Podcast | Alaska trolls and how to use the 'Timeline of Emotions' model to parse Disinfolklore

Two Russian mafia dons meet in Alaska. As cover they chat about ceding territory, they don’t and never will control. Two Russian mafia dons trying to archetype themselves as Reagan / Gorbachev. Two Russian mafia dons meet in Alaska to condemn millions of humans in those territories to certain torture, starvation and death.

Two Russian mafia Dons meet in Alaska.

Druidey Donald Draumpf Disinfolklore rearchytyping reality by entertaining idea Sovereignty is malleable - Donald is trafficking in Ukraine’s Sovereignty without a mandate.

Druidey don Don Draumpf Disinfolklore is attempting to sell a property - Ukraine’s territorial integrity - that he neither controls nor owns.

Ukraine here is Don’s instrument.

The purpose is to destroy the post-WWII legal and social order. Undermine UN Charter, International Law (UN Charter, International human rights law, international criminal law, Geneva conventions, law of the sea, genocide convention, 2003 treaty on state border).

Political purpose is undermine Ukraine and European Union’s sovereignty, security, prosperity.

“Nobel Peace Prize” motivation is a troll. It’s repeated ad nauseum by media outlets that have fallen for a troll.

“Nobel Peace Prize” motivation is preposterous and consistent with a cartoonish representation of Don’s personality.

Don and those in control of him - the Russian mafia - are very focussed and clear eyed.

Ukraine is an instrument to destroy Sovereignty of states (magical/ trolling brainwashing aspect) to wrap us up inside a Disinfolklore Galaxy and Juridical aspect of Sovereignty (International law). To destroy the security of States (exercise of we’ll protect you/we’ll abandon you coercive control/ off/on NATO). To destroy the Prosperity of democratic equality-seeking post-WWII states.

Ukraine’s only goal in tolerating America and Russia’s continued collusion is to troll the U.S. into providing it with weapons (in exchange for European money), so it can destroy Russia’s force power and the Russian state.

Ukraine and European powers (upon whom US arms industry depends) have leverage in a very complicated information game being run by these two Russian mafia dons, and the Useful Idiots who are unknowingly working to archetype Putler and Disinfolklore Don as some dime store Reagan / Gorbachev. Meanwhile, Ukraine has resumed its destruction of Russia’s only source of foreign currency - its fossil fuel infrastructure. After America persuaded Ukraine to stop attacking these assets on 24 March 2025, in the past twelve days Ukraine has hit and significantly damaged five of Russia’s largest oil refineries as well as essential export infrastructure.

I want to talk first briefly about something that has been on all of our minds for the past week, and I want to apply the DisinFolklore Analytical Method and some of the tools I've been speaking about over the past 12 weeks to help us cut through in one way the character Alaska.

So if you remember in the very first show I talked about how disinfolklore imbues the character into stories and it's not just personalities which develop characters but it's actual places it's any phenomenon in a story and this is one of the genius discoveries of Russian propagandists that they can, and indeed of MAGA and Donald, that they can imbue personality into objects and phenomena in stories. And Alaska is one, Alaska Talks is one such character. Then I want to talk about the timeline of emotions and this timeline of emotions work which I've just sent this I tweeted about it a while ago it's a very important tool in the analytical toolbox that I am helping to make us all aware of and the timeline of emotions is the product of work, joint work, by the psychologist Paul Ekman and the 15th Dalai Lama. Paul Ekman, some of us might know that great show which is based on his work, Would I Lie to You? Maybe I've got the title wrong.

But basically, Paul Ekman has an intuition as a genius, a brilliance, which he then evolved for seeing micro expressions and understanding what they signified about the people's minds on their faces. And the work he's done is extraordinary in the timeline of emotions tool I put into the distant folklore analytical method.

But the first thing I want to really talk about, because it's on all of our minds, is to give a perspective on the character Alaska talks. So in the Disinfolklore analytical method, we can talk about Alaska talks as a character. in a story which provokes emotions, which has been provoking emotions in all of our minds.

And in the Disinfolklore analytical method, we can perceive particular memes in our information space as characters, So this is in line with the idea that the news we are listening to is in many ways, including the structural, absolutely identical to folklore, to stories, books, novels, plays, music, in which we expect to encounter characters with personalities.

Usually given a moniker, a name. And many of us, for instance, who've been lucky enough to go to university or study literature or critical theory, have had the opportunity to write essays on, for instance, English language novels or foreign language novels on characters in novels and films.

