Disinfolklore

I’m 100% comfortable with using the term ‘meme.’ I use the term ‘meme’ interchangeably with the term ‘informational unit’ and also with the term ‘troll,‘ where troll is describing the item of Disinfolklore or the item of information. So ‘meme,’ for me, is more than simply the visual image that we have come to think about it as being. Obviously, when the term ‘meme’ was coined in whatever was 1976 by by that English philosopher Dawkins, it described ‘informational unit.’ What I call informational units (which are communicated in cultures in the same way that genes, or the genome are communicated biologically). I discovered Disinfolklore as a narrative form in eastern Ukraine, where I gradually realized—while working in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018—that what I was observing were particular items of Disinfolklore, usually recurrent memes or “units of information.” The quotidian, daily ebb and flow of news and “newsey” content made me wonder: was there a system behind it?As I looked more deeply, I realized that Russian military strategy includes the concept of Information Confrontation. According to Russia’s military doctrine, Information Confrontation comprises two elements:1. The means (instances of information such as memes, trolls, and informational units).2. The Information Environment.This led me to what I now call a Disinfolklore galaxy—a system Russia created inside occupied Ukraine. Every thought, every movement, every aspect of reality—from where you work to how you commute, to the people you talk to, whether family or colleagues—is injected with what I call Disinfolklore. Ideas meld with the texture of life itself.Unless you profess certain memes, beliefs, or informational units, you risk consequences. If you get it wrong, you might lose your job—like the ABC News journalist who called Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, “full of hate.” That journalist lost his job. This is a perfect example of how the Information Environment impacts every aspect of life: you say something, and you lose your job.That was eastern Ukraine, where I discovered what I now call the Disinfolklore galaxy. Today, I conceptualize the Disinfolklore universe as being made up of many different galaxies. The MAGA Disinfolklore galaxy shares many continuities and similarities with what I saw in Russia-occupied Ukraine.In early November 2024, just after the U.S. presidential election—which Donald Trump reportedly won—I had a vision. What happened to MAGA, to those who are part of MAGA, was going to happen to all of humanity, starting with America. This vision became the basis of my talk at the Pirate Party Conference in Munich during the Munich Security Conference: Welcome to Our Disinfolklore Universe. Today, we see the same melding of reality in America’s relationship with Ukraine, which is why we’re here. We want Ukraine to win, but most of us understand America will never tip the scales in Ukraine’s favor. Now we just hope it doesn’t tip them against Ukraine. Ukraine has been central to U.S. politics since 2016.The Republican National Convention in August 2016 marked a turning point. Paul Manafort, whose work contributed directly to this war in Ukraine, was later imprisoned for operating as an unregistered agent for Ukraine’s former president. Manafort had the commitment to deliver military support for Ukraine removed from the Republican platform. I have posted before about the exact moment when MAGA shifted to a pro-Russia stance. Recently, Reuters reported evidence that the United States may not fund Ukraine militarily next year. This path—from secretive policy changes to mainstream acceptance—illustrates how thousands of memes invade our information space, forming what I call the Disinfolklore galaxy.My main teaching, for lack of a better term, is that when we tune into individual memes and informational units daily, we fail to see the larger structure: a Disinfolklore galaxy as powerful as the one that surrounds those who embraced MAGA. This phenomenon is not about intelligence or education; it is a deliberate attempt to hack minds and surround people with an information environment designed to influence behavior.Paul Manafort remains a dark force behind much of Ukraine’s division between 2004 and 2014. The irony is stark: those he worked for—and MAGA—claim the Maidan uprising was engineered by the U.S., even though Manafort supported Yanukovych, who, according to leaked texts from his daughters, arranged the massacre on the Maidan in February 2014. At that time, European leaders were in Kyiv urging demonstrators to accept a deal with Yanukovych, but he fled. Manafort later worked for Donald Trump. Though not prominent publicly, he appeared at the national convention, and his influence persists.Today, figures like Tulsi Gabbard amplify narratives reminiscent of Russian disinformation playbooks. Her recent video about nuclear war exemplifies Disinfolklore: carefully crafted aesthetics, deliberate archetyping, and messaging designed to evoke fear. The imagery—dark tones, ashes, and even her gray hair—suggests archetypes of witches and doom. This is not accidental; it is psychological warfare.Applying my Disinfolklore analytical method, I interpret her message as a statement of power: surrender to us, and we will protect you from elites who allegedly seek nuclear war. For those who resist, the underlying message is intimidation—“You are powerless.” This aligns with decades of narratives portraying cities as lawless and elites as corrupt, themes deeply embedded in American discourse.The method I use draws on cognitive models like Paul Ekman’s Atlas of Emotions: trigger, experience, reaction. Every day, we undergo countless emotional journeys triggered by stimuli—tweets, images, videos. Separating experience from reaction helps us resist manipulation. Gabbard’s video triggered curiosity in me; my reaction was analysis, not amplification.Ultimately, Disinfolklore thrives on fear, negativity, and archetypes. Whether through memes, videos, or orchestrated spectacles like Russia’s missile strikes or human safari footage shared on Telegram, the goal is the same: to create a distorted reality. This is what I observed in eastern Ukraine, and it is what we see now globally. Unless more of us wake up to these tactics, their influence will deepen.Elon Musk dresses up in superhero costumes, the Pirate Party began as a party of protest, and pirates from literature, from art became their part of their their moniker, their folk the folk heroes of pirates. They were going to be the pirates. So it was appropriate, but I made the speech there, and then, since then, I’ve worked carefully on detailing the whole idea, this whole aspect of the Disinfolklore narrative method / narrative form and Disinfolklore, analytical methods. So it’s many different things, which concerns the Disinfolklore universe.When I saw Tulsi Gabbard’s “Nuclear Ashes” speech in the run-up to America’s bombing of Iran, I decided to apply the method—a 12 tool algorithm designed to help us interpret any Informational Unit. Any meme, whether it’s a photograph or an image circulating in the English information space. We’re likely seeing similar patterns in Northern Ireland right now, where riots have erupted following allegations that two immigrants allegedly attempted r***. This turmoil reflects a perennial theme in Disinfolklore—and in Indo-European thought—where outsiders enter the inner realm and threaten its fertility, sovereignty, or security. These three archetypes recur across Indo-European societies, as noted by leading theorists of language, linguistics, and religion.Since recognizing this pattern, I’ve used it as a tool for analysis—whether examining riots in Ballymena or other unrest. I wouldn’t be surprised if Telegram is involved in amplifying hatred. Applying these methods helps us understand what leaders and influencers are trying to do—whether in Ukraine, Russia, or elsewhere. Russia demonstrates the endgame: a nightmare reality, mirrored by the CCP, North Korea, and Iran—societies deeply embedded in Disinfolklore, using stories to hack minds.Tulsi Gabbard’s video is archetypal Disinfolklore. The aesthetics immediately reminded me of a strange artifact a Ukrainian friend sent me during the war: a man in 1970s-style visuals discussing hypermodern issues like global warming and environmental catastrophe. Gabbard’s video evokes a similar mood—dark, foreboding, like being lost in a forest. It is cynically and carefully produced, down to details like her gray hair strand, reminiscent of a character from The Munsters. This deliberate archetyping casts her as a witch, placing viewers in a negative psychological space.The imagery—dark backgrounds, ashes—reinforces this mood. For someone like me, who filters what enters my mind, the video felt abrupt and unsettling. Was it responding to something in the news cycle, or was it simply injected into our space as a deliberate artifact? Either way, it signals intent. Combined with events like the activation of the National Guard and military parades in D.C., it suggests escalation—a coup in motion since the disputed 2020 election, now accelerating.Applying the Disinfolklore literacy tools, I see deliberate archetyping: Gabbard as a witch-like figure, invoking nuclear war, ashes, and elites. The message is layered but clear: fear. This negative mood bypasses rational filters, embedding itself in our minds and triggering routines and traumas. Coming from someone tied to U.S. intelligence circles, the irony is striking—she positions herself as anti-elite while claiming elites want nuclear war because they have shelters. This is nonsense, of course, but effective as psychological manipulation.The third tool—finding the Mana in the meme—asks: what energy does this convey? So Mana, for me is an energy, and the energy in the meme. So you just look for what it what is the energy? The different levels. Layers. Is it negative? Positive? What’s it saying? What’s it doing? What’s the intention? Mens rea. For me, the intention there is to say, we are going to protect you. If you surrender to us, we’ll protect you from this nuclear war which the elites, which the outer realm people, want to spark. For those of us who don’t fall for that, the message is: we’re so powerful that there’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing you can do anymore. You’re powerless. We will arrest you. The army will shoot you. For me, the ultimate energy is a statement: “We will protect you if you surrender.” For those who resist, the message is intimidation: “You are powerless.” The fourth tool—inner/outer realm immanences—reveals another layer. Every Disinfolklore artifact plays on this tension: Insiders versus Outsiders. Fertility versus Threat’s to your community’s children. It’s women. Guarantors of any community’s persistence over time. Migration tropes in English info-space often depict outsiders as corrupting the Inner Realm’s purity. Gabbard’s message embeds this archetype: elites as the Outer Realm, stirring chaos. Yet, she’s as elite as it gets: Director of National Intelligence. And she’s archetype herself as One of Us. If you didn’t have the dark forest end of the world aesthetic provoking your emotions about the end of the world, you might just laugh off the attempt to hack our emotions. Yet, I repeat, this actor is actual director of National Intelligence.She could have blamed Russia or China, but she didn’t. Leaving interpretation open aligns with decades of narratives portraying cities as lawless and elites as corrupt—deeply ingrained in American discourse. that she and the people she’s working for are all working together, whether it’s her boss, the Chinese, the Russians, Iranians, the North Koreans, all of these nuclear all of these nuclear powers. So she could have said that they were the ones who were threatening us, you know, Ronald Reagan type thing, where these are our enemies, or even Axis of Evil type thing. But she didn’t use this. She left it to the interpretation, to the Maga interpretation. And this has been very deeply built on decades of this idea, especially in America, of the cities being lawless lands, where the Maga Maga base living in safe communities, generally speaking, in nice or certainly, the people I know, or my relatives who’ve gone Maga are quite wealthy and quite safe. But even from a young age, they’ve been banging on about how unsafe the cities are. And now I see what’s happening in in LA, or in the information space about LA is built on this decades-long idea that have those in the cities are Outer Realm there and then. The Inner-Outer Realm switching is dizzying. Yet characteristic of Disinfolklore.The fifth tool—adapted from Paul Ekman and the Dalai Lama’s Atlas of Emotions—maps emotional journeys: Trigger, Experience, Reaction. Social media bombards us with triggers, and our reactions often amplify Disinfolklore. My reaction was analysis, not amplification—a conscious choice.So then the fifth tool is this idea, which I got from the Dalai Lama and the great psychologist Paul Ekman, who did this amazing work, which is available online, called Atlas of emotions. And in it, they have this, this system, which I adapt into the Disinfolklore analytical method called trigger experience reaction.So any of the emotional journeys that we go on each day… We go on 1000s of emotional journeys, millions, perhaps each day, whether it’s as we’re going down our timeline is an obvious way of illustrating this. We see pictures. I mean, all of us who are experts at filtering and responding to information in a way that perhaps we don’t understand how, how amazing we are at this. Now, by just being on simply being on Twitter, we have so many different algorithms to filter out things in our mind and not to let them into our Inner Mind, where they might contaminate our own Mana. but Ultimately, we’re being brought on oodles of emotional journeys. Obviously this also goes In Real Life as well. In work. With our spouses or children. Even with our pets or just walking down the street as different stimuli bounce off us. It’s this timeline of emotions that the Ekman Dalai Lama cognitive model of Trigger Experience Reaction. So there’s a Trigger - a meme. We Experience a feeling of Anger, Fear, Disgust, Sadness, and/or Enjoyment. Then we React to them. Obviously the Disinfolklore Analytical Method’s message is that you can separate the Experience, the Sadness, from the Reaction. You can avoid actively falling from the trolls. Or, you know, sharing that Disinfolklore. Sharing that image. As we talked about last time of someone who’s trying to, you know, at the moment, there’s a lot of stuff about Elon Musk’s father. This conference in Moscow. Where these famous people have gone to. A lot of us have shared the pictures of them, for instance, which is, from my perspective, part of the purpose of the conference. By sharing that nonsense we’re contributing to Russia’s motivation to stage such events as a means of continuing to wrap us up inside a Disinfolklore Universe. So we choose to react to this experience by sharing it. So with the Tulsi Gabbard thing, for me, the experience I had was curiosity. My reaction to it is this conversation here today that I’m having with you. Not really a conversation that’s the monologue. Hopefully, maybe we might have questions or reactions to what I’ve triggered. For me, it was when I as soon as I saw it, I was like, Okay, let me apply the Disinfolklore analytical method to it. Then the other six tools, which I won’t go through now, the Code of Positive Trolls. The most important element of the Code of Positive Trolls really in for me is Generosity. There was nothing generous in what she was she was saying. There was nothing positive about it. It wasn’t even a cynical attempt to please us. It was a, was a, it was a cynical attempt to put us at dis-ease. For that reason, it’s a perfect example of Disinfolklore. And what I mean by Disinfolklore. As indeed is what we see when Russia sends missiles into Ukraine and then it shows its own murders and destruction. Russia showing its human Safari training of drone pilots in Kherson on hunan prey, including small children. Russia has killed 1,800 civilians in Kherson then published the First Person View footage of these Crimes Against Hunanity on Russia’s own state controlled social media platform/Disinfolklore propagation apparatus Telegram. Boasting about, creating Disinfolklore. I saw this process in its primitive form in Russia-occupied Ukraine. I’ve spoken about how Russia filmed me and my colleagues then spun bizarre takes for months on end about mythical events. So this is the same thing which I saw in eastern Ukraine, where reality becomes the pictures of burning cars in the tiny area of Los Angeles where MAGA is trying to conjure into being a civil war. Being used and repeated, repetitively, repeatedly or by the mainstream media, and used as pretext to create what I call the Disinfolklore Galaxy.Ultimately, Gabbard’s video exemplifies Disinfolklore: fear-driven, archetype-laden, and manipulative. Similar tactics appear in Russia’s missile strikes and Telegram’s “human safari” videos—spectacles designed to distort reality. This is what I observed in eastern Ukraine, and it is spreading globally. Unless we wake up to these methods, their influence will deepen. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Dive into the intriguing world of peppercorn rent and contract law, where the host uncovers the deeper meanings behind legal terms. Explore Marcel Mauss's ideas on reciprocal obligations linked to personal pledges. Discover how communal feasts symbolize energy transfer and the concept of mana. The discussion takes a fascinating turn, comparing memes to ancient deities, showcasing how cultural notions of life energy persist. Finally, the host connects linguistic patterns to age-old beliefs, revealing the intertwining of magic and social organization.

