Coercive Control techniques being used to descend a global MAGA/Russia-esque Disinfolklore Galaxy over humanity

So another so another busy week in the Disinfolklore Galaxy that we are currently being wrapped up inside.

I don’t use the term Disinfolklore Galaxy lightly.

It is a technical term. I can define it scientifically.

The easiest way to understand what’s happening to us, if you are not MAGA, then just look at MAGA and see how people were wrapped up inside MAGA. You think ‘gosh, that’s really odd. That would never happen to me.’

But now we as a participant in Ukrainian info space, we are now experiencing this same process. So this is really one of the main frames - Disinfolklore Galaxy - which I would like to use to interpret the data coming from a whiplash week within which Donald stops deliveries of Patriot Interceptors. No he doesn’t. That person did. No that person. He didn’t know. Now he wants to arm Ukraine, using Europe’s money. But he didn’t ask Europe. No-one in NATO was warned about Donald’s announcement.

“Controlling or coercive behaviour” by individuals of other people became a crime in England in 2015. Among examples of what such Coercive Control behaviour involves in English law include the following, which also apply to how Russia acts in occupied parts of Ukraine towards Ukraine and Ukrainians: isolating a person from their friends and family; depriving them of their basic needs; monitoring a person via online communication tools or using spyware; using digital systems such as smart devices or social media to coerce, control, or upset the victim including posting triggering material; taking control over aspects of their everyday life; depriving them of access to support services, such as specialist support or medical services; forcing the victim to take part in criminal activity … to encourage self-blame and prevent disclosure to authorities; economic abuse including coerced debt; controlling the ability to go to school or place of study; taking wages, benefits or allowances; threatening to hurt or kill; threatening to harm a child; threatening to reveal or publish private information; threatening to hurt or physically harming a family pet; assault; sexual assault or threats of sexual assault; reproductive coercion; limiting access to family, friends and finances; withholding and/or destruction of the victim’s immigration documents, e.g. passports and visas; and threatening to place the victim in an institution against the victim’s will.

I’d like to talk about today this whiplash feeling I first experienced this feeling when I worked as a diplomat in eastern Ukraine. I worked on a bridge that divided Russia occupied Luhansk from government controlled Ukraine. I physically passed into a space. Russia-occupied Luhansk in which what I now understand as a Disinfolklore galaxy was being unfurled, revealed and entrenched not just in the geographical space that is Russia-occupied Ukraine but in the mental space of every single person who lived there and the Disinfolklore Galaxy that was created inside Russia-occupied Ukraine and inside the minds of everyone inside Russia-occupied Ukraine was a function of several different aspects of the same communications techniques that Donald today is using. The energy. The Mana of Disinfolklore is coercive control and coercive control can be exercised using physical violence, sexual violence, economic violence and psychological violence.

Often Coercive Control through which Disinfolklore Galaxies, like the MAGA cult and inside Russia-occupied Ukraine and inside Russia itself is a function of all four types of violence. The result of it is that the people who live inside these - I use the metaphor of Spider-Man‘s web which some of us might remember if we’re of a certain age where you’re just covered in this web and it’s just sticky sticky sticky and you can’t get out but you can see through it ‘cause it’s translucent and this is how I see the Disinfolklore Galaxy descending.

I saw it descending over the people living in Russia-occupied Ukraine it took me a long time to understand what it was. Today I see Donald attempting to descend this web this Disinfolklore Galaxy over the whole of humanity…

I don't know whether anyone's counted them, but thousands, tens of thousands, as we glance through specific visual memes that communicate many different ideas at once and which provoke us on different emotional journeys, thousands, tens of thousands that we, as those of us participating in the X, Telegram, TikTok, Insta, information spaces are experiencing.

And this is aside from our in real life interactions with our pets, friends, family, work colleagues and people in shops. And throughout all of this, we can detect the vibrations emanating from two particular Disinfolklore Galaxy-creation. mechanisms: one Russia and two - for want of a better way of summing it up - MAGA.

So now MAGA which was for most of us it was an object outside us. 2015, as perhaps we saw family members fall into that Disinfolklore galaxy, now it is entwined with whether or not our social security check will arrive, whether or not Ukraine will get Patriot missiles and the same thing with Ukraine and Russia.

So I really try to communicate this idea of how Disinfolklore is wending its way through our consciousness, through our minds at all times now. We are out on the extremes. I mentioned this last week, how I perceive those of us who are participating in X and the Ukraine information space, but other people are in other discourses.