But the Disinfolklore analytical method enables us to see how abstract concepts can be imbued with the character of personality. So by this I mean, for instance, the Russians and MAGA attribute aspects of personality to non-human entities. MAGA, say, to libs, owning the libs. Democrats are an abstract and they become archetyped and then individuals and othered and then individuals are used as fodder in stories according to whether or not they match the attributes, the personality, which these MAGA propagandists give to, for instance, a Democrat or a Lib or European or whatever you like.

Russia, for instance, archetypes itself as a bear, and so this is the primary archetype in Russian self-identity and propaganda, which then begets other sub-archetypes like don't poke the bear. And these, as I've argued in my writing and before on this show, the don't poke the bear troll, the meme, ‘Don't Poke the Bear’, is probably the most successful Disinfolklore meme ever. And it's so successful that international relations majors and those who advised, for instance, both Republican and Democrat presidents in the United States, for decades were and are animated by this meme. And we sometimes think that the meme, Don't Poke the Bear, corresponds to some meaning system apart from the metaphor itself. But in my humble opinion, it doesn't. It is simply that. So the idea that you don't attack Russia, which of course Ukraine defies and stamps on every single day, it is all... is all there is to don't poke the bear. So it's a meme which is then imbued with the character of a serious geopolitical strategy that governs the conduct of nations that determines whether or not America or other countries will defend international law, their commitments under the UN Charter and a variety of other international legal instruments that were signed up to after the Second World War. And ‘Don't Poke the Bear’ is all there is to it. Often professionals talk about it as if it's... it's just a proxy for something else, but actually that is all it is.

And so there we have Russia archetyping itself as a bear, so as an abstract concept. And it also archetypes itself as an innocent bear cub in many situations, as I spoke about last week. So the innocent bear cub Russia is forced, is compelled to respond to what it perceives as provocations.

And provocations itself is another character, which is an abstract concept, which is... is almost alien outside of discourses involving Russian. We do talk about agent provocateur or crime passionnel in the context of Roman law or France where you can be justified in attacking your lover's suitor, and it's a defence.

But of course, this is really only in literature, but Russia itself has used this, what I call the provocation logic cycle, as a character which enters our minds and determines our responses. to frankly, when we're not, when our brains aren't addled, clear situations in which if you're attacked, you're allowed to defend yourself, as in the case of Ukraine or any of our countries attacked. And so this phenomenon... of characters appears in the stories, the millions, the billions of memes which we're encountering at the moment, which I call Disinfolklore, because these stories themselves reach at least one of the six elements in the Code of Positive Trolls.

The first element is really the only one one needs to know at the moment, generosity. And it's not generous of Don, Druidy Don, Druidy Don, this in folklore, Druidy Don, to offer the souls of millions of Ukrainians living inside areas temporarily under occupation. It's the very opposite of generosity. They don't belong to him.

He's archetyping himself as a peacemaker. But this is not generous, it's most ungenerous to Ukraine. You could argue it's generous to Russia. And in fact, I would argue it's very generous to Russia. And then the second element of the code of positive trolls, which determines whether we're talking about disenfoked or counter disenfoked or is triggered, which is ethical discipline. And so ethical discipline is set by the post-World War II legal order, the United Nations Charter, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which governs the 2003 treaty between Russia and Ukraine, in which they recognized and set out an excruciating metre by metre detail their borders, that treaty itself registered in the UN treaty depository.

I often tweet it because it's got Vladimir Putler's name, it's got a signature on it, this treaty. So you could argue it's very generous of Don to offer part of Ukraine to Russia. but it's not ethical because it's against the international rules-based order.

But usually we don't need to really know anything about international law to understand that any story and any meme and any talking head speaking words which supports the absurd proposition that a power that Russia, which is losing the war on a large number of metrics, should be granted a legal title over land which it cannot conquer anymore.

Through might, and it's Russia itself which asserts the idea that might is right, might is right, and now it is depending on another country, the United States, to deliver in a meeting in Alaska lands, legal title to lands and people, which it can't win on the battlefield.

And so this is such a bizarre and unusual situation that I think we can work very hard to maintain our focus on how odd it is for any American president or Western leader to offer another country, part of another country, as part of so-called peace talks, without the other country being there, while that country, Ukraine, is winning the war and killing and eliminating a thousand Russian soldiers a day, and as we've seen in the last day or two, booting the Russians out of Sumy, and other parts of Ukraine and now Ukraine is back in fact to attacking the so-called Druzhba pumping stations in Bryansk and hopefully continuing to attack all of the rest of Russia's oil infrastructure.