**Audio updated on 9 November due to editing error after 50mins in the original version**I wanted to talk about the continuation of what we had spoken about before. Part One:This basically involves a few different ingredients into the analytical theory that I invented, which is called Disinfolklore. Disinfolklore is both an analytical theory. Part Two:It’s also a way of seeing. It’s a description of a new form of narrative. It also is a way of cutting through Russian disinformation and in particular in the context of the Ukraine war.Part Three:However, it is an aspect of our culture which can be used in different contexts. The tools the modern discipline of Cultural Psychology and particularly the jurisprudence of Sympathetic Magic (including the Laws of Contagion and of Similarity (which includes the law of Difference) can be applied in the context of Disinfolklore. I am the first writer do this.But first, I thought I would just quickly go through some of the things I wrote this week. I wrote earlier on in the week, which is quite apt today because I see a couple were arrested and charged by the Polish police for one of whom, or both of them, I think… Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

So my first interest in magic stemmed from reading this paper on the war magic, which was used by the fifth Dalai Lama who lived around 1560, around that time, and was a great esoteric practitioner and basically once and for all beat this other Tibetan Buddhist sect with the help of Mongols and after that ruled Tibet until now. The idea of war magic, I mentioned it last week…Great question. Yes. So my first interest in magic stemmed from reading this paper on the war magic, which was used by the fifth Dalai Lama who lived around 1560, around that time, and was a great esoteric practitioner and basically once and for all beat this other Tibetan Buddhist sect with the help of Mongols andafter that ruled Tibet until now. And the idea of war magic, I mentioned it last week, it wasn’t so much the esoteric practices and spells which the fifth Dalai Lama, who was a great realized practitioner, but also a good military leader. It wasn’t the actual spells or the claim wasn’t that it’s not the spells,but it was that the word got out. that he was doing this. And this really disturbed the Karmapas, who was the other, we still have a Karmapa, but it was these battles which were won. It was the words that got out. And that really fascinated me. as war magic, as propaganda.And there the magic was in the sense of these esoteric practices, which I suspect go back, or many of them anyway, go back to the early Indo-European culture. And they’re just preserved in Tibetan Buddhism via India, where they were converted. And so And this was in... I read that in 2016.So this is while I was working in Russia-occupied Ukraine and going across the bridge all the time and trying to work out what are they doing? What are they talking about? What is all this nonsense in their information space that’s brainwashing people? Ah, it’s war magic. This is what they’re kind of doing.So I would archetype exactly what you’ve just... talked about in that way as a way of once you categorize it in that way then you look at it more like like an artifact in a museum you can walk around it and look up at it and down atit and as you in fact are obviously are doing you know rather than you know rather than you so you see it as an objet dar rather than something to be worried about or something that’s going to trigger your negative emotions which is obviously how therussians want to do it and i mentioned a bit earlier i’m not sure it was when you’re joined but one of the really important things I’ve tried to do and it’s helped me in distant folklore and looking at mythology is especially when you’re looking say at someone like DuganIf you have a deep hinterland or a deeper or a deep understanding, or at least a conscious understanding, you actually look it up to look at what does this symbolism mean? Then it enables us to look at what Dugan is doing and what, as you’re describing, the Russians are doing as their gobbledygook. It’s a pastiche.It’s a troll, but it’s a muddle of lots of different things. You get this sense in the Russian Orthodox Church, everything happens behind the veil, a bit like The Wizard of Oz. I don’t know whether or not Putin believes... I don’t know and it’s not necessary to know whether they’re utterly cynical. I suspectthat they don’t have an understanding, say, of... Wendy got this immediately when we talked about in the second week of emptiness, which from the Buddhist perspective is this idea that everything is empty of manna, of essence. And therefore, you can either go to one end of the extreme and despair, And that’s nihilism, the extreme of nihilism.Or you can go to the other end of the extreme and make up loads of s**t and come up with lots of nice stories to make yourself feel better about things. And that’s from the standpoint of ultimate reality. But in conventional reality, you have to accept that this chair, if I sit down on it,it’s going to work. The airplane is going to fly. And what the Russians are trying to do with that kind of stuff is probably from a standpoint of their own confusion, is muddle all of these different discourses, ultimate reality where nothing matters, because they are ultimately nihilistic, to breaking the laws of physics,which is the conventional view of what magic is, to using stories to scare people, And what we can do is develop an immunity, I think, to what they’re doing by understanding its absolute, well, Okay, so it doesn’t always help that it’s absolute nonsense because it’s not absolute nonsense because they’re mixing loads of things in.And I started this evening at eight o’clock by quoting from Soliev talking about Ukrainians being demons. And one of the, this early, there was a bit of a controversy over whether early archaic Roman religion was called Numenism. with the MN in numinism or whether it was called demonism. And again, the MN is also in demon.So this idea of manna is quite a helpful way of looking through all these things. But Solyov this week, yes, saying Ukrainians are demons. We heard this before about them being Satan worshippers. And if you don’t have any grounding in religious discourse, or if one doesn’t, as many of us don’t,I taught myself this stuff because I wanted to know what they were talking about, then you can miss the significance of what they’re trying to do. You can be a bit... Because a lot of people don’t have grounding in religion, for instance, they will just try and ignore it. Like I’m just thinking of normal military people,for instance, or many of our politicians in London or in Washington or something like that. though in Washington they might have some grounding in religion, but that demon chatter will work with them. So I feel, yeah, it’s a pastiche. So that’s, I think, what they’re doing. It is of no more significance than it is a pastiche.But one of my early intuitions, and by pastiche I mean... They are taking, as you point out, the hazelnuts in Irish mythology, which fall into the river up in the Moran Mountains and then the salmon eats the walnut and then the fisherman eats the salmon and becomes the king. And this is... As we know now,this is one manifestation of an essential story of what happens in the afterlife in Indo-European societies and in Indo-European religion. I once heard Putin talk about how he had been told there was massive freshwater reserves under the Azov Sea. And again, this is from an ancient Iran idea.And I thought, okay, he’s been trolled by someone who’s been studying ancient Persian. And then a year later, I saw the story that they had drilled and they didn’t find anything. I was like, I could have told you that. So this is why I get the idea that they’re not coming from a standpoint ofwe really understand this stuff and we’re just playing with it. We’re digging up these symbols and the symbolism, we’re putting them together and we’re toying with people like deities. I see it more that they are doing a pick and mix of different tropes and elements. Dugan, for instance,he is clearly very bright and has a real grasp on symbolism, which is probably why he’s so successful because there’s not that many people around who do understand it. But as the Russians did with Wagner, which is really clever what they did with Wagner.And I’m not even sure that they understand what they did by linking in with the foundation of the Germanic people. I think they just tuned into the Nazi aesthetic. But they really went, they ended up bringing in the foundations of Germanic culture and Manus and the sons of Manus whofounded Germanic culture and the Wagner operas and how the Germanic nation became a modern nation state and what they were doing with their distant folklore, creating a sense of identity, hacking, destroying existing senses of identity and creating a new sense of identity through using forcemonikered as the Wagner by Purgosian who wrote a book of fairy tales himself. So I’m not ruling out. They are extremely... They know exactly what they’re doing. I’m not sure I’ll ever have that conversation. But my feeling from reading people like Surkov and Dugan very closely is it’s...they don’t really understand what they’re doing, but they are brilliant at it. And they’re using symbols and tools which are politicians and are army people or are specialists in disinformation, for instance, they’re not at the races, they don’t get it at all. They’re not even valuing it.Some of you might remember when I first brought up mythology in the context of the predecessor to Volia from the ancien regime, You know, they try and shut me up. And yet we were talking about Wagner. So it’s that attitude of, oh, I’m a bit intimidated by that. I don’t know anything about it.So I’m just going to ignore that part. They’re probably just talking s**t. So, yeah. So it’s good. It’s important. But we shouldn’t let it intimidate us because it’s just classic war magic. I’ll leave it at that. A great question. I have to. Thank you so much decoding. That was amazing. Thank you. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Our mantra: “Look for the Mana in the Meme!”1. Scan for the ‘Mana in the Meme.’ 2. Identify, unlayer it. 3. Characterise the Mana’s Dimensions. 4. Evaluate them. 5. Make the Call: Positive, Negative or Neutral. 6. Intervene, Act appropriately.I felt bad all week. I left you on a bit of a downer in this Podcast:That the mental war that Russia has launched against all of us in all of our countries, wherever we’re from, will continue after Ukraine’s victory.I wanted to situate that description of how I see that reality- that the Russians’ war against us will continue after victory. Even if, as I do in this piece below, I can foresee the gentle eradication of what Putler referred to as ‘the Russian Ethnos’ which has, as we see in Ukraine, a remarkable propensity to commit war crimes - 300,000 or so registered war crimes in Ukraine since Feb 24 2022.The German and Japanese Ethnos’s survived after World War Two because they repented, acknowledged their crimes, surrendered their war criminals and got on with credibly rebuilding their cultures, communities and countries with the help of benign occupation forces of Canada, England and the United States.Russians themselves say that they are going to continue to prosecute their mental war after the end of the kinetic phase. Russia’s mental war is hidden inside Disinfolklore (qua the narrative form which I am the first writer to identify and name and the analytical theory which I invented and which I’m elaborating upon here for parsing all forms of disinformation). See here how Galina Rymbo, a poet, translator, feminist and anarchist of Moldovan-Romanian and Ukrainian origin who was born and raised in Western Siberia and now has found sanctuary in Ukraine wrote about what I call the Disinfolklore Universe:I am proposing a solution which many of us can integrate into our own mental algorithms. To vaccinate ourselves against the contagion of Russia’s mental war against us.Disinfolklore, the analytical theory, is supposed to help us in real time.The challenge I had set myself was to come up with a method that we can all use on-the-fly in our daily lives to parse data/informational units/memes.I use those words or those terms interchangeably.The visual memes that we have come to associate with the moniker Meme. I go back all the way back to, I think it was 1976. Richard Dawkins coined the term or the moniker ‘Meme’ to describe cultural ideas that pass around through the ether, as it were. Through human culture.It’s always fascinated me that that word ‘Meme’ didn’t need to be created until that book.Actually, when I think about it, the concept of Mana, which I use a lot in my work. The concepts of contagion or medium - something which is passed between us - actually serves the same purpose as Meme does in the English language.By meme, I mean any visual, audible phenomenon. Anything that affects our energy, our Mana. Anything which comes inside into your Inner Minds through, through or even actually inside our own minds.Part of this idea of Contagion, in Cultural Psychology and Anthropology (which I mentioned three weeks ago) that once something is lodged in your mind,that it has its own energy and it works away by itself into provoking our own emotions.we’ve all had sleepless nights over ideas or woken up thinking of something and can’t get back to sleep about it. And in many ways, the purpose of Russian disinformation is to plant these memes in our minds, these informational units, which burrow away and affect our attitudes, our intentions, our moods and our motivations, those four ideas.That’s how I look at, that’s the kind of the cognitive model which I use in Disin folklore as an analytical method for parsing Russian and any form of disinformation, but also any form of data really coming in from the outside that it affects the cognitive model that I’ve established or elaborated on, which has been pretty stable now for about two years. aspect I added was moods during a trip to Turkey last on the Turkish Riviera last, not last summer, the summer before last. And I’m very interested to see that moods are often used in the analysis of howfairy tales and various things affect people’s minds. So the cognitive model is that we have an energy, we have a manna, we are human. MN is in human. This is our energy. This is what shines through us. It’s in our mind. And external things come in and they impact this manna.Mana is the source from which all our moods, attitudes, motivations and intentions flow. This is what I believe Russian disinformation attempts to hack. It attempts to hack our Mana, our energy. Then this has an impact on our attitudes, on our moods and or on our motivations or on our our intentions. Any of those four elements. So in that sense, the tool which is most useful on-the-fly to deal with misinformation from my perspective. This mental war which is being prosecuted against all of us. Which, as I argued last week, will persist after the kinetic war has ended. After victory. After Ukraine has these 150 to 200 fourth generation fighter jets. Zillions of different drones and all of that matériel. This mental war will continue in our communities. I take note of what was being discussed today by Genesis Man and Midwest Fella and some of the callers in about how hopefully Orban will lose. That this will hopefully turn the tide on this epidemic of far-right and far-left madness which has which I associate with Telegram as a mechanism, and I associate with Russia, whether in the sense that they’re either creating the division where none existed before, or they’re finding, identifying very early on these divisions in our community wherever we are. They’re exasperating the divisions and making them bigger. Take this idea of ‘look for the Mana in the Meme.’ Disinfolklore’s (as an analytical method) main Mantra. Look beyond what is immediately given in the particular meme. The Disinfolklore analytical method should be useful independent of the source of the data or the source of the meme. Because you can’t always discern the source. The most conventional methods, I spoke about it, I think it was in the fourth episode, when I set out the European Union’s External Action Service or Diplomatic services Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) framework. Now that Donald has closed down all of the disinformation unit in the State Department looking at FIMI (which is kind of the the grown-up word or an alternative word for what I call Disinfolklore (qua narrative phenomenon sneaking trolls into our Inner Minds millions of times a day these days). Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference is quite a mouthful!Helpful people sometimes wrote to me to say ‘Disinfolklore is a bountiful. It’s hard to say. Can’t you vile up with a better moniker!’ ‘Try saying FIMI is my usual response!’ FIMI defines itself as ‘foreign’ interference in our information space. Manipulation of our information spaces is okay, according to this model, if it is not foreign. So the same Meme would be okay if uttered by a domestic source. Obviously Russia then just persuades, hypnotised, trolls, manipulates EU nationals to promote its Disinfolklore. That weakness is immanent in the FIMI framework. In the context of the European Union ‘foreign’ means our enemies China and Russia (and to some extent Iran and North Korea) when it comes to FIMI. Therefore, if you can trace any particular Meme back to those sources, then you know it’s foreign interference, and it’s prima facie wrong. Obviously, one of the intrinsic features of Russian disinformation (as Galina Rymbo notes above) is that Russia plants its trolls in the voices of people in our own community. So it’s harder to see it. So this English MP who we’ll all have seen this week, Zarah Sultana whose ‘Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class’ absurdity this week went viral. She naturally name checks that “of course, Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes.” Then she goes on to say: “but President Zelensky is no friend of the working class.” So when you’re looking at a Meme like that… Let’s take that as an informational unit from an English MP. She’s saying, ‘of course, Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes,but President Zelensky is no friend of the working class.’ All of us can see through that immediately because we’ve spent so much time in the Ukrainian information space. We’ve seen, I’m not going to say we’ve seen it all, but we have seen a lot of it. Someone like me, for instance, who was a great fan, actually, of Jeremy Corbyn up until that Panorama documentary. It basically... revealed that this group set up by the Labour Party to investigate allegations of anti-Semitism was stopped at every possible turn. Those committed Labour Party members hired specifically to deal with the wave of antisemitism claims against the party, then blew the whistle. All these very committed young Labour Party officials who reminded me of myself when I worked for the Irish Labour Party, the Irish Green Party, the antisectarian Alliance Party of Northern Ireland and the English Labour Party as well. Just committed to the cause and trying to help it. I lost faith then in leftist, formal leftist, self-declared leftist politics at that point. I had no idea of this whole tanky thing. I’d never come across the term tanky until relatively far into the war. It might have been when those American legislators, AOC and co, wrote that draft letter. I think it was in September 2022. Basically... Donald’s position up until now is their position, which was ‘Blame the Victim’ Ukraine should make peace. Everyone at the time went nuts. That was way back in the historical era of 2022, before Donald had hypnotised humanity with Russian Disinfolklore tropes like ‘Ukraine is an obstacle to peace.’So I discovered the term tanky. Now I recognize the energy / Mana of tankydom in many memes. The Mana of tankydom. When I hear the stock qualifier of an anti-Ukraine positioning attempting to conceal itself -“of course, Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes….” This is exactly the kind of thing we hear when we hear the Russian opposition.When then they go on to say, “…but President Zelensky is no friend of the working class.”There’s been some fantastic... take towns of Sultana on this.I’m quite optimistic that this whole episode certainly has served to help educate some people anyway into the contradictions of tankydom.I wondered how I would use the Code of Positive Trolls. There are these 12 analytical tools which are part of the Disinfolklore analytical method, which I’ve spoken about before. Half of those tools are archetyped into what I call the Code of Positive Trolls. That’s code in the legal sense. It’s also code in the sense of moral code. That if you want to proof outgoing informational units, outgoing memes. The Disinfolklore analytical method is not just to help me interpret Disinfolklore in incoming trolls.I’ve got my Incoming Troll Radar, which is scanning for the Mana/energy in incoming informational units. To determine whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral. It’s also about outgoing.I don’t want to be like Sultana. I presume she’s well-meaning. She went to this conference in Paris and is a full-on tanky. We certainly have no evidence that she (and nothing I’ve seen about her. I don’t know that much about her. Hardly heard of her before. I did look her up on Wikipedia. Nothing makes me as suspicious of her as I am of say, Farage or Jeffrey Sachs or people who are actually paid to be tankies and have taken money, whether it’s from RT or from other Russia-connected sources. In order to promote particular trolls. Or particular memes).So she goes to this conference and I read a brilliant critique of some of the people in that conference in Paris which Sultana referenced and particularly of “Ukrainian” people there who are basically Russian patsies.I’m going to say that. The person who’s analyzed this is Galina Rymbo poet, translator, feminist and anarchist of Moldovan-Romanian and Ukrainian origin who says she was born and raised in Western Siberia, in the working village of Chkalovsky in the city of Omsk and who’s currently living in L’viv. She was critiquing Sultana and critiquing some of the people who were at this conference in Paris. There is in particular these Ukrainian leftists who are against the war. They want peace. They remind me of these bloggers Russia used in Ukraine to divide Ukrainian society who transformed from blogging about. Edit/eastern spirituality to becoming anti-bad-Let Covid Rip demonstrators outside provincial government administration buildings across Ukraine while I was working there. To, suddenly, archetyping themselves as “anti-war” Ukrainian “nationalists.”