You know, even football. We heard someone talking about how Donald met Chelsea Football Club this week before we saw him meeting. I think it was Barcelona in the White House, and he asks them these preposterous questions which they have no idea about.

So the Disinfolklore Galaxy is intervening in all sorts of other discourses. So I try to stay aware of that. What I'd like to talk to you about today is this experience that we're inside, not from the outside perspective, because I'm part of it.

And it's a fundamental tenet for me and for all of my work and for many of our work that... Disinfolklore is not something - disinformation- that happens to other people.

Trolls are not things which other people fall for. Weak people, unintelligent people. They are a phenomenon in our mental space and our information space that all of us are being constantly enmeshed in, hit with, provoked by.

I first experienced this feeling when I worked as a diplomat in eastern Ukraine between 2015 and 2018. I worked on that bridge, that physical geographical, that physical space that divided Russia-occupied Luhansk from government-controlled Ukraine. As I physically passed into Russia-occupied Ukraine, Russia occupied Luhansk every day, I became enmeshed in what it was impossible to avoid seeing as a Disinfolklore galaxy. Of course, I didn't have that nomenclature then. I didn't coin the term Disinfolklore until around the 15th of February, 2023. Basically in that world was filled with false stories being broadcast from every possible medium, in every possible style and mode into the minds of the people living there and then being broadcast onwards from them into their friends' and family's lives and then having an impact because, of course - I've talked before about Mana, the energy, the Mana of MAGA and Russian disinfolklore is coercive control.

Coercive control exercised in these four forms of violence, which I find quite useful model, physical, sexual, economic, and... physical, sexual, economic, and the fourth one will come to me in a second. And psychological, did I say that? Physical, psychological, economic, and sexual. I think the four are there, but hopefully you'll get what I mean.

Coercive control is immanent in in every meme and in this idea of the 48 days Donald’s given to Russia to murder Ukrainians. Obviously, most of us are also connected to other discourses, whether it's US politics. or other countries of interest.

There too it's the same dynamic. It’s the same energy/Mana of coercive control in all of those processes. We see today Israel, as I understand it, bombing Syria in quite a serious way, again allowed by Donald and facilitated by Donald.

So we see this coercive control is not just a metaphor, it's not just happening in man and female relationships within the patriarchal evangelical community. It's being projected from that micro to the macro on a geopolitical scale in every sphere. NATO is now trying, Donald is having ensured that Europe or most European powers now understand that America is no longer our protector and that we need to be independent of it.

Now, Donald, they concocted this preposterous plan where Europe will pay for weapons from America and then pass them on to Ukraine with these preposterously complex import and export and legal agreements and all that. And France rightly and Italy rightly have said, ‘no, we're not playing this game.’

I'm assuming what's underneath that and immanent in there is this understanding which has arisen, hopefully in those of us who have remained clear-eyed, that America as a secure, reliable security protector is dead and gone no matter how many times we're lured back into the family home by promises that our wife or our husband will no longer hit us.

No matter how many times we're told, they've turned over a new leaf. They're no longer drinking. They're putting the violence behind them. They're just so sorry.

We're not going back into this coercive control relationship. But we can't… We can't get out of it completely. We have to play the game.

We have to pretend to a certain extent that we're still part of it. I hope I see that immanent in the actions of France and Germany and obviously the Baltic states and Poland and Germany I don't see it in the Nordic countries, but I imagine it's there, this understanding that we are still backing out of the family home. We will not be lured in with these trolls of NATO weapons. We'll buy a few American weapon systems and give them to Ukraine, but we're not relying on them anymore. It was good to hear Latin yesterday on Volya Radio on X spaces talking about how Ukraine would be unwise to depend on the F-16 platform for the future. So the future is French.

The Disinfolklore galaxy itself was created inside Russia-occupied Ukraine and inside the minds of everyone inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. It's a function of several different aspects of the communication techniques that were being used. Their energy is always discernible if we look for coercive control, whether it was from the internet trolls forcing us to think what we don’t even want to contemplate or from bosses telling their staff that they either needed to support the regime or leave or people being disappeared. The Mana of Disinfolklore Galaxy is this coercive control. I used this metaphor in my February 2025 speech in Munich, which was very important, marked a very important moment, not just because what I talked about there, where I declared the Disinfolklore Universe made up of many different concatenating Disinfolklore Galaxies.

