that’s coercive control.

The Budapest Memorandum specifically makes it a violation to exert economic coercion on Ukraine by any of the parties, whether England, the Russian Federation, or the United States. Yet we see this normalisation of economic coercion by Donald—tariffs are a form. His whole tariff troll is a form of coercive control, not just on other countries but also on the Americans who are paying the tariffs.

Coercive control is immanent in almost every breath Donald takes as a case study. Once you can see it in him and what he does, you can see aspects of it in what other normal people do, in geopolitics, in what Putler does. Whenever you encounter that energy in memes, you know that’s probably disinfolklore. Someone is probably trying to affect your mood, your motivation, your attitude, and your intentions through a story whose immanence is coercive control.

Coercive Control as a Shortcut

That’s one very common immanence in disinfolklore. If you’re looking for the mana in the meme—the energy in a meme, whether it’s a story someone is telling you, a story you’re participating in with a friend, something on Twitter or X or Instagram Stories, or images, or something you think about—when you identify this aspect of coercive control, you have a shortcut. Often these judgements need to be made quickly in real life. I want the disinfolklore analytical method to be something we can use individually, as I do, in my daily life to get me through the day and to help me navigate very complicated realities.

We’re looking for ways of cutting through the confusion. You’re looking for the mana of the meme, you spot coercive control, then you mount your defence or your counterattack—or you just get out of there. You don’t need to spend three days trying to work out what’s going on. You simply recognise: this is not a story I want to let affect my energy. I don’t want how I act to be changed by this, because someone is deliberately trying to coercively control me into behaviour which is against my identity.

If I allow myself to be coercively controlled—and obviously there are circumstances in which we all have to surrender to it because we’re just not powerful enough to resist at that moment—that doesn’t mean we can’t try to recognise it. Epstein’s victims and Donald’s victims often understand they’re being coercively controlled, like we do, like I do now. We just can’t do anything about it for the time being. We have to wait till we get a bit bigger and find a lawyer or something else.

We can keep our identity—help sustain our identity—by noticing what’s going on and by mentally resisting. If we do find the power to overcome it, that is an identity-preservation process. The opposite is what I’ve described before: the purpose of the disinfolklore universe inside MAGA or inside Russia-occupied Ukraine is to transform our identities through the medium of our moods, intentions, attitudes, and motivations by using stories to attack them and manipulate us—to pulate, to shake our mana, our own energy.

After a time, we’ve acted in ways we would never have dreamed we would act. Take your average MAGA adherent and bring them in your time machine back to 1990 when they were a Reagan Republican. They would never have agreed with any of the nonsense they agree with now. Identities are transformed through these memes deliberately. Donald and Putler and those trying to change our world are trying to promote this spheres-of-influence nonsense from their IR textbooks, rather than territorial integrity being sacrosanct according to the UN Charter and a variety of international legal instruments, as well as being the obvious means of maintaining stability in our world.

The Cognitive Model: Information as In-Forming

I’ve described a bit now the cognitive model of how disinfolklore affects our intentions and motivations, and therefore our activities, including our thoughts. This is a key part of the disinfolklore analytical method. As James pointed out, there are loads of other models out there. This is just the one I’ve come up with to match my experience of how my mind, my mana, my energy is impacted by meanness in stories.

It’s also something I’ve developed which I hope is accessible to people. When we detect trolls coming in—detect this energy, say, of coercive control—or we have a sense that someone is trying to manipulate us, we mount our incoming troll radars, always looking for this. Mindfulness is another word for it, though that kind of puts people off. It’s this mindfulness where you’re a gatekeeper between the external and your mind, and you triage certain bits of information according to their risks of negatively impacting your mood or your attitude or your intentions. When you detect coercive control in any form, immediately you’re on guard, and you’re not going to let it affect your inner mind, your mana.

When you feel your moods or attitudes or intentions being scraped or vibrated by these things, these data, these memes, that can also be a sign that it’s time to—metaphorically speaking—get out of there and just not let it in and avoid it.

I think it’s important to have an accessible cognitive model when we’re talking about information. The clue is in the term itself: information. It’s about forming you. It’s forming the inside of you. This is one of the beautiful things about Indo-European languages. We have really true renderings of what is happening in the words we use every day, yet we don’t think of it that way. We think of “inform” as merely meaning somebody is telling us something we didn’t know. The clue, when you think about the term, is that it’s forming our inside.

That’s what I mean by the energy, the being manipulated, where someone is pulating your mana, your energy, with information, shaking it up and down in such a way that it affects your moods and intentions in the negative way. The opposite works too. I’ve been noticing a lot how children react—for some reason it’s just been on my mind—the way they make each other laugh. I’ve got my eye in now and I see it a lot on the streets. That kind of friendship is really familiar to me, and I try to do that in my real life a lot.

That’s positive trolling—definitional positive trolling—where two friends are just making each other laugh and smile. They’re practising generosity by doing that. Their intention is all good. I think that’s absolutely wonderful. That is great counter-disinfolklore. That’s positive information.

I’ll come back to that again next week. Hopefully that was helpful. That was eight different tools. I’ve actually got 37 more.

Continued from:

First in Series:

On Minsk: I’ve talked before about how my Disinfolklore Analytical Method allows us to look at any form. One takeaway from a lot of my work at the moment is to try not to treat these as organic or accidental emanations — just as seeing Elon in the White House archetyping himself with his son as the dark hero, Batman and Robin, is trying to affect our moods. Seeing these elements as part of a system might prevent us reacting to them as if they’re individual artefacts and moments in our lives. They’re very much part of what I would see as the coup or insurrection which, according to both the Georgia and federal indictments, began within the first moments that Donald Trump disputed the results of the 2020 election. The racketeering charge in the federal indictment tells us it’s a whole system, not just one moment. That perspective is essentially what I do in my work — selling perspectives on the quotidian, the daily elements, to help us understand ourselves, where we’re fitting in, how we’re affecting the culture.

Our culture — which most of us have chosen to engage with on X — that’s our main entry point, our main power: to affect people’s timelines. We know how we’re affected by information we see. That’s why we’re part of this Volya community, because we think there’s power in communicating this understanding. What we can do is see this as part of the system and become Disinfolklore-literate: look for what I call Archetypal Disinfolklore, look for what they’re trying to archetype themselves as, how they’re trying to manipulate us, and then find ways of explaining and sharing this comprehension.

I’d quickly reference the Tulsi Gabbard issue because it ties into what we talked about last week. I’m trying to give tools that help us discern the mana in the meme — the energy in the memes we encounter each day as we scroll, interact with our culture, and create our culture. Axios reported that Tulsi Gabbard is prepared to submit her resignation if Donald authorises entering the Israel–Iran war. There was also credible reporting that she was excluded from a meeting to discuss the impending war. From that, I deduced she is — as most of us know — recognised as being part of the Russian influence network, and they were trying to keep her out of that meeting. Her preparedness to resign over the Israel–Iran war complements my analysis of what is going on.

What’s particularly interesting is that because of what we know about Russia’s economy — because we listen to Mokrushyna and Prints every day and Absurdistan — we almost uniquely as a community have a detailed idea of Russia’s economic state, its dependence on oil exports, and its dependence on Iran for weaponry since it was first reported in October 2022, when Iran was denying providing Russia with weapons and drones. Up until then, we didn’t know which way Iran would swing.

I have this fixed flagpole in my mind: Russia does not want the United States to enter the war in Iran. Therefore, anyone who is suddenly out of character against this war — Tulsi Gabbard being one — we can use this as a good litmus test to know if they’re in Russia’s influence, whether paid or otherwise. It’s very particularly interesting to see which way Donald goes in the end. On one hand, he’s suddenly become like a Messiah to these patrician neocons who always thought of him as a clown, and now he’s offering them what they’ve dreamed about since 1979: bombing Iran back to the Stone Age. On the other hand, the MAGA element — Bannon and company, who’ve been leading the charge against Ukraine, which again is a litmus test for where these people’s loyalties lie.

In this context, I look back at Gabbard’s video — the aesthetics, the Soviet-era aesthetics, the argument about World War III which we as a community understand. A highly educated, brilliant American friend contacted me and used this World War III meme. Whatever media she’s consuming is promoting it, and we’re very familiar with it from here.

On the archetyping idea: this gave me the concept of re-archetyping World War III. I read a few pieces this week, which some of you will have seen, on what war looks like now — using what all of us have learned from watching how drone warfare has evolved, listening very carefully to Alan and Chuck Pfarrer and others. All of us have learned a lot about warfare, and because most of us didn’t know much beforehand, we’ve perhaps been more open to the new rules. I saw Trent Telenko’s post yesterday setting out the range of Shahed drones, which I don’t think any of us would be confident about defending against. We’ve seen how they’ve evolved and how Ukraine has countered almost every obstacle, but the Shahed drones are an absolute problem for the world.

I found some of my early tweets on Shahed drones. In 2023, a drone attack was four Shaheds. Now we’ve got 400 a night, two nights of 400-plus. When you see that Iran has Shahed drones within range of Central Europe, according to Trent Telenko’s map, you become less gung-ho. If you’ve archetyped in your mind that the US Army is the biggest and best in the world, and you’ve been reading Telenko’s posts — he integrates these daily lessons and batters them against his existing archetypes about force power and defence. He’s constantly lobbying for hardened shelters for stealth bombers. But I’m also looking at what’s happening in Kherson.

The Shahed drones and Iran aren’t really on the minds of most people in the normal world — they tune in to Ukraine every now and again. As far as I can see, they’re not really on the minds of the neocons pushing for war in Iran either. I’m waiting to see Dick Cheney visiting the White House after all Donald did to his daughter. That story is very interesting — they’ve been paying for this war for decades.

Someone like Trent Telenko is re-archetyping his ideas of what’s necessary to defend, constantly updating according to the latest data. Others aren’t doing this — many pushing for war, and on the other side, people either paid or accidentally under Russian influence who want to stop the Iran war at all costs. I wrote about how we need to outline this. My tweets are proper interventions worthy of being printed in journals, because I don’t see responses from the so-called experts. It’s exactly what we saw with the Iraq war — it’s all right to bomb a place back to the Stone Age, but what happens on day two?

Now, what happens on day two is pretty obvious to me. One scenario I’d be considering: many of us will remember when Kherson was liberated — those wonderful days, many of us were on Volya Radio that day — and we expected blowback, but it didn’t really come for another year. The UN Commission of Inquiry report we discussed in the first week of this show: that drone war starts in July 2023, after Kherson was liberated in September 2022. It took a while, then they started with one or two drones. Today we saw 30 people injured, hunted by drones. Drone warfare — drones launched almost every day from Enerhodar Nuclear Power Plant, which is my long-term litmus test for whether people really understand World War III as anything other than a mantra that provokes archetypal images of this 1980s view of ashes and the whole world turned to ashes.

Tulsi Gabbard’s video depicted that — in words and images. Mokrushyna has talked very well about this, and I remember seeing videos on the BBC in the early 1980s about nuclear winters. When the World War III signifier is trotted out, the archetypal identity provoked in minds of people of a certain age is precisely what Gabbard was articulating. It was so clumsy with the Soviet imagery. That tells me, in light of this new data, even more strongly that the Russians are behind her, and that they don’t want this war. She obviously saw it coming and thought to put out this quite cryptic video at the potential cost of her job, according to her orders.

But the idea of re-archetyping World War III — which this has all provoked in my mind — is precisely about drone warfare. The scenario we’ve seen in Kherson and other cities, now with fibre-optic drones: what happened with the pro-Palestine movement which grew up suddenly after October 7th on university campuses across the world — I foresee a so-called peace movement, an armed peace movement. The model would be the Vietnam War: an insurrection masquerading as a peace movement, injected into a society constantly divided by Chinese TikTok. The NRA and their guns would be nothing against drones. Today’s means of blowback are much more significant than with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The knowledge we have enables us to re-archetype our ideas of what blowback might look like if Donald enters the war. The only hope, ironically, that he won’t carpet-bomb Iran is Putin and the Russians — everything I see tells me they definitely don’t want this. They don’t want Iran bombed because of their dependence on Iran to get oil to market. Everything I’m seeing through Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson and Dugin — all these clans, paid or unpaid influencers, are suddenly coming out against war. All of them were probably pro-Iraq war. That’s where re-archetyping comes in.

The other thing I wanted to talk about, connected to re-archetyping and Archetypal Disinfolklore — it’s the first tool in my Twelve Tools. Arsenal, Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy.

Letters to Ukraine — the horror on all levels. I worked with mothers of missing soldiers in eastern Ukraine for four years, almost every week. I met these mothers to talk about their missing sons. I hoped their bodies would be returned. There were always rumours they were enslaved by the Russians.

This is Trigger, Experience, Reaction. There’s the trigger. Then we have the experience in our mind — sadness, disgust, hope, whatever particular emotion we feel — and then we react. Mokrushyna’s reaction today was: “I just can’t do the show today.” That saved all of us from just depressing each other over those hours as news came out of the child stuck under the soil. We all have to do what we have to do to protect our own minds.

This is reflected even in the meaning of the days of the week — discovering this whole literature on archetypes in Indo-European culture, an insight that the French linguist and philosopher Georges Dumézil discovered in the 1930s. Underlying the structure of all Indo-European communities is a tripartite structure of archetypes, of functions. Most of us will be aware, for instance, of the caste system in India — a personification, a reflection of this structure: sovereignty, security, and fertility or prosperity. The monarch, the soldier, the woman or farmer. Once you get your eye in, this structure is everywhere.

This is partly why I look so deeply into linguistics. The shaman trickster is memorialised in our days of the week by Woden. Woden — as in dies, sky, day, deity — the Germanic deity, Odin in its English manifestation, Woden in Germany. Odin self-sacrificed on the royal mound at Uppsala in Sweden, gave himself to himself, hung himself for nine days and nights. That story is very much reflected in Jesus Christ’s sacrifice.

Donald Trump — once you get your eye in and read, as I’ve read, all of Dumézil’s amazing work, which is very important to my understanding of archetypes and their origins — and so it pleases me a lot when people try to think about which archetypes apply. The important thing to note is these are the three primary archetypes: the sovereign — and sovereignty has two aspects, the magical and the juridical. The juridical manifests as Tiwaz’s Day, Tuesday. The magical aspect — the priest-like aspect, the Brahmin, the Flamines, and again this M-N sound across different Indo-European cultures — is also reflected in the days of the week. Tuesday in English comes from the Germanic. The days of the week in English, rather than in French where they come from the Roman, show where the border lies. Then you have Friday — Freyja — who is a reflection of the pre-Indo-European aspect in our structure. It comes into everything.

This discovery — that this structure actually exists — this was the person who inspired my entire work for the past six years: to try and work out what Donald Trump is doing. Then to realise that this is a perennial character who pops up not only in literature, folk tales and stories, but in the earliest written texts, in this structure. Everything Donald Trump does as the shaman, the archetypal shaman trickster, who has the magical rather than juridical aspect — and Putin is also playing this role — was quite a discovery.

If you’re reading a folk tale about the shaman trickster, you’re in a completely different cognitive space than when you’re scrolling down Twitter or listening to Trump in Canada or wherever. Yet it is precisely the same phenomenon. This is so deeply embedded in the way we organise ourselves — more than half the world’s population today speak an Indo-European language as their native tongue — that we don’t understand our attraction to him, or our repulsion, or how he manifests.

We see similarities between Modi, another shaman trickster, Boris Johnson in England, Nigel Farage. Of them all, Donald — because he’s managed to trick his way into executing the sovereignty function in the most powerful community of humans ever assembled. Or you could argue the Yamna in southeastern Ukraine, where between 4100 and 2500 BCE a small community of people had these archetypes of sovereign, security and fertility manifest as characters in mythology, which then ran into religions — whether Iranian, Indian, Germanic, Celtic or even Christianity. It was so concentrated there that we still think in these terms.

This is about re-archetyping Ukraine. Its contribution to the way we think makes it the most important culture there is. The titanic struggle is between — because of course, Iona, you’re right to point out that President Zelensky is the comedian. He’s literally a comedian. That’s what he did — actor, comedian. When asked in the documentary, “You played a president on television — has that helped prepare you to be president?” President Zelensky looks quizzically at the interviewer as if he’s the stupidest person he’s ever encountered: “No, they’re completely different things. In one, I’m playing a role.”

Donald Trump managed to re-archetype himself as a leader of humans through a television show where he was acting as an entrepreneur. He was never an entrepreneur, but he played one, and they wanted that role. Like Putin, exactly like Putin — they are shaman tricksters, brilliant at provoking emotions in other people, either revulsion, disgust, joy or following. They do it in this magical way that priests, advertising, religions and cults have done for millennia, but in a very cynical way, and it’s not ethically disciplined — which is the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls.

Hopefully in coming weeks we’ll talk more about this, because it’s the most important insight I have to share: there’s an archetypal structure in our news, in our Disinfolklore, manifested through characters, through stories, which is perennial — at least since 4100 BCE, since the first Indo-European language was forged in Ukraine. That’s the miracle of the connection with Ukraine: all of this was born there.

That’s partly why I’m confident President Zelensky — who was born 150–200 kilometres from the area where Indo-European languages began, around the borders of Mykolaiv and Kherson oblasts, the heartland of the Yamna community — you go through Kryvyi Rih, where Zelensky is from, and there are great stone circles there. In this titanic struggle, I’m 100% confident President Zelensky will win, because he’s against two dime-store shaman tricksters. Putin — once you get your eye in, you can see how he performs the tricks. Two bare-chested men with his rod, his bendy rod. These archetypal identities are replayed, and in people’s minds it’s just so basic.

Whereas President Zelensky not only was a comedian, a shaman trickster who creates and provokes emotions in people’s minds for a living, built a business around it — he then transitioned with a really strong idea of what is real and what is fake. The others are caught up in their Disinfolklore galaxies and Disinfolklore universes. This is the struggle — the Titanic in Greek mythology, much of which was born in this area of Ukraine. We think of Greek as the beginning just because it was recorded first, but now we know better.

You have these archetypal identities, these gods, which confuse people — the hero’s journey and all of that, which Jung and others in film scripts talk about. It’s quite confusing for those without a classical education. But what Dumézil’s genius was — and he spent the rest of his life working through it after his insight — is that this is immanent in a huge body of linguistics and literature, one of the main evidential trajectories before we had ancient DNA. If you found the same story with the same archetypes in India, Iran, Irish mythology, and Germanic mythology, you knew it must come from a common source. This was before ancient DNA demonstrated that the common source manifested as a particular community of humans in southern Ukraine.

This is absolutely key because there are lots of second-tier archetypes — moving, dynamic archetypes like Russian Disinfolklore and propaganda, like Minsk as a character. And again, the M-N sound in Minsk, Yamna, Monarch, and the R-T sound in security, prosperity, sovereignty. You have these sounds, these archetypes, these meanings, this language personified by characters which are perennial. But then you also have characters created in stories — in Russian news and elsewhere — which are second- and third-tier. There is this fundamental structure, and it is there. It’s peer-reviewed.

The moment I came across Dumézil’s work, as I was trying to research what Donald Trump is doing and the shaman trickster — to see that it’s there, that it’s a structure — I’d like to help people become aware of it. Because then we see there’s nothing new about him. It’s the same trick played at the fairground, the same thing we see on TV. We just invest it with something more serious because he’s occupying the sovereignty function of this community of American humans. And now we hear him archetyping himself as a soldier, as war.

Those three archetypes are fundamental — in our cognition, in our culture, manifesting in every timeline, all over the place, all the time. It’s the same story for at least 6,000 years. I make no claims for non-Indo-European cultures.

Power of Mana

What I do as a writer

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6 months ago · 2 likes · 2 comments

Continued from:

First in series:

First thing I wanted to talk about, which is something I noticed on my Twitter about five days ago. I first noticed I was getting a lot of pictures of David Bowie and the Rolling Stones. Never really liked the Rolling Stones. Really loved David Bowie from the age of about eight onwards. And that got me thinking, why am I getting this stuff on Twitter?

And then I realized, ah, for some reason, I had cut off images. There was a setting in Twitter which I used as part of my incoming troll radar to block images. And so I would never see images on my Twitter feed, just text. And suddenly that disappeared. And then I looked for the setting and the setting had disappeared. And then I Googled it and I discovered two days before I worked this out, because I was wondering why am I, what is different about this experience? And what is different is I’m getting two channels of information and I’m used to only getting one channel of information on Twitter, which is just text.

Power of Mana

What I do as a writer

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6 months ago

I would click sometimes on images to look at them if I wanted. But basically, it was my only way of controlling what was going into my mind, into my brain. And they got rid of the setting inside the app which is obviously very annoying because clearly there’s an intelligence behind this and what the intelligence behind this is trying to do is involuntarily feed us with visual memes which can have a greater impact on imprinting on our mind and printing archetypes on our mind. And so obviously that’s very annoying that I as the consumer who actually pay because it’s my main medium for initial writing.

And the algorithm trolls me and I troll it and it inspires it. I’ve trained the algorithm so that it hits me with my for you feed is, every now and again there’s a bit of a change but it’s basically exactly how I, I’m pretty happy with it the way it is especially if I can cut out the images. And because of that, I pay for it. And it’s extremely annoying to have my experience determined in this way. That’s one thing, because I think of it as a violation of my right as a consumer or to have the experience that I want. And then I think also, what’s behind it? Why is the intelligence behind the algorithm trying to feed me images which I don’t want to see. It should be no skin off their nose. And it’s very annoying.

So I worked out a solution for this, which I now have. I have quite a few different types of browsers on my phone, which I use for different applications. I use the DuckDuckGo browser now for YouTube stuff. It’s particularly well optimized for that and it doesn’t keep any of the cookies and I generally don’t have to sign in. And so, for instance, I was watching the great Chuck Pfarrer and Alan Brewer today on YouTube through DuckDuckGo.

But now for Twitter, I am fighting my instinct, which is to always go for the app, but I now go for the, it’s on Firefox, and that cuts out the images. Unfortunately, it still has video, but it’s easy for me to scan through there. And I’ve been doing this now for about five days. So I just say that in the context of incoming troll radar, how do I control the information coming into my brain, coming into my mind, because we’re all dealing with so much of it. And the visual, the image element of it is something I can do without because I work in text mostly. I always add images to my writing and I consider myself mainly a writer, but I do use different forms of media. So I just suggest that if other people have found this lack of a setting, that’s my practical solution to it. And so far it’s working quite well.

China and Russia: Territorial Ambitions

I noticed a tweet by Jay and Keeve the other day where he, Jay was referring to this. We’re seeing this story appearing more and more about the China coming in to take a bite out of China, taking a bite out of Russia. And I think it was actually mentioned on Times Radio today, which generally I don’t listen to, but I have started. They were interviewing William Taylor, who was the US ambassador to Ukraine in the late 90s and then the charge d’affaires after an acting ambassador after Donald and Lev Parnas and co got rid of Maria Jovanovich who I met in Dnipro once and who was really amazing really engaged with the granular aspect of what was going on in Ukraine. And so I listened to that interview. And even on that, which is quite mainstream, they’re referring to this idea that China is now talking about taking parts of Russia.

And I think maybe it was even Genesis Man raised it today on their show about how there’s a game, there’s actually a game now in China developed, which is, you know, which part of Russia do you want? So I can really get behind that. But Jay and Keeve made a point which I agreed with because when I first heard about this latest round of scary stories about China, not scary from our perspective, but scary for the Russians taking parts of Russia in this latest round. It was about two months ago by Constantine inside Russia. And as some of you will know, I have a slightly love-hate relationship with him because I am suspicious of him. Despite that I found I find him engaging some of the time and and and a good source of information and again going back to the incoming troll radar and one of the algorithm one of the parts of my algorithm which which I work on is if I find myself wondering about the authenticity of some account then the fact of me wondering about the authenticity, I now use as an indicator that probably I should be ultra careful with them.

And so I’m very careful about Constantine in Russia, inside Russia. However, he, about two months ago, he featured as one of his news stories on his show about how the Chinese media was running these stories about China getting ready to take parts of Russia. And I thought to myself, because I am slightly suspicious for a number of reasons, and we can talk about that again. Because of that, I was wondering, why is he telling us this? And what is the perspective? And my hypothesis was, this is a Russian operation attempting to scare us with the idea that China’s going to come in and take a bite out of Russia. So this is Russia trying to put itself in the place of the West and basically say, you know, we’re protecting, we’re keeping parts of China inside the white supremacist European envelope.

And we’re doing you all a service. And if you don’t give us what we want, then China’s going to come and take in a bite of Russia. Now, of course, and Jay and Keev, seem to come to this conclusion as well. Now, if it is true that there is this game which is approved in China, and any of us who know Russia very well and Russians very well understand they are, it is their primordial fear is of China, not of Europe. And so it’s completely plausible that China itself is generating some of these stories. But it’s equally plausible that Russia, in their madness, think that they’re going to somehow scare us into sacrificing Ukraine because we don’t want China to take Yakutia. And so I just wanted to raise, yeah, so I suppose I start from the, I want to avoid being automatically manipulated, having my manner pulated, moved up and down in such a way that I can’t control it.

Mental Hygiene and Visual Images

Visual images have such a powerful impact on our consciousness that there’s many things you can’t unsee. And so if anyone writes trigger warning or they say, oh, this is awful, and then they kind of show it to you, like if I scan in the text and I see that I never click, you know, click on it. I remember, for instance, when the Christchurch shooting, that shooter in Christchurch, I remember I was working in Dnipro and going to a meeting in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast with a colleague, a Turkish colleague, Turkish Canadian colleague, and all the way there, he was watching this first-person shooter video. And then I had another Kazakh colleague who, when we got back to the office, he said, oh, yeah, I was watching it as well. And then the next day, my Kazakh colleague said, I’m being haunted by this imagery of this thing, and I was watching it. And I was like, why did you watch it?

And so obviously that’s a more extreme case than a lot of the stuff that’s coming across our feed. I don’t need to see it to understand that someone else has seen it, like Chuck Pfarrer, for instance. I’m pretty sure he watches a lot of this stuff. I know, for instance, Denys Davidof, who I find to be a good source. I go through stages with him. He watches all of the videos. And I trust his judgment on the granular, the tactical level. If he says to me, this group of Russians were unalived, as he nicely puts it, I don’t need to see this imagery myself.

Disinfolklore

Outgoing Troll Radar!

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2 years ago · 6 likes · Decoding Trolls

So it’s about mental hygiene and and it’s an intrinsic part of the Disinfolklore analytical method. And the code of positive trolls is this idea which I have to try and, if we’re operating in this space, as all of us are, we’ve made an active choice to remain with Twitter despite everything. And I’m sure not a week goes by when we don’t think, why am I doing this to myself?

But since we have chosen to dance with the devil, that doesn’t mean that we have to take everything on board. And I just found cutting out the images didn’t affect my Twitter experience in any negative way. And it was a good shorthand way of modulating what was going into my mind and moderating what was going into my mind. And when I was googling it I saw that it was a big thing when this was brought in to get rid of media previews in 2013 and then somehow so it’s been there for like 12 years and now suddenly it just disappears, which is very very annoying.

Disinfolklore

Incoming Troll Radar

⚡️Don’t get me wrong, there were times on the eastern Ukrainian bridge when it was impossible to tell whether or not explosions had truly injured people, as the Russian bridge trolls alleged to me…

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2 years ago · 3 likes · Decoding Trolls

I just raise it here because, as I say, your incoming troll radar, whether it’s from your best friend sharing imagery from the Gaza Strip or Instagram or indeed from Ukraine, because obviously one of the reasons Russia does these horrific attacks is to create this disaster porn and to impact an imprint on our minds. So one of our ways of fighting it is to resist it. Now, obviously, normal people who don’t spend all day long scanning Twitter and trying to learn all the, they may not need this kind of prophylactic, you know what I mean? This incoming troll radar. And I have nothing against images per se. It’s just there’s certain things you can’t, I’m sure we’ve all seen things we can’t unsee. And I want to try and maintain some semblance of control over what goes into my mind.

US-Russia Spheres of Influence Deals

And so the thing about Donald’s national security officer, Fiona Hill’s 2019 thesis that Russia wanted to offer the US, Venezuela in exchange for Ukraine. Dave Troy, whose work I respect a lot, he was pushing this a lot. And it was good that he brought this into our minds, but it sounded plausible to me like a typical grandiose rushist master plan. But since 2019, Russia’s lost whatever, 1.4 million soldiers. It’s taken, what is it, 0.7% of Ukraine in 2025 at a cost of 400,000 of its soldiers. And it’s still 1,000 kilometers east of Kiev and probably won’t ever even take Pokrovsk.

So the Russians no longer have the power and leverage for deals like this. Yet we do see the archetype of Russia as a great power is a phantom limb. It’s still in our information space. That we see, for instance, Donald talking about how China and Russia are going to take Greenland unless he does. And what we need to obviously do is, which most of us have done, all of us have done probably, I should think, update our data-resistant archetypes of a Potomacan state so that Russia isn’t even part of it. So it’s one thing for Dave Troy to draw attention to this 2019 spheres of influence deal. But it’s another thing to not point out that this is six years later and Russia is not what it used to be.

I think it’s a really important saw as something to cut through a lot of the stuff in the information space, especially being promoted by people like this guy Gideon Rachman and the FT that I mentioned last week, they haven’t updated their data-resistant archetype of Russia to take account of the absolute disasters it’s undergoing.

Now, I do note a lot of these when I watch this Times radio and these more mainstream, these more mainstream media shows, that they seem to have got the point now that Russia’s basically absolutely hopeless. It just doesn’t, as Chuck Pfarrer and Alan have been pointing out to us, they just don’t seem to have neither the strategy, the tactics, or the force power to do anything.

So what I would prefer, and I tried to do this with Dave Troy, but he generally has his replies closed, was to try and modulate it. I think it’s fair enough to talk about the 2019 Fiona Hill’s testimony, very important testimony. It does us a disservice unless you constantly remind people who may not be paying that much attention to the granularity of the battlefield. It does us a disservice if you don’t remind people that we are changed as a result of the war, but Russia has changed and it’s lost the capacity. And again, Donald and the billionaires around him, they’re not charity people. Nobody gets a free lunch. And hopefully we’re seeing Donald realizing that he has the power. Now he’ll invoke Putla and Russia and China when he’s talking about this mad idea of Greenland. But it seems clear, and it could change tomorrow, that he’s finally got the point that Russia is basically pretty useless. So I would have preferred if Dave Troy had emphasised how this is 2019, but now it’s different.

Defending Against Donald’s Disinfolklore

Then the first line of defence against Donald’s Disinfolklore shtick is basically that, that understanding that Don’s Disinfolklore universe has taken over their minds. And this is what I’ve warned of in Munich in February 2025. So we see this bill introduced into the Congress to conquer Greenland, but now I see there’s an alternative bill. But there’s certainly people who are in brainwashing mode. And starting a war over Greenland is only a quick mental step away from them. War inside NATO is now a definite possibility.

The othering of Europeans in Europe is another mental trick, which I mentioned last week, that I think it’s the same trick that has been done on cities, which Donald is now, he’s now, as I understand it, he’s sent in ICE and the border force. He realized he doesn’t need to send in the National Guard into cities. He can send in ICE and the border force. And this feeds into, again, the complicity between the activities of these people and the Disinfolklore which is created of them, which is published in Fox News. I note there are some great counter Disinfolklore operations going on, whether it’s Midas Touch or Status Coup, who are doing some great recording of these events.

We’ve got to protect our minds from the madness that Don is transmitting into our minds goes back to something we talked about ages ages before where the the sharing of memes, oh, look at Donald’s latest ridiculous meme, and then you share it, you know, him archetyping himself as the Pope or something like that. Because you want to highlight its ridiculousness. You’re actually doing MAGA’s job there, just as you’re doing Russia’s job if we’re showing the terror and the horror in a careless way, in an automatic way where we just respond emotionally.

We’re like, and I do every now and again, I do share some grim things because it’s important to remind people, like the stories about Lisa and her mother and Vinytsia and these terrible events. If it’s a Ukrainian voice, particularly a female voice who has made the decision to share this, then sometimes I will share it as well because I, not because I agree with it, but because they’ve made this choice. They want the world to be aware of it. I have a tiny little bit of power to amplify it. So that is our first line of defense - protecting our minds from this madness, whether it’s memes that are involuntarily being thrown into our mind because the intelligence behind Twitter has decided that we shouldn’t have the freedom to decide what images we see.

Russia’s Antisemitic Agitprop

I wanted to just quote something which I came across in this great report, which I might deal with in a few weeks when I finish going through the fundamentals and the Disinfolklore and the battling archetypes part, which is a report that was published by a Polish think tank called Capturing Minds and Reshaping the World. I haven’t processed it all into my brain, but one thing which jumped out at me was this, and I wanted to bring this to all of our attention. This, I called it, I titled it Russia’s Antisemitic agitprop.

So again, it’s the complicity between creating the events and then the Disinfolklore. So the report is going back into the documentation and how the, how we got to this point in the Russian Disinfolklore apparatus where it creates the events, it creates the marches, the parades, it facilitates October 7th, then knowing that there is a deep antisemitic strand that many of us are unconscious or unaware of until we subject ourselves to being educated about it. Then they use these events to provoke responses and to cause chaos in all our countries. This is going on in Ireland, in England, in Spain, in many, and in France, in many different countries, this one antisemitic vector that Russia is doing so much to bring to the fore.

So it interested me to see this documentation from January 1959. So here I’m quoting:

“the establishment of a new separate unit called Department D in Russian operational jargon, Desa Disinformation, within the first chief directorate of KGB intelligence in January 1959, marked the beginning of a systemic approach to these operations.”

Initially, Department D consisted of around 50 officers who engaged in both verbal and operational disinformation. The unit’s first mission was to discredit West Germany as a neo-Nazi state, 1959. As part of this effort, East German agents were sent to desecrate Jewish graves, paint anti-Semitic slogans on synagogues, shops and the offices of Jewish organizations and to incite local residents to carry out similar actions. Within a year, by 1960, the West German government recorded 833 anti-Semitic acts, which exposed it to international condemnation and tarnished its image in the eyes of global opinion.”

This is something which Ireland is going through at the moment. Spain in Catalonia, they’re going through this at the moment. And France. So these are international patterns which fit in with the operational art of the Russians.

Andropov, who was head of the KGB before he became General Secretary, he signed off in 1964, personally, on the painting of Nazi symbols in New York City and in America.

When I was in Dnipro from about 2021 to 2022, swastikas started appearing around the city. I immediately intuited this was false, this was not real. It was what the Russians might call a provocation because it just felt wrong in the sense that it wasn’t an organic event. Since then, Rolling Stone then in March 2022 did a great story. I got in touch with the author and told them about the Dnipro issue which in turn led to a wonderful Rolling Stone piece on the resistance, resilience and patriotism of Dnipro’s Jewish community members. Yet Rolling Stone’s initial piece was about how a Russia-connected Ukrainian oligarch was paying people to paint swastikas in Ukraine.

So if you have family members or friends who aren’t aware that this is what Russia does, then… To put it in a positive way - when you become aware of the deep history of this particular vector of Russian Disinfolklore creation and a means to plug into deep archetypes in many of our minds that we’re not even aware of. We find it difficult to surface them because if anyone accuses you of being antisemitic, it immediately creates a defensive response. You may never have read the working definition on antisemitism.

But when you do, as I had cause to do after an event in Britain where the former head of the Labour Party had, and basically, and his leadership came out to attack a documentary, which was done a brilliant, very, from my perspective, brilliant documentary by Panorama, which got the people, there was a lot of accusations of antisemitism justified under his leadership. And thousands, tens of thousands of complaints were made. And so they set up a mechanism under public pressure, the UK Labour Party, to go through all of these complaints. And it turned out the six or seven party, young party faithful who had been given the job of sorting through all these complaints eventually realized that the leadership and the party was stopping them from investigating properly.

And they sang like canaries to this BBC Panorama documentary. And it was a very important moment for me because up until that point, I had always thought, oh, this is just the establishment being against this guy Corbyn. And these accusations of anti-Semitism aren’t correct. But then when I saw this BBC Panorama documentary, and heard the testimony from really, really true Labour Party activists, people like me. I worked for the Irish Labour Party in the Irish Parliament for a while, so I recognised them as genuine people, and they came to the conclusion that something really iffy, not only disorganised, but but not pleasant at all, was going on to stymie the anti-Semitism claim.

And then the UK Labour Party at the time, which is something we’re going through in New York City at the moment with Mamdami, and it disappoints me. But I haven’t taken the time to look into it quite deeply where he abolished the international or the working definition of antisemitism and decided to define it himself. And this is exactly what the UK Labour Party under Corbyn did. And because of that, I ended up reading it and it really taught me something and helped me see through the Russian agitprop, as I call it, into that.

So that’s why I found it quite interesting to see this. This goes back to 1959. And this is, as we see the Russians do on the battlefield, continuing the same strategy again and again. They took Kup’yansk, then they lost Kup’yansk in September 2020. Now they’re trying to take it again. They’re doing the same with Liman, hearing Alan and Chuck Pfarrer. Talk about it today. Again, Lyman, it seems to be safe now again. And that was the city which I went through every time I left Severodonetsk, so very close to my heart. But there is this kind of repetition that the Russians keep on doing. And we see this evidence in our information space from the antisemitic point of view.

These campaigns, which are tearing many of our communities apart - and I’m not saying in any way shape or form that we don’t all have to work this through ourselves in our own brains and stuff - but if you know that these are Russian paid operatives painting swastikas in rural Ireland on on the ground then it does enrich your analysis of what’s going on. So that’s why I think it’s worthwhile bringing to attention what’s going on with the Russian method.

International Law and Territorial Integrity

International law is not what you think it is. I studied it at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. It’s not international law that prevents the subversion of territorial integrity. It’s the memory that before sovereignty, security and territorial integrity were protected as a matter of law, hundreds of millions of humans were sacrificed on the altar of mobile borders. Those who, without having studied international law, opine on its irrelevance and obsolescence, well, fate has some surprises in store for you. Snarky arch social media commentary won’t protect you from mass graves. The joke’s now on you.

The cases that define borders and much of the content of international law are from the South American continent. Your children and community’s children are about to learn some hard and avoidable lessons. When territorial integrity is threatened by Donald or Putler or Xi and you cheer, you will deserve your fate. Those of us willing to die to defend territorial integrity as a principle, as a matter of law, and as the bedrock convention necessary in human communities committed to peaceful coexistence also have some surprises in store for you. You have been warned.

And obviously that’s not really addressed to anyone listening here, but to the people who were opining, oh, international law doesn’t matter anymore.

The Macron Cyberbullying Judgment and Free Speech

I wanted also to highlight the Macron cyber bullying judgment from two weeks ago, because it’s obviously very important for Disinfolklore. And especially listening today and seeing some of these videos that Status Coup are creating of the ICE operations, particularly in Minneapolis, where basically the groups of civil society activists are making it really uncomfortable for ICE to be there by exercising their First Amendment rights to basically say whatever they want to do, say and they shout using whistles. And Donald and his Homeland Security person have basically responded by saying, well, if you’re shouting at an ICE person, then you’re disrespecting them and they have the right to shoot you.

And so the vacuity, the cynicism of promoting a particular idea of free speech, which is one of the main organising fictions by the political right, moaning about the lack of free speech, archetyping Europe as a bastion of non-free speech, while at the same time those very same people are enabling heavily armed individuals to shoot unarmed civilians who are merely exercising their right to free speech.

So in the current moment, this is a great reminder, a daily reminder of how cynical the idea of free speech is being used, how cynically it is being used by the so-called or the self-declared right.

And so the Macron cyberbullying judgment, the war on free speech, the dividing lines. So the American far-right agitators now in control of the US government want us to believe freedom of speech always meant total freedom to commit speech crimes. However, this is a very recent meaning of free speech when you go into the literature. So we know, for instance, it was never legal to shout fire in a crowded theatre when there was no fire.

However, this absolutist idea of free speech is a relatively recent phenomenon and is a particularly provincial idea of free speech. However, it has taken hold in the minds of people. So people feel quite apologetic if they’re introducing moderation rules, for instance, on the internet. And since 1980 and the beginning of computer-based social media, I have catalogued over 45,000 articles on our collective attempts to prevent internet-based trolling criminals from gaining immunity from prosecution authorities for their crimes.

So if you incite violence as a troll online, that is a crime just as much as it would be if you’re inciting violence in real life. However, when people like the people who own this app talk about free speech and try to use Europe’s attempt to exercise control and sovereignty over the use of internet-based platforms to commit crimes in their jurisdictions. And they’re then archetyped as being anti-free speech.

I mean, for example, from 2007 onwards, I charted the rise of Facebook funeral trolling in Australia, England, America and elsewhere. Online anonymous, spontaneous trolls defacing memorial pages established by mourning families with hateful threats. The first conviction was in Australia and where today a social media ban for children is being piloted and a similar law is planned for the UK. The free-for-all enabled by those perverting the meaning of free speech that has enabled Russia and MAGA to use US-Russia Telegram and Chinese TikTok, internet, social media to subvert our democracies is not inevitable.

We have the power to resist, provided we’re clear-eyed about what is at stake and how far the far right will go to destroy our freedom with their phony free speech advocacy. Ne’er-do-wells, like some English listeners will know this character perhaps, like Toby Jones in England, who created this NGO called the Free Speech Union, basically to promote this troll that you can’t say anything these days, or America’s new national security strategy. They have the capacity to destroy our communities in the name of protecting a narrow and recent view of free speech.

So today, the United States government sanctions European Union officials who implement laws ensuring well-governed free speech on and offline which have been passed by the European Union’s 450 million population institutions. Americans and the far right everywhere have been trolled into thinking their rights are transgressed when they are prosecuted for engaging in behaviour online, which would be unlawful if engaged in real life. Threats of violence, assaults, sexual harassment and worse.

So the main content in Jack Smith’s Jan 6th federal indictment was Donald inciting violence, using speech to incite violence. So it’s hardly surprising then when Donald himself promotes the idea of free speech. But it has never been legal to commit crimes. And you don’t have freedom of speech. I mean, every crime basically will always involve speech and therefore we always will have some forms of speech which judges and juries and grand juries can determine whether it’s legal or not.

So this idea that free speech is something absolute is not only ridiculous in the light of this license to shoot people blowing whistles in the face of ICE agents, but it’s also ridiculous in the light of hundreds of years of jurisprudence. And in 2008, as social media was going mainstream, Facebook memorial page trolling was a niche operation. And you can see this as I’ve gone through all of the data using the Dow Jones Factiva database of tens of thousands of media sources. And you can see the rise of this from about 2008 onwards. And I have the documents on it. And it was the major piece of research which I did when I created the decoding trolls and positive trolling in February 2020.

Today, however, what had been a niche operation, Facebook memorial trolling, today it governs geopolitics. When Donald uses online platforms to threaten violence against Denmark, Donald is breaching European Union law. He’s also breaching the UN charter by the threat of the use of force. However, this is now normalized, but it is still a breach of the law. And if we can just keep this in mind, it will help us. It’s our first line of defense.

Russia, MAGA, Modi in India, Xi, Iran, they spend billions subverting our communities by injecting bile into our minds, which if done personally, person to person in real life, would be prosecuted and eliminated immediately. So the judgment in the Brigitte Macron cyberbullying case is very welcome. I celebrate that she and Emmanuel Macron, their courage in subjecting themselves to the pain of that trial, for all of our sakes. Because its significance is they want us to think that there’s no way to police speech and moderate it and that they can do whatever they want to do to our communities.

However, cases like this and what Australia has done and what they’ve done in England with the age. And I believe it’s been considered in the European Union as well. I remember Ursula von der Leyen, who I think has six or seven children, saying, I will never accept that a foreign media company will decide what my child sees. And I wonder, will the European Union react to this image? It’s very niche. Maybe I’m the only person in the world who’s even noticed they’ve gotten rid of this media previews thing. But I’d love to see action taken on that.

Surrendering to free speech zealots is a luxury of our brittle, sovereign, secure, and prosperous communities can no longer afford. Brexit and MAGA’s rise demonstrate how subversion of governance of free speech is how autocracy and the axis of misogyny win power and begin and sustain kinetic wars. So that’s what’s at stake. I wanted to mention that.

**Russian Liberal Narratives and Responsibility**

I did have one further, one last thing, which actually came up from Natalka from Ukraine. I think she’s Canadian. Is she American? But anyway, as we all know, she does amazing work. And she brought forth this testimony this week from a guy called Nikolin, who I hadn’t heard about before, but a Russian political analyst, a so-called liberal. And in it, he argues basically, so the bit which interests me about this is mainly his use of the term archetypes.

So I’ll go straight to that. So basically, he is arguing that Russia did not mean, it didn’t intend to create, to basically brainwash the entire, the whole of Russia. So he’s saying, he’s saying, so this is the guy, Nikolin, and he said, I’ve often come across the view that all the propaganda over the past decade targeting Russians and their dehumanization was the result of a cunning plan coming out of secret Kremlin laboratories and institutes. I must respectfully disagree with this. Fortunately, with some basis, as someone who is somewhat familiar with the murky waters of propaganda.

So then he goes on to argue that it’s a more apt analogy. So he’s trying to argue that

“this wasn’t planned. A more apt analogy would be a descent down a dark staircase. A hand feels along the wall. And so basically, he then says, there’s no strategy, only a stubborn desire to keep going downward because it’s easier that way. And then he argues that then the path became path-dependent, inevitable.

Perhaps the initial goal was to atomize and break society into atoms. They did that. Next, to confuse its consciousness with external enemies. They did that. To dig from the depths of public consciousness, archetypes of greatness, imperialism, and hatred of outsiders. They did that. But all of this was not for the sake of February 24th, but it was to solve the immediate problems of the distant, now forgotten years of 2010 and 2012.

Then Ukraine conveniently falls into the role of external bogeyman. And in the process of it being torn apart by propaganda…”

So basically, I have an intuitive counter-reaction to this. I mean, I’m very interested that he uses the term archetypes because we also have the testimony from Surkov, the former deputy prime minister of Russia, where he says

“Russia began to produce meanings itself and went on in information counter-offensive. And he, he transfers the concept of mental matrix archetypes of our national consciousness to the sphere of foreign policy.”

This goes again into what Russia is doing in our communities, say with antisemitism or particular, particular campaigns which is running to divide our society, where it’s going into antisemitic, the antisemitic archetypes are perennial trolls in our many of our minds until we do the mental work to get rid of them and we learn the methods. And so Russia can go into any culture, basically, and promote these archetypes. So Russia wasn’t only doing it to itself. It was and is doing it in other countries.

But I also react against his idea. I mean, in some respects, he’s right. But on the other hand, my testimony and the value of my work, in Disinfolklore and the collection which I made from early 2015 onwards of vast troves of the Disinfolklore apparatus inside Russia-occupied Ukraine belies his account that this was accidental. Because from the very first moment they were using these othering tropes to create inside Russia-occupied Ukraine a sense of identity, that they were Russian and subvert their identities. And this is from 2015 onwards, whereas he’s talking about this as if it was an accidental emanation and not a considered strategy.

Now of course my belief is they tested the methods and perfected them in Russia occupied Ukraine, in occupied, temporarily occupied Crimea, temporarily occupied Donetsk and Luhansk. And then using what they learned there, they switched over to, brought it back to Russia, the empire striking back in a way, and did it to themselves. And individuals from Putler down have all ended up brainwashing themselves. I sense there’s some kind of nitpicking in this guy, Andrei Nikolin, who’s trying to absolve Russia of its responsibility in creating this brainwashing apparatus and this perfecting method, which again, in the case of MAGA, I don’t think it’s an accident.

Disinfolklore

⚡️How MAGA Began.

⚡️How MAGA Began…

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a year ago · 12 likes · Decoding Trolls

I’ve written before using the first-hand testimony from Chris Wylie, who was in the room. He and Steve Bannon conceived of MAGA. They conceived of how to create this movement and they executed that plan and and this is where we’ve ended up. And I don’t think Steve Bannon would complain about where we’ve ended up today. Perhaps he’d wanted to all move a bit more quickly.

So I do react against this idea of absolving responsibility by this Russian liberal thinking that it was just an accident because of what we have seen during the full-scale invasion and the use of meat assaults affecting the people living in Russia-occupied Ukraine whose identities were subverted with scientific brilliance. So that’s all I kind of had on my writing. That’s taken a whole hour, so maybe other people want to speak or have some questions or out.

It’s that energy of the persecution syndrome that I’m not responsible. I can see it in Konstantin inside Russia when he did his thing about, he featured in, Dugin apparently wrote about him because I think Constantine had done a thing about how rubbish the Russian army is. And then Dugin responded for this. And then, and then he did a show on how this makes him feel.

And yeah, obviously, it’d be a bit of a nightmare to be featured in, you know, for one of these people to take notice of the small guy. Obviously, Constantini is a half a million followers. He’s much less small than I am, for instance. But there is just this, but again, it’s a trait perhaps that all of us are susceptible to. We have to do a lot of mind work to overcome this idea of persecution syndrome. And we see so much of this in The Tales of Woe, for instance, that mockers will read or whatever, that it’s hard not to assume that this is a kind of a it’s a cultural trait among the russians but of course it’s in a particular authoritarian personality type we see it in Donald as well I mean god how how many positive signals do you need from the universe to just become a nice happy person.

You know, Donald has had so many amazing things happen and yet he still feels he’s hard done by. So we do see this kind of this habit. But when I see that energy in people, whether it’s in my own private life or in real life, in real life rather than virtual life, but also online, now that I notice it and I’m looking for that energy, I am a bit suspicious of it. And it is a bit too convenient when you hear it from one of these Russian so-called liberals. It’s a nice story that this stuff just happened accidentally, but either they’re really naive or they’re trying to pull the wool over our eyes. And it’s part of this campaign to say, oh, look, it’s not the Russian people, it’s just Putler who are responsible for this. It’s not the ordinary Russians. We’ve just been brainwashed.

I was going to start with reasons to be grateful, because as you know, one of the four aspects of the model in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method for noticing how information — what I call Disinfolklore, or Infolklore — affects us and changes us is through our moods. Moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations: these are the aspects of our consciousness, our identities, our beingness, which are impacted. A good piece of Disinfolklore will affect all four. Attitudes and moods are more long-duration elements — of course moods can be immediate as well, but in terms of feeling happy or sad over a six-month period, Disinfolklore and indeed Infolklore can affect us greatly.

When I talk about Infolklore, I mean really what Mokrushyna, for instance, talks about. Mokrushyna and Genesis Man’s partnership, for me on a day like today, buoyed me up, transformed my mood, made me happy. I love the way Mokrushyna tells the stories. The same story which is Disinfolklore when published on Telegram by the Rashists can be Infolklore when told with Mokrushyna’s mocking tone, drawing attention to elements we all recognise because we’ve been on this journey since February 24th, 2022, and some of us for longer.

Not all news is necessarily Infolklore or Disinfolklore. Part of my self-appointed job, my little contribution to helping us navigate the current age, is to characterise some of it as Disinfolklore, some as Infolklore, and to communicate how I do this in my head using evolving criteria. When news affects our mood and/or our attitude and/or our intentions and/or our motivations, then it’s definitely in the realm of folklore or Disinfolklore.

Reasons to be grateful today, given everything going on. Ukraine is, technically speaking, handing Russia’s arse to them. If we imagine everything happening — Venezuela, Greenland, everything in America — and we think of having this ogre in the back of our minds with Wagner, this storied mythological force able to fly in anywhere and do anything, we think of Russia having its four million tanks, the entire output of the Soviet Union. And then we see that Ukraine is handing Russia’s arse to it. Whatever happens from this moment forth, so much of that mythos and materiel is gone that it’s laughable when Russia is put in the same category as China, the United States, or the European Union militarily.

People’s algorithms, their data-resistant archetypes, their data-susceptible archetypes — if they are changing, they’re updating in real time according to these stories, which could be Disinfolklore or Infolklore. Whether it’s Kupiansk, where Putler announced it had been taken, and now it’s clear not only was it not taken but Ukraine retook it and cleared out most of the Rashists. Pokrovsk, obviously under pressure, but from what we can see it seems to be holding, and we see videos of Russia’s annihilation there. These elements of a story have a capacity, when amplified enough, to transform archetypal identities in people’s minds. Ukraine handing Russia’s arse to it every day is a wonderful thing.

Russian Arctic incompetence — absolutely wonderful. Mokrushyna was talking about it today. We hear this idea of a deal between the United States, Russia and China to divide up the world, and Russia’s propagandists are promoting it. But really, the guys around Donald — they’re not charity people. They’re hard-nosed. If they sense weakness, they pounce. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you can hold your own and pretend you’re rich enough in the country club, in Mar-a-Lago, you can be one of the gang. But if your Arctic seaports are falling apart and you don’t have any ships and your piers are crumbling — even Donald, whatever tie he has with the Rashists, will look at that and think, “Well, I was going to divide the world up, but...” That pressure is going on. Good to see.

None of us — particularly those who made the decision to speak out after February 24th, 2022 — are scared of Russia. There may come the knock on the door, but none of it is in any way as bad as what every single Ukrainian faces every night when they fall asleep, if they can fall asleep. We’re not scared of Russia anymore. A whole decade’s worth of popular culture promoted this idea of Russia as a giant, a massive bear that had to be feared and negotiated with in a quiet voice. But because of what we’ve seen since February 24th, 2022, we’re not scared anymore. When we hear Disinfolklore about Greenland, about NATO collapsing, we can be grateful this isn’t happening when we still feared Russia as somehow equal to us. We have Ukraine and its strength and power.

We have the 800 billion euros, which went almost without a blink — agreed last weekend in Kyiv with the national security advisors. 800 billion euros up to 2030 is a lot of cash. Ireland back in the day was getting sort of 10–11 billion over the whole course of a budgetary cycle and built all its motorways for that. An amazing reason to be grateful.

Russian air defence — it’s now mainstream that it’s absolutely rubbish, because of whatever went on in Venezuela and Caracas the other day.

We have the Epstein Act of Congress, which came out of nowhere. A miracle. We have a lot of work to do on that front, but it’s there. Every redaction, every lack of publication is now a breach of the law. It’s not enough, but it’s there. No one anticipated it. Chuck Schumer’s finest moment.

German, UK and French leadership, and many other leaders. We could have terrible leaders in those countries. We could still have Scholz, for instance. Imagine all the stuff we went through for the first two years of this nightmare with Scholz. Now we’ve got a proper German leader.

Ukraine will soon have its Gripen, its Griffins. Information wars are devastating Russia — all that stuff about Putler’s palace has gone into the mainstream. Donald kind of making fun of them. Story after story going into the minds of people who are interested in geopolitics but don’t pay attention at our level. Russia can’t take advantage of any of this.

We see this mental routine: “Putin must be really happy about this,” these Putin-understanders who articulate their mood through this rhetorical method. Perhaps he is — who knows, who cares. Think about how annoyed they must be that they don’t have any power left and everyone can see it, while Donald is doing all of this. That brings me enormous joy. If they had only waited for the full-scale invasion a year or two, had a bit of patience, they could have had everything. Now they’ve lost everything because they didn’t wait. When Russia could be at the moment of its greatest strength, had they not had their arses handed to them by Ukraine — there’s no real substantive advantage I can see. The Arctic ports are a perfect example.

I wanted to start with that positive thing because I should be practising Infolklore as well, trying to positive-troll us using proper, truthful, genuine reasons, not deception, and being ethically disciplined. There are many reasons to be grateful.

In 2018, when Russia seized two Ukrainian naval vessels off the coast of occupied Crimea, it caused a big crisis in the Sea of Azov. I was sent down to establish the OSCE’s monitoring model based in Berdiansk. Most Ukrainians of a certain age will remember this moment — another horrific humiliation. Whatever’s going on in the Atlantic right now — again, reasons to be cheerful. Medvedev, on the day of the raid, actually wrote that he wants the Americans to kidnap President Zelensky on Russia’s behalf. As Will characterises it, this is peak Absurdistan: the Russians justify their entire war based on a mythological coup which, if there was any coup, was executed by Paul Manafort, who’s still Donald’s adviser. And now Medvedev is admitting the Russians are so useless they can’t mount a raid and actually wants the Americans to do what they can’t. Peak Absurdistan. Let’s count our blessings.

What I noticed in eastern Ukraine was that the Russians used stories to create community. On the south bank of the Donets River, in Russia-occupied Luhansk, through this othering process, they convinced Ukrainians that they are Russians. Then they convinced them that the other wants to cross the river and kill them, and that their only protector is Russia — who is in fact their captor. Classic coercive control. You can understand it on a micro level: most coercive control relationships with a violent element are male to female. When Putin speaks, when individual Russians speak — in their family where the man is beating the wife — that’s a coercive control relationship. From the micro to the macro, the entire system inside Russia-occupied Luhansk, which I watched from the inside out by crossing into there every day for three years, collecting and analysing the media — what I now call Disinfolklore — this idea of coercive control: “If I’m not beating you, someone else is going to beat you harder, so you better stick with me.”

We saw that appalling headline yesterday in the *Washington Post* about Rubio saying America is going to use coercion in Venezuela, and in Greenland too. Coercive control, the use of fear, the use of ultraviolence to get their way. At the time, I didn’t know what they were up to. I could see something was really odd — the rhetoric in thousands of stories every day. But I didn’t know the objective. After the full-scale invasion, I realised: the game was to convince them they’re Russian, that they should fight for Russia, that they must participate in these meat assaults against their fellow Ukrainians.

Today, Russia uses Telegram to create community. What I noticed was that community identity is wholly formed through storytelling. This is the method, the means they use in this fake state — Russia-occupied Luhansk People’s Republic, or the Luhansk Folks Republic.

The modern nation state was created after Herder’s 1777 plea to unite the ten German tribes that Tacitus had written about in the first century of the Common Era. Herder asked: “Where is our Shakespeare?” He said, “We are ten disparate tribes who have never had a unified state.” He looked at England and saw that England had its Shakespeare. He made this plea to start collecting stories that characterise the German tribes — folk songs and folklore typifying Germanness. Ninety years later, the first unified German state was created.

This was also 1777, about five years before William Jones. Jones made his speech to the Asiatic Society in Kolkata, setting out the proposition that having looked at the grammar, the roots of verbs, the structure underlying Sanskrit — he was at the time a judge in India, a Welsh-English judge, but he had written the first English-language grammar of the Avestan language, so he understood the structure of ancient Iranian, Greek, and Latin. He was a Greek and Latin scholar at 15, spoke dozens of languages. He went to Harrow in England. William Jones realised that the structure of Celtic, Latin, Sanskrit, Gothic, German, Iranian, Greek — the similarities between grammar and roots of verbs in these languages were such that they could not have arisen accidentally, but must have come from a common source, perhaps one that no longer existed.

Herder, at the time, had no idea that German or Gothic was just one of many Indo-European languages, whose sets of stories themselves have similarities and come from a common source. In my other work, when I look at the M-N sound, we see this in Mannus, whose name is memorialised in German — Herminone is one of the founders, Mannus had three sons. But anyway, in 1777 Herder was saying, “Where is our Shakespeare?” Out of this programme, the Grimm brothers start collecting folktales, Goethe starts writing *The Sorrows of Young Werther* and creating this literature. I visited his house in Frankfurt — at the time he’s just a teenager and there’s a French general living in his house. He’s under occupation. Frankfurt — the French take their name from the Franks, the Germans, and then they go back to Germany to occupy Frankfurt. They’re trying to create a sense of Germanness, get rid of the French, and create their unified state. Then Wagner takes Tacitus’s stories about the ten German tribes and turns them into operas which all the educated classes attend and think, “We are one people.” They answer the call. Ninety years later, the first unified German state was created.

Identity is wholly a function of stories. Know this, and you will begin to understand how Russian Disinfolklore works to undermine and recreate identity.

In Ireland, we had the Celtic Literary Revival of the late 1800s. It led to the creation of a unified sense of identity — that Celtic language was something real and profound. I saw the other day this absolute idiot who writes in *The Guardian*, one of those old-timers — Simon something, I can’t remember his second name. I used to read him religiously, but he’s written a few things about Ukraine, always about how Ukraine should just give up, it’s just a proxy war. He actually wrote in 2022 that the Celtic language probably doesn’t even exist. There are whole libraries about Celtic culture, the Gauls, all of that.

Creating a sense of identity in Ireland: there was a language we spoke, which we think through, which got wiped out of daily use mostly. But the literature is all there. It’s the oldest vernacular literature in Europe — its monuments go back to the fifth and sixth centuries of the Common Era, when the rest of Europe had nothing comparable. Irish poetry and structures preserved the only written-down record of Celtic literary art.

MAGA likewise creates community through stories. These stories have similar structures: grievance, fear, memes, others coming over the river, the migrants coming in — so to stop them, we need to bomb the other people. They have the same kinds of structures as the stories I saw in Russia-occupied Ukraine. And what I saw in Russia-occupied Ukraine is where Druidy Don’s Disinfolklore universe is leading us.

I had this horrific vision this morning. Some of us will have seen the Epstein survivors’ analysis of some of the files released so far. There’s enough to see certain things which aren’t yet demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, but it’s possible that the mental model we have — a group of people for whom Epstein was the front, trafficking vulnerable young women and children to an island where extremely influential people coerced them — may not be all that was going on there, on that island which wasn’t properly investigated, and on Great St James Island.

This idea of Greenland being a distraction strikes me — no, the proof of concept of the enslavement of people and the extraterritorial nature of an island is perhaps what they have in store. It’s not about data centres or creating a sovereign state as a Silicon Valley on the ice, an Ayn Rand kind of place beyond the Rockies, a Shangri-La. What they may have in store is more akin to Auschwitz than Shangri-La. That’s the horrific vision I have. I want to share it so we bookmark it. I don’t know it for sure — it’s a sense, a feeling, because what’s going on is so unusual.

But hopefully that’s a bit inspiring too, because we saw Europe’s leaders yesterday make a very strong statement. No one is taking this as just trolling. The Danish military wasn’t taking this as a joke six months ago either. Whatever is going on in the background that inspired world leaders to say what they said yesterday, they obviously have a sense of things we don’t know about. But I also sense that what they want to do there is even worse than what the Rashists did in Luhansk, Donetsk, occupied Crimea, and across the whole Soviet Union. That should inspire us to campaign hard.

Our moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations are affected by these stories. We’re Disinfolklored into depression or sadness. All the work we put into Volya Radio, especially the presenters — this is our way of responding.

When I studied international law, most of the content — state responsibility, sovereignty, what is a state — a lot of the case law comes from South America in the 19th century, specifically on borders, extradition, rendition. The Monroe Doctrine: I’d obviously seen it suddenly in our information space. I’ve spoken about how characters — part of the Disinfolklore Analytical Toolkit — can be tracked in data. This new character suddenly arose: the Monroe Doctrine. I didn’t look into it deeply because it seemed like one of those characters you see when watching a Netflix series — a new character comes in and you don’t know if they’ll stay. Some stay the course, others get killed off.

What Scouts Green just quoted about the White House press secretary — that’s one voice, then Donald’s another voice, and you have this cacophony. It’s really hard to put them all together. *The Waste Land* itself as a motif in literature comes from early Irish literature, passed into Welsh mythological literature, went to Chrétien de Troyes in the first Grail tale, and came right back via Monty Python and this whole effusion of Grail tales into British and European literature. The whole idea of the Wasteland arises when the king tells a lie, has a lying thought. The result of these lies is what we’re seeing in Russia at the moment.

T.S. Eliot’s *The Waste Land* was originally to be called “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” from a Charles Dickens novel, *Our Mutual Friend*. When you read it, it’s just a character in Bermondsey who says, of another character, “He do the police in different voices.” Eliot took that and the poem is indeed lots of different voices, a concatenation. “He do the police in different voices” keeps coming back to me when I hear these different voices.

If we look at all of these different stories as part of this attempt to put us into what I call a Disinfolklore universe — the totality of them — that’s the main way I’m trying to assimilate them. I’ve got a category in my head: Disinfolklore universe. Donald’s saying this today, saying that. I’m trying to avoid going with the flow of these trolls and allowing them to hack my mind.

If we really want to go to the Monroe Doctrine as Scouts Green describes it — 1830-something, about South America — then most of the content of international law when it comes to borders and territorial integrity, I postulate, is the result of the Monroe Doctrine: a century of conflicts over borders, the Bolivarian Revolution, one country going into another, complete mess until the post-World War II legal order and the idea that territorial integrity is sacrosanct. That’s my way of putting a negative spin on the Monroe Doctrine. While the archetypal MAGA patriot goes, “Oh great, we’re going back to 1830,” I’m sure we’ll see articles in *The New Yorker* and *The New Republic* about the devastating results of the Monroe Doctrine on these countries and indigenous populations. If we have this new character being introduced into our information space, introduced as an explanatory character — like a Netflix show introducing us to our favourite character’s parents to soften them — I postulate the Monroe Doctrine is an ogre, not a friendly giant. That’s my way of undermining what they’re trying to do.

There’s clearly something going on in the background they know about. My best suggestion is something to do with Epstein Island: a sovereign state and really horrific things, worse than *The Handmaid’s Tale*. Everything else is froth to distract us, including the Monroe Doctrine, which probably has positive elements but I suspect a very dark side. There’s also the huge irony that they’re trying to destroy the primacy of international law over domestic law. But this tripartite splitting of the world would have worked only if Russia could take Pokrovsk — an exaggeration, it wouldn’t matter even then, but the fact that it can’t. Then you go back to the people around Donald: hard-nosed people with an animal sense of pecking order. They won’t give Russia anything for free.

This was part of how ridiculous it was for Medvedev to say the Americans can seize President Zelensky for them. How well do you know these people, Mr Medvedev? If America goes in and seizes President Zelensky, they’re not going to give Russia Ukraine — they’re going to take it for themselves. They’re not charity people. If they think you’re one of them, as tough and rich as them — sure, you’ve got a sixth of the world’s surface. But you can’t organise a booze-up in a brewery. You can’t even take Pokrovsk. You’ve been saying, “Give us four more months.” Some of us will remember when Donald said, “You’ll have two more weeks.” Then they gave them a few more months. I believe Lavrov said to Rubio, “Look, we just need another two months to wrap this up.” And Donald and company really gave the Russians time from early March onwards — when, as Will always remembers, around the 22nd of March, Ukraine suddenly stopped hitting the oil wells.

If it’s a tripartite split, I think Russia’s lost its place. Today I was thinking about the Unified Reich a lot. Some of us will remember when Donald revealed the “Unified Reich” back in April 2024 — some of us immediately spotted it and understood: this is to revert us to the 1930s, *Handmaid’s Tale* America. Maybe the Unified Reich consists of China, Russia and the United States. But Russia is not going to get a free lunch, because all three states are characterised by what I call the Axis of Misogyny. They want to reverse the post-World War II legal and social order. They have a perspective on half of humanity — the female half — that they should be subjugated. There are many commonalities among the MAGA paleo-conservative approach.

I don’t believe Greenland is a distraction from the Epstein files. Whatever was going on there that we now know about, there’s a lot more — we know the tip of the iceberg. We should have ten million records released, unredacted. The vision for humanity: slavery, sexual slavery, coercion, no laws, the island nature, the use of Disinfolklore to brainwash and conceal and confuse — I believe this is part of it. The tripartite split is possible, but this is why I started with the positive: if this had been going on before Ukraine started devouring, picking apart the corpse of Russia like a bald eagle eating a dead carcass in a field, we’d be in a much worse position. I don’t say this to create complacency — there’s a lot to be cheerful about.

Ukraine is just doing it. All this stuff about peace troops — as Mokrushyna reminds us, this is after a so-called peace. But there’s going to be no peace until Russia leaves all of Ukraine. It doesn’t worry me that British and French troops aren’t going in now. Ukraine is handing Russia’s arse to it, trading land for a little bit of local peace, and we see the state of Russian forces on horses and the like. The main danger, as I’ve spoken about before, would be a Minsk situation where it’s frozen. Ukraine offered a ceasefire that enables it to satisfy Donald’s ridiculous position. We could be pretty confident the Russians would never accept it — a good bet, and so far it’s worked. Then it’s easy to talk about.

President Zelensky has managed to change the archetypal identity of Ukraine in people’s minds. It drives me nuts that Ukraine has to do this — that people think Ukraine was too belligerent. I have people in my own life who said things I now realise they either believed or had picked up from the information space: that Ukraine kind of wanted this war. “She was asking for it. She wanted me to hit her.” Now we’ve gone through this ridiculous charade since Donald came in, of Ukraine modelling wanting peace. We may have to go through some of those stages again. But ultimately, I remember Budanov saying about a year and a half ago — and I remember a member of the Verkhovna Rada saying, “This ends this generation. I’m not going to subject my children to this again. We are going to finish them off this time.” Everything Ukraine does is very skilful, all about trolling Russia to its destruction, moving it forward, tickling it. President Zelensky as a 21st-century troll.

Merz, from my perspective, is doing exactly what we need. We wouldn’t be in this situation had Macron and Scholz been in the position Merz is in. We saw that thing a few weeks ago which moved me a lot, where he says he wakes up every morning and thinks, “I am in a bad dream,” and then remembers: no, Ukraine is going to be hit by missiles. Merz models feeling this as a human being. I haven’t seen anything from him that annoys me, whereas Scholz and the people in his cabinet — “Ukraine won’t be able to use the tanks” and all of that.

Is Germany ready to lead? It’s certainly ready to lead Europe. A lot of us will remember Thomas Theiner’s brilliant work in the old place. But I notice a hectoring tone — he’s only got one key in all of his tweets. I think he’s coming from a positive place, trying to motivate Europe. But it’s a constant negative tone, and the danger is it’s the same archetyping of Europe as weak that MAGA is continually attempting. This isn’t archetyping for archetyping’s sake — it’s to archetype Europe as weak so they can scare Europeans and take Greenland, which is part of the territorial integrity of the European Union. Strategic archetyping, exactly the kind the Rashists were doing inside eastern Ukraine and in the run-up to this war, trying to demotivate people.

This constant hectoring — “You’re so weak, America’s so strong” — is psychologically unsophisticated and really demotivating. Being told you’re rubbish and stupid doesn’t help. Tell me if I make a mistake, fine, get the hectoring tone out, but move on. You don’t have to do it in every single tweet. You might see this energy, this immanence in there, because the substance of the story — this came up again with the person who phoned in to Volya trying to denigrate Volya and Ukraine, archetyping Ukraine as desperate. Then we saw from the former defence minister that Ukraine got 30% more money last year from its allies for military means than in any previous year. An escalator going up. We have the 90 billion coming on stream from the European Union. Merz was very much part of getting Ukraine that. There’s Disinfolklore and drama about loans, but that’s just noise. Now we have 800 billion for Ukraine, a non-EU member. It’s in the budget. Extraordinary. No other country in history is about to benefit from so much. As Will has been saying for ages: make sure you put it on budget like Sweden has done, and then the Russians will calculate, they’ll see. Now it’s on budget. The Russians, because they’re desperate and have no exit strategy, will archetype Europe as weak. But when we as discerning consumers of Infolklore and Disinfolklore look at what is actually happening — objectively, this is extraordinary stuff, impossible to dream of from most of 2022 and 2023. Including the Gripen incoming and everything else.

It occurred to me today as I was listening about the document dump: the chaos of these files is a catastrophe for Donald and everyone. There are tens of millions of documents. We have enough documents now to know there are tens of millions more to come. But from the perspective of a lawyer, you have — I’ll say infinity as a metaphor — infinity of different ways to charge particular criminals. Well, you don’t — there’s a set of different ways for any particular set of facts. You develop a theory, take a view on the most solid charges, and if the person is guilty of huge numbers of crimes, you try to take the most solid one.

Any of us who followed the Stormy Daniels case from the first time Michael Cohen was charged and jailed — it was done on illegal funding of the election, because the payment to Stormy Daniels should have been registered. That was the most solid case they could make. Donald was unindicted co-conspirator number one. But then it was dismissed, and when it came back, it turned into a business records fraud case.

By analogy, you can see the clearest case against Putler. He’s entitled to sovereign immunity because these are acts done as head of state. But because international law — this principle which sadly the current US regime and Putler and all the paleo-masculinist conservatives want to get rid of — holds that international law has primacy over domestic or municipal law, certain crimes cut through that immunity. The stealing of children under the Geneva Conventions is a really clear-cut crime. And the idiot has admitted to it. He is just as idiotic as Donald in the sense that if you were their lawyer, you’d constantly have your head in your hands, because they keep admitting to crimes from which they’re not immune. He has admitted on television to stealing these children, as has Lvova-Belova. The Council of Europe has established the tribunal to try Russia for the crime of aggression, and Putler and all the leadership will be responsible for that. They’ve committed so many crimes — the genocide case is going through, tortuous and complicated, and will go on for years. And the Compensation Commission was signed last week in The Hague.

This is where Ukrainians will be able to claim compensation. And again, this goes back to Putler understanding what awaits him and Russia, and why they will never relent. There’s no chance, as far as I can see, unless the European Union gets catapulted into a Disinfolklore universe — which I don’t see happening at the moment, thankfully. When I made my Munich speech, I wasn’t sure. It was the same day President Zelensky was speaking in Munich, and J.D. Vance spoke the next day or perhaps that day as well. It wasn’t clear to me how things would go after the White House visit. The typical pattern would have been everyone trying to assuage the Americans and selling out Ukraine — that’s what had happened since 2014. But that didn’t happen.

You see this huge pincer movement, like a lobster claw, against Russia — notwithstanding Ukraine’s execution of justice by blowing up long-term assets. Yes, it would be great to see him charged for absolutely everything, but this crime is serious enough that the key would be thrown away, and it’s the easiest to prove — he’s admitted it. They could convince even extremely conservative judges.

Why hasn’t it happened? Unfortunately — I won’t go into too much detail for personal reasons — but I think five judges at the ICC are now sanctioned by the United States, including the chief prosecutor. I’m hoping that now Europe has to say to America: sorry, we’ve helped you for decades, but now it’s over. The chief prosecutor is accused of something which I suspect he didn’t do. We see this coalition between the United States, Israel and Russia trying to destroy the International Criminal Court — the apex of the system established after World War II. It was almost unimaginable that the ICC would be established before the Rome Statute was founded, around the turn of the century. Now Israel, the United States and Russia together are trying to destroy it through all sorts of disgusting means. I suspect the court is under great pressure, but the warrants for Putler’s arrest, and indeed Netanyahu’s, are still alive. The case against Russia is much stronger. I’d say it’s the best, the easiest chance of a conviction — getting a warrant against a sitting president is really, really almost impossible, but we’re seeing justice being rigged every day. That’s my explanation from a lawyerly perspective. I recognise the frustration that we don’t see a massive charge sheet and constant pressure.

I’ll also mention the European Court of Human Rights case, which is the definitive history for as long as our civilisation lasts. That 600-page judgment will stand as the definitive history of Russia’s war of annihilation against Ukraine, starting in February 2014. It settles as a matter of law and fact basically everything about the war in Ukraine, and it should be the last word. I wish we lived in a world where that judgment — those 600 pages and all the decisions about when the occupation started, the destruction of all freedom of religion in Ukraine by the Russians, the murder of people, the Disinfolklore crimes in Russia-occupied Ukraine, the killing of journalists and people like Victoria Amelina and Victoria Roshchyna — formed the framework, the mental frame for humanity. But alas.

One of the ideas I’m pretty clear on this week is what I call the zero-sum war. Putler and President Zelensky understand this is a zero-sum war. Whichever side loses will, as the Manchu Qing dynasty or the Hittites did, completely disappear from history. The Hittite is the first attested Indo-European language. The Hittite empire lasted from about 1500 BCE to 1100 BCE. They signed the first treaty we have in international law. I’m about to visit Mitanni, where the Mitanni empire was, which I’m really excited about. The Treaty of Mitanni between the Hittites and the Mitanni — the Mitanni themselves were Semitic-language-speaking people, but they worshipped Indo-European gods. We know this because in the Treaty of Mitanni the guarantor is Teshub the storm god — I’ve just named my new kitten Teshub — but also Indo-European gods like Indra, in charge of the sovereignty element, and various others.

Today we see the same dynamic. Most of us are pretty convinced the Ukrainians aren’t going to accept another Budapest Memorandum-type arrangement. But everyone’s talking about who will guarantee, who will protect the treaty. In the Treaty of Mitanni, 1500 BCE, you have the god Mitrashil — who is Mitra, the god of juridical law — and the god Indra, who embodies both the legal and magical aspects of sovereignty. And then the gods Nasatya, the horse-born divine twins. We’re scratching around looking for guarantors of peace, and this is where it began in 1500 BCE.

By the zero-sum war I mean this idea — which we see in the *Financial Times*, which just continues to get rolled and trolled — that Putler is unknowing and misled by all around him. This is such a childish fantasy that I’ll never listen to any serious commentator who argues it as the sole explanation. We have to bank on Putler having a clear-eyed idea of what is going on. He knows, as far as I can see, because he understands all of Russia’s crimes. He pretends not to, and Russians pretend not to in their Disinfolklore, but they understand what they did in Bucha. They knew they were planning to blame Bucha on Ukrainian Nazis and then invite the Germans and the EU to see — “Look what the Ukrainians did, our war is justified.” They know all of their crimes. They pretend they’ve forgotten, but they understand. And because they know all of their crimes, they know what Ukraine is going to do to avenge them. This is why I call it a zero-sum war. This is my governing concept, and has been for a long time, even more so now during this peace process.

If you think Putler doesn’t know about this, then you’re falling for the old-fashioned “good tsar, bad boyar” troll — which we laugh at when we see those videos of Russian citizens appealing to him as if he gives a damn. Therefore, Putler’s dominant strategy is to continue the war as long as possible to save himself. He’s talked about Russia’s ethnos — that we Europeans just want to destroy his ethnos.

A slight bit of trolling from me, but I think it’s positive trolling: I saw this about the Manchu Qing dynasty, which ruled China for about 400 years until around 1911. Today it’s virtually impossible to find anyone in China who self-identifies as Manchu. It just disappeared — a dynasty and an ethnos, an ethnicity. People identified as it, and it vanished. So what I say to, as Chuck Pfarrer might put it, our Russian listening guests — though I doubt we have any — don’t worry about your ethnos disappearing, because the Chinese have a very gentle way of disappearing ethnos, and you won’t even notice it.

Like Putin, Putler may not know whether Russia is occupying Kupiansk, for instance. But he knows that Kupiansk is a thousand kilometres east of Kyiv. And he wants Kyiv. He doesn’t want Kupiansk. So while the minutiae of the occupation may escape him, he knows the entire war is a complete and utter disaster. Ukrainians know it too — Anne of Odessa, among other sources, is saying that even if this peace treaty were agreed by the Russians, they’re not going to stop. There will only be one ethnos at the end of this war. My money’s on the Ukrainians and not on the Russians. But if you know that as a Russian leader, you will continue to the very end.

It does seem as if European leaders get this. The mad uncle in the attic — Donald — and the people around him, I don’t think they get it. I presume there are some people around them who do.

Disinfolklore

Our Disinfolklore Universe

1 Introduction: Declaration of ‘Our Disinfolklore Universe…

Listen now

a year ago · 19 likes · Decoding Trolls

Power of Mana

Why No Mana in Hittites’ Mythological Founder Monarchs’ Monikers?

Here are the first words in any Indo-European language, for which we have written evidence…

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2 years ago

⚡️Victory on the battlefield will not mean the end of this war.

After Ukraine wins the war, we need to continue fighting to re-centre contemporary and Ancient Ukraine in the mental models of humanity.

Ancient Ukraine is the location of the Common Source for ALL Indo-European languages, and religions

See:

Power of Mana

Ancient Ukraine’s Don-sounding Rivers, Yama, and Lords of Death

The similarity between the moniker Donn (Ireland’s pre-Christian Lord of Death) and the names of rivers which embodied Gods, Lords of Death and the passage to the afterlife across the Indo-European cultural zone may be significant…

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2 years ago · 3 likes · DecodingTrolls

and

Power of Mana

First Aryans in Judea: Trope of First Self-Sacrificing Monarch

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2 years ago · DecodingTrolls

Ancient Ukraine birthed modes of social organisation like the Indo-European model of monarchy,

A world-beating model of domesticated horse-powered pastoral farming, and wheel-powered migration that conquered Manuland was born between the Don and Dniepr (Don Apris) rivers of Ancient Ukraine:

Power of Mana

Ancient Ukrainians: Cannabis, Wagons, and the first Indo-European language speakers

Descendants of Ancient Ukrainian Yamnaya Culture have left us the first archaeological evidence of cannabis used for ritual purposes…

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2 years ago · 1 like · DecodingTrolls

From 4,200 BCE when the cultural ancestors of the first Indo-Europeans to conquer all of Anatolia (today’s Türkiye) left Ancient Ukraine

Power of Mana

Why No Mana in Hittites’ Mythological Founder Monarchs’ Monikers?

Here are the first words in any Indo-European language, for which we have written evidence…

Read more

2 years ago

to 2,500 when further waves of migrants left Ancient Ukraine to found Greek (the first olive branches for the Olympics came from Ancient Ukraine and Zeus Pater and his son Apollo were Ancient Ukrainian innovations) culture:

and Celtic cultures.

Power of Mana

Saint Moninne: Reversion to the Moon-based Metaphor

Saint Moninne is a perfect example of what motivated my search for the meaning (M-N-), if any, of this recurrence of M-N- sounds in Indo-European culture’s sacred vocabulary - Brahmin, Brāhmaṇas, Bramaṇā, Flamines, Mantra, Brāhmaṇa, Angra Mainyu (destructive…

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2 years ago · 2 likes · DecodingTrolls

Italic (yes, Ancient Rome is Ancient Ukraine’s daughter culture),…

Power of Mana

Should we call Ancient Ukrainians the first Aryans?

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2 years ago · DecodingTrolls

Ancient and contemporary Ukraine has been at the centre of our world, yet not our mental models of our origins for millennia:

Power of Mana

Bono, Manna, and the Discovery of Our ‘Common Source’

And thus the discovery of the Indo-European family of languages and culture was announced. One balmy night in Kolkata. 2 February 1786. By William Jones, a Welsh Oxford-trained Persian expert and lawyer, in his second presidential address to the Asiatick Society which he had founded, shortly after arriving in India to be a judge…

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2 years ago

Centuries of ignorance and Russian Disinfolklore, however, has masked this:

This is what my Finding Manuland project is about.

From the 17c onwards the idea that “western” culture was somehow founded in Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome has been relentlessly promoted:

Today, due to new sciences like Isotope analysis of Ancient humans

Power of Mana

Archæogenetic and Isotopic Revolutions

We notice how certain sounds and meanings are identical across the area between Ireland and India. We remark how over a period…

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2 years ago

linguistics

Disinfolklore

What Meaning Means

Happy to announce that I have identified for the first time THE two fundamental Cryptotypes underpinning all extant Indo-European languages…

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2 years ago · 5 likes · DecodingTrolls

comparative mythology

and Archaeogenetics

Power of Mana

Decolonising Prehistory: Our Expanding Mental Model of ‘History’

Finding Manuland is a travelogue of physical and mental journeys through today’s Europe and Asia…

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2 years ago · DecodingTrolls

we know for certain that Ancient Ukraine birthed Indo-European culture. Let’s re-centre Ukraine, and transform our mental models accordingly.

Power of Mana

Ancient Ukrainians: First Indo-Europeans

Relatively early in my research, I read that the builders of the mound that concealed the Dnipro stone henge were from what archaeologists call the Yamnaya Culture…

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2 years ago · 1 like · 2 comments · DecodingTrolls

⚡️ “Kammalia” is one of the oldest attested Indo-European words.

Today, over half of the world’s population speak an Indo-European language.

This is a list of the oldest attested words in any Indo-European language.

These are the personal names of Anatolians living in Kaniš / Kültepe which feature in documents dated to 1,900 - 1,800 BCE (I visited the site where these documents were found).

Among them is the name of a man called Kammalia.

Four centuries of linguistic evolution and Kammalia had become Kammaliįa in Hittite / Nešumnili

(the earliest attested Indo-European language).

Now, in English 4,000 years later it’s Kamala, and a female name.

First Writing in Any Indo-European Language:

Power of Mana

First Writing in Any Indo-European Language

I wanted to visit where the first example of writing in any Indo-European language was discovered…

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2 years ago

⚡️What Will Ruschia’s De-occupation of Crimea be like?

Like this is how Ruschia announced the deoccupation of Lyman, 24 hours after purporting to incorporate it into the Ruschist constitution:

“In connection with the creation of a threat of encirclement, the allied troops were withdrawn from the settlement of Krasny Liman to more advantageous lines - RF Ministry of Defense.”

Ukraine will then exchange 2m forcibly disappeared Ukrainians Ruschia is holding hostage (and for which Putler received his first IC arrest warrant) for 1.5m illegal Ruschist occupiers in Ukraine who have illegally entered Ukraine since March 2014.

⚡️GOP’s Project 2025 Talking Points

✅ Women must have children to participate in public life.

✅ No civil rights for unwhites.

✅ Only blonde, whites get DEI hired.

✅ No joy. No laughing (I’m not joking).

In the Autumn of 2019, I was trying to understand of what Don’s power/Mana consisted. I wanted to understand in order to counter how Don Disinfolklore used Twitter to roil humanity’s minds into believing trolls like the Hunter Biden troll or Pizzagate Conspiracy.

At the time I was a diplomat in eastern Ukraine- I could see how Donald’s trolling even then had real world effects on the battlefield.

So of all the gateway concepts to Master/Magister, I chose “trolls and trolling.”

Then, when I formed the hypothesis in the note below about Trolls, Trolling and energy exchange, I became @DecodingTrolls to test the hypothesis and to troll others into perceiving how we become part of the problem when, unthinkingly / unknowingly, we perpetuate others’ trolls, like, for example the idea that Europe and Ukraine are “weak,” in whichever guise such trolls are conveyed.

As notes below, trolling and Don’s motivated trolls are CENTRAL to his mana/power. And the key/core/dominant determining troll that yields/yielded Don’s power was about pedophilia (cf. PizzaGate troll that recruited many MAGA adherents to their Magus Donald due to the disgust it engendered, unjustifiably, about his main rival Hillary in the minds of those who fell for the PizzaGate troll).

This is why the public cover up through ‘redaction’ of the Epstein files goes to the core of Don’s Mana/power.

“The very trolls that Donald Trump has relied on since 2016, people like Jack Bysiobieck, people like Benny Johnson, people like Charlie Kirk while he was still alive….

There’s this whole group of trolls and they have been instrumental to Donald Trump’s ability to grab attention and refocus it somewhere else…

In other words, these people, so long as social media, so long as Twitter is viable, they have been able to swamp the public’s fear with Trump’s bullshit and in the process drown out other things.

‘A new report by Reuters uncovered that in the first half of this year alone, President Trump’s family has raked in more than $800 million from sales of crypto assets. This on top of potentially billions more in unrealized on paper gains.’

Now, much of this cash has been coming in from foreign sources, which doesn’t come as a surprise when we factor in.

So they are an instrumental tool to Donald Trump, to his ability to be able to be always the center of tension, but ensure that it’s the kind of, you know, ensure that he can direct the attention where he wants it to be.

‘Mr. President, why wait for Congress to release the Epstein files? Why not just do it now?’

Donald: ‘I think you are a terrible reporter. You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter.’

Those trolls, that troll in the effort, is fundamentally tied to conspiracy theories about pedophilia.

Fake worrying about pretend pedophiles is an easy way[…]…

He relies on these trolls. These trolls rely on conspiracy theories about pedophilia. He installs these trolls as the FBI director and deputy director, and he’s stuffed.

And then when he tries to make it go away in July, he can’t, those trolls at first, even the Psobe act…

What happened is that he threatened those same trolls, the same trolls his power utterly lies on, and they stopped chasing Epstein.

But by that point, it has this weight and salience throughout the MAGAbase…

[Don’s chief of staff Wiles is] the same woman who’s telling us there’s no ‘there there’s inside the Epstein files, is also telling us it’s not central to Donald Trump’s power, which not only was it up to the moment in July when he tries to shut it all down, but if you look at what has happened since July, if you look at the way effectively Democrats plus Tom Massey plus Marjorie Taylor Greene have been able to take the speaker’s gavel away from Mike Johnson over and over and over again, it is fundamental to his power right now. “ [From Ball of Thread: Young Playboys Gone Wiles, 19 Dec 2025

This material may be protected by copyright.]

⚡️Trolls are energy (Mana) that only moves when we share them.

Then, we become the troll.

The informational unit (Troll) consumes us as it instrumentalises us to keep it in motion.

Like a virus hacking our mind, the troll uses us to keep their troll moving.

Ruschia’s Nordic troll monarch Putler is very successful at provoking us into doing his mental work.

We are the petrol fuelling the troll, even when we disagree with its content.

That’s the point of trolls like Nigel Porridge, in fact. Their oligarch backers pay to promote their trolls. Then, by reacting and perpetuating the trolls, we fuel and energise that which we think we’re opposing.

We become the Useful I***** of Useful I******.

One solution I’ve found if I must talk about Nigel Porridge or the Chef Wanger Nazi, the Chef of Disinfolklore, of the Chief Sorcerer Putler is to corrupt their monikers.

Disinfolklore

Applying the ‘Generosity’ Element of the Code of Positive Trolls

Disinfolklore uses stories to communicate fear into others’ minds. Counter Disinfolklore is an analytical method employing the following means to neutralise the power of Disinfolklore to hack minds with such emotion-moving stories…

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2 years ago · 4 likes · Decoding Trolls

⚡️Biden Resolved Perennial Plight of the Sorcerer - Can Starmer?

Two aging Sorcerers: Deva Biden vs. Asura / Danava Dæmon Donald.

Fighting for power (Mana) / Sovereignty over our world.

Both Sorcerers know their mantic powers (Mana) fade further and further with every dawn.

Both have apprentices.

How can they know the right moment to empower their apprentice?

How can they be certain that, once empowered with all their Magus Master Monarch’s Magic, the Apprentice won’t destroy their Master/Magister?

How can the Magister/Master immunise themself against treachery by their Minister/Apprentice, should they stand down?

The Plight of the Sorcerer from the first moment Indo-European patriarchal Monarchy began in eastern Ukraine.

The complication is always some variation of:

What if I convey my Mana to my Apprentice Magus, and then they use my own Mana against me?

How do I immunise myself from my ambitious minister/apprentice?

Sorcerer Donald tried to solve his plight, by hanging his Apprentice Magus Pence (out to dry) on Jan 6.

“Pence’s former counsel, told the panel that Pence refused to get into the vehicle after being evacuated from the Capitol, raising concerns that the driver would have taken him to a secure location & thus prevent him from certifying the electoral results.”

Then Sorcerer Donald was convinced by Sorcerer Thiel and Musk to take on their Apprentice Magus Vance, in return for immunity, and $1b+ - a true Devils’ bargain:

Yet, of course, Donald doesn’t trust Vance.

A dæmon recognises other dæmon’s and their apprentices from 1,000 paces.

Donald, once again, like a folktale ingenue has made the same mistake: his apprentice, he’s sure, will betray him.

By contrast, Sorcerer Biden chose his apprentice from good stock.

Apprentice Magus Harris was as loyal as Magus Pence had been to Sorcerer Donald. Wise Sorcerer Biden, unlike Sorcerer Donald, knew the right time to pass on the Right to her.

And it is done.

Contrast too how Sorcerer Putler dealt with his Apprentice Magus the Chef of Disinfolklore Prighozin himself:

Disinfolklore

Meta-Disinfolklore (7) -

The Chef's Saucerer's Internet Research Agency's Disinfolklore provoked the division in England and in the USA that delivered Brexit and Trump…

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3 years ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Decoding Trolls

England’s anti-mask pro-Covid Sovereign gave his mother Long Covid:

She dies. He gets Sovereignty over all the English as a result.

Shakespeare loved a good succession battle.

Brown agreed a devil’s bargain with Blair, lost his soul over Iraq, then lost Mana (power) almost as soon as he managed to get rid of Blair. Ségolène Royal and Francois Hollande, similarly, destroyed each other. Starmer, current UK PM’s popularity’s in minus figures (manifestly unfairly in my humble opinion). Yet, Ed Miliband his predecessor’s popularity among party members is above 40%. Can Starmer effect a transfer of the crown, before his unpopularity leaves the way open for pro-Russia “Reform” party? This remains to be seen. Ireland’s former prime minister Leo Vradaker, similarly, was unpopular. He surrendered power / mana to one of his deputies, who then did well in the subsequent general election.

On and on, back as far as Indo-European culture’s first empire the Hittites, we have seen issues with Magisters unwilling to surrender power/mana. After 500 years, around 1,200 BCE Hittite destroyed itself over how to pass on power (Mana).

Resolving the Plight of the Sorcerer is THE trickiest magical trick any Indo-European sovereign faces.

Doing so is, perhaps, President Biden’s greatest achievement.

⚡️State of Donald’s Mana - Post Kamala Update.

Donald’s power / Mana depends 100% on his value to America’s top 20 oligarchs. Only value is Donald’s electability.

Donald’s *x’aranah / Mana is a creation of our media space controlled as it is by 20 oligarchs.

Once Donald’s chance of election affects these supporters, Donald falls to earth, as Ancient Iran’s Lord of Death Yima did.

In Iran’s ancient Avesta it is said of the Lord of Death Yima (who corresponds to Odin in Germanic cultures - for whom our Wednesday is named - and Donn in pre-Christian Ancient Ireland):

“For a long time Yima holds the ‘sovereign empire over all the lands,’ and his reign, of untold prosperity, is protected by the *x’aranah / Mana / fake polling data, those marks of divine election which guarantees and expresses the legitimacy of a king.

But one day he commits a sin.

According to the single passage that mentions it in the remaining Avesta, the sin is lying:

Donald’s extraordinary prosperity, Yast 19,33 says emphatically, lasted until ‘he lied,’ until he ‘began to think the lying word, contrary to truth.’”

Etymologically “truth” corresponds to what “is. That which exists, is positive and not illusory.”

“Rtá” is opposed to “drúh” in the ancient Indian Vedic language.

“Arta” is opposed to “druj” in the ancient Iranian Avestan language.

The idea and form of the signifier “Art” as that which is created which reveals truth stems from this.

In the language of Darius’s inscriptions, drauga, the “lie,” is essentially the attitude of rebels, of usurpers or potential usurpers who deceive the people by pretending to he “king” in place of Darius himself (Darius I (522–486 bce) founded the Achmenaid Empire that ruled Judea, Greece, and other lands for 300 years).

No-one wants to back a loser, especially the billionaire anti-loser class.

⚡️Tulsi’s Nuclear Disinfolklore Trolling

To remind myself why this relates to what we’re going to talk about today, which is Tulsi Gabbard’s meme. James, I’m 100% comfortable with you using the term meme. I use the term meme interchangeably with the term informational unit in my work, and also with the term troll — where troll describes the item of Disinfolklore, the item of information. Meme for me is more than simply a visual image, which is what we’ve come to think of it as. When the term was coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, it described informational units — what I call informational units — which are communicated in cultures in the same way that genes are communicated biologically. So I’m very comfortable with that.

I discovered Disinfolklore as a narrative form in eastern Ukraine, where I gradually realised, while working in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, that what I was looking at — particular items of Disinfolklore, particular memes, particular units of information, the quotidian daily ebb and flow of news — there was a system behind it. I began to look more deeply and realised that in Russian military strategy, they have this idea of information confrontation, which has two elements: the means, which is the instances of information, and the information environment. That’s one path to what I now call a Disinfolklore galaxy — which is what Russia created inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, where every thought you have, every movement you make, every aspect of your reality, from where you work to how you get there, to the people you talk to, whether family or colleagues — every aspect is injected with Disinfolklore. Ideas meld with the actual texture of your life. Unless you profess certain memes, certain beliefs, certain informational units — if you get them wrong, you’ll lose your job. You’ll be like that ABC journalist who called Stephen Miller full of hate and lost his job. A perfect example of how the information environment impacts every aspect of your life.

That’s eastern Ukraine, where I discovered what I now call the Disinfolklore galaxy. The Disinfolklore universe is made up of many different galaxies. The MAGA Disinfolklore galaxy has many continuities, many similarities with what I saw in Russia-occupied Ukraine. Then I had this vision in early November 2024, just after the election, that what had happened to those who are part of MAGA was going to happen to all of humanity and all of America first. This became the talk I made at the Pirate Party conference in Munich during the Munich Security Conference: “Welcome to Our Disinfolklore Universe.”

Now we see this same melding of reality in everything to do with America’s relationship to Ukraine, which is primarily why we’re here — we’re interested in Ukraine and Ukraine winning. We’re hoping against hope, and I think most of us understand it’s never going to happen that America would tip the scales in favour of Ukraine. Now we’re just hoping it doesn’t tip them against Ukraine. Ukraine has been central to US politics since 2016 and the Republican National Convention in August 2016, when Paul Manafort — whose work led directly to this war in Ukraine, and who was imprisoned for operating as an unregistered agent for Ukraine’s former president — had the commitment to support Ukraine militarily taken out of the Republican National Convention’s platform.

I’ve posted before about the exact moment when MAGA went pro-Russia. Now we’ve seen reported in the last couple of days — Reuters reported two days ago, and Hegseth actually said it in Congress yesterday — that there’s evidence the United States would not fund Ukraine militarily next year. We see this path from an extraordinary secret act, which caused a fuss when publicised, to now being mainstreamed and just one of thousands of different memes invading our information space. The totality of all of these makes up what I call the Disinfolklore galaxy.

That’s my main teaching, for want of a less grand word: when we’re tuned into individual memes and informational units day to day, what is actually being arranged around us is a Disinfolklore galaxy, just as powerful as that which surrounds and embeds and encapsulates the people who went MAGA and the people in our own lives who we know went MAGA. It’s nothing about intelligence or education or learning. It’s a deliberate attempt to hack people’s brains and minds, to surround them in what the Russians call an information environment in which all of these different memes are operating all the time to ensure we do or don’t do what those creating it want us to do.

I bring up Paul Manafort because he is the dark force behind much of the division in Ukraine between 2004 and 2014. The irony of the people he worked for and MAGA claiming that the Maidan was a US-engineered coup — when the very person who supported Yanukovych, who according to his daughters’ texts we saw publicly, arranged the massacre on the Maidan in February 2014. At the time, the current Polish foreign minister was in Kyiv trying to tell the demonstrators, along with Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, to pipe down and make a deal with Yanukovych. But Yanukovych fled. And Paul Manafort now works for Donald Trump. We don’t see him in the public light, but we did see him at the National Convention last time. What we see now with Tulsi Gabbard’s video about nuclear war has all the hallmarks of this same playbook.

That’s the link between Ukraine and America — a multi-layered link. On the positive side, we have the one force in the world who can actually confront and defeat this: President Zelensky. That’s the overall conception of how my Disinfolklore perspective helps me understand what is currently going on in the United States — these demonstrations by the president, illegal orders trying to create Disinfolklore which affects the minds of ordinary citizens who don’t know which way to go. Tulsi Gabbard is throwing in with her nuclear speech a very potent weapon — a statement of intention, is how I read it — with her idea that elites don’t care about nuclear war because they’ve got shelters.

I have the Disinfolklore universe — “Welcome to Our Disinfolklore Universe” — the speech I made in Munich at the Pirate Party conference. Note, the Pirate Party itself is an example of the unreal melding with the real. They always had an intuitive sense — just as Elon Musk dresses up in superhero costumes — pirates from literature, from art, became part of their moniker. The folk heroes of pirates. They were going to be the pirates. So it was appropriate that I made the speech there. Since then, I’ve worked carefully on detailing the whole idea: the Disinfolklore narrative form and Disinfolklore Analytical Method, many different things concerning the Disinfolklore universe.

Today, when I saw Tulsi Gabbard’s Nuclear Ashes speech, I decided to apply the method — the Twelve-Tool method, an algorithm we can learn in our own minds to interpret any informational unit, any meme, whether it’s a photograph or a picture. We see them sometimes in the English information space, and we’re probably seeing them in Northern Ireland at the moment, where there are riots because two alleged immigrants have allegedly attempted rape. As a result, we see tumult and communal riots. This is a perennial theme in Disinfolklore and indeed in Indo-European thought: outsiders, immigrants, come into the inner realm and affect its fertility. It’s either the sovereignty, the security, or the fertility — always one of those three themes. These are the essential archetypes in Indo-European societies, according to the great theorists of Indo-European language, linguistics and religion. Since I realised this, we can use it as a tool for analysing whether it’s riots in Ballymena in Northern Ireland. I haven’t looked into it yet, but it won’t surprise me if Telegram is somehow involved in stirring this hatred.

I decided to apply the method because it should be useful for us to understand what Tulsi Gabbard is doing. We see it — it comes up on our Twitter feed. This is what I’m trying to do. I’m not trying to write academic theses. I’m trying to understand what the people leading our communities are doing or trying to do, whether in Ukraine, whether it’s the Russians. The Russians show us where this leads, because they’ve created this nightmare inside Russia, as has the CCP and North Korea and Iran — communities deeply embedded in Disinfolklore, where they use these stories to hack the minds of their population.

I applied the method to the Tulsi Gabbard video because it’s archetypal Disinfolklore, really what she’s doing there. The moment I saw the aesthetics, I thought of a video a Ukrainian friend from eastern Ukraine sent me about a year into the war — a really strange artefact. She was asking me what I made of it. She didn’t really understand it, but she felt attracted by it. It was a man in a very 1970s aesthetic, like we might remember from the news in the 1970s, but he was talking about ultra-hypermodern things — how war in Ukraine was going to lead to an environmental catastrophe, and really we should be focused on global warming. The aesthetics of Tulsi’s video reminded me of this, because it communicated this mood of darkness, like being in a forest, of just feeling off. It’s so cynically and carefully produced — even her hair.

I haven’t paid much attention to her because I try to control what enters my mind. This is in fact the first time I’ve probably ever watched anything consciously by her. But to see this grey hair strand, reminiscent of Lily Munster from *The Munsters* — it’s deliberate archetyping as a witch. To put us in that space, our minds in this negative space. And then the imagery flashed up: the darkness of the background aesthetics, then the imagery of ashes. To someone like me who tries to control what goes into my mind, this came out of nowhere. I don’t understand what prompted it in terms of the news cycle. Is she responding to something? Or is this an artefact pumped into our space? Either way, it is a very deliberate announcement, in my interpretation, of what we see going on — the activation of the National Guard, the military parade in DC — that she is announcing that this coup, which they have been prosecuting since the 2020 election results were first disputed, they’re really going for it now. They’re not happy with how things are going.

I applied the Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy tool — Tool 1 — and got to this idea of her deliberately archetyping herself as a witch-like figure, like Lily Munster, with the wisp of grey hair, and the archetypes of nuclear war, ashes, elites. It’s replete with archetypes.

The Incoming/Outgoing Troll Radars — Tool 2 — should obviously always be switched on when you’re on Twitter, because everything there could be a troll designed to affect our emotions and hack our rational thought processes. The overall idea Gabbard’s video communicates is fear, a negative mood which has the power to overcome our radars, so that we allow this in — even just wondering, “Why is she talking about nuclear ashes?” It goes into our inner mind, and we start getting worried. This triggers different thought routines and traumas, deliberately provoked by the aesthetics, the mood, the words, her expression, the strangeness of this coming from the head of sixteen national intelligence agencies. This is as deep state as you get. And here she is archetyping herself as not part of the elite — who she says have nuclear bomb shelters and are therefore trying to spark a nuclear war. Which is itself nonsense, because just because you’ve got a shelter doesn’t mean you’re going to spark a war.

Tool 3 is looking for the mana in the meme — trying to find the energy. The energy is communicated through the mood, the darkness, the messaging. But what is she actually saying? I heard several discussions today about what she was saying, and people have different interpretations. It works on so many levels. But for me, the ultimate energy is a statement. Mana for me is an energy in memes. You look for what the energy is — the different levels, negative or positive, what it’s saying, what it’s doing, what’s the intention. For me, the intention is to say: “We are going to protect you. If you surrender to us, we’ll protect you from this nuclear war which the elite, the outer-realm people, want to start.” And for those of us who don’t fall for that, the message is: “We’re so powerful that there’s nothing you can do. You’re powerless. We’ll arrest you. The army will shoot you.”

Tool 4 is the inner-outer realm immanences. Every item of Disinfolklore — whether it’s a picture of a dark-skinned individual ogling a classic European female, a trope I see often in the English information space — is about inner realm and outer realm. Migrants coming in to take away the fertility of the inner realm, the daughter of the inner-realm people. That’s really what the anti-migration discourse is doing — taking away the sense of security in our communities. This inner-outer realm immanence was deeply embedded in Gabbard’s message. It was a minute and twenty seconds long. But the main message is: there is an elite who have nuclear bomb shelters, who will be protected, and they are the ones stirring nuclear war. She could easily have said this is Russia, this is the CCP. But she didn’t. She left it open to interpretation — which in itself, from my perspective, is a statement that she and the people she works for are all working together, whether it’s her boss, the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans. All nuclear powers. She could have said they were the ones threatening us — a Ronald Reagan-type stance, or an axis-of-evil framing. But she didn’t. She left it to the MAGA interpretation. This has been built on decades of this idea, especially in America, of cities as lawless lands, where the MAGA base lives in safe communities. The people I know, my relatives who’ve gone MAGA, are quite wealthy and safe, but even from a young age they’ve been going on about how unsafe the cities are. What’s happening in the information space about LA is built on decades of this outer-realm idea.

Tool 5 is the idea I got from the Dalai Lama and the great psychologist Paul Ekman, who did this amazing work available online called the Atlas of Emotions. They have this system, which I adapt into the Disinfolklore Analytical Method: Trigger, Experience, Reaction. Any of the emotional journeys we go on each day — thousands, millions perhaps — whether scrolling down our timeline or in real life with work, spouses, children, pets, or walking down the street as stimuli bounce off us. All of us who are experts in filtering and responding to information — we may not understand how amazing we are at this now, simply from being on Twitter. We have so many algorithms in our mind to filter things out. But ultimately, we’re being taken on oodles of emotional journeys.

In the Ekman–Dalai Lama model: there’s a trigger, we experience a feeling — disgust, sadness, one of the five emotions — and then we react. The message is that once you separate the experience from the reaction, you can avoid falling for the troll or sharing it. We talked last time about the conference in Moscow, where famous people have gone, and many of us shared pictures of them — which, from my perspective, is part of the purpose of the conference. We react to the experience by sharing it.

With the Tulsi Gabbard video, the experience I had was curiosity. My reaction is this monologue. As soon as I saw it, I thought: let me apply the Disinfolklore Analytical Method.

The other six tools — the Code of Positive Trolls — I won’t go through now. But the most important one for me here was Generosity. There was nothing generous in what she was saying. Nothing positive. It wasn’t even a cynical attempt to please us. It was a cynical attempt to put us at dis-ease. For that reason, it’s a perfect example of Disinfolklore — as indeed is what we see when Russia sends missiles into Ukraine and then broadcasts the footage, or conducts human safaris, which we talked about the other week when the UN reports came out, where they’re using Telegram to send FPV drone footage. They’re boasting about it. They’re creating Disinfolklore.

This is the same thing I saw in eastern Ukraine, where reality — the pictures of burning cars in a tiny area of LA — is being used repeatedly by the mainstream media as a pretext to create what I call the Disinfolklore galaxy, to really depressing ends, unless more of us wake up to it.

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