[see https://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2021/01/19/7280367/]These Manosphere adjacent so-called Ukrainian leftists gave speeches at the Paris conference where English MP Sultana learned that “Zelenskyy is no friend of the Working Class.” Some of us might have watched those excerpts online. These are a species of people that I encountered as a diplomat in Eastern Ukraine. It took me a little while to discern who was a Russian asset or agent and who was well-meaning and acting in good faith. Who was sane and which activist was a fantasist either knowingly or unknowingly being controlled by his Russian curators.One person in particular whom I met at a court hearing related to protecting Ukrainian servicemen’s rights - a perfect cover that trolled me into believing this guy was a Ukrainian patriot. As a diplomat building a network, I spent about a year meeting him a few times. To collect information. To take the temperature, as it were, in eastern Ukraine. It took me a year to work out that actually, beyond all reasonable doubt, and certainly beyond my need to take a risk, that he was basically a Russian (knowing or unknowing) Useful Idiot. Once you know that there are people who profess these views “Putin of course is a dictator and has done war crimes, yet…” And who at the same time may well be pushing informational memes that are contrary to Ukraine’s best interests. Once you know that’s possible. Then it’s easier to understand that if you’re at this conference of socialists or leftists in Paris and you hear someone criticizing Ukraine. Then their words are repeated by a self-declared Leftist English member of parliament as if these people are the true voice of Ukraine. These anti-patriots are not Ukrainian patriots. Yet trying to represent themselves as patriots. They are being representedly archaetyped as Ukrainian. As an example of how not all Ukrainians are in support of President Zelenskyy or his Servant of the People political party. Or of a country which is at war.The Mana or energy of their memes directly and indirectly being transmitted by Sultana is 100% Russian, not Ukrainian.Like Jeffrey Sachs, mysteriously they get platformed constantly. Their memes influence influential people like Sultana. Most of us don’t have the time. Well, actually most of us do have the time here because we spend our days, whatever, even in between our jobs and everything like that, we’re just on this constantly.Yet most normal people don’t have the time to go through what I’ve just gone through. I did only very cursory research on all of this. So I went to the Code of Positive Trolls. The fourth criterion is Mana/Energy. We look for the ‘Mana in the Meme.’ That little mantra that we learn and that come into our mind, we ‘go, okay. What’s the Mana in all that Manosphere meaning from this ‘Dublin Group’? It’s Russia. 100% Russia. I have a feeling something’s off about “of course, Putin is a dictator and he has done war crimes, but Z is no friend of the working class.”You immediately have a reaction to this. You think, “It’s quite a clever non-sequitur.” A Both Sidesing.Then to go on about how to mention that President Zelensky is a dictator or so. I mean, it just so happens I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the apartment building in Kryvyi Rih where President Zelensky grew up. And because I used to visit, as a defendant,I used to visit a civil society organization which was based in that building. And I went there before he was president, when I didn’t even know who he was. And then after he was president, when the police would be there protecting him. And Krivi Rhee, as most of us know, is like,Aside from the purely Marxian/theoretical aspects of the formal definition of the working class, if Sultana wants to get into a pissing contest (excuse me, pardon my French) about who’s working class or not. I don’t know anything about where Sultana grew up or her background. Just because President Zelensky’s parents happened to be academics, everyone who grew up, most people who grew up in the Soviet Union grew up in the same kind of apartment buildings. The same kind of apartments as President Zelensky did. His apartment building is what people in London, what people, say, from West London might look at in Elephant and Castle or in East London as being, or in America as “projects.”They have that vibe about them. Kryvyi Rhih, Dnipropetrovsk’s second city where President Zelenskyy grew up is a very serious industrial town.In fact, the first time I went there (I have visited Kryvyi Rih for work many dozens of times) was to investigate some far-right guys who had attacked an LGBTIQ campaigner. A really brilliant campaigner in Kryvyi Rih who, like President Zelensky, tried his best to operate in this environment because he’s a really courageous person like President Zelensky. Some of us will have come across the story about when they built this underpass in the center of Kryvyi Rih. Under this roundabout. It was a big thing. It happened I think when President Zelenskyy was maybe 15 or something. This was a story one of his best friends told after he became president. President Zelenskyy went out with his guitar to busk in the new underpass. They took bets. His friends took bets about how many songs he’d get to sing before he got beaten up. Well, he got to sing one or two songs and then he got beaten up,and his guitar broken.So, you know, it’s a really tough, tough place: Kryvyi Rih. This is why it’s completely consistent with the real 3e!, as it were, the real President Zelenskyy, that he wouldn’t run away. Take a ride. Run away. Because he’s a tough, he’s a tough cookie. He grew up in a tough neighborhood. Really tough neighborhood. Really tough town. Steel making town. Whatever environment Sultana grew up in, I would say his would give her a run for her money. However, the beauty of the Disinfolklore Analytical Method is that you don’t have to know all of that to intuit that there’s something wrong or something off about what Suktana said. Let me show you how the Code of Positive Trolls can help us discern the Mana in the Meme: “I’m archetyping myself as more Working Class than President Zelenskyy.”The first element of the Code of Positive Trolls is ‘Generosity.’This is something I’ve come to realise recently. If you want to archaetype yourself as a leftist, you just profess care about the working class. That’s your Virtue Signal.Want to archaetype herself as right-wing? Archaetype your concern about migration or how everyone should be able to be as rich as humanly possible without boring taxes. Its rhetoric. The Mana is: “I’m archaetyping as Right. Or left. Follow me!” When Sultana talks about President Zelenskyy (or as she says dismissively ‘Zelenskyy’) as being no friend of the working class, this is a self-archetyping. She’s situating herself as a friend of the working class. Using President Zelenskyy. While she was at, I think it was, Birmingham University. It is now a top university in England. While she was there, her Wikipedia page says, she worked in Primark and various kinds of Fast Fashion-type stores. She would consider herself working class. Actually, however as a former student or scholar in Marxist, Marxian philosophy, I understand that formally a proletarian is someone who creates value for the capitalist. Their essence. Their being. Their Mana. Their energy is alienated from them. Invested into the product of their labour. Then the capitalist for whom they’re making this widget then takes it from them. It’s that sense of psychological alienation arising from the physical alienation of what you’ve spent four or five hours of your life creating. Out of that comes the need for revolution. The alienation that capitalism provokes in our minds, in our sentiments. While in the late 19th century, the mid 19th century, there were many people who weren’t proletarians. Today, most people fit into this formal definition of proletarian: creating objects of value which are alienated from them and which contain their Mana / energy. Sultana is not a proletarian. Because she’s actually a member of the English parliament. Today even people who work in the City of London or on Wall Street or in Facebook. These guys who’ve been recently hired by Facebook for 100 million a year to make AI algorithms, improve them. They are all formally proletarians and in the working class. So Sultana’s idea of working class is completely anachronistic. Aside from that, the idea of manifesting support for the working class and for the proletarians and for those who are exploited or those who feel alienated from themselves by the system is very generous.Therefore, the generosity criterion in the Code of Positive Trolls can’t disassociate really generous people from those who are just archetyping as generous. So then the second element is Right / ethical discipline. If you don’t have any information about Sultana, you think, well, she’s in good faith. She’s accepted Putin as a dictator and that he’s done War Crimes (though after 300,000 documented War Crimes by Russia, so far in Ukraine, for which Putin has Commamd Responsibility it’s hardly a huge stretch for Suktana to concede that. Not being a friend of the working class, allegedly, however would seem according to her values equal to 300,000 War Crimes! That’s some exchange rate!). Like, who knows if it’s true or not that President Zelenskyy is a friend of the working class if you don’t know anything about President Zelensky. If you don’t know anything about Sultana, you think, well, maybe she’s “Right.” Maybe that’s Ethically Disciplined. Though that’s me being very generous. As she has equated 300,000 War Crimes with being a friend of the Working Class, which seems pretty off. But I’m trying to be generous here, even if it is not Right to so equate President Zelenskyy who won 64% of the vote and every single district in Ukraine (apart from one up near L’viv), whereas Putin is too scared ever to have gone for election in a free and fair vote without, for example, murdering 1m Chechens so he could archætype as a ‘Hero’ before ballots are cast.So we go to the fourth criterion, which is Mana / Energy. What’s the energy / Mana in what she’s saying? If you don’t have a concept of looking for the “Mana in the meme,” then you might bother to do that. Most of us listening here, we have a sense of what sounds Right / Ethically Disciplined.We can smell tankydom because we’ve had so much practice. Our training set is millions of memes that have passed us on the timeline since the 24th of February 2022. So that training set has enabled us to scent in date what smells of tankydom in ways normal civilians who don’t spend every spare moment of every day on helping Ukraine defeat Russia in the information war. What I’m trying to do with Disinfolklore as an analytical method is to drill down into how am I sensing these matters that we now intuitively can without almost a second thought? What is the smell of tankydom? What is the smell of pro-Russian-ness? Because they disguise it all the time. Fig leafs.Obviously, if it’s coming from RT today, you can... you know it’s Russian theme or Russian Disinfolklore. When it’s coming from Sultana or from some pro-Palestine activists or from the most unexpected people - from your mother or your child or your best friend.M’ockers (Volya Radio presenter on X Spaces) has often described the interactions she has with her best friend who comes around to moan about migrants. Immanent in that, if you’ve got these words that I’m trying to communicate like Mana, is the energy of the Disinfolklore bearing stories of migrants colonising M’ockers friend’s mind. Sadly, the BBC is always repeating it. Everyone’s always repeating it. But underlying all of that are different layers of whether it’s the money that funds GB News (which came from these guys who made their money in Russia in the early noughties from oil via Malta). Or whether it’s Farage getting money from RT or Nathan Gill, the Reform leader in Wales who was convicted and is about to be sentenced for exchanging money from Russia for speaking in the European Parliament.There you can see these genetic, these causal connections with Russia, and that’s great. Many of us suspected it when we would hear how say Nathan Gill or Farage or others are talking Russian Talking Points. The Mana of what they’re saying is so eerily similar to Russia’s main Mana immanent in its information warfare memes that it can’t be a coincidence or these people, like M’ockers friend is, are not innocently being brainwashed unknowingly by Disinfolklore disguised Russian information warfare memes. It does indeed really help every now and again if someone is outed as actually taking Putler’s shilling, as it were. Then it’s much easier to explain to low-information people like most people in our lives who aren’t following this stuff in such granular detail or my friend’s who it’s hard to explain these things to. With Mana though, we’re looking for... When we don’t know that there’s a conviction for taking Russian cash to oppose Ukraine in the European Parliament. When we don’t know there’s an actual physical genetic connection between Russia and the speaker. When we don’t know the source of the meme. All we have to go on is the meme itself. This is what I’m trying to teach and inculcate myself and disaggregate the quick... instinctual, intuitional intuition that many of us have now for when we hear certain memes and certain tanky-esque words. So for me it’s a six-step process.I scan for the Mana. I try to find and isolate what is the energy / Mana inside this. Next, I’m identifying its layers here. So Sultana archetyping as Working Class by othering President Zelenskyy, by saying President Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class. Slightly cynically putting in that, of course, Putin is a dictator and has done more crimes. Then somehow equating that with President Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class. As mentioned, this is not Right. So she’s not merely archætyping herself as a friend of the Working Class. She’s not merely modelling generous, earthy virtue. She’s deceptively equating a dictator who outside the Rule of Law has murdered over a million people, with President Zelenskyy who was democratically elected and who commands an army which, sure, has eliminated over 1m Russians. Yet, he has done so within the law. States have an inherent right to defend themselves. It’s Article 42 of the UN Charter. By contrast, Russia signed up to respect Ukraine and other states’ sovereignty, security (including their territorial integrity). So Sultana is not only Wrongly equating President Zelenskyy with Putin, she is equating the values of the unlawful mass murderer Putin with her own. That is simply not Right or Ethically Disciplined.The standard which the Code of Positive Trolls uses to distinguish ethical / truthful or rightful behaviour from its opposite is the post World War Two legal and social order. President Zelenskyy is defending that. Sultana, apparently, equates the fact that Putin is a War Criminal with the (false) opinion she picked up at a Paris conference that, truly, President Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class. That’s simply not Right.The Mana of Sultana’s troll is akin to a species of meme which basically is justifying genocide in Ukraine by some alleged or perceived failure in virtue of President Zelensky or Ukrainians, which of course is the most famous one was that “Ukrainians are Nazis, therefore just kill them all.”So many people fell for that troll. So you scan for the Mana. You’re looking for the Mana. You’re looking for it in any meme. You’re identifying the layers immanent in the Meme, as I’ve just done with Sultana’s troll. There’s lots of different layers to even this very simple “Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes. But 3e! is no friend of the working class” meme/troll.Layers there are on the one hand that’s great, she sees that he’s a dictator and he’s done war crimes, but does she know about Lisa? Does she know about that poor babushka and her goats? Does she know about the toddler, the human safari? And all of these, does she know anything about Izium?Does she remember what went on and all these things? So this isn’t just War Crimes. This is 250,000+ of them. Crimes Against Humanity too. Does she know this, as she tritely dismisses President Zelenskyy? There’s lots of layers to what she’s saying, even when she says something as simple as “Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class.”When I hear, there can be a certain tone in which they say that, and it’s not very respectful. Usually, even when I’m writing. I did go through a stage of saying 3e! (pronounced Z), because that was how he... His party had the sound Z from his name.Now usually I say “President Zelensky” mainly because I would hear reflected from the right in America and from people like Sultana who know nothing about President Zelensky and have no sympathy for him or for Ukraine disrespect and dismissiveness that is contagious in merely referring to President Zelenskyy as merely “Zelenskyy.” There’s a certain sense of contempt. That’s it. So there’s layers. There’s lots of different layers in it.Then next to characterize the Mana. So what is it on balance? Is it Positive, Negative or Neutral? In this case, supporting Ukraine is the metric. You make a call. So scan for the Mana. Identify its layers.Characterise it. Make a call.This is what we do intuitively, a million times a day as we’re scanning our timelines. Deciding whether or not to read on or share dome visual, audible or textual meme. We make a call. When I talk about Contagion and this aspect of the Law of Sympathetic Magic…So the formal definition of the laws of Sympathetic Magic are:“Descriptions of a consistent pattern of beliefs, thoughts and practices observed across a wide range of traditional cultures. Their widespread occurrence suggests that they may constitute laws of human thought.”So that’s the view from anthropology. From philosophy. Of what these Laws of Sympathetic Magic consist?They are “laws of human thought.”As I’ve said before, I can’t go that far. What I can say is: I spend my time looking for mental laws affecting native Indo-European-language speaking people like me whose minds, whose native language is an Indo-European language. There’s certain commonalities between all of us who have our minds formed inside Indo-European structures of thought. It’s these commonalities which Russian disinformation can hack and take advantage of. So while 19th and early 20th century philosophers can talk about the Laws of Sympathetic Magic because they were looking in the colonies for them. They were looking at what they considered to be primitive peoples. They were trying to discern how they think and how they think differently from so-called “civilized” people.When I encountered this body of work (19/20c literature on Polynesian use of the term Mana), I realized, ah, this is very similar to what we have in disinformation sphere, where you have these very strange ideas repeating, being amplified, which are different, yet the same. They have what Wittgenstein called a quality of Family Resemblance. When you first encounter them, you are disgusted by them. They seem very strange. Then you go away to a metaphorical desert island (you take a break from the Internet) for six months. Return, now everyone believes them. Like Brexit. It’s a perfect one. Donald’s takeover of the US Republican Party. There’s lots of others.We have all of these different journeys, mental journeys, which we have gone on ourselves from disgust to casually accepting something.When Russian disinformationists or Disinfolklorists or MAGA or Brexit or England’s latest far right corporate lobbying group masquerading as a political party “Reform” or in any of our countries take us on these journeys, they purposefully and manipulate our Mana. They ‘-pulate’ our Mana. Shake it up. That process of changing our attitudes, our intentions, our moods, and our motivations, sometimes it happens naturally.Yet, that’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about people who are deliberately manipulated, like Sultana, by these people. These Russia-adjacent leftists in Paris at this conference. I’m not making any judgment that she is trying to manipulate others. She may well just be an archetypal Useful Idiot. We see these processes going on. The three Laws of Sympathetic Magic are Contagion, Similarity, and Opposites. There’s really only two which are Contagion and Similarity. Law of Opposites is usually classified as being a part of the Law of Similarity. Contagion, which is the medium. So you have a source of Contagion.You have RT today, which is pumping out a meme. That meme itself, once it leaves the Source, manifests the Contagion (Mana). There’s something in it, a Mana, an energy, which then... gets assimilated into a Target. Source, Contagion (Mana), Target.If we’re talking humans, it’s going into their brain, it’s going into our brains. Contagion is really what I mean by Mana. By energy. Mana is something that passes between us. So the meme itself obviously is going between us. I am posting it. I am the source. You are receiving the meme. You are the target. It’s actually something in the meme which is the contagion. It’s that word mana which I use for contagion and which I worked out is essential to have a grasp of in Disinfolklore and in Disinformation interpretation before I encountered the academic discipline of Cultural Psychology. The discipline which looks most closely today at the Laws of Sympathetic Magic.The law of similarity really helped me understand this strange phenomenon that, so for instance, that somehow the fact that President Zelenskyy is a native Russian language speaking Ukrainian, who is part of the Ukrainian Jewish community, somehow with enough amplification, this demonstrates to certain minds that of course he’s a Nazi.Again, it’s so absurd. There is this strange effect in our brains that we will believe opposites 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. Even when we know rationally that the virus is the contaminant inside the contagion. We know rationally. We know scientifically. 