I declared it was open at precisely the time JD Vance was hitting, slapping us all on the face, was exerting psychological violence against us by attacking our democratic systems and say Germany’s means of ensuring Naziism remains dead by regulating by law certain speech acts inside its jurisdiction.

Then on my way back from Munich, was that many of us probably will never forget the moment we first heard and saw the images appearing on our timelines about the meeting in the White House between President Zelenskyy.

So I used the metaphor of Spider-Man's web, which some of us might remember if we're a certain age. We're just covered in this web, and it's really sticky, sticky, sticky, and you can't get out, but you can see through it because it's translucent and there's light. and you think you can get out of it. And I use that to communicate what I mean by a Disinfolklore Galaxy, which we saw descending on friends of ours in MAGA and which we - those of us who've been looking at what happened in Russia-occupied Ukraine, and obviously we see it has happened to people in Russia as well.

It took me quite a while to see what it was and to find its constituent. elements. But from the very beginning, there was what I call a Family Resemblance between MAGA and Russia-occupied Ukraine -the communications techniques.

So both arrived at the same time. They're genetically connected, as those of us who read the Mueller report and who read the House and Senate Intelligence Committees’ reports on Russian interference in the 2016 general election, presidential election in the United States.

Those of us who read the Grafica reports, which were done for the House Intelligence Committee and other work which set out the tactics and tropes used by Russia to ensure that Donald was elected in 2016.

This was all arranged and organized under the auspices of Prigozhin and to this day most people probably haven't mainstreamed an understanding of how much of an impact this particular individual and the Disinfolklore propagation apparatus which he financed had on the lie, all of our lives, whether it's in Brexit, England, on the migrants and the political parties like in Hungary, in Poland and in Slovakia and other countries had on that.

So there's that genetic connection between MAGA and Russia. There's also the technical connections in terms of the same techniques, the same cult building techniques. The manipulative storytelling. The use of memes in newspapers. The impact of these billions of memes on us. It's a system.

It's not just individual daily news which goes on the next, but immanent in it is a really complex, well-planned out, highly effective system, which now doesn't just impact our favourite aunt who went MAGA, or someone we know, our favorite influencer who went pro-Russia, this impacts all of our lives.

So I've worked on it to try and develop my 12 analytical tools.

I didn't set out to do that. I set out to try and understand in the fall of 2019 what Donald was doing. And I didn't understand it then, and I didn't really have a theory on it. I wasn't on Twitter.

I didn't go on Twitter until June 2021. And this was while I was in Ukraine. It was during the whole first impeachment over Ukraine. So again, there was always these connections for me in my work in eastern Ukraine. At that point, I was in Dnipro, working where I worked for four years from 2018 to 2022 for the OSCE covering Zaporozhzhia and Dnipro and Kirivohrad for them for the OSCE for the international community and all along that coast of Zaporozhzhia which is now under occupation and my job there I basically went along and spoke to hundreds of elected officials in all of the villages and what they call the hromadas, the decentralized villages, all in areas which are now under occupation to try and understand the impact of the of the uh of Russia of the attack and what was going to happen in in the future and that was my day job.

But at night I was trying to parse the data in Russia-occupied ukraine and connect it with uh what was going on in the world and what was going on with with MAGA at the time and the Republicans in the America.

Of course, at that time, many of us will remember we thought a few javelins would make a difference. And yeah, they made a great difference for a few days, but we need a lot more than that. And so the 12 analytical tools which I developed out of all of this work, which I hope will help us in a daily way, I use this.

Most of us will understand what a Venn diagram is.

We have the two circles. One is MAGA Donald. The other is Russia. And in 2018, 2019, when I started really in earnest looking at these separate areas, the Venn diagram representation of MAGA and Donald, there was only a little bit of crossover in my conscious awareness.

Now, if I can flash forward to this week, we see these circles are quite synonymous. The space, the common space between them is vast. and they're meeting at every geographical point in the world, whether it's in Kosovo and Serbia or in just everywhere.

Everything Donald is doing to help China and to help Russia is this joint space. The techniques they're all using from my perspective are quite similar. I see the patterns in them.

I feel quite lucky that I chose to focus on this. I thought after the 2020 election that, you know, that was it. You know, I'd done quite interesting work. Now that was all dead and gone. Here we are the same phenomenon - trolling and trolls - is back into impacting our whole lives. The trolling element was the first metaphor which I used. So my definition of trolling is emotion-moving activity of body, speech and mind.