So this is such an unusual situation where against the wishes of 42 million Ukrainians, a foreign power is attempting to deliver part of their land to another foreign power while Ukraine is winning on the battlefield. So we have to then question what is going on.

Now, many of our leaders from other countries say, from the European Union and other countries, are all name-checking President Trump and thanking him for his peace efforts. I have absolutely no insight into their inner thoughts, but I imagine most strongly that this is a verbal capitulation to Donald and it's how they've decided to deal with it.

But essentially how I see these entire talks and the talks about talks, so all of the information warfare memes emanating from Russia, emanating from America and emanating from the chatter from people like us. risks archetyping Ukraine as weak. So that for me is the primary purpose of this entire enterprise.

It's some irony that just at the moment, Ukraine is at its strongest. Donald and Putler are trying to archetype it as weak, as a supplicant, as looking for peace. And Ukraine must demonstrate in this Disinfolklore Galaxy that has been created by Donald and by Putler, Ukraine must demonstrate that it wants peace even though it is attacked.

But ultimately, Russia and Donald are continually trying to archetype Ukraine as weak as indeed Donald did in the White House that time. And so that is what I essentially see all this waffle about the Alaska talks as trying to affect.

And if we have this in mind, then we can be quite careful about how we talk about the Alaska talks so that we're not promoting it. the idea of Ukraine as weak. We're not using the limited oxygen there is to talk about this soap opera, which essentially is two Russian mafia Dons meeting in America,

to talk about buying a skyscraper which neither of them owns. And neither of them has the power to own and never will own. They just don't have the military force. to force Ukraine into surrendering its land. And how anomalous this situation is can be seen in how normal peace processes go.

And Donald himself has been claiming credit in a variety of different peace processes where he is playing a the role that you would normally expect in a piece process. And when I say playing the role, I mean acting in the role rather than playing a substantive role where he is attempting to be in the middle and an impartial role arbiter, whereas in the Ukraine case there isn't almost any pretence about archetyping himself as an impartial observer. He is and has been consistently since Paul Manafort's plan of 2016 to surrender eastern Ukraine to Russia.

This is the consistent policy position of Donald Trump and the Russian mafia, mafiosi, whom he represents, works for and for all we know is. So we have Russia and Russia negotiating in America the fate of a country it cannot and never will control. But these are very resonant, emotionally resonant trolls. The Alaska talks everything Donald says about Ukraine, everything his advisors, Lindsey Graham, Putin, all of this chatter is very emotionally resonant.

The Nobel Peace Prize troll is preposterous on so many different levels and it's repeated so frequently, as I wrote about yesterday, I presume it's put forward by Donald and his team as a motive to cover and conceal what is clearly the case is that the United States,

It's probably the worst moment in America’s history, by far worse than Iraq. because of the long-term consequences of it. But what President Trump and America are doing is providing a motive to conceal the fact that they are working on behalf of a foreign power to sell out a supposed ally. And so what we can do, I think, is be aware of this and and try to resist being drawn into it and try to resist having our emotions, our intentions, our mood, especially our moods, our attitudes and affected too much by this play which is going on in our information space and in fact in our own brains and our own minds. And this is the worst case scenario I talked about in my February speech at the Pirate Party Security Conference in Munich at the same time as the Munich Security Conference.

I set out how I believed what Donald and Russia would do now is to roll out their provincial Disinfolklore Galaxies globally. And we had a first taste of that, actually, while I was speaking in Munich and in the week afterwards with the White House meeting. and European and global leaders passed the test then, but now we see a similar structure in the situation now.

So these things go in cycles and the strategy which Donald uses and which indeed Russia uses is to continue to bulldoze us with this nonsense every few months until we surrender to it.

And my job and our job as Friends of Ukraine and as NAFO fellows and on Volia Radio is to keep a clear-eyed focus on what is real and what is an illusion, what is illusory. and the illusion here is Donald is peacemaker, that something will come out of these political talks.

That's all I really wanted to say about the Alaska stuff. And so really what Donald and Putin and many of us unknowingly have the effect of doing is... When we're sharing memes, for instance, about Alaska, we're negatively impacting our own moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations.