400,000 scientific papers show the different aspects of the harm of the virus that caused Covid. Billions of people have taken the vaccine. Only a minuscule number of them have been harmed by the vaccine. Whereas billions of people have been harmed by imbibing this horrible virus.Somehow people, certain minds can be convinced because virus vaccine are similar, are associated that they can be... that they are associated. Cause and effect become reversed, through association and similarity. So the laws and this exploration as part of cultural psychology, which is the discipline it’s become a part of now, were very interesting to me. This idea of magical thinking, which was always seen as negative. I first encountered Magical Thinking in the context of Brexit. Brexiteers, and particularly this group of n’er do wells in the English parliament called the European Research Group, who actually never did any research was the joke. They were no joke. They were on our airwaves the whole time for ages.They were magical thinkers par excellence. Manipulators. ‘We’ll leave the European Union. Our biggest market. We’ll become richer.” That’s Magical Thinking. When you look into the literature… When I started to look at it, I saw that, oh, this is often a stage in children’s development before they get cause and effect right. Whereas now, as mentioned in a previous episode, magical thinking isn’t seen as so negative now. It’s a means of innovation, really, basically. You innovate, because you think magically. Because you think you can put this together. The drone warfare kit that Another Alex Ferguson, are working on, there’s probably a lot of magical thinking there. It’s working, which is... which is good. So this word magic I think is worth just looking into. It appears a lot. We’ve recently seen that movie the “Magus in the Kremlin. The Magus. This “G” sound was associated in the Greeks in early 5th century BC with singing a wailing song of grief. So the tales of woe which M’ockers is so brilliant at recounting. They are really… They are magic. They are the original meaning of magic. As far back we’ve written records.This is the first time this verb which is the element in magic appears. So to sing a wailing song of Greek a Greek playwright then uses the words in the Persians to describe songs here I’m quoting “that call upon the souls of the dead to appear to the living.” So that’s what Russia does. We used to always have May 9th - “Victory Day, Russians call it. I attended a few of them in Ukraine, as part of my job. Everyone holds up placards showing photographs of their relatives who supposedly fought in the Second World War. The Immortal Regiment. The whole institution was revitalised after the 2009 demonstrations against Putin stealing the Russian election. It’s a Soviet-era institution. The Immortal Regiment troll in modern Russia is about calling the souls of the dead.When Putler is talking about the great patriotic war, that’s what he’s doing. Then you have in this other play, one of the very early uses of this word Gōes, which goes into magic, is in this play. This guy called -I don’t know anything about him- but he’s called Hippolytus. He’s called a Gōes by his father when he attempts to control his father through clever speech.Where I first became interested in what I learned was called War Magic, which is propaganda, which was used by the fifth Dalai Lama in Tibet.Basically it became known by their enemies that the fifth Dalai Lama was doing all of these esoteric spells on the enemy. It wasn’t so much the effect of the esoteric spells themselves which caused their enemy to be defeated. They panicked when they heard that he was doing it. So it’s this use of War Magic as propaganda when Russia tells us what it’s going to do. People get really scared of the nuclear stuff. That is prima facie war magic in exactly the way that I learned about the concept and got particularly interested in it.So I just mentioned that to say that that’s why I was particularly tuned into thinking about looking at what magic is rather than um this uh like I suppose every country has them. There’s this guy Paul Daniels who was very famous in England in in the 1970s and 1980s as a magician. Or all of those illusionists. Essentially if we take the Disinfolklore perspective and look at what Donald does, what Putler does, but also what President Zelensky does as examples of magic. Then again we need a way of distinguishing between Pootler and Donald and President Zelensky.I’ll finish up today on this piece which I wrote a year before I... I came up with the word Disinfolklore in March 2022. And actually ghost originates from this ghost as well, from magic, same route, because he attempts to control them through his clever speech. And that is what Russia does through its propaganda and its disinformation. But it is also what President Zelenskyy does. But the second element in the Code of Roswell Trails, which is right and ethical discipline.And I was posed this question by scouts recently, which was, well, how do you determine whether something is proper sort of in war? And for me, the ethical discipline, what’s right is defined by international law, by the Geneva Conventions. And none of us, I think,or most of us wouldn’t approve of any willful flouting of the Geneva Conventions, which are There were some preceding 1949, but the great body of them came in after the war with the Nazis. And so that’s what sets the ethical discipline. And that’s why President Zelensky, quite apart from the fact that he’s a better troll than Pukler,because we see again and again, the same old stories got the stuff coming out this week from I mean, their lines, that was all he could come up with in America, that stuff, which we’ve heard a million times before. Whereas President Zelensky, I think he’s been on TV every night. He’s done that.He does his thing from his iPhone every night. Every night the presentation is different. Sometimes he does these really inspiring things which help all of us, keep all of us motivated. So that kind of innovation, that’s the kind of innovation you need if you’re going to build the USSR’s most successful independent TV production company and be one of the most successful actors and a household name in Russia even, before 2013. When he, I think in December 2013, he pulled out of Moscow and left. This kind of look at how you can affect people’s emotions is precisely what we’re doing when we’re looking at disinformation and propaganda. I’ll leave it there for now. Just quickly end up with the the idea that which I saw it somewhere else, but I’m quite interested by it, which is just this idea that the left, that Sultana can somehow bring about peace in Ukraine by disarming Ukraine.This is a perfect example of how the law of similarity and the law of opposites operates. It’s such a bonkers idea. It makes no sense. You just have to think about it for three seconds. Ukraine gives up its arms and then peace will come. But the emotion, the calmness that comes over us when we hear, oh, peace, this is a recipe for peace. We’ll just stop arming them. And I hear it from friends as well, who are properly equally well-educated and intelligent as Zoltana. They’ve fallen for the troll. It’s very hard to break them out of it. But that is our challenge. I’ll leave it at that for now.Podcast available wherever you get your podcasts or on this page. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

In 2021 Ilnitsky, adviser to the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation (2015-2024) stated that the purpose of Russia’s “mental wars” is to destroy self-awareness, change the mental, civilizational basis of the enemy’s society (I’m indebted to Tetiana Boryak of Vilnius University and to InformNapalm for drawing my attention to these quotes by Ilnitsky in https://informnapalm.org/ua/format-c/)“It is possible to destroy the state and destroy the country by changing the self-awareness, worldview, goals, values and priorities of society. The mental war is aimed at changing the worldview. Moreover, if the Armed Forces and infrastructure can be restored, then the evolution of the worldview cannot be changed. ...The information space is [already] completely filled with “necessary” content.” He allocates “10-15 years to rebooting historical self-awareness [in any community], the system of education and upbringing, and therefore, the basic meanings and goals of society, that is, ideology, including the rewriting (resetting) of history, the destruction of traditions, ways, beliefs (religion) and basic values [in any community Russia is operating on]. The operational goals, which are implemented within 3-5 years with the help of “social technologies of manipulation of society”, are “attack on the existing lifestyle, dismantling, vulgarization and displacement of current norms of behaviour, undermining trust in power, splitting society”... Mental wars are fought without declaring.” However, Russia keeps declaring this war and explaining to those of us who are paying attention precisely what it is doing. Russia cannot help itself.From a document obtained by world-leading Ukrainian information warfare collective InformNapalm (see Wikipedia) and signed by Putin himself:The novel character based on ex-deputy prime minister of Russia Surkov, archetyped as a “Magus,” in Giuliano da Empoli’s “Magus of the Kremlin” explains why Russia must communicate its “undeclared” strategies and aims:Surkov, the theatre studies graduate who designed Putin’s election campaign and his presidency has declared the “mental war” in multiple texts. In early 2025, for example, Surkov set out how Russia invades the minds in whichever country it’s operating: “Since the 2000s, Russia began to produce meanings itself and went on to an information counteroffensive to the West by transferring the psychological concepts of the “mental matrix” and “archetypes of national consciousness” into the political and information realms. Hacking every country’s archetypes of national consciousness yields Russia directed “fig leafs” (as Surkov describes Russia’s operation through surrogates) 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. Disinfolklore engenders division and disgust in all our communities, and is created and perpetuated by such “provocations.”In every locality there are variations on the theme (temnik) commensurate with difference in the base “base archetypes of national consciousness.” The Mana / energy, temnik (themes), tactics, techniques, procedures however are similar and yield the same results: chaos and division, an undermining of authority that begins in the individual consciousnesses of a population. Never thought about Palestine before, yet now you think of nothing else? Never imagined you would camp out in campuses which have no impact on Israel, Hamas or Hezbollah’s decisions, yet there you are suddenly doing it for weeks on end… That’s Russia’s Mental War operating against you and your community. Even after the Russian so-called federation dissolves (perhaps within the next few months) this Mental War will continue - “Moreover, if the Armed Forces and infrastructure can be restored, then the evolution of the worldview cannot be changed.”We’ll come back to how the Disinfolklore Analytical Method that I invented while working inside Russia’s kinetic and Mental Wars in Russia-occupied Ukraine can help us overcome this terrible moment in human societal development.How this war ends? I’ve written four pieces since July 2023 on this. The first piece I wrote on 8th of July 2023. First Crimean War ended with the treaty, yet the second Crimean War will end just like the first Gulf War. So this was in the context of all this talk and this troll,this Disinfolklore about how all wars end in negotiations. These Russian talking points at a time when Russia was in as bad a state as it is today. In the First Crimean War, Russia kept pirating ships in the Black Sea and tried to passportize Christians of all nationalities in Judea, Canaan, the Holy Land. Eventually, even Russia’s allies, including the Austro-Hungarian Empire, united into a coalition of the willing against Russia. France, Britain, Türkiye or the Ottoman Empire / Sublime Porte (as it was known then), Sardinia and Italy and Prussia and Austria. Because, of course, there was no Germany then. It was just one German state: Prussia.If anyone gets onto the subject of new countries, interesting always when And when you look at the Treaty of Paris that ended the First Crimean War, to see whose signatures are on it. Turkey’s not there because it wasn’t a country then. Neither was Italy, neither was Germany. Austria is there, but mainly as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After it was beaten in the 1856 Treaty of Paris, this allowed Russia to continue occupying Crimea, where a continuous genocide of indigenous Ukrainian Tatars ensued. Crimea was to remain a demilitarized zone. Russia also was obliged in perpetuity never to use the Black Sea with military vessels. By 1870, it was clear that Russia was remilitarizing Crimea and began to interfere with Black Sea shipping again. The end of the Second Crimean War will not be a Treaty of Paris. That ship has sailed. Had Russia retreated from most of Ukraine after losing the battle for Kharkiv or Kherson, it’s possible the Great Powers might have pressured Ukraine to compromise. Now that won’t happen. It’s possible they would have allowed Russia to keep part of Ukraine: Luhansk and Donetsk. And it’s very interesting in the context of Donald’s latest brainwashing by Putler that Crimea isn’t even in the conversation. And while from the Russian perspective, that is that they’re hoping that models, that they’ll never give up Crimea. But obviously from our perspective and from Ukraine’s perspective, as we’re watching the pressure on Crimea,that it’s not a part of the conversation is fantastic. And my analysis of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since 2015 has been that the main reason why Russia escalated in Ukraine Luhansk and Donetsk and in Kharkiv and Zaporozhye and Dnipro and all these other parts of eastern Ukraine where it tried to spark revolutions, but which fizzled out immediately,including in Odessa, almost immediately as the people came out of the streets and got rid of these Russian patsies from the streets in Dnipro and Zaporozhye and Kriviri. Odessa and other places. But the main reason it escalated was it was surprised by the sanctions from the White House and wanted a bit more leverage,which is why it then invaded the mainland. And so basically, if Russia was in some dream reality uh allowed to keep uh Crimea then it would be just getting exactly what it had wanted in 2015 and we’ve thankfully seen enough world leaders in the last week saying Russia should get nothing you don’t get anything when you losewars so how I thought um the war would end then um in um July 2023 was that it would be like the Gulf War. And the Gulf War ended with a very long, I think, 21-page letter from Iraq, the first Gulf War, from Iraq to the Security Council of the UN, basically complaining full of grievances.And someone then, off the record, an Iraqi diplomat was asked, Does this amount to your capitulation? And they agreed. But if you read the letter, you wouldn’t think this was a capitulation. They were confused at first. And so that’s how I foresaw and actually still foresee Russia, Muscovy’s capitulation.There will never be this moment where everyone shakes hands, nor should there, nor will there need to be. President Zelensky said again this week, we will not forgive and we will not forget. So on 5th of August 2023, I wrote again another piece which was about how any time...It would again just be like the first Iraq war where every time Iraq breached the terms of the UN Security Council resolution, English, French and American fighter jets would bomb Iraq into a submission again. So it’s great to see the signing of the Grippans today, something all of us have dreamed of. happened today.So I foresee again that that still is on target. Ukraine using its drone when it manages to really get its drone production up and the West manages to get it up to the level that we can see thousands of drones go over Ukraine.of the Russian border every night, then I think that will precipitate the end of the war. Then in May 2024, I wrote the conditions to end Russia’s war. Ukraine has every capability, 10,000 drones a night to Takums, Taurus, F-16, to hit targets inside the Russian Empire whenever it chooses.200 km strip inside Russia along the border of Ukraine has turned into a wasteland capable only of supporting all forms of wildlife, excluding humans. And then on the 18th of March 2025, I wrote how this war ends. Ukraine, Poland, maybe Turkey, Baltic states aided by Finland, Scandinavia, Nordics will eject Russia. from 100% of Ukraine.I don’t see too much of a sign of this. Frankly, I don’t think it’s going to be necessary at this point. But they are kind of doing it by proxy, by arming Ukraine. So that’s all very positive, unless you’re obviously on the front line and fighting this war.But this week, I came across this amazing document written by a researcher in Vilnius University called Tatjana Boriak, and it was published on InformNapal’s website, their blog site, and I will probably refer to it again over the coming weeks because it’s a really rich and deep document which is completely complementary tomy work and my work on disin folklore and my findings in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018. And she comes to many of the same conclusions. Her analysis is pretty similar. And it’s just we’re going for different markets, really. But so some of what she has There’s these two quotes at the very beginning of the report,which I’m just going to focus on today. So the title of the document is How Russia Formats Identity and Tries to Conquer the World with the Help of a Mental War. And so I emphasize that I came to this from the ground up. I didn’t start with theory. I was in this situation. I was inside the occupation.And it was just really weird, as I’ve talked about before. the whole language, the othering of Ukrainians, the turning of Ukrainians and myself as a foreign diplomat there into devils, into demons, the demonization of us, the gradual transition among the people left in Russia-occupied Ukraine. Their identities were stolen from inside their heads, and it’s this whichNow we have MAGA and anyone we know with MAGA as a good example, as something many of us will at least be aware of the idea that this can happen. Your identities can be stolen from you using what I call distant folklore. And that can alter society and that this is not an accidental thing.This is not an organic process. This is planned and implemented with all the help of modern technology. And while many of us can look at perhaps MAGA, and I’m always picking on them, but just because it’s perhaps an example that we all in this audience from all around the world are aware of, This is happening,as I talked about in my Munich speech, which frames all of my work, possibly for the rest of my life, but but really certainly for the foreseeable future, where I foresaw the disenvolved folklore galaxy that Russia used inside Russia-occupied Ukraine to change the identities. And I use that language as, indeed, does Tetiana Boryak use this language.I’m murdering her name, probably. How Russia formats identity. So she’s taking the language from computer discourse and taking formats identity. This is what I saw with my own eyes and felt. It’s what we saw with people with Brexit or with MAGA. But I foresaw that this method, which the Russians then turned on themselves inside Russia,and that MAGA around the same time started using with Donald’s presidency would then be mainstreamed across the whole of American society and across the globe. Now, within days of my of my speech or my talk at the Pirate Security Conference in Munich in February 2025, a conference none of us will ever forget because of its proximity,because of Vance’s speech, but also its proximity to that traumatic White House meeting. then the world leaders responded and rallied behind President Zelensky as they have ever since, which is fantastic to see. But there’s still, I see in every country in Europe, there’s the signs that this war is going on.This is how I framed the discussion by how this war ends when the kinetic stage of the war ends. whenever that is, hopefully relatively soon. And with the collapse of Russia, we see these signs this week. We talked about this two weeks ago. We’re already seeing these early warning indicators where certain federal units areappealing to Moscow for money, food and heat and resources. And this is precisely the dynamic of which I spoke about and identified as the reason why the Soviet Union collapsed, the immediate reason why the Soviet Union collapsed, because the USSR, the Central Soviet under Gorbachev,was trying to strong arm Belarus into signing a gas deal that Belarus couldn’t afford. And winter was already upon them and they hadn’t signed it and they weren’t getting any gas. And the only means Belarus had of getting gas was along with the Russian SovietSocialist Republic and the Ukrainian was to declare the end of the Soviet Union. and declare themselves as independent sovereign states who could enter into legal relations with each other and solve this problem. And so the Russian SSR under Yeltsin and the Ukrainian and the Belarus entered into the, they