Disinfolklore

[Lieutenant-General Budanov, chief of Ukraine’s main military intelligence directorate - HUR - nicknamed “The Owls”]Elmo Robin and Druidey Don Batman dressed up in Marvel Universe costumes (through AI and In Real Life). Posting them them on their own Disinfolklore propagation network X. And compelling other oligarchs to do likewise of theirs. Were embedded in Disinfolklore - stories that purposefully affect our Moods/Intentions/Attitudes/ Motivations in ways that repurpose us to serve the Disinfolklorists memes/means to transform our world.Druidey Don’s wife wore a meme chic costume for his inauguration. A Ukrainian fashion designer in Los Angeles noticed a market for real world clothes that mimic and riff off a Marvel or Disney World aesthetic. She chose to model Druidey Don’s vision of Disinfolklore universe in which we are battered daily by a million hitherto unsayable and hitherto undoable things. So the abnormal becomes the normal. We have no anchor, except the Mememaster in Chief’s next whim to latch on to.The power to Archetype at will belongs to all of us.  BUT, if you own the memes of distribution of memes (the main means through which Archetyping outside our minds occurs) then you can archetype at scale. Ukraine uses such archetypal symbolism to intimidate its enemies, provide an organising focus for its forces and to cast spells.Magyar’s Birds is the moniker for Ukraine’s 414th Separate Unmanned Strike Aviation System Brigade. The cutting edge of Ukraine’s drone warfare. It takes the call-sign of its ethnic Hungarian chief Robert Brovdi - Magyar - and adds the bird symbolism. Today, Brovdi is the overall commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces (which has taken out around 25% of Russia’s oil refinery/fossil fuel transport capacity since early August). But his own unit lives on, enmeshed in bird symbolism.“The vulture or owl goddess, a maleficent twin of the birth-giving goddess, appears as Death in the guise of a vulture, owl, or other predatory bird or carrion eater, yet has qualities of regeneration. A vulva, umbilical cord, or labyrinth is painted or engraved on her images. Hooks and axes symbols of energy and life stimulation-are engraved on western European stone stelae and on passage-grave slabs representing the owl goddess. In one of the Çatal Hüyük shrines of central Anatolia (seventh millennium BCE), the beaks of griffins emerge from the open nipples of female breasts. The owl goddess’s breasts, depicted in relief on slabs of megalithic gallery graves in Brittany, also suggest that regeneration is in her power.The snowy owl appears in a number of engravings on the Upper Paleolithic (Magdalenian) cave walls of France, probably already as an epiphany of Death. There is rich evidence of the owl goddess throughout the Neolithic, Copper, and Early Bronze ages. During the last period, the owl form became the usual shape of urns…” [Encyclopaedia of Religion]“…sacrifices to this goddess are known from the Paleolithic (Ksar Akil, Lebanon, mid-Paleolithic; Malta, c. 15,000 BCE), earliest Neolithic (Zawi Chemi Shanidar, northern Iraq, more than 10,000 years before our time), the Neolithic, and the Bronze Age (Isbister, Scotland). It is clear that large wings had enormous symbolic importance for millennia…”[Hittite double-headed bird (~1,400 BCE) at ALACA HÖYÜK, Anatolia - photographed by Decoding Trolls].Zoroastrian fire altar, & Iranian “Shahed” drone which sacrifices Ukrainians for Putin’s health (Zoroaster/Zarathustra, if he was an actual human being, as distinct from a mere mythological concept, lived around 1,400 BCE in ancient Iran,Iran, like all Indo-European cultures, adopted language & religion first forged by ancient Ukrainians.1st Aryans were Sintashta & Andronovo descendants of ancient 🇺🇦 migrants into Kazakhstan.Yes, the bat. We all remember those pictures of Druidy Don. I called him Druidy Don because he’s kind of truthy, Druidy, as in the class of intellectuals in Celtic, ancient Celtic society called Donn. Donn is the Lord of Death in ancient Celtic culture, who according to Irish mythology (which was first written down around 1100 AD in the Common Era, but through the language dates from earlier and is about the Indo-European invasions of Ireland, the island of Ireland) is Ireland’s pre-Christian Lord of Death. And obviously you have the Don Hyper (Dnipro) River, you have the Don River, you’ve Dnipro River, which is the Dnepro, the Upper Don. And they’ve Dniester, Don Istres, I think it’s Lower Don from the perspective, if you’re looking at them from Crimea. Then you’ve got the Danube, so you’ve got these DN, you’ve got these DN sands associated with rivers, which were the embodiments of uh deities and uh Druidey Donald you’ve got Donald and Druidey Don. So you see Druidey Don and Batman and Robin basically archetyping themselves as Batman and Robin Elmo in the White House dressed in black, so using comic again comic book haute couture darkness.Once you get your eye into what they’re doing and how they are archetyping, it seems quite clumsy sometimes.It works quite well at the subconscious level, as of course Jung knew. They clearly know what they’re doing because it’s not an accident that Melania was dressed by DressX, two Ukrainian fashion designers from L.A. who tapped into this market. It’s not an accident that Donald was talking about Alphonse Capone just the other day again. But he did it every one of his campaign at his campaign. So they very much know what they’re what they’re doing. They know it works in the moment and and they’re tapping into these into these archetypes.Yes, the owls. I’m always impressed with General, I can’t remember his exact title, but Lieutenant-General Budanov, the owl behind him. And I link that to Sumerian imagery archetyping, where the owl Lilith, I think. And we have many images across the pre-Indo-European civilization of owls. So they’re extremely adept at generating archetypes and at working on that plane.Long before I worked out and came up with a portmanteau Disinfolklore, when I look back at my writing since the war, and even before the war, but my public writing about Ukraine has only been since the full-scale invasion because I worked as a diplomat and I couldn’t write about Ukraine when I was working there.But President Zelensky, obviously, as I wrote this piece at the end of March 2022, Let’s Compare Trolls, where I set... 20th century, who I call Duncey Putin now. He’s Duncey because he’s like a folklore idiot. He’s the idiot. He’s the town fool. He’s like Raskalnikov in Crime and Punishment, who kills two women to see if he can get away with it. It’s just the stupidest thing ever. He’s been tortured by it. And this is Duncey Putin, the master strategist, who just wakes up each day. We see this archetypal character, Istanbul Peace Talks. They’re really pushing this. They’ve been pushing this.I spotted its emergence in mid-March 2022, Istanbul Peace Talks in an article in the Financial Times. And for people who are really tuned in to what had been going on in Ukraine (as I was since 2014) even what was reported then in mid-March 2022 in the Financial Times - that Ukraine would capitulate - was just… It was so not only even (apart from the fact that Russia, most of us or meant some of us could already see that Russia’s invasion was a disaster within the first week of it. I’m on record as saying on the 1st of March 2022. Russia has done a reverse Napoleon because I saw what the communication logistics difficulties it was having with that massive convoy and the Russian units were complaining that they couldn’t connect with each other. So I likened it to doing the opposite of what Napoleon had done. Napoleon obviously invaded Russia, and here was Russia invading Ukraine. But it’s a reverse Napoleon in the sense that it shared the problem of having the logistics and all Ukraine had to do, which is what it’s doing on the long duration. All it just has to do is keep drawing them in and letting them waste to their logistics, waste to their resources, which is exactly what the mythology, um, embedded in war and peace, um, tells us, um, field Marshal Kutuzov, the famous Russian general who, who resisted all attempts to, to, um, to make battle against Napoleon, kept on withdrawing, and everyone, the Tsar, and everyone said, come on, you must face him, and basically tried his best to avoid, and then the winter came).And so President Zelensky is a master archetyper. I actually found footage of him archetyping himself as Napoleon when he, in one of his programs before Napoleon, long before the war, which is wonderful. He’s just got this massive hat on. And so I juxtapose that with that great meme some of us will remember when President Macron finally came to sense. You know, it was President Macron’s idea of Ukraine as this little brother of Russia. Germany’s idea of Ukraine as, well, actually, our debt, we owe our debt to Russia, not to Ukraine for killing - What was it, 8 million Ukrainians? But when I saw President Macron make that speech, and he first did it in an interview in mid-February 2024, where he basically went all in, and then he made that amazing speech, and then the Macronian memes came out with a Napoleon hat. Um, so, uh, president, so you asked the question, what do I think about the owls and the Batman and, um, the bats in FSB? Yeah. Ukraine is working on that plane and it is blessed to have, uh, president Zelensky who operates, uh, it was his job. Uh, he didn’t just, it’s like second nature to him. He operates on this symbolic plane, uh, in such a successful way that he had the, he and his, um, his writer, his wife, who’s a writer, and his friends from Kryvyi Rih, which is a city I know really well. So I kind of understand deeply what he comes from. I actually used to visit the apartment block he grew up in quite a lot because there was a CSO, a civil society organization I did a lot of work with in Kryvyi Rih.And so I really understand this in a deep sense where he came from. And when you hear us say MAGA people talk about Zelenskyy or if I’m in England and, uh, in the shires and people are saying to me, what do you think about Zelenskyy?I know that they’re talking about a character they read about in the newspaper who has been relentlessly archetyped as somehow unconnected to the, what was it, 64% of the people who elected him directly, more bigger mandate than probably any democratically elected leader in a free and fair election in world history (like it’s literally at that scale!). Now thankfully we see him he’s up to what 72% or whatever in those so um so there is this war and this is um this is actually where where I and I’m operating on this level and all of us are unknowingly but this is where the war will be won and lost.Lieutenant-General Budenov and President Zelenskyy get this. We have from the very beginning - it is a war of symbols. If Ukraine can archetype itself as a winner, it will get the means it needs to succeed. If Russia manages to archetype Ukraine as part of Russia, as a loser, then no one will help Ukraine. That is the level that the war, so we have these two battlefronts, we have the kinetic battle space where Ukraine is doing extremely well. And then we have this war of symbols. And you ask, what can we do about it? So what Volya Radio (Volya4UA on Twitter or on Spotify) does, what Mockers does, and Jenni and Ioana , I see you all there, what you do every day and Absurdistan Will Thiel’s “Absurdistan.” What you’re both doing is Archetyping of Russia as this great culture which many of us were embedded in. And I know I’ve had this conversation a lot with Ming as well. He, like me, has read a lot of great Russian literature. And we’ve fallen for that troll. We’ve imbibed it. We’ve been drunk on its beauty and the amazingness of it. But then when you pull the stage, when you realize that actually it’s just a stage play, and then the Potemkin metaphor. It’s just so beautiful, so wonderful, because what you’re doing is de-archetyping Russia as this great culture, as Natalia’s (@NatalkaKyiv on Twitter) work does really well. So that’s really important work. We need to continue doing this and getting it into people’s minds. I mean whenever I obviously can’t really talk about many of the things I hear from say mockers or from Chris Owiki or whatever in normal polite society. People literally won’t believe it. Yet all of us have this kind of uh understanding of the absurdist and the lack of toilets. There’s just the mad stuff they come up with for to get people to sign a contract which doesn’t mean anything. Because you can’t coerce someone into signing a contract. It’s like what you do, again, goes back to Duncey Putin. It’s one of the first things you learn in contract law. You know, if there’s coercion. Yet every day we’re reading about these crazy folktale-like tricks of getting people to sign the contract torturing them. Then suddenly they sign the contract and they can be magically sent uh on a uh back you know to the front line where they’re killed within 24 hours. It’s absolutely insane stuff. It’s no way to run an empire covering one-sixth of the world surface. It’s comical. Absurd. It’s extraordinary stuff. The more people - they used to have this program in England called Eurotrash, where they basically seem to be based on, you know, bizarre things that happened in Japan in the 1980s- We need to continue doing that about Russia. This is the great work, say, that we see people trying to explain to Donald that Russia, you know, its economy is tiny. You know, it’s the size of Chile. This is not, this is, you know, if you’re going to sacrifice America to something, don’t sacrifice it to Russia.Russia is just rubbish on every level. Obviously all of our countries can be archetyped as rubbish. But we’re not committing genocide or, and doing these horrific crimes. So that’s, that’s what we can do. But the war of symbols, Lieutenant-General Budanov and, President Zelensky and many of the people around them are operating on that level.It’s beautiful to watch. It’s part of the evidence that I parsed to work out what’s going on and what I can.I do have I have these 12 tools which I use and which I’m proselytizing that we should be able to use in our ordinary conversations and ordinary daily lives to help us see through this. The lenses of what I call the lenses of Disinfolklore. Archetypes are really important in my work. Once you identified them and verbalized them for me I understood immediately I see them immanent they are immanence’s in almost infinity of instances of Disinfolklore and memes and units of information we see everywhere. Especially that one - Russia has the right to decide on the destinies of its neighbours. Tool One – Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy​Tool Two – Incoming / Outgoing Troll Radars​Tool Three – Look for the Mana in the Meme!​Tool Four - Inner / Outer Realm immanences​Tool Five - Trigger, Experience, Reaction​Tool Six - The Code of Positive Trolls​Tool Seven: Generosity ~ Is the Meaning in the Meme Generosity?​ Tool Eight: Right ~ Is the Meme’s Mana Ethical Discipline?​Tool Nine: Mana ~ What are the Meme’s Implicit Archetypes?