So I use those four terms to describe the overlapping aspects of our emotional spectrum. that Donald works on. So that is their primary objective, Donald, MAGA, the people behind him, the entire information space. It's to affect our moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations. And the content of the memes is immaterial, whether it's about Alaska, Ukraine giving up territory, or Russia's victory inevitable, or migrants or people eating dogs or dogs eating people, who knows what they're talking about. The whole point is to affect our moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations. And we have sovereignty over our moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations. And my job is to help give us resilience and myself build my own resilience to being affected in this way and to find little tricks. So, for instance, the trick I mentioned, I think it was on the third appearance of how I've stopped. I don't have images anymore on Twitter. I've the image preview. I think it's media preview. So I've cut that out.

That's halved the amount of data which my brain encounters and which I need to filter out. And I can then just click on the picture and I can see it if something in the text entices me. And then other tricks that we all use, we probably see the first two words or three words of certain messages or from certain people, we can block them. or just filter them out. So that's one way we can do it. But when we're jumping into the pool, we need a way of noticing how our moods, attitudes, intentions and or motivations are being affected by a particular meme. And then if, as most of us do, and everyone certainly on Volya Radio wants to do, we want to counter distant folklore by consciously and positively affecting others and our own moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations with positive information.

So positive information as defined by its conformity with any of the six elements in the Code of Positive Trolls. For instance, being generous, being ethically disciplined. So Peter Pomerantz wrote a book about the Second World War, a propagandist who used deception. to help undermine the Nazis. That's not my job. I do a different job.

Ethical discipline is the most important element in the Code of Positive Trails and in my work. And I try to stick rigidly to that. Obviously I fail a lot, but that's my aspiration and what people pointed out. I try to make up for that. For me, the memes or the ends do not justify the memes.

I know there's people in NAFO and co who don't mind doing all that, but that's not my role. And so that's what I mean by positive information. The memes conform either to all or most, I think actually to all of the six elements of the code of positive trolls, they're generous, they demonstrate patience.

So we think about the difference between Donald and Putler as 20th century trolls and President Zelensky a 21st century. Troll. So both sets are trolls. Titanic struggle between the two. As far as we know, President Zelensky is generous. He's ethically disciplined. He's like ridiculously patient. I mean, I'm so ashamed personally.

But he and all Ukrainians have to go through this drama over simply defending their country. It's extraordinary. And how he has to pretend, as I assume he's doing, to kowtow to President Trump. and pretend that these so-called peacemaking efforts are anything other than chaos sowing, and they've been chaos sowing for months now, for six months now, and they've completely tried to skew the battlefield and the information battlefield against Ukraine. And so the patience, which is the third element of the code of osterodrome, that President Zelensky and those around him are demonstrating is just, I mean, they should get the Dalai Lama Award for patience. Their focus is extraordinary, whereas we see with Putin and Donald Trump, nothing they do is generous, nothing they do is ethically disciplined, so they failed to first two elements, and nothing they do is patient. As we see these attacks around Pokrosk, this is about the 4,000th time We have seen Russia put everything it has into trying to create a tactical advantage, which they can then somehow spin into a strategic advantage in the information space. Whereas all of us know that Pokrovsk was supposed to fall a year ago. So we're already in credit. And as far as I can see from Russia, malcontent news, which I subscribe to, this Pokrovsk stuff is, yes, it's bad news and it's danger, but it's nothing of strategic importance, but it will be spun by useful, knowing and unknowing useful idiots into something which Donald will probably amplify very soon. So controlling, so that my method works on any sensory information. So it's not just about Ukraine or MAGA. It should work in our personal life. It should work on the source.

Whether the source is the internet or your best friend or your mother telling you something about Ukraine or Russia or anything, really. But it's designed particularly to help us resist the mood-affecting disinfo-clore of Russian and Trump, Brexit, Disinfolklore. And really, whenever we feel this sense, our mood being altered by a meme, that should be our first indication that something funny is going on. And something potentially bad is going on. So with the Alaska thing and basically, well, by now we know that anything emanating from MAGA, Donald, or any of those people around him, like Lindsey Graham and all that, whenever they affect our mood positively, we need to be on guard. Yeah. And usually when they affect us negatively, that is when we should do our best, and I try to do my best, I don't always succeed, in avoiding amplifying the nonsense, whatever the particular mood-altering nonsense they're purveying is.