declared independence,they became sovereigns and they could enter into contracts and Belarusians did not freeze. And so that same dynamic, I think, is what will precipitate the end of the Russian Federation and it could be imminent. So that’s wonderful. So that’s, I don’t think I really foresaw that in 2023, the mechanics of it,because we didn’t see Ukraine’s attacks on Russia in that way. And I don’t think many of us foresaw it and we mustn’t, mustn’t lose sight of that. Even with all this tomahawk talk, which probably most of us aren’t that disappointed about because we never thought it was going to happen. We’ve been to this rodeo before,we’ve seen this trolling going on constantly, and so we weren’t going to fall for it. But essentially, They’re arguing over which assets in Russia to bomb. And we saw that strike today in Bryansk, allegedly using a whole universe of different weaponry, including the Storm Shadow missile system. from the Anglo-French one. So this is quite an advance.And I heard Lavrov a couple of weeks ago talk about the tomahawk because America shouldn’t give the tomahawk because they couldn’t be trusted with it. As if there is some legitimate target in Russia which Lavrov would approve them hitting. So I don’t lose sight of that. And it’s great to see that this is the discussion.The discussion is about which weapons systems Ukraine should have to target Russia. But as far as we can see, no one is pressuring, not even the White House is pressuring, seems to be able to pressure Ukraine into relenting. And so that’s That’s fantastic. So how does war end? But unfortunately, when this happens,the dynamics which the mental wars which Russia set off inside Russia occupied Ukraine, then expanded across the across the whole of Russia, and now into all of our countries, those dynamics won’t suddenly end. And that’s what’s been on my mind as I began to think through it. So, Tatiana Boryak quotes twotwo brilliant quotes at the beginning of her paper, which kind of set out what the mental war is in the words of senior Russian advisors. And the first is from a 2021 quote, and it’s from an advisor to the minister ofwho was in power from 2015 to 2024, a guy called Lenitsky, who was born in Lviv, as it goes. And so according to Lenitsky, humanity in the 21st century has entered a new stage of wars, mental wars. The purpose of which is to destroy, and this is a direct quote from him, is to destroy self-awareness,change the mental civilizational basis of the enemy’s society. It is possible to destroy the state and the have in mind the image of the White House being annihilated by that guy for yesterday. It is possible to change the mental civilizational basis of the enemy society. It’s possible to destroy the state.and destroy the country by changing the self-awareness, worldview, goals, values, and priorities of society. So it’s possible to destroy the state, the country, by changing the self-awareness, worldview, goals, values, priorities of a society. The mental war is aimed at changing the worldview. Moreover, if the armed forces and infrastructure can be restored,then the evolution of the worldview cannot be changed. The information space is completely filled with necessary content and mental wars are fought without declaring. So here’s what he’s saying is, I think most of us believe Russia will be destroyed and will be turned into six or seven sovereign states, which hopefully can develop a long more... civilized lines.But what he is talking about, this bit which really got me, which was if the infrastructure can be restored, then the evolution of the worldview cannot be changed. This is the de-brainwashing process which Germans and Japanese successfully went through after the World War II. But he basically,what he is proclaiming is that Russia has set off a mental bomb inside all of our communities, which is independent of the force which put it into development or into being. And I can identify evidence that this might be the case. Now, when I say look at Georgia, I was listening recently,I don’t very often listen to him, but Dennis Davidoff, who does a really great daily battle, what’s going on in the battlefront. And he was talking about this, the fact that Russia is apparently now using a newly built Georgian refinery to refine its oil. And Denis Davidoff,who I’ve really enjoyed watching his evolution from he was really supportive of Trump, then he didn’t want to get involved in American politics, then he really turned off Trump. And so it’s wonderful. You see in real time a real human kind of being confused and being rolled and roiled.And he’s so aware of so many things, but he does a slight blind spot when it comes to telegram. He really falls for, what’s his name, trolls about being countercultural and racist. not being part of the Russian establishment. But here he’s mystified as to why Georgia would allow Russia to use its refinerieswhen Russia invaded two parts of Georgia. And for me, it’s quite simple that Russia is in charge of Georgia. It is occupying Georgia, but it did so through this brilliantly designed troll that integrated all of Russia’s learnings from its failures in Ukraine and was called the Georgian Dream, which is constructed on the pillars of Georgian identity.So the entire... structure is on what Georgians feel about themselves as being different and not anything else. And so that message of the anti-European message or how outsiders, foreigners were subverting their Georgian-ness was ironically broadcast by the outsiders who were the Russians. And that pattern we see with MAGA and American nationalism and the flag and thiswhole thing this week, we see where the GOP leadership is trying to archetype the No Kings demonstrators as being somehow un-American when it couldn’t We couldn’t be more American than to protest and demonstrate our opposition to tyranny and autocracy and authoritarianism, but they are trying to subvert the very pillars of the identity as Americans ofAmericans and confuse everyone, turn everything upside down. We see a similar process in Britain and in Ireland as well, where pillars of national identity, this whole campaign about Ireland for the Irish, which is based on a really jaundiced view, a really bogus view of what it means to be Irish and didn’t exist a few years ago,but it’s suddenly arisen and now is involved in this. There’s an election campaign going on there. We see it in England with the painting of the Georgian flag, the English flag on roundabouts and councils are complaining that they have to spend two million pounds to remove these paintings of flags.And this is something that I encountered a lot in Northern Ireland when I worked there for an anti-sectarian political party. So we see this pattern around the place. And Surkov, Vladislav Surkov, who is the former deputy prime minister of Russia, until he was slightly blamed for the mess after Putin’s election, after Medvedev.stepped down and we had all of those demonstrations and protests. And Surkov was supposed to, he created this NASHI movement, which was basically a Hitler youth movement who were supposed to just crack heads. And NASHI didn’t really work because the demonstrators embarrassed. So he lost favor. But he then, he was sent to Ukraine and he became,he was in charge of Ukraine, Georgia, the Russian occupation of Georgia. And he was the so-called curator of Ukraine. So he was in charge of all of the stuff in Eastern Ukraine, where I was, and inform NAPAM, which is this brilliant Ukrainian information warfare collective, managed to get Surkov’s inbox from his email, which was a brilliant moment,2015, 2016. And in it, you read the details of how the minutiae of how Surkov, from his office in the Kremlin, was involved in determining whether you could get babushkas at your protest, the demonstration in front of the American embassy in Kyiv, or if you can give us $2,000 more,we’ll get some younger people and we can get this group of people. And Sorkov was involved in approving even the effigies of... of Poroshenko, President Poroshenko at the time, which were going to be burned and all of this really minutiae of how you create fake demonstrations and fake stories, which then are spun around the world.in as real, you know, pure the creation of distant folklore. And of course, Surkov was a theatre studies graduate. So this is what Surkov wrote in 2025. And my eyes when I read this originally, popped up at the time, and it’s quite a complicated text, but this was after my Munich speech. And so Surkov was taught,but I was reminded when I was reading Tetiana Boryak’s piece of this, because she quotes it at the beginning of it. So Surkov transfers the concept of the mental matrix archetypes of our national consciousness. He says that work is being done with mental spaces that are influenced by the mythical environment and the relief of collective historical memory.And only then politics is used as a means of achieving his goals. And then Sorkov in this piece, which I had read before, a very short piece written this year, he then goes on to say he was looking for a fig leaf to disguise Russian imperialism. And so he came up with Ruski Mir,which was obviously already there, but he is the one who decided, okay, this is how I’m going to cover up what I’m doing. So this is the equivalent of MAGA, the equivalent of Georgian Dream, the equivalent of Ireland for the Irish, the equivalent of Britain for the British or Brexit. these fake expressions of patriotism, the archetypal,archetyped patriotism, which cover up something which is much darker and more malign. And so when he uses the term mental matrix, the archetypes of our national consciousness, he’s revealing this pattern which we can see in many different countries. And it’s of this the mental war that Russia is fighting consists.So while it’s easy for us to explain to someone who isn’t MAGA, I can use the example of Maggie to say to you, look, this can happen to people. You can be brainwashed. You lose your identity. We’ve seen it with some parts of the people who freed Palestine and any other cause. But what’s underneath it,what’s imminent in it, is this attempt, conscious, purposeful attempt to change the archetypes of our national consciousness. And it’s quite hard. So for us to see it being done to ourselves, but for others as well to see it, because you have to explain so much to people to say that, look, this can be done.You can be brainwashed. Russia has said these things. These people have said these things. They said, we are doing this. And then people like me and people like us, all of us listening, and people like Titiana Boryak and the amazing work that InformNAPALM does, we see the evidence of this on the ground.We see these strange protests which come out of nowhere. And the Palestine thing, I had never in my life seen any tents in the university I went to in Dublin, Trinity College originally. And we have this very nice, very old campus with this beautiful square. And when I went back there, during the height of the Palestine,Free Palestine protests, the students were camping out there in a way they never camped out for Iraq 1 or Iraq 2 or Ukraine. It was just unusual. And we saw that across the American campuses. We have friends and acquaintances who have been radicalized by different stories and different stories. memes, whether it’s anti-vax or all sorts of things.But the one thing most people aren’t getting radicalized over is Ukraine and helping Ukraine. Thankfully, enough people, enough powerful people are, but we don’t see that kind of strength of passion to radicalize Ukraine. That’s also a bit of a bit of a clue. So this is when Surkov is talking about archetypes of national consciousness,he’s talking about archetypes in the same sense I am, which is different from Carl Jung’s, because Carl Jung believed in these universally applicable primordial archetypes. Now, I do believe there are primordial archetypes, and I believe there’s archetype, certain archetypal structures which work on Indo-European intellects. So that’s slightly different from Surkov.But I am with Surkov in this thing that you can, and he uses the term archetypes, you can change the meaning So this is why he says, Russia began to produce meanings. So you produce new meanings for the archetypes. And in this sense, since 2009 in Russia, Ruski Mir was the meaning. Russia’s borders end nowhere.All these wars are justified. We can put up with any suffering as long as Ruski Mir is expanded. And suddenly, all of these quite reasonable, the Russians who went out to protest in 2009 and demonstrate, they all now march instead, as do many of the MAGA people or in all of our... other countries where these meanings,the meaning of national identity becomes subverted in a quite conscious way. And so what is to be done about this? And this is my work is where I’ve spoken before about the mana in the meme is part of it looking for the mana in the meme is part of itbecause it’s not good enough to say to someone uh oh look if you if you start reading this maga stuff you’re going to become maga and brainwashed and we’re going to lose you to the cult you’re going to become like a moony or um uh in the cult you you umWhat we need is a tool that we can look at in real time and try to see what’s imminent in the memes and in this, what are the patterns, what are the things that are common to it. And this pattern, which I described before here today with Georgian Dream, Ireland for the Irish,MAGA, Americanism, any movement which attempts to subvert or even use in a negative way as othering the archetypes of our national consciousness, that immediately, that when we spot that energy in Georgian dream, in different movements in any countries or in any texts or memes, then... that should be a warning to us.And if we’re scanning for that energy, that anything affecting the archetypes of our national consciousness, But just demolishing that whole wing, or I don’t know what you’d call it, old stables or something in the White House, you could not get a more clear demolition of the archetypes of our national consciousness than that.And that image is a perfect example of... of an actual literal and metaphorical demolition of an archetype of our national consciousness, which is the White House, the sacred place, which the British bombed. And here this interloper, this usurper is having it demolished.So what I see in that is this same energy and this mental war, which has been set off. And the dynamics in all of our societies are such that even when Russia collapses, mainly because most people can’t trace this back. They can’t see the Russian energy in a lot of these movements.Even when Russia collapses, that won’t undermine these movements for themselves. And so our fight will go on, I think, after the war ends. while Ukraine is turning itself, becoming like Poland and the rest of the European Union and trying to heal from this pain and suffering.But we have this other, this mental war, which we will still be fighting. So that’s what’s been on my mind this week. And I talked a lot, so I’ll leave it at that. And then next week we can... I have a few other things to say about magical thinking and contagion.Yeah, I can give you a direct answer. And this is from a document that informed NAPAM. They managed to get the contents of the email box of... the secretary to this organization, which is very important. It’s the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of the Sciences. And as mentioned before,Putin himself is chair of the board of the Russian Academy of Science in E.ON. And it’s a very short document and it has Putin’s signature on it. I’ll point it. Is there a purple space? There isn’t. I don’t know how to do it. But anyway. You can share it directly to the NIST decoding. Oh, can I?Do I have that power? Yes, you do. Wow, amazing. Gosh. Volia Radio, is that on? Yes, that’s it. God, that’s amazing. What a power. Okay, so basically, so this is an excerpt from that document, which I think answers your question in the immediate sense, Wendy. Accordingly, to solve the problem of social, so the document itself is entitled,this is the de-Westernization of Russia. Okay. And so there’s loads, as you can imagine, loads of waffle, but it’s only four pages, actually. But anyway, accordingly, to solve the problem of social entropy in such a system of social relationships, the most obvious solution... would be to continue the policy of exporting chaos abroad.That is, diffusing internal tension through external expansion. In the historical, you know, I talk about mana and energy, this is all the energy of absurd Russian people. policy documents, but signed by Putin himself. And we see that you wouldn’t believe this if you didn’t see the evidence in Ukraine and the, you know,the blowing up of our armaments, depots and all sorts of things that we’re all aware of, but perhaps normal people aren’t that aware of. So it’s hard to convince them that these documents actually are they set out the policy which we then see the evidence of being implemented. So the most obvious solution,this is to the Russian nomenclature, would be to continue the policy of exporting chaos abroad. That is diffusing internal tension through external expansion. So that’s the tight answer to your question, I think, Wendy, from their perspective. Through chaos, they can diffuse internal tensions. And how does that benefit them? Why would they do it?Yeah, I mean, I think all of us are astonished. Like, why do any of this? Yeah, because it clearly doesn’t benefit them. And the more it doesn’t benefit them, like a normal country might have made the error of invading Ukraine. But a normal country would have left after two weeks and declared victory and just gone home.But we see them still doubling down. And the close-up tonight, their brains are just rotten with... And I’m a great admirer of Marxist dialectics and Adorno and the like of it, but I hope my mind hasn’t been rotted by learning this stuff. But it’s in this sentence, Wendy, like the problem with social entropy, the most obvious solution.would be to continue the policy of exporting chaos abroad. And you’re like, that is not the most obvious solution. The most obvious solution is to try and do what Poland does, what France, what Ireland, what all these, every other country in the world tries to do,which is create a more secure environment for their own people rather than exporting chaos abroad. So... But then it gathers its own dynamic, as we see with this war, this trope at the moment, which I think is probably true, that Putin can’t stop the war because the whole thing would just fall down. I mean,I’m happy that people talk about that being true, Putin can’t stop the war, but without then saying, oh, Ukraine must surrender, because that was the case for the first year or two, we had to fight that. So then these things gather their own momentum and as we see with MAGA and elsewhere, these movements begin and they’re uncontrollable,they’re uncontrolled. and no one can control them. And that’s why I fear, why I identify that when the kinetic war ends and when Russia collapses and when these people are in hiding or in war crimes tribunals or being hunted by the gore for the rest of their lives,that we’re still going to be living with the consequences of this mental war that has been set off by the oligarchic elite for all of their individual reasons, I guess, since 2015, really, as far as we can see in the aftermath of the world financial crisis as acounterbalance to what they thought would be the rise of the left and what have you. And then it just becomes intoxicating. But yeah, it doesn’t benefit them. And I’ve written before about how if you were to do a cost-benefit analysis of Russia’s propaganda, which they’ve never done. They’re on genocide autopilot. Like if they worked out, okay,so the cost is we’ve brainwashed ourselves into believing this stuff. We’ve created all this chaos everywhere. We’ve lost a million and a half people. And we’ve destroyed our country and we’ve destroyed the future of however many people there are in Russia, 80 million, 90 million left. You’d never engage in it, but it doesn’t seem to be rational.They don’t seem to be in control of themselves. Yeah, that’s the best answer I can give, but I’ll certainly see if I can go up with a better one. But basically diffuse internal tensions through Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