So this can be Donald trying to troll NATO countries now into spending European money on arms (which probably will never arrive or will arrive in dribs and drabs or there'll be all sorts of supply problems, you name it).

So it's about trolling us with the hope that this is going to happen.

We see the response of the nation states of France and Italy to this trolling, which is to say, no. We're not playing this time.

But that trolling is also in Donald's latest untruth from untruth social, which has all of the archetypes in it. We talked about that the first few weeks, which he has used to troll people.

So a MAGA adherent, a MAGA member's brain will just be triggered by all of these trolls, like these mantras, these energies wrapped up in language like ‘Hunter Biden’, ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’, ‘China’, all of these mantras which he he established it.

This is how you get people into a cult. This is what happened to our relatives and friends who became cult members, MAGA cult members. This is what happened to all the Russians. This is what happened to the Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Ukraine.

Coercive control is the technique. This is what happened to people we might know in our own lives who got into abusive relationships, who got involved with pickup artists. It's a technique. It works time and time again. And now it is happening to our civilization.

The good story here is that I have the belief that Ukraine is led by somebody, what I would call the 21st century troll. He is a master of all kinds of communication techniques. He is a master of emotional understanding of the emotional spectrum and how language and imagery interact to affect our emotions, at scale. He’s also a master of organisations, as well as the juridical element.

So he's a master of the magical element of leadership - trolling - and of sovereignty. The juridical, the formal, the procedural, the boring parts, the nuts-and-bolts of sovereignty.

So Ukraine is playing, as I predicted and many of us predicted, is giving us a masterclass in how you deal with this.

Their dominant strategy is, and we saw it this week, Ukraine, the instruction went out, and I read the instruction, and I'm obeying and adhering to the instruction as well, went out to all Ukrainian leaders and everyone in Ukraine from the Ukrainian government, from President Zelensky, is we have one job. Our one job is to get America on on our side and to keep America on our side.

So there's no space for cussing America or going, oh, really, you know, it's really annoying. And it was interesting hearing the Ukrainian lobbyist yesterday on Volya Radio, brilliant show, encourage everyone to listen back on that.

Someone who's really connected to all of this and him saying, look, after the White House visit, there was no kind of backlash and recriminations, it was like, what can we do to get America back on board?

But how I would see it is 95% of Ukraine's success factor and its victory plan doesn't depend on America or Donald. They can afford this 50 days. It's not nice. Horrible things will happen. But they're taking the bet. They can manufacture drones.

They can plan better their attacks on energy infrastructure in Russia. The bet is that Russia can't effectively spend those 50 days defending against them. So it's a bet. Ukraine has taken that bet. So they're giving us a masterclass in how you keep America on board, not just for the Patriot missile, defense missiles, and all the other millions of other things America can do. But for the future and also for the sake of their allies in Europe, the Baltics, and because none of us are ready for America to physically withdraw. And that's still on the table. All of us expect it to happen and have to plan for it to happen.

So that's how I see their strategy. their strategy fitting into this 50 days.

Coercive Control is about cult formation. Many of us will not have consciously experienced being... Well, some of us might have, actually, if you...

I remember once walking down the street, and I ended up in... I didn't know it at the time, but they were the thing that John Travolta's part of. And before I knew it, I was sitting in this office on Henry Street in Dublin, and they were asking me all these questions. I was doing this somehow. I got out of there.

But... that now this is happening to us everywhere everywhere we go and so we are being wrapped up in i use the metaphor Disinfolklore galaxy because it's a bit less um intimidating than uh cult.

The purpose of the coercive control of everyone in the MAGA US government cult - everyone who is left - from Druidey Don Disinfolklore himself. Everyone down the hierarchy from Don. Everyone who succeeded in that world is is both a recruiter and a victim.

This is something we have never seen uh before. It’s unfamiliar to us. Those of us who studied or lived or worked in Russia-occupied Ukraine will have seen it before. This is what's helped me recognise it.

What Adolf Hitler did… What Mussolini did was very effective. But they did not have the techniques that are available today. Skinner’s work on behaviourism at Harvard, which is integrated into these kind of aspects of our internet and our computers and our computer programs, the nudging, trolling of us using effective techniques. This provoking of emotions so that we act in particular ways. This wasn't... this wasn't scientifically grounded for Hitler and for others. They didn't have the internet and Telegram or TikTok.