And so the best tool I've come across for helping this comes from the Nobel Prize winning Peace Prize, someone who actually won the Nobel Peace Prize, Dalai Lama and the psychologist Paul Ekman. And they developed this three-step timeline of emotions model. So timeline, it's a nice play on words here.

They didn't mean it because they came up with this before we had timelines. But the timeline of emotions helps us find a pattern that in the oodles of emotional journeys we're stimulated to participate on each day and each hour, minute and second. Almost all the stimulations in our environment trigger an experience of an emotion and often a concatenation of emotions. And sometimes we have difficulty interpreting the meaning of these emotions in real time, but how we react to such triggered experiences has a huge impact on the way we live. And we can read this timeline of emotions, cognitive model, trigger, experience, reaction. So it's just three words.

Donald would probably even be able to remember it himself. into a huge variety of emotionally resonant storytelling forms, from Russian disinformation to contemporary films, advertising, courting strategy, memes, and really any accidental or strategic measures that we or others use to affect emotions. I'm going to labour this point because it's so important to understand how Disinfolklore works and how we can work to counter it. so please be prepared for some repetition and if you take away anything from this hour it's trigger experience reaction so every meme and by meme I consider any informational unit a meme so Alaska is now a meme but any of the memes, any of the informational units about Alaska, they are themselves informational units which have the power to rigor our emotions which we can then experience consciously and then how we react to them, whether we share the meme whether we allow the meme to depress our mood, and then we allow it to depress our mood, and then we go on and depress someone else's mood, which is the purpose of these memes. So the first, the step one in this model, which we can use for interpreting any data, is something in your environment, our environment triggers our emotions. And we experience a feeling or feelings with a certain set of qualities.

And this is Paul Ekman's great contribution to science and to psychology, where he reduces and has this model of the five most important emotions. and obviously you can have any number and you can have different emotions here but he's spent decades on this and is just and is brilliant, if anyone's seen Lie to Me that, I think it's two seasons, it's well worth watching, you really learn a lot about psychology from it.

Anger, fear, disgust, sadness or enjoyment? So whenever we feel these emotions which underpin our moods, our attitudes, our intentions and our motivations, anger, fear, disgust, sadness or enjoyment, this is one of the core teachings in distant folklore and in positive trolling which is once we feel our emotions engaged that's when we can raise our incoming troll radar to try and triage whatever this informational unit is and to try and work out what's going on here. So anger, fear, disgust, sadness or enjoyment, the same meme will provoke in will enjoyment as in mockers sadness or disgust or in a MAGA cult member will enjoy the meme. but i will get angry about it um but the point is that we're triaging what's coming into our heads and then we react in a particular way either reflexively automatically which is how many of us operate on twitter and things or carefully to that feeling and that's what what we with the alaska troll for instance and all of this nonsense that's going on at the moment uh we can be quite careful about it but only if we recognize what's happening and we work out what is the trigger what's our experience of this trigger what emotion are we feeling fear disgust sadness or enjoyment and then we have a separate reaction to that we decide how are we going to react and So rather than the impulse, which would be all those three trigger experience reaction in one millisecond, that we do this deliberately and it's practice we can use.

So for instance, suppose the idea that outer realm immigrants are a bad thing has been promoted relentlessly in our culture's information space. Such immigrants are portrayed as a threat to our inner realm's cultural sovereignty, security, and sustainability. So this inner realm, think of the princess's fairytale castle surrounded by a moat, or MAGA's idea of America, or Brexit's idea of... of England and outer realm division is usually imminent in most forms of effective distant folklore. And basically, whenever we're taught to feel that immigrants are going to threaten our inner realm, then any meme or story about immigrants coming to steal our sovereignty, they're going to take away our votes, our security, they're going to be criminals and do unspeakable things, or fertility, which is upon which the sustainability of our cultures depends, which is when Donald talks about Immigrants doing unspeakable things to female or male members of our community.

Then we feel this anger, this sense of threat, and we react emotionally. And it's this emotional reaction. So trigger, experience, reaction. This emotional reaction. We vote for Donald. or we go out and do bad things to immigrants or we just vote for anti-immigrant parties or our moods change, then that is giving power to the propagandists.

So that's really the timeline of emotions, trigger, experience, reaction is just what I wanted to leave with you today. So that's all I had really to say today.

Many thanks to Volya Radio (.@Volya4UA on Twitter / X spaces and Spotify. I appear weekly at 19:00 Kyiv time for an hour.

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