The United States government has published an Executive Order and a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) (h/t Ken Klippenstein) that use Disinfolklore about an entirely fictional character called ‘Antifa’ to justify entirely un-American activities by the Federal government. Both documents are premised on entirely fictional (Disinfolklore) accounts of so-called Anti-Fascist plans for violence against the Right. Only evidence we have about plans for violence is from messages from Young Republicans (aged 18-40 years-old) that demonstrate they’re planning to exterminate Americans using gas chambers. Accusation in a Mirror (accusing the future victims of the crimes you’re planning to commit against them) is common to all genocides. It’s a pretext for murdering or displacing the scapegoats. A motivation. Reveals intentions.The policy framework for oppressing anyone the Federal Government chooses to is now completely grounded on fictional events which never happened. For example, the U.S. President alleges falsely in NSPM-7 that the bullets used by the alleged murderer of his father’s Far Right hero, Charlie Kirk, were “engraved…with so-called ‘anti-fascist’ rhetoric.”This entirely false and unfounded accusation in a formal document used by the US President as a policy basis for persecuting supposed members of an entirely fictional organisation called “Antifa” signposts the arrival of Disinfolklore into the heart of US government and society. It’s precisely the pattern I watched the Russians use in Russia-occupied Ukraine (where I worked as a diplomat 2015-2018). It’s a new level of “Disinformation.” It’s why, as I argue in this podcast, we need a means - the analytical method I invented to parse Russian and MAGA - Disinfolklore to understand what is going on here.In my work as a writer, what I try to do is provide the tools to analyse phenomena in real time. To find a way of looking at them, of cutting through the rhetoric. If Both Sides, for instance, are saying, are Othering what they term disinformation. The political ‘Right’ is claiming that what Antifa is talking about is Disinformation. Antifa -not that it is anything anyway. It’s a set of inchoate individuals… If Antifa is saying what the Right is talking about is Disinformation. Then we need what I call an ‘evaluative framework/dimension. An evaluative level/layer with which to define what is Disinformation. That’s where my Code of Positive Trolls came into my life in February 2020. A set of six criteria, six elements that you can use to parse any meme, any linguistic or any piece of data and any informational unit. It’s an attempt to objectively define what is disinformation or non-disinformation, i.e. what is good, what is bad, what is positive, what is negative.That’s what I use in terms rather than going for sinister/left and Right or writ or any such divisive wordings or self-declared labels. So I just go for the positive, negative, neutral, which is also in the word neutral, neutral, no movement. That evaluative dimension, then that led me to, I was looking at, for the reasons I’ve spoken about before, that I was in eastern Ukraine on this bridge in this very folklore-like situation, which had structural elements like folklore. Also the whole setting was just folklore about the whole thing. That made me interested in folklore before I realized actually Russia was using stories to troll people into particular attitudes, moods, motivations, and intentions which suited to them. We see today this horrific footage, which I would not recommend anyone watch. I certainly won’t be watching it. I can see a Disinfolklore without experiencing it of Russia hitting the World Food Programme convoy in Kherson.I think it was our very first episode with the release of the UN Commission on Ukraine, which was set up immediately after the full scale invasion and which has done amazing work reporting and cataloging and recording the many war crimes of Russia.I think our first, maybe it was our second episode coincided with the release of the UN Commission’s report. It’s based in Vienna and is part of the Good UN. They released their report on Kherson and the human safaris and set out evidence which will be used in court in war crimes, the crime of aggression.One of the things which I highlighted there to explain what I mean by Disinfolklore, is again what we see with this footage published by Russia of its war crime of destroying by a drone this convoy. I believe no one was killed or injured, which is fantastic.They are creating, the Russians are creating the crime and then publishing it using Telegram, presumably, so Russian state-controlled media (which now these young Republican self-declared Nazis are also using). The purpose of this, the glorification of these war crimes is something new. It’s something which I saw in eastern Ukraine. And... it’s quite stunning for people.It was that recognition without quite knowing what was new about it or what it was that led me to search for a new word, a new term for what I now call Disinfolklore. That is archetypal disinfolklore: releasing the footage of these war crimes, trying to flood the zone with so many crimes that it will be hard for anyone just to take it in, to interpret them. The last figures I saw we were on, which were from about 2023, that Ukraine has registered something like 250,000 war crimes, but we won’t be distracted. We see Kaja Kallas, the EU High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs and Deputy Head of the European Commission in Kyiv this week. The European Union dispersed or is dispersing 10 million euros for to try Russia for the crime of aggression. I think we talked about this before briefly. This is the crime of aggression, which is the most serious crime in humanity, in our culture, in our civilization.The tribunal which will be run by the Council of Europe, which is a distinct organization from the European Union, they are set up to hold the Russian leadership to account over that. So that’s all ongoing and these reports and Russia’s catalogue of war crimes will not, I don’t think, it’s not going to overload the system.So last week I talked about I was thinking myself a lot about magic. There is something oddly magical about why Russia thinks there’s something positive for them, from their perspective, about filming, for instance, the bombing of this convoy or the killing of... of over 100 people in Kherson with the drone safaris and the burning of buildings and hospitals. Equally, there was something magical in how certain minds were being captured and captivated by what seemed to me transparent nonsense. Yet it caught hold in people’s minds like this, the Antifa troll. The smear if you like, or the troll, or the woke, the anti-woke troll. If you had said to me, in 2020: We’re going to plan this campaign. We’re going to captivate the minds of the entire political Right. We will use this as an organizing fiction in every country. It will attract certain personality inventories, people and people with power. They will organize around this concept of wokeness against the post-World War II legal and social order.They will support the abolition of, this will gather together everyone who supports the abolition of equality legislation, which protects people from being discriminated against on certain protected grounds (like sex, sexual preference, political viewpoint, etc.). We will vilify refugees. Like in the UK, there’s no legal way for anyone to claim asylum in the United Kingdom anymore. So as a result of that, you have all these what they call Small Boat People, which is kind of a Disinfolklore moniker, coming in across the water. You have all of these things, which when I was studying law in the late 90s in Cambridge, in England... studying European human rights law, international criminal law and the rest, conflict of laws. This was unforeseeable and impossible. This would never have happened. Yet it has happened. (https://medium.com/@StephenDougla.s/https-medium-com-stephendouglas-what-was-studying-at-cambridge-like-2b1f69f6c93b)Now it’s normal. And now not only is it normal, most people haven’t even noticed it’s happened and have no idea of how unusual and extraordinary this is.So the word magic often came to my mind because even you think about magic, it is really, it’s about… In psychology, there’s this phase that children are often told to go through. I first came across it with the Brexiteers in England, magical thinking where you try and think something into being, which sometimes happens.This is a great song by the amazing Norwegian band Aha, which I always loved as a teenager, which is Dream Myself Alive, which is this idea that you can create reality through your dreams and work towards them. So that’s valid. There is something equally quite magical about that. But the magical thinking was, for instance, in the Brexit sense, was they thought they would just become richer by leaving. And there was nothing, there was no cause and effect. Children, before they understand cause and effect, they go through the stage of magical thinking. And it’s often seen as quite negative consequences.There’s a positive side to it, which is this idea that you dream yourself alive. So that kind of interested me with what Prighozin was able to do and was able to achieve with the Internet Research Agency when I started to look into it and look into the reports say by the Senate Intelligence Committee after the 2016 election and what Cambridge Analytica was doing. There was something quite magical about how Trump himself could get into office after all his crimes against good taste and the rest. Something anti-intuitive about him talking about Mexicans and immigrants and then successfully trolling exactly these immigrants to vote for them. In some ways, there’s a mechanical explanation for this. Say in the migrants thing, the message is, oh, “it’s only criminals who are migrants. If you’re not a criminal, you’ll be safe.” So people, Mexican or Cuban migrants, heard that message very, very clearly. It was repeated ad nauseum. Palestinians in different parts of America, voted for Donald rather than Kamala. So there is something causal, something mechanistic we can explain about it. The manipulative con-man element.There’s also something slightly magical in the sense of it doesn’t make sense from the standpoint of our rational thought processes as they existed in, say, 2010. It’s just nuts.The whole thing is nuts. So much of what is going on is nuts. I think Putler himself is giving a bad name to magical thinking because even the dogs on the street who pay no attention to anything and who we have never been able to get interested in Ukraine for the past four years, they are noticing these petrol queues. They are resonating with people much more easily than watching... Mariupol be bombed from the air. So Putin’s attempt to magically think Russia into victory itself is giving a bad name to magic. And I thought, and one of my early drafts and a lot of my early writing on Disinfolklore was focused on this idea of war magic, which is propaganda. It’s part of my origin story for Disinfolklore because it really pushed me to justify and explain why It’s these stories underlying not only our cultures on a macro scale. The stories which are underlying what the frogs, the inflatable frogs, the stuff around Kirk and the stuff around George Floyd’s murder. It’s these stories which out of this has generated the support or not support for Ukraine. Ukraine itself, I’ve long maintained before I even understood how important Ukraine was for our culture history, that it has been the very center of US politics. Invisible to many countries since President Trump’s first election. As manifested in the impeachment and all of that malarkey leading up to it. The Hunter Biden troll. All of that stuff. Ukraine was absolutely central to it. Now it is central again. In a much more central way with a lot more agency. Telling that story and framing it in that way, I think, is very important. One of the things I’m talking about tonight is why I felt it necessary to create a new moniker, Disinfolklore, as a substitute for what most people understand to be disinformation. I mean, it just so happens, as I’ve spoken about, I discover or I created the moniker Disinfolklore around the 14th or 15th of February. I marked it with a tweet, which is there, which is 830,000 views now by accident. Because I had this folder, this ‘folklore’ folder on my computer from which I established, I think, in April 2020, where I started putting in stuff about trolls and about trolls as folkloric trolls. Then all of the work which I was doing, looking at trolls and trolling, which I talked about two episodes ago when I went through the Factiva series. Dow Jones Factiva database for 45,000 or something media sources globally and I got back to my query 65,000 returns.I Went through each of them and I still have them. I talked about the ones where M’ockers (presenter on Volya Radio) this week has been, I think it happens to her quite a lot, but she just posted it.She kind of named and shamed this person who wrote the most horrific abuse to her on a DM. You know, this is so normal now. she wouldn’t even think about reporting it to the police. As far ago, as long ago, in a land that we all lived in in 2010, as the Web 2.0, as Twitter and Facebook were beginning. This was police reportable. There was the right-wing media and the right-left-wing media was all jumping down the throats of the social media companies. The police were investigating and people were brought to court for things which are said today a million times a day without any without any punishment, criminal, even though these are criminal offenses. That itself is a story which is important to tell and remind people.The Disinfolklore moniker emerged when I found that ‘Folklore’ folder. Then I had another folder of disinformation. I was like thinking, I need a new moniker because I’m talking about something that no one really knows about. Not even the people I worked with in eastern Ukraine and Russia-occupied Ukraine recognized what I recognized as something strange, weird, new. So I know that no-one else recognized it. I need a new name for it. And when I put the folder, I put the folders together, folklore and disinformation, it just popped out of me.It just so happened that there’s so many shape-shifting dimensions which I, too, Disinfolklore as a narrative form, as a description of what Russia, for instance, is doing by filming their attack on a World Food Programme convoy in Kherson today and which the UN Commission referred to this nightmare circle where, and again, I worked this out very early on in the war in Ukraine, because I was part of some of the stories that Russia was creating in 2015 on this bridge, which I worked on in eastern Ukraine, where I realized there was this fluidity between events on the ground.I spoke about the sausage troll episode, I think, in a previous podcast. Russia plants two tons of sausages in this place. Then it creates a whole story about it involving unconsenting participants like myself as a foreign diplomat. Even a Russian colleague as well, who was ridiculed inside and by the Russian media archetyped as smugglers ourselves. We had brought, as the international community, we had brought these two tons of sausages. Now Russia was going to destroy with artillery and just a whole. This sparked months of stories in the Russian occupier media. So that was just one of thousands, millions of different stories, of different artefacts, which all went made up, all aggregated. I saw after the full-scale invasion, the purpose of it all. The relentless othering of Westernness, of Ukrainians. The justification of genocide. So this is new. So there’s similarities with what happened, but it is also new.So this is why Disinfolklore, I realized how important it was to to have a new word for it. For instance, when people say the Democrats aren’t as clever or as effective at creating these monikers, and then amplifying them relentlessly. Such that they enter the minds of all of humanity - like ‘woke’ or ‘Antifa.’ This is branding. What I can Archetyping in my work. Take this now ubiquitous word ‘disinformation,’ for instance. A 1972 top secret KGB dictionary defined:“disinformation data as especially prepared data used for the creation in the mind of the enemy of incorrect or imaginary pictures of reality on the basis of which the enemy would make decisions beneficial to the USSR.” So this is a perfect example of that. Even if you are talking about disinformation, you’re inside the troll. So if you’re talking about Russian disinformation, I read a document which was published recently on... disinformation in Georgia and disinformation in former Soviet republics.Basically it depends on you and I agreeing what is negative and what is disinformation. Then we can talk about it. We can’t really have a discussion unless we have an evaluative framework about why this is disinformation. We can do what the European Union’s External Action Service does with its brilliant work, in creating an alternative framework for a whole discussion about what it calls FIMI, foreign information manipulation by enemy actors. If you have designated enemies like Russia, like China, which are seeking to subvert our democratic ideals and destroy our right to participate in public life. Then if you can trace any particular item of information, any informational unit to Russia or to China or to Iran, you can designate that as disinformation or FIMI or disinfolklore. I was looking for some other means of doing this. A means of doing it on the fly. Also a means of expressing the system-wide dimension to having... billions of these memes blasting out of us, at our sensory perception from everywhere, from the television, from the internet, from social media, from our mothers, from our fathers, from our friends, from our children, from video games, from cartoons, from YouTube. Of seeing a continuity between them all. This led to what I’ve spoken about before - the realization that Russia, either by accident or design, had discovered what the early European so-called nationalists like Herder in Germany had discovered, which was that you needed to create a story around which the 10 historic German tribes could unite.In order to do that, you needed storytellers and artists and composers. You needed Goethe to write Faust, a very old, ancient Indo-European tale present in practically every culture with the devil tempting someone into things you needed to. The Grimm brothers and their teams of people to go out and collect stories and villages and words and language. You needed Wagner to create operas based on Germanic legends collected by the Roman Tacitus. Out of that soup of memes and ideas, you could create a sense of national identity, which was so strong. that after two millennia of disparate Germanic tribes wandering around the forests and having fights with the Celts and the Gauls, you could turn them into one nation state in 1870. A similar process happened in Ireland. In the modern state of Greece. In Spain, with the Civil War. In France. In almost every modern European country. Herder himself, this guy from 1777, Germany, he looked at England and saw it uniting around Shakespeare.So what Russia accidentally discovered was that you could artificially create the sense of identity using disinfolklore. And there is something magical about that in the ordinary sense of the word, magic. Obviously disinfolklore stories, folklore stories have lots of magical elements to them. There’s an element of magical thinking to say, Simonyan, sitting on the dace at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June 2022, with Putler sitting beside her. She’s dressed as green, like a little green man herself. She’s just talking matter-of-factly of what they’re saying in the offices in Moscow about how All our hope is in the famine. We’ll famine Africa and then millions of refugees will pour into Europe. Europe will stop supporting Ukraine. They’ll realize that we have to be friends because we have no choice not to be friends. There’s something childlike about this. It’s like it’s Russia and Europe, famineing millions of people. Then just like you, you know, you used to have fights with your best friend when you were six years old. Ten minutes later, something happens to unite you. You’re happy again. So there is something childlike folklore like and magical, magical thinking like also. It’s out of these crazy ideas have emanates this war.These ideas are expressed in stories like I’ve just told about St. Petersburg. But he’s also telling a story in St. Petersburg to move people, move millions of people to explain to us what Russia’s strategy is, because it’s not enough just to do it. They need to put a story around it.So that’s just a little introduction. We don’t have time to talk about, to go on. So next week we’ll talk about Contagion and how the jurisprudence of sympathetic magic comes into this. But thank you for listening. I think you’re thinking of what’s called, it’s called the executive office, which is run by our friend Sachs and one of Donald’s sons, where you pay vast amounts of money. None of those people who were banging on about Hunter Biden troll for the last 10 years seem to care anything about any of this. Anyway, that’s an aside. As you say, we need to move on find a way of stopping it. Accusation in a mirror, which is something that I learned from reading about the first New Lines Institute did its first report in early, about a month after the full-scale invasion began, dedicates a chapter to accusation in a mirror, which I then became familiar with.I was able to see that structure, which is you accuse your enemy of precisely the behavior you’re planning as a pretext for what you are going to do. All of us who are tuned into the Ukrainian info space have an edge over people who aren’t. We have had a masterclass in this what I call provocation logic cycle of Russia revealing its intentions, its mens rea, Mana and the energy in it is what it’s going to do by accusing Ukraine of it. Now we kind of, we can read this. We’ve become literate in it.When I was reading earlier today this memorandum, national security memorandum that Donald signed, which uses this, you know, for instance, the troll about the cartridges used by Ukraine this guy who was trying to kill his father’s idol. It’s my psychoanalytical explanation of Charlie Kirk’s murder. The casings containing antifa messaging on them. Basically, if you’ve come across the term accusation in the mirror or you understand what Putin has done, it’s a projection. It’s a revelation of intention. What is going to happen. It’s predictive data. We’re reading in a certain way and the people minimizing this and saying ‘The sun is going to rise tomorrow.’ This is what’s happening. That’s what for genocide scholars is very ominous because this accusation in a mirror precedes and has preceded every... I accept no blame for this and the entire national security memo is accusing people of crimes which it is only MAGA’s adherents who have been doing, including the attempted assassination of Donald, if we understand where those people came from and their beliefs.Say within the Ukraine thing, and I think Ukraine is a really useful train. It’s a good training for us. To help our compatriots cut through this nonsense. Again, just this term nonsense, which the North Atlantic Fella Organisation (NAFO), I just loved it because it just archetyped all of this as just nonsense because you avoid getting in the woods.For me, the framing in, say, the Ukraine situation, not both sides between Russia and Ukraine, The two sides, and President Zelensky has, as a lawyer, as a fellow lawyer, brilliantly always got this. He has taught so many people this. The side is international law, the post-World War II legal order. That’s one side, You’re either in favor of protecting that or you’re in favor of Russia, whose entire job is to try and get rid of that. You can map that framing onto MAGA and what it’s trying to do. It’s immanent in every single one of these memos. Even the idea of Antifa, because human rights are universal, protected by these instruments, these post-World War II instruments. That for me is my framing that’s immanent in all of my work. These are the battle lines. We are either fighting to preserve the post-World War II legal and social order, or we’re fighting to revert to the 1930s.They’re not hiding this. They haven’t hidden it. Donald hasn’t hidden it from the beginning. The unified Reich stuff. He says what he’s going to do. If you can’t parse data for the nonsense and the non-nonsense. And obviously there’s gray area stuff, which he says. There’s certain things which he and his followers and the entire amplification network produce, which are predictive and reveal their intentions. Anyone of normal intelligence who is constantly looking at data and improving their mental algorithms to interpret it, should be able finally to work out what’s going on.Here an example we have, say, with Putin’s attentions. So there may have been people in February 2020, in fact, I knew people in February 2022, who even after the full-scale invasion began, they were saying, “oh no, it’s just a small scale one.” That thing President Biden was accused of saying where he said, “oh, our response would be different if it’s just a small incursion over a big incursion.” Some of those people who in February 2022 fell for the troll have, through watching this entire, this nightmare for the past four years, or three years, have altered their algorithm. Now they understand that Putin doesn’t desire peace. Well, actually, we’ve seen this on an accelerated scale over the past six months, perhaps among Donald and his supporters, which, of course, we didn’t need this journey because we’ve been watching this from the beginning. So there is this way we can predict the future. We can look at certain kinds of data and go, okay, that is what’s going to happen unless we somehow stop it. I suppose we can all get better at that in different ways in our life. The signs here are very clear because they’re not trying to hide it. They can’t archetype themselves as Nazis… well, I’ll put it this way, they can more easily archetype themselves as Nazis, as right-wing authoritarian followers, by speaking as those young Nazi Republicans were speaking on Telegram. That’s how you do it. You don’t speak in euphemisms. You just say, look, send them to the gas chambers. Straight away, that’d the signal. I’m on the in-group. I’m arching myself as one of you and against them. That’s how they’re doing it.So it is helpful to us when we see that out. I mean it’s a double-edged sword because they are used to recruit people as much as they are used to uh to put off people but constantly reminding um people of it I suppose what I try to do is, yeah, well, it’s created there.Those are, I mean, that’s archetypal disinfolklore. It will be used as lore within Republican circles. Some people will be fired, others will be promoted as a result of it. Looking at it as a signaling, as an in-group signaling, There’s so many dimensions to it.There’s infinity of stories to distract from the Epstein files from MAGA so that we have no expectations that this story, which should end, finally end everything. All their careers probably won’t. Because there just seems to be infinity of rage cycles. Our best hope is that Ukraine can become, it can lever itself into place and be the only good thing that Donald ever does and becomes the means through which Donald really distracts from Epstein continually. But from the... Yeah, I don’t. I mean, there’s journalists who are doing great, amazing work, and Politico, obviously, here is doing amazing work.I did notice Donald saying two days ago he cussed Politico. He singled it out in some context, and I was wondering, what’s going on there? Because my perception is Politico has been quite helpful to him. But clearly he knew the story was... was coming along. I saw a comment today, which I think probably is right, that this is the logical, the belief systems of these people, of these radicalised young Republican Nazis, is the output of people who were trained purposefully by Charlie Kirk and others. And And they’ve gone global. They’ve got their plans to activate the far-right everywhere. My insight with Disinfolklore is that Groypers, these are all monikers. These are all folklore. It’s all folklore, basically. And as far as I know, no-one else has made this connection between these disparate discourses between the present and the past and the constant eruption of it. I do now realise that I need to use a moniker ‘Infolklore’ to describe positive, non-mean stories that are generous, that are ethically disciplined, that are... that have an energy, an identifiable energy, that are focused, that are insightful. And there are people, there’s filmmakers making stuff using using AI.There’s a great article in Wired this week on the first AI auteur in Hollywood who’s just been able to voice so many different voices and all well scripted, brilliantly scripted. So we need to be making our own Infolklore and emotionally resonant memes. The situationists did this. The Russians do this. Arranging and provoking protests themselves as situationist interventions like protests. Pussy Riot for example. When you read the Surkov emails setting up all of these demonstrations and protests all around Ukraine.You see the back and forth. “Well, for $2,000, I can get you this number of babushkas. If you give us $5,000, I can get some younger people. We can have signs like this. We can have an effigy of Poroshenko if you give us this much money. And all the answers coming back saying, okay, this.” So perceiving as the people in Portland are doing and as the people you’re referencing are very cleverly in America because people are so highly educated, especially grad students, into understanding the spectacle, understanding postmodernism and hypermodernism and looking at this. Well, maybe that’s also kind of a meta thing. So Donald is the perfect, and MAGA, exemplar of hypermodernism, which was summed up by his niece’s biography, “Too Much, Never Enough.” “…the hypermodern approach highlights acceleration and excess as defining qualities of the contemporary moment.”If postmodernism is cynicism. Irony (it’s way beyond Irony that Donald accuses Others of very crimes his own supporters have in store for us). Cynical reason. There is no God. There is no truth. Then hypermodernism exists. Is just too much, never enough. Acceleration and Excess.AndI think we all understand what the fact that most political violence in the United States emanates from far-right supporters of Donald, so his accusation in formal documents that the opposite is true, is verifiably false. So we need to kind of get on that. Understanding MAGA and what we’re seeing as a spectacle, as art, as an art, as drama, as story, as folklore, as folklore stories, that is an edge anyway over how most people are seeing it. Archetyping it as like Lost (TV series of constant cliffhangers that never climax). As a spectacle gives an edge, because that’s the realm they’re operating in. It’s all just about emotional resonance and trolling. All my work - I consider myself an artist and a writer primarily. So all of my work is about trying to do that. Of course, the Nazis, they were against certain kinds of art. But then other kinds of art like Wagner and classical music, they loved. Used to justify their horrific crimes. So we probably see the whole idea of blogging. It’s a new medium. The influencers. These are all the artists. The MAGA artists. Charlie Kirk himself, an artist, magician, priest. These roles are always fulfilled in any Indo-European community. Great art will be created out of this moment. It is the responsibility of the artist to find joy and provoke joy as well, because otherwise it could all be a bit grim. So I do try. To miss the joy is to miss all. It’s one of my very early mantras, which I try to recall all the time.Next time we’ll talk a bit more about the jurisprudence of sympathetic magic, which gets into of what does this cognitive dissonance consist? And as a taster, I’d give you just this, I mean, from the, from a, very basic cognition way that our brain will aggregate lots of things and form patterns in them.It’ll arrive at a Good Enough conclusion at what this thing is. What this phenomenon is. It will make decisions on the basis of it. In the jurisprudence of sympathetic magic, which was written about and archetyped first by Marcel Mauss and Fraser and various others, and now by cultural psychologists. In the law of similarity, it is the key definition there since the early 20th century, is that if something looks like something, if something looks like an elephant, to use the Lakoff term, Then it probably is an elephant. Before the advent of multimedia and images, this was a Good Enough way of getting through life and through society and through the world. If it kind of looked like good food, you could eat it. If the person looked nasty, they were nasty. Then now with the advent of digital imagery so prevalent, we see a picture of Putler in his bare-chested and we think, oh, strong man, he must be strong. We mistake the substance for the image.This is a cognitive dissonance which we can use, which we do use in our daily lives the whole time which most of us, we used to get through fine. It is also used by malevolent forces to troll and trick us into making bad choices. So the law of similarity/ of association is one of the two main constituent elements in this jurisprudence of sympathetic magic. So that’s a good lead-in to maybe what we’ll talk a bit more about next week. Out. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

I note how 40% of Americans currently believe the US is currently on the “Right” track. How does what is illusory become right in our minds? Through story-borne illusory artefacts that troll our minds into misperceptions - Disinfolklore.However:Yet:So basically what they’re doing is, and again, I’m going to use this term archetyping because it’s very important to me and it’s very important to what they are doing. And this is a very old phenomenon, which some of our earliest writing in ancient Iran comes from this inscription by Darius,who founded the Akhmeneid Empire in around 600 BCE to 300 BCE. in which in one of his inscriptions, which is very, I’ve came across because I was trying to look into where the idea and the sound right, writ, wrecked came from. And if there was any insights we could get to what’s happening today from this sound,which appears in, it’s in sovereignty, It’s kind of hard to see it in sovereignty, but it’s there, the reign, the regla, the ren, the queen in French, the regent, regé, regé. And it’s in security, it’s this rite, integrity, and fertility, prosperity, these three aspects of Indo-European society.So I was trying to trace these sounds back through different linguistic through the Indo-European linguistic traditions. And Darius writes about how Arta, which is truth, in the ancient Iranian and Vestan language, how truth is upended when usurpers claim to be king, they claim to be the monarch, and when they’re not the rightful monarch, and this word rta,rt, rta, and then in the Indian tradition, the Vedic tradition, it’s rta, rta, so the reversal, which is just a phenomenon we won’t go into here in linguistics where sometimes in different traditions the same meaning is attached and the signifier the words change but thesound is the same rata rta truth that which is not that which is not illusory that which is so the truth and the tr and truth and is also from this. It survived in English, which is another phenomenon. And so what Donald and Tulsi and all usurpers have always tried to do, and so obviously before Jan 6th,many of us who saw what MAGA was up to and who didn’t like the aesthetics or the family separation policy or talking about migrants as rapists, Mexicans as rapists, you know, from the very first moment on the sets, in Trump Tower. What they do, and this is why it’s relevant to Russia as well,because they try to create truth, a certain truth, which we know is untrue. And in a distant folklore galaxy, you don’t know what’s up and down. You don’t know whether the crowd was bigger for Obama or for Trump. And those 26,000 lies And this idea of right belonging to the people who archetype themselves as thepolitical right sometimes is true. But when they start promoting untruths, when they promoted a usurper then the actual measure of what is right which is the truth that which is not illusory and for those of us who are very clear-eyed and clear-minded about this and again James asked what can we do about this this iswhat we have to do we have to keep our eyes laser focused on what is the truth and when we find ourselves wandering into that territory that Russian disenfoked or promotes that, oh, I don’t know. I’m just a small person. I have no power. I don’t know what is truth.We have to be that character at the end of 1984 who knows what is. What is illusory and what is not up until the final moment. And it’s so obvious now since Jan 6th And since the insurrection, and I’m comfortable using that word because that’s what the Jan 6th committee used. That’s what was used in the indictments.And this rect, insurrect, it’s the same sound. It’s the same meaning. It’s about right. It’s about truth. Insurrect, those who are trying to use sir, what is right. Now we have this playing out in the, such obvious terms that when I speak these words to you and describe them to you, you can see it,you can match the reality we are seeing. We are seeing Donald, the usurper, who attempted to, who engaged in insurrection from the first moment he denied the results in November 2020 and just up until and there afterwards. And now those very people, including us, I’ve seen those references as well. I’m quite, I’m happy to believe them, Wendy,certainly that the Proud Boys and such like are part of ICE. They’re these so-called federal agents as part of it because this was predicted. As many of us here do, I listened very carefully to Michael Cohen in the run-up and for the two years in the run up to after 2020 elections.And this was all very much predicted. It was foreseen. And And it’s, um, and all, and again, James asked, what can we do? We can just keep on keeping the receipts, keep on writing about it, keep on talking about it, trying to, uh, but so we see the usurpers, uh, taking over what is right.And what Donald is very, his main, uh, his main game as indeed is Putin’s and the CCP, um, and Tulsi Gabbard as the apparatchia is to re-archetype what is true and what is the real, what is right, writ right. And they are usurping what is right and they’re deliberately trying to affect people’s minds,which we’ve seen happen to people who have fallen into the MAGA cult, many people we know. clever, intelligent, nice, welcoming, beautiful people who went MAGA for whatever reason. And now we were in danger when I made my speech in February 2025. It was a week before President Zelensky’s White House visit. And so You know,that was an amazingly positive response to President Zelensky’s White House visit, because obviously what the vice president were trying to do, were again trying to archetype President Zelensky as not right, not sovereign, not just, not real, a usurper. And this is obviously what the usurper Putin, who has never engaged in any free and fair elections,tries to do himself to both Zelensky and to, you know, to Russia might just right. They’re trying to do it. So this for me is the primary struggle. Now, the European leaders refused Even at the cost of the transatlantic relationship, in the immediate aftermath of that,there was a unified response to what the American leadership was trying to do to President Zelensky and to truth itself and to right to international law, which again, droit, right, or droit, the king, and in law, R-O-I-T, droit in French. It’s all the same sound and it’s the same meaning and it carries through in the French,in the Romance linguistic tradition from the Latin. It’s in the English from the Germanic tradition. It’s in Hindu from the Sanskrit and Vedic tradition. It’s in Iranian. It’s in every Indo-European tradition when President Zelensky was inaugurated as the rightful sovereign of Ukraine, whose job is to protect the security and prosperity of Ukraine.He held in his right hand the rod, which symbolized and has symbolized for thousands of years leadership in Indo-European communities, just as the King of England in the photograph is, um, inauguration photograph, he holds a rod in his right hand and that symbolizes the right, the identity of the sovereign, the monarch, the leader with right, with writ.And if we believe in the infallibility of kings, which of course none of us do, then of course whatever they do is right. And that was the meaning of the Supreme Court judgment, sadly. which has made these unlawful orders that President Trump makes today, would,if he didn’t have this immunity for acts within the perimeter of his job as commander in chief, i.e. unlawfully ordering the Marines on a species legal grounds to to California, then he would face life imprisonment if he didn’t have that protection. And he was given this, you know, this right.So for me, this is a very ancient struggle. And it’s so obvious to those of us who understand and who studied Jan 6th and what happened and who had an intuitive reaction to it in the moment. We understood it was not right. And then, you know, watching the Jancic Committee, as I did,and as many of us probably did, and then reading the indictments, the Georgia indictments and the federal indictments, you get a real picture of how unright it was. And this is essentially what they’re trying to do, where the usurpers are archetyping themselves as right. And we’ve had some positive things, which is the European leadershave cut America loose. The European Commission President von der Leyen a week ago in a speech in Aachen, she declared that Europe would now seek independence and it will create Pax Europea. And basically what I see from obviously all I see is what you see publicly, but it seems to me that there cutting America loose,but President Trump is a genius at stringing people along and I hope stuff is going on in the background which will continue to ramp up. So that’s kind of my answer to the To the Proud Boys and the being part of ICE and these units creating disemboked or mobile disemboked or creation units,wrenching children away from parents and then filming it. broadcasting it, trying to own the libs, and trying to create this tumult, which then creates further distant folklore and gives them the opportunity to claim a monopoly on what is right and writ and law, and to bring in the army and all of that.And the second element to your question, That was interesting. Yeah, I didn’t pick that up on the Japan thing. So, yeah, okay, well, that’s the declaration of war against what we consider the civilized world. I’m sure the Japanese, so everyone now has to develop nuclear arms. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

One of the more interesting areas of my research these days is on what Cultural Psychology calls “the Laws of Sympathetic Magic.” These laws or mental routines are very relevant in my Finding Manuland project (particularly the Law of Contagion), as well as in Decoding Trolls. However , the ability of Disinfolklorists like MAGA or Russia to convince us, using Disinfolklore, of the complete opposite of what is true (MAGA will make America great; Ukraine, rather than Russia, is full of Nazis; vaccines not viruses harm us;…) is a phenomenon so common and so attractive, it calls for explanation. In the past I have written about how the Chef of Disinfolklore Prighozin financed the Internet Research Agency’s successful campaigns to get Donald elected the first time and Brexit done. I wrote about how, through amplified Disinfolklore, that apparatus was able to convince many people to muddle Cause and Effect. However it was not clear to me which aspects of our psychological made us susceptible to such trolls. Economists are more or less agreed that America’s economy in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election had never been healthier or stronger. Yet MAGA Disinfolklore convinced Donald’s voters that not only was the opposite of that true but also that Donald’s tariff troll would make them richer, even though empirical evidence belied these trolls. Nevertheless millions fell for this troll and how and why they were susceptible to it is fascinating.The two main sub-laws in the Jurisprudence of Sympathetic Magic, which find their most ready application in the realm of consumer/market research, are the Law of Contagion and Law of Association. I first noticed how in Disinfolklore we can be convinced to believe quite easily the opposite of what is true (for example, that vaccines cause the effects the virus the vaccine protects against actually causes). This is an example of what Fraser in the Golden Bough referred to as the Homeopathic Principle in the laws that govern our modes of thinking. A smidgeon of plausibility amplified by Disinfolklore can serve to dominate our thinking so much so that we neglect, in this example, to vaccinate ourselves against a disease.The Law of Similarity, which particularly anthropologists like Levi Strauss and Marcel Mauss identified, which is that people think the... So for instance, this thing about with the COVID vaccine, mistaking the solution to an empirically, visually you can see it using certain kinds of instruments, uh, virus, and that the response to that, uh, is actually the cause of the problem. This mode of thinking is almost mainstreamed into our minds. I remember the first time a neighbor talked to me about how it was the vaccine causing the problem, not the COVID. And I tried very earnestly trying to explain to him, um, how literally billions of people have taken the vaccine and there’s been a problem with a few thousand or a tiny percentage, whereas everyone who had got the COVID had suffered harm and damage. We can see it and all of that. Now however I don’t even bother trying to explain to people because it’s just been mainstreamed. There’s a ‘logic’ which seems to go into this law of similarity that it’s a central element in most culture, in most mental models of the world. And disinformationists use this. They riff off this by mixing cause and effect. You can confuse people into muddling these things so that for some reason, people will believe that the vaccines is what’s causing the harm and that it’s not the disease the vaccine is designed to fix. We see that a lot in Russian propaganda. We see it actually on that paper or on that poster where NATO, in this sense, is the vaccine. But it’s the vaccine against Russia invading and killing everyone. Yet it’s being blamed for causing the war. It’s the complete opposite. So this is the law of opposites, which they’re riffing off. It’s just being aware that this exists as a mental guideline in our minds, whether it’s universal or not, I don’t know, but, but, but it’s, it works and it’s in, um, uh, it’s in stories as well. Levi Strauss’s entire anthropology, was very much on the opposites and what he called the Law of Association. We see it in our information space all the time. This what Orwell did in 1984, probably unknowingly, that you say, you know, ‘up!’ is ‘down!.’Donald does it the whole time where, you know, he says it’s China will pay the tariffs, not us. And it’s the opposite of what’s true. And for some reason that is believed by certain kinds of personalities.Probably all of us believe in things which are the opposite of what is true in different contexts. So for me, a meme, it can be linguistic, audible to any informational unit, whereas I do recognize meme as this. So for me, meme is back to its original meaning from Richard Dawkins, I think, created the term meme that we understand. Basically the cultural equivalent of a gene. But obviously in a contemporary parlance, most of us think of memes as a visual image itself. But with that in mind, what I do in my work is I have various memes meaning linguistic artefacts, which usually have an image as well on them. Because these same themes pop up again and again and again, I then, as part of my communications strategy, I repost these memes. Many of you will probably see that. And thankfully, in two years of it, I really haven’t got that much bad reaction from it, you know, because from my perspective, people just ignore it. They don’t have to take it seriously. But I get very little, very little pushback. So one which I’ve been thinking about this week a lot is the meaning of the drone, how drones have changed the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.So basically now you have, and this meme is popping up a lot in our information space that “Ukraine is trying to provoke a nuclear war.” We hear all of the talking points coming from pro-Russia voices, even if they’re dissidents in the West, trying to model rationality, saying, oh, Ukraine shouldn’t have hit the part of the nuclear triad in Operation Spiderweb when Ukraine destroyed one third of Russia’s strategic nuclear bomber fleet in one night. So for me, whenever that meme pops up, I have my response to it, which is that under the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, until the last few months, as a non-nuclear power Ukraine could not participate in the Mutually Assured Destruction dialectic which has governed International Relations and global strategic thinking since World War Two. So Putin then designated Ukrainians as terrorists. So this inner / outer realm switching, which I’m sure you remember from my work, is the key immanence in, is a key way we can spot what I call Disinfolklore as well. Russia is the terrorist state yet it tries to designate the country lawfully defending itself as Outer Realm Terrorists, the opposite of what is true. Because whether it’s talking about migrants being criminals or Ukrainians being terrorists, it’s creating this inner / outer realm division using memes. Out of that, that creates the community.This is partly what led me to my discovery of Disinfolklore in Eastern Ukraine, where I was working on this bridge, which geographically separated the other world of Russia-occupied Ukraine from the rest of Ukraine. So it was a geographical separation point, a bridge, literally a bridge, not just a metaphor. A physical bridge. Across the bridge, it wasn’t like crossing from Romania into Bulgaria or Slovakia or Greece, from Bulgaria to Greece or into Türkiye, where you’re just basically crossing into two different modern European countries. It was going into this world, this other world of all of these mad competing logics inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. It didn’t make much sense to me when I first went there. I saw people gradually inculcating these Opposite Logics from taking into their minds memes and stories (Disinfolklore) from the information space. That’s exactly what Russian anmd other kinds of Disinfolklorists always do. They create this community in the inner realm (MAGA, Russians) and the enemy (Liberals, Trans, Democrats, Ukrainians, the West), using the enemy, the outsider, the transgressor of the norms that Disinfolklore defines for whichever inner realm is being legislated into existence by the Disinfolklore. I noticed that this is what is in many folk tales or færy tales. In the archetypal troll tale, which is “Three Billy Goats’ Gruff”, which is basically responsible, when I did the research, that is responsible for the really for most of the appearances of the term trolls in our culture. I came to this conclusion after going through the Dow Jones Factiva database, which has something like 45,000 different sources in it. I went through every appearance of trolling and trolls since 1970. It was about 85,000 entries when I did it a couple of years ago. I could trace the term, the metaphor throws to two main common meanings. One, it’s a meaning, a word in American English, which isn’t in English English.It’s a form of fishing where the bait wanders around in the water and fish come and catch it. It spread from that meaning into police trolling for criminals, so looking for people. Then the other meaning is from the folklore, which comes from this archetypal troll tale, Three Billy Goats’ Gruff.The tale itself is Three Billy Goats. They’re brothers. They’re migrating. So three is significant to me. They’re migrants. In the children’s tale, they’re just crossing... They want to cross the bridge to go to a new pasture. This is the archetypal migrant tale. This is what all of our forebears have done a thousand different times because of famine, acquisitiveness, epidemics or war. We have traveled and migrated across the river, across the bridge into another land to look for fresh pastures. Of course, when your five-year-old or six-year-old child is reading it, they’re not thinking about this migration. That this is a tale about the archetypal migration. But it’s nevertheless immanent in the story and in its attraction.The troll who’s guarding the bridge, who interestingly is the, so basically he is fooled by the first two goats crossing the bridge. They say, oh, I’m quite thin. Wait for my fatter brother. And then the third brother comes and he kills the troll.We don’t really find out in the tale what happens. Basically we assume then that the three migrant outer realm goats ate all the food in the inner realm that the dead troll was trying to protect. So it’s this structure of going over a bridge from the outer realm so that the goats are in their outer realm. They’re trying to cross into the troll’s inner realm. He’s guarding. He’s trying to stop them. This is the tale in every MAGA meme. This is the tale in English political discourse at this precise moment. Really over the past seven, eight years, the whole migrant troll, migration troll, has become endemic in most political discourses. The structure is the same everywhere, whether it was for me in eastern Ukraine or in modern political discourse. It’s someone building community in what they define as their inner realm, by reference to a threat from the outer realm. The outer realm threat, threat, is often a migrant who’s coming to take the sovereignty, the security, and or the prosperity, fertility of the inner realm. They build political support, uh, and community around this external threat. That is the archetypal Indo-European structure. It’s the structure in all our minds. It works, even when you explain to people that this is the structure of, this is what they’re doing.So this is when Donald announced his, uh, his run in, in, 2016… When he came down the stairs, the golden stairs in Trump Tower. Again a Disinfolklore meme integrated naturally into concrete reality: the man who lives in the tower, the golden tower. He came down and he called the migrants criminals, the Mexican migrants who are coming to steal your daughters. So affecting the fertility of the inner realm. Then he lures the actual migrants who vote for him by saying, oh, “but you’re not a criminal. These are the criminals. These are the (I’m not going to use that horrible word again) R-A-P-I-S-T-S.” That’s about affecting the fertility of the inner realm. So these are all very common structures. It’s immanent in everything I do in Disinfolklore. It’s immanent in all folklore. We take in these archetypal structures from, I believe, from Disney or from folktales, but we also take them in from news and now from Donald and from Putin. When he’s calling the Ukrainians Nazis. These are the patterns of association that expert Disinfolklorists integrate into their memes, using the laws of sympathetic magic. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Russia is attempting, accidentally on purpose, to blow-up Europe’s largest nuclear power plant: Enerhodar in Zaporizhzhia, which it has been violently occupying since 3 March 2022. [full thread cataloguing in hundreds of Tweets Russia’s attempt to hold Europe hostage to nuclear blackmail: Provoke the Distress, then Purport to Salve It, which is part of Russia’s Provocation Logic: https://x.com/decodingtrolls/status/1760275518321021345?s=46].Then yesterday Russia bombed an electricity substation that feeds power to Chornobyl’s reactor number 4 which Soviet Russia blew up in 1986.This week I want to talk about Mental Routines. They’re immanent in Disinfolklore. Stories that inculcate rules. We’re not really aware of what’s going on and therefore we don’t put up our what I call our Incoming Troll Radar. So we’re not aware that not only are we being told a story but the story itself is going into our minds. It is inculcating certain rules and certain logics. One of the most important logics that most of us come across in this world is what I call the Provocation Logic of Wife Beater Logic: Look What You Made Me Do To You…I want to talk about an element which I call, I call them mental routines. Basically, they are ‘logics’ which are transmitted through stories and through Disinfolklore. So a perfect example of what I mean is in... In a folk tale, for instance,“Elderly Laplanders used to tell their children about the big sea snake that lives in the deep and very cold feet. fjord. When the big sea snake finds a child alone on the shore, she may come out of the death and swallow that child. So this one story advises the children to keep a little bell in their belt.” Clearly most of us will recognise the mental routine inside the story. The purpose of the story is to inculcate rules into the a child’s mind so that they’re safe; that they don’t go off alone without this little bell.So we’re not aware that not only are we being told a story and also that the story itself is going into our Inner Minds. It is inculcating certain rules that affect our Mana (our Inner Mind’s energy). Certain logics are being transmitted via Disinfolklore. One of the most important logics that most of us come across in this world is what I call the Provocation Logic. Provocation Cycle Logic, which is: You Made Me Do This. Basically, we can also call it wife-beater logic. So you provoked me. You forced me to invade your country. You... And this comes into almost every statement that Putin makes. We see it countless times a day in whether it’s on Telegram chats or in other means that we come across.It comes in to all authoritarians. So Donald Trump. also inculcates this particular logic. Everything is someone else’s fault. Every action which the people take is someone else’s fault. What I realized is that these mental routines are actually taught. So we’re not just sitting listening to a story that inculcates this mental routine that “Ukraine supposedly discriminates against Russian language speakers. So we came in and killed 100,000 native language Russian speakers in Mariupol.” That’s the logic of what they’re saying. When this is repeated a lot, then we not only hear the story, but we then take into our mind this logic as a unit, as a module.What put me in mind this week was something that the great @NatalkaKyiv. Natalka Kyiv on X, who is just brilliant. She gives me so much source material. She quotes this guy called, it wasn’t really on my radar, his name is Nesmayan. And then she’s just updated, actually, it said that this guy Nesmayan was added to the Russian government’s extremist list after making this post.So on the face of it, this post, but there’s just one element in it that I just wanted to take out. So basically, he writes this post about the spiderweb operation. Now he’s been added two days later to the Russian Rosfin Monitoring Service list of terrorists and extremists. From his perspective, it’s going to be, it’s really unfair because he’s a very loyal Putinist from the sound of it. You know, he’s a totally loyal Russianist. He’s basically exactly like Igor Gherkin in a different sense in that he’s a total patriot. He’s just speaking what he thinks is the truth.Now he’s going to be, God knows what’s going to happen to him. But there was one element in it that really made me think about this idea of mental routines, which are inculcated through stories and which we often take on into our minds without thinking about them. So the provocation logic one, which is the most eminent one, not only in Russian Disinfolklore, in what every time Putin speaks. But also in certain kinds of personality. People who have certain kinds of personality inventories, particularly authoritarians. It’s also part of Russian military doctrine. I first came across it in eastern Ukraine. But the element in this guy’s post, which really interested me and provoked me to offer to speak, tonight about this briefly was his second point. So he’s trying to interpret spiderweb (Ukraine’s operation that successfully annihilated 1/3 of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet in one night) and as ever with these Russian thinkers and intellectuals, their minds (from my perspective) are so rotten. They’ve inculcated so many contradictory mental routines. Their education is so terrible, absolutely so terrible. They’ve lost the ability to reason in a way that most of us, uh, thankfully still can reason (but obviously my people who’ve gone MAGA can’t anymore). Their minds are rotten, basically. So this guy is saying, he says that, um, the second point is that the Kremlin is being provoked to use a nuclear strike on Ukraine.So in all seriousness, this is what he’s saying. He’s saying, uh, Ukraine obviously isn’t, doesn’t have any agency. So Ukraine is a child. And everything it does is the product of some Western conspiracy against Russia. So, again, it’s inculcating this narcissistic mental routine. Clearly, this person probably believes it in their own life. They also believe it on behalf of Russia. Every time they listen to Putin or any of the other intellectuals, it’s like a circular firing squad. They’re listening to these mental routines. They think they’re normal. Uh, and they really believe it. So they think the Spiderweb thing, uh, operation is a way of provoking Russia to, um, to use a nuclear strike on Ukraine. So basically, uh, to put it in Wife Beater logic, uh, by, uh, attacking it, um, through this amazing operation that we all witnessed, uh, Ukraine has put on a short skirt and, uh, in order to lure Russia to its fate.Everything here, he goes on to say, is strictly according to Russia’s nuclear doctrine. A strike has been carried out, undermining the strategic balance. All the reasons to use nukes are there. So basically, the West in this conspiracy has got its agent, Ukraine, to strike these fighter bombers. The reason it’s done this is because it knows what Russia’s military nuclear doctrine is. So obviously Russia is going to respond with a nuclear attack. This is the whole conspiracy. Metz, Zelenskyy, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump, you name it. Everyone is in on this conspiracy. And Operation Spiderweb is in order to do that.Then it’s clear that all persons involved in the adoption and execution of such a decision will be declared war criminals. So then he goes on to say in the West with all the ensuing consequences. So he’s talking. So what he’s saying is he’s saying that Ukraine is deliberately provoking Russia into annihilating the entire world with nuclear weapons. Then he’s switching to say that basically any Russian who falls for this troll will then be declared war criminals in the West with all the ensuing consequences. So basically, according to this mad logic, the operation was to get Ukraine to provoke Russians into using nuclear weapons. Then when Russia uses those nuclear weapons, the West, the collective West, will declare the people... responsible for using those nuclear weapons to be war criminals, with all the ensuing consequences. When I read this, I was just thinking: this is mad. Like, this is crazy logic. People will read this and go, oh, that’s quite because we’ve seen many of the posts saying over the past few days, oh, it’s going to be nuclear war and all of this stuff. The kind of mind, the kind of brain which can think this through itself is addled with what I call Disinfolklore and all of these false logics. Basically, he’s equating the idea that the main problem with the nuclear strike that Russia makes is that they’ll be declared war criminals in the West. With all the ensuing consequences. So that they won’t be able to travel presumably to their Mayfair flats or to Italy or whatever. So it’s completely valueless. There’s no values in there about thinking about the millions of people who might die or that the reason not to use the nuclear weapons is that they’ll be declared a war criminal doesn’t even make sense inside their own logic: because they don’t believe in the primacy of international law, it simply doesn’t make sense. So this really struck me as being a perfect encapsulation of the rottenness in the minds that we’re dealing with here. These kinds of logics. So in this sense, I mean, the logic, the logos, the argument is: There’s a conspiracy. Ukraine, the main purpose of the attacks is not because we’re fighting a war here. It’s to provoke Russia. Russia’s response will be nuclear, obviously. Then the West will celebrate because it can then declare Russia to be war criminals. So the story doesn’t even make any sense in their minds because they don’t really believe in international law.This got me to thinking how mad these people are in the sense of they have driven themselves all crazy with these logics. I suspect the reason he’s been declared... a terrorist now or an extremist isn’t because of why I’m highlighting this particular mental routine.It’s because he’s, um, he’s trying to, uh, well, actually I have no idea. I have absolutely no idea. I’m not going to even, um, Well, it’s perhaps because he says it’s a zugzwang in its pure form, but something else. So basically, he’s saying that having got this conspiracy together, Russia is zugzwanged.As I understand it in chess, it’s a move that you make that, um, that you’re, uh, you’re basically it’s, it’s whatever Russia has done in Ukraine, they’ve zugzwanged themselves. They can’t get out of this mess, um, without collapsing, uh, Russia basically. So maybe that’s why he’s been, um, designated an extremist. I was thinking about this as well, because a lot of us see a lot of people using AI. So they’re asking Grok in the way that we might ask the Oracle at Delphi. Then they post, many of us have probably done this, then they post Grok’s answer and say, oh, look, this is Elon’s, not even Grok is against Elon, all of this kinds of things. I was put into mind this, that if the Russians, as we know they are, they are infecting the models, they’re infecting the data sets, the training models for Russia, all the different AI models with different logics, as indeed are many other MAGA, that we risk also teaching AI these mad inferences, these what we call heuristics. So in the Disinfolklore analytical method, I want to look for these structures. The provocation logic structure is immanent. It’s the most common one I’ve identified. If we see this, usually the word provoked is used. So that’s very helpful.In Russian “provocatsia” so that’s really helpful because that can signal it but often it’s uh sometimes it’s hidden. But the meaning is the same that it’s Wife Beater Logic. You made me whatever I do to you is the result of uh your provocation.In the ai thing I wanted to find out was um where Pakistan was getting its weapons from. So I asked, does India sell Pakistan weapons? Which is obviously, I don’t think so. But I wanted to see what it did. And it inferred that they, it said that they didn’t but then inferred that they might on the basis that the countries were next to each other. It struck me that this is a similar kind of heuristic or mad logic. Many of us with MAGA or Brexit or other things or anti-vaccine stuff, you know, it’s the “logic” that the vaccine is causing the illness, not the deadly virus. Not the five rounds of COVID which you’ve had. So many of us learn and we inculcate these heuristic logics. Disinfolklore is full of them. The Russians are geniuses at broadcasting them out. If we’re looking for them, then we have a chance of defeating them. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe