It pops up as a perennial troll: you’re in the countryside, something strange happens, and it’s attributed to a troll appearing and interceding. Trolls perform the same function as angels or leprechauns or banshees or Baba Yaga or rusalky. It’s all the same — every Indo-European culture has these substitutes for energy, to explain things.
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.
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