So this is the experience of all battered spouses. Sadly, we are now going through it. What I'm trying to do is provide us with a product - Disinfolklore Analytical Method - that we can use in our heads, a mental algorithm we can use in real time as we're dealing with all this data. To cut through this whole mass of confusion, which in the autumn of 2019, I was looking at just as an external object.

It was in Trump world. And prior to that, I was looking at it as an external object. I wasn't in America. When he got elected it was still external to me. Now it's everywhere.

But the same unit, this idea, the unit, the fundamental metaphor, the fundamental unit for me is troll and trolling. This emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind. That activity can be anything Donald says, anything his sons say. It can also be the activities of all of those people working underneath him. The 50 days mantra now, which is just so preposterous. Now we see what's happening around Pokrovsk. On the battlefield. The fifty day troll gets even more… It’s even more horrid. There's no, we can go, oh, well, maybe he's expecting Russia to run out of steam. It's not, like, I suppose when it came to President Biden and his administration and many of us, believed after a while, we thought, ‘okay, there is a method to their madness. They are trying to wear Russia down. And yes, it's totally immoral, but they have a plan. And at some point, they're going to go all in.’ Then many of us realized at the end of it, there wasn't a plan.

This is different because we have the data about what MAGA governance is doing to America. It’s coercive control. So what it’s doing to Ukraine fits that pattern. However misplaced President Biden and his advisors, were, they weren't consciously, actively malign people who closed down all of USAID and have left what is it, something like 100,000 people have died as a result of this already and have destroyed the American system of governance. They are hunting people in parks and 3,000 people a day being seized on the streets.

So we can't just look at Ukraine as an independent space and hope, okay, Donald will do good by Ukraine, while in every other domain he’s acting for Russia and China in destroying America. It's part of this entire system.

We can't come to any other conclusion when we look at the data than that he is in league with Russia and indeed with China and the interests of these countries. He’s ancting against our interests. Somehow though Ukraine has manoeuvred through brilliance. It's maneuvered itself into a space where it's no longer like that White House visit.

We cannot however hope that in 50 days, like we will end up in 50 days, we will end up totally inside the cult of being subjected to this if we believe that. That would be my take on that. I listened to the words Donald said very closely the other day. He hardly mentioned Ukraine.

So we're reading into it a lot. When he made the speech announcing how Europe was going to buy American weapons to use in Europe, you know, he talked about all the conflicts which he solved - none of which was true. He talked about all the money America had given to Ukraine. It wasn't true. And he hardly mentioned Ukraine.

Now, obviously, that's a positive that he wasn't talking badly about Ukraine. We will bank these successes. It's a huge success of Ukraine's diplomacy operation and an achievement by all Ukrainians. And we've all paid a minor part in this - to get the situation back from how it was in the White House visit in February. But there's nothing to hope for here, really.

We just need to plan as if America is no longer there and will never come back. Take what we can from them, but there's nothing good coming from that.

The problem is we're vulnerable to this hope. That’s our vulnerability which they take advantage about or we think things will always come right in the end (although most of us probably no longer think that um sadly since at least since the full-scale invasion). Or we're encouraged by MAGA or Russia. We’re looking at MAGA people as victims, those poor souls. It's while we're falling for those trolls we're being wrapped up in something very, very, very similar. The people we're dealing with are very clever and just working on a different plane, as Zarina Zabrisky (see her latest film at https://khersonhumansafari.com/). She’s talked about her time as a linguistics student in St. Petersburg. How she did a course. Linguists had to do a mandatory course on combat propaganda. So this is in the 90s. So this is what we're up against. And I worked with a lot of people, army people in Ukraine, senior officers and they have an amazing skill set.

But what we all have to acquire is a very different skill set, is to reconceptualize, for instance, the war in Ukraine as a proxy war by China. It may be, it may not be. But that's the kind of conceptual framework we have to look through the framing. Agilely look at it Like you might look at some 4D or 3D space in a computer program, you know, kind of move around it and look at the diamond from every angle.

That's partly how we can avoid getting embroiled further in this Disinfolklore galaxy. What we can do to try and keep ourselves free. But every day is a struggle. We can't avoid this struggle if we are going to participate in the Ukrainian information space or actually now at this point in any information space.

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