​Tool Ten: Is the Meme’s Mana Promoting Patience?​Tool Eleven: Mindfulness – Should I Potentially Allow this Meme into my Mind?​Tool Twelve: Insight/WisdomThat archetype of Russia has this kind of power. It’s in every international relations paper you come across. It’s, and you know, people, Putin understanders, And yet, of course, none of our countries, not even America, you know, which would have, which until Donald anyway, would have the right to say we are an amazing culture, which is the best in so many different areas of human endeavour would do that. Yeah, it was really helpful for me because it’s a way of cutting through.Derrida talks about “knowledge is for cutting.” Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy really cuts through data. Wherever you pick it up - whether it’s some Telegram post or something that we pick up on tweets, those three archetypes - Russia’s indispensable. Russia’s undefeatable, Russia’s obsession with fairy tales and folk tales and Baba Yaga. And just James, while I think about, yeah, the other way we can, you know, it was the Russians, I believe themselves, who called the Baba Yaga drone, the Baba Yaga drone. So we can use this power of magic against them. They use it against themselves. They scare themselves as well. And Ukraine and Lieutenant-General Budanov and its communications policy is really good at doing this.President Zelensky plays it straight, but the apparatus around... And this is why we are very privileged, as all of the people here participating in the space right now, we’re all equally embedded in this... information space on this plane on this this plane the information space plane. What we are witnessing, I think, is, I mean, it’s obviously unprecedented. The patterns we pick up on are so important in every domain. In every - what I call - Disinfolklore Galaxy whether it is MAGA or CCP or or what is to come or anti-vax or any of these other areas. We’re just seeing this epic battle of the titans between Duncey Putin through Idioting on one side and the Comedian Zelenskyy. So this D-N- sound. I have them in all. Duncey, Druidey Don, The Comedian. The Comedian Zelensky. I think most of us understand who’s going to win this Titanic mythologically, in the mythological sense, battle.Watching it in real time is obviously, a bit of an edge of the seats situation. It’s horrific and horrendous. It’s also extremely… it’s where most of us can make a contribution. It’s also very interesting. Yeah. I think it’s, um, going back to Karl Jung. It’s President Zelensky’s Aura drives Donald nuts. Because he, he, he, President Zelensky does play it straight in those interactions. I thought the most interesting thing about that tweet, which wasn’t picked up by that much, was how, and for me, this is the first time I’d seen this, that Donald’s awareness that Russia will collapse if it continues, well, anyway, in Ukraine, that was very interesting to me. Someone is getting to Donald. Someone is gradually adding a grain of sand at a time and upsetting that archetype of Russia as undefeatable in Donald’s mind. Obviously, he may change his mind. But to put that in that very compact tweet, I found that very interesting. It echoes something former Ukrainian President Kravchuk said in 2020 in the interview, which I often repost because it’s so wonderful, where he talks about how, of course, Russia could go, as they say, on the offensive again. But if she does, she will fall to pieces. That, of course, wasn’t the conventional view that many of us were exposed to. I remember reading that in the interview at the time in 2020 and thinking, God, that’s interesting. Clearly that message is getting through somehow to Donald. Someone’s drawing the pictures in his daily briefings.Once he senses in that animal way, Russia is the loser. And that archetype is upset and destroyed, which is obviously being chipped away by a lot of people he’s speaking to, whether it’s President Zelensky or the President of Finland or Merz or Prime Minister Starmer from England and Meloni and all of them are all, and his pastor (if he ever speaks to him), they’re all chipping away at these archetypal identities in Donald mind and I do get some hope from that. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Let’s look at how scanning informational units / memes for immanent characters might help us better interpret manipulation techniques, in real time. We look for the Mana in the Meme. So today, the character of the Mana we’re hunting out in the data entering our mindstreams is what I designate as a “character.”In the Disinfolklore Analytical Method for parsing Disinformation, a ‘character’ can correspond to a real person, fictional beings, countries, fictional animals (Russia acrchetyping as a ‘bear’ is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and a perfect example of a perennial character in Disinfolklore), and in fact any existent.I will talk about character and characters in Disinfolklore. But maybe I will start quickly with just a brief precis, as it were, of what I mean by Disinfolklore, because maybe not everyone here is aware of how I conceive of Disinfolklore. So in 2016, I detected my first Disinfolklore galaxy in Russia-occupied eastern Ukraine.Now I detect multiple Disinfolklore galaxies. Make America Great Again, MAGA, Russian, Chinese Communist Party, and others are spreading through our biological and computational neural networks. like translucent triffids rewilding the Garden of Eden. So here we have a perfect example of the narrative form that I try to capture with my moniker, Disinfolklore.So we have this idea of folkloric characters. So in this case, triffids, which are a fictional plant, people of a certain generation, who grew up on the island of Britain will remember the day of the Triffids. I think it’s a book from the 1930s. The Garden of Eden itself is a tale, is a folkloric reflex, obviously with a very deep and religious and important patina. Nevertheless it’s a folkloric story. The kind of story which if we read in folklore we would be quite quite accustomed to read such stories in folklore but because any Christians who are listening here will be aware it’s inside the Bible.So it has this very serious tinge to it and of course the idea of Disinfolklore galaxies spreading through our biological neural networks is very important to the idea of Disinfolklore, which is also a cognitive, a theory of cognitive perception. and how our emotions are used through stories to hack our rational thought systems.So there are biological neural networks. And the idea of the computational neural networks, of course, we are dealing, those of us here listening who are dealing with with twitter and x are constantly being trolled by uh computational neural networks i have a great relationship with my for you feed which i i hear a lot of people complaining about their for you feed but i have no complaints about mine it is it is a great algorithmically driven inspiration to me every day it serves me up content that really inspires me and which uh doesn’t annoy me and anything that does annoy me or people who annoy me I just block and weed out the the the bit so i have quite a good relationship with my computational neural network but of course many of the choices we make in today’s world are the product of computational neural networks by that i mean neural network mainly i mean neural network algorithms which are usually in the form of as we encounter them the choices they they are offering us multiple uh different choices but i’m quite zen with them.So this idea the Disinfolklore galaxies spreading through our biological computational neural networks like translucent triffids rewilding the garden of eden so triffids invaded the world and the day of the triffids the book the triffids these massive plants basically take over the world And this is what I fear and what I see, saw this word, which is very common in American English, but it doesn’t exist in Irish or English, England English or Scottish English, which is trolling. So I think probably dragnet is a play on this word.common word in American English where cops troll for criminals. And we see it in when I was researching the moniker trolling and looking into its uses in contemporary culture. It comes up a lot in regional newspapers. So I, for instance, created a dragnet using the internet. And at the beginning of my research in February 2020, I then had access to the Factiva all source, 35,000 source database for information. And I did a search for trolls and trolling. At that time, I got 65,000 results and I went through all of them and a goodly portion of the results which dealt with fishing or trolling in the context of looking for prey on the internet.Mainly it came from police. So I suspect dragnet is a play on trolling, which is not to be confused with trolling is, as you describe it, it’s using a net. So I think probably in American English, maybe dragnet is the equivalent of trawl, as in T-R-A-W-L, which is different from troll. Trolling, for those of us who don’t know, is so it comes into American English as commonly used in the context of policing from phishing discourse. And And maybe this fisher is listening to this. But from my understanding of it is trolling, you throw the bait into the ground or rather onto the water on a line.And the bait wanders around the water. So you have this idea of movement and wandering. And it eventually ensnares its prey. And that, as I understand it, is trolling as in fishing. And then it went from there into police discourse. And then in the early days of the internet, what we call searching was called trolling, interestingly enough.We had this kind of competition. for the meaning of trolling in the context of internet culture. And for instance, way pre-Google, there was a troll, internet troll search engine, early form of search engine. And obviously that came from the phishing, from phishing discourse. And I think this competition,So James may have misspent his youth reading grim fairy tales. Wendy, on the other hand, was probably interested in Nancy Drew and trolling for criminals. And I may have spent my misspent youth on... um on various different uh chat chat boards in the early days of the internet where uh trolls and trolls and goblins and uh this phenomenon from early computer culture trolls was there was a factory in in southern california in oakland um where the copyright was owned for Troll Dolls. And this pops up in the literature constantly over the decades. It’s now resolved, but there was like a 40-year struggle between the copyright owner, the trademark owner for Troll Dolls and various different franchises. And in the end, he won. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Trolls entered into early computer lore, computer culture, which was born basically within miles of Oakland, California, and this troll doll. And so the three of us have different origins for the word trolling, and we’re all using them slightly differently. And out of this competition becomes embedded... an idea of a word a moniker troll and at a certain point the the meaning of it becomes relatively stable so no one really uses trolling now in the context of internet search for instance it’s still used for looking for criminals and in various other forms. I think the dominant use of the term trolls and trolling nowadays is in the context of what I call my definition of trolling, having gone through this data set, is emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind. And so any time... We’re moving emotion.This idea of movement is intrinsic to the TR sound, the TR sound in travel, transition, trans, transcend, and in oodles of other words. So movement is in there. And this idea of moving emotions, which is common, whether it’s an evangelical preacher driving the emotions of their audience, in uh on the internet all of us are being trolled each day by the aforementioned neural network algorithm which is driving the r4u feed and uh equally we’re trolled a million times a day by our pets by our lovers by our children um by advertisers and so for me this is common this is the essence i hoped i would find an essence for uh for trolling that i could then character.“Pro-palestinian uh organization” which is a new character that has entered our information space since the bombing of um Iran uh last week and i i predicted last week that on this very show that pro-palestinian that the the war i’m not going to call it hybrid war the war the pushback the blowback would take the form of so-called pro-Palestinian protests. We have seen them in Times Square. We have seen two fighter jets in England be daubed with paint by so-called pro-Palestinian protests. so-called activists. We have seen an organization called Palestine Action in the United Kingdom. It’s about to be proscribed. And we have just, today, I’ve seen reported that a group of 150 so-called pro-Palestinian activists have broken into a warehouse of a company in Belgium, and the company makes materiel for Ukraine, for the Ukraine war.So we understand the genetic link between October 7th, Hamas, between Hamas, Iran and Russia, and we understand this is not in any way controversial. These are very related organizations with related tactics and are part of October 7th, which conveniently provoked a divisive furore around in most Western countries, completely out of character and out of proportion to the fuss over Ukraine. And I don’t know, Jane, if you’re in North America somewhere and this graffiti was painted there, then there’s two clues in it which make me feel that it’s inauthentic. The first is no one cares about Ukraine, basically, apart from a few of us, really.But of course, in the information space, the idea that Ukraine has been cared about more than any other issue is has taken hold and so many people low information people will think oh we’re doing everything for ukraine but the people who listen to this space understand how little we’ve done for ukraine so that assumption in there makes me very suspicious and then the russian uh we know we have lots of documentary evidence um including from the metro mitrovkin archive which is an archive of documents that were smuggled out by one of the leading lights in the KGB and that has been published under the editorialship of Christopher Andrews from Clare College, Cambridge. the college next to the one that I attended, and is a fantastic source for, if you suspect the Russians are up to some trick, then generally speaking, you will find its origins referenced in the Mitrohkin archive.We know that Andropov, we also know from proper documents that Andropov explicitly authorized the use of anti-racist and anti-black graffiti in New York City in the 1960s. We know that the Dividing the Democrats memorandum, which was written by Pat Buchanan, who is an advisor of Trump even today, and emerged, I found it, in the archive related to Watergate.We understand the symbiotic connection between this use of racial division by the Russians and also by the far right, connected to Donald Trump. And we also have some great reporting, some of which I contributed to, of the anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic graffiti in Ukraine, which was paid for by a Ukrainian oligarch, Jewish, by the way, but on behalf of Russia. That was in Rolling Stone towards the beginning of the war. So we have this pattern, we have this technique of trying to stir racial division in order for Russia to gain. And that... Those two elements in that particular form of graffiti,as well as the yawl, which seems like a very artificial way of trying to appeal to Black people, makes me suspicious about it, especially in the context of now. we have again this re-emergence of so-called pro-Palestinian peace movement. And the war, and I was going to talk about this in a bit because it’s very important, the war we will see the blowback from because we have an understanding of the Disinfolklore connected with the Ukraine war. And October 7th, and also an understanding of what Russia’s party tricks are from looking at documents like the Matrokin archive or simply listening to mockers and reading the telegram channels and Ukraine’s critique of them over the past three years. Then this Belgium case which came up today is just a perfect example. Why would a so-called pro-Palestinian group destroy material which is banned for Ukraine if it is not on behalf of Russia.So this is almost so obvious they’re trying to get caught and make it obvious. And we know the Russians do this. It’s not enough for them to manipulate. We have to know they are manipulating. It’s part of their strategy. And so what we will see over the coming time will be Chinese Communist Party, Russian and Iranian-driven proxies in our communities using TikTok and Telegram specifically. We will see Tetushiki fake demonstrations. We will see really stuff which will make the post-October 7th protests in Colombia and other universities happen. in in my alma mater in Cambridge as well uh looked like um child’s picnics and so that so it’s interesting you you raised that you you raised that issue of that graffiti um James and on the genetic link that I mean that article is 23 years old and I um I looked into it quite considerably because of what we talked about in the second show about the Indo-European roots.So as I understand it, what we now know from an ancient genetics demonstrates this not that any of this matters today for people in Gaza who deserve to be able to live in peace and not be hassled or killed or whatever but the the Palestinians emanate from the Aegean.At some point their language changed from an Indo-European language. They’re mentioned in the Bible and they got a really bad press in the Bible from the Jews, but they are an Indo-European country, Indo-European language speaking people originally, genetically, come from the Aegean and their forebears had originally come from ancient Ukraine, but we had Indo-Europeans.They came around 1000 BCE, around the time various different tribes were coalescing into what became and what has become the Jewish community. The Jewish community, by definition, are genetically distinct because they have interbreeded for, at this point, 3,000 years, basically. So the idea that there is no genetic difference between them and Palestinians is just not right.It’s not correct. And we know a lot more. The whole genome. So that article is from 2001. As I remember, the whole genome was only... and it was like of a worm or something. Talk about character because one of the really powerful aspects of the Disinfolklore analytical method is that we can look at particular characters in memes, in stories, in our information space and get an idea of what their typical behaviors are. And then when they behave differently from those archetypes that we form, then we can pick up data information from them. And obviously the opposite as well.And so this week, for instance, the pro-Palestinian activist has suddenly become a character in Disinfolklore in a way that I hadn’t noticed so much before and hadn’t impacted on Ukraine. Another character is which I detected through this again this recurring theme anti-Andre Yermak theme. So in Disinfolklore we look at our information space and whichever theme we’re interested in, say, Ukraine, and we have thousands of different characters and the characters can be individual humans or they can be places, they can be Bobovna or Mockers’ boom of the day. The idea of character isn’t tied to seagulls or humans or even sentient beings. And On the contrary, and also that the dissent folklorists can archetype, for instance, Ukraine as weak. And when Rubio talks about the character Russia, that it can’t be beaten on the battlefield today, what he is really doing is archetyping Ukraine as weak, and indeed the West as weak, but it’s not obvious in it. So these are all characters.And the character which I think, I believe, is behind the recurrence of these anti-Andrey Yermak stories is tied to the Dividing the Democrats memo, which in the Nixon White House, but also to Ukraine, and is the character who Paul Manafort, who is, again, he is in the inner fold, back inside the inner sanctum of Donald’s foreign policy.He, as many of us here will know, between 2004 and 2014, his job was to divide Ukraine between Russian language speakers and Ukrainian language speakers and to dominate the Russian language speaking Ukrainians. He did this through storytelling. He learned at the feet of Pat Buchanan and various characters who were around Donald, who were around the beginning of MAGA. And so if we’re looking out for characters in our story world, whether it’s specifically Ukraine or MAGA or American politics, then the dyed black haired Paul Manafort as a character is a really important character. And if you’re not aware of Paul Manafort and you are trying to discern a pattern inwhat’s happening today, then I humbly suggest that is a gap in one’s knowledge. Now, there’s many characters I’m not aware of and I become aware of all the time, but Paul Manafort is particularly important and key to understanding what Donald is doing now, today, over the past few weeks, this whole two weeks thing. These are all very...cleverly exploited strategies by them. These are not done by accident, I believe. And Paul Manafort, for instance, had Yulia Tymoshenko jailed the princess in the high tower for three years. And Paul Manafort, we’ve seen the invoices from the evidence when he was put into prison.for acting as a foreign agent for Ukraine, for Yanukovych, and for tax evasion. We saw, and I was very privileged, because I always wanted to see this stuff, and then when he was busted in all the court documents, we could see the presentations Paul Manafort used to make to the... leaders in Western countries justifying Yulia Tymoshenko’s imprisonment.And one of the elements in there, and this goes back to the graffiti, James, that you mentioned, is one of the crazy strategies which Paul Manafort executed in order to destroy sympathy for Yulia Tymoshenko and to increase empathy for Yanukovych, his boss, who had campaigned on the grounds of moving Ukraine closer to Europe.So again, exactly similar to what Georgian Dream has done. So when you understand characters and you’re looking for characters and patterns, the character of Russian Disinfolklore, the characters of their strategies, the people they act through. And then once you’re looking for them, you can identify them. And that really helps discern. So the stories you read,the Disinfolklore you read on Telegram, aren’t just existence independent. of other stories, they actually have imminences in them. Their energy is similar to other stories. And so one of the bizarre things Paul Manafort did is, and I’ll post it in the purple space, but he, right now, he, he,Yulia Timoshenko had gone into power in a coalition with this party called Svoboda, which means freedom in Ukrainian. And they are a far-right nationalist party, but I have reason to believe they’re a Russian creation. And my reasoning for this is I was once brought to a meeting in Dnepro with Svoboda by a Russian diplomat.who wanted me to meet them. And one of the first things I noticed in the room was a copy of Mein Kampf in English, in a bookshelf full of books in Russian and Ukrainian. And I was carefully placed in a seat beside this.And you’d have to be pretty dumb not to work out what they were trying to do. And because of this, when I learned that Paul Manafort had, as part of his campaign, he had used the fact that Julia Timoshenko had been in coalition government with Slobodan. as a reason why we shouldn’t have any sympathy for her.So this is again fitting this pattern of Russian and the connection between Paul Manafort and Russia is several fold. His work in Ukraine was paid for by four pro-Russia oligarchs including Oleg Deripaska who’s been in the news this week, Dmitry Firtash, and again we know this from the House Intelligence Committee reports which weredone in the wake of the 2016 elections. He worked for Yanukovych and was paid, I think it’s something like about $35 million by Yanukovych, who, as we know, was the pro-Russia candidate, despite he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. We know this because he then ran away to Russia. They rescued him and they were still talking,they’re probably still fantasizing about making him president in in Ukraine. And so if you’re aware of Paul Manafort as a character in this story, then it’s really key to understanding even what’s going on in our information space this week when we see Newsweek writing an article about howAmerican lawmakers on both sides are getting a bit sick of Andre Jormack. And if you remember Victoria Sparks, towards the beginning of the war, she has been briefing against Andre Jormack for a long time. And so if you were neutral, as I was on this issue long before the... the full-scale invasion,because Andrei Yermak has often been the subject of gossip and unfavorability. And Victoria Sparks was briefing senior American lawmakers that he was, in fact, Russian, a Russian spy. And when you see all of this popping up again, because you’re aware of characters and you’re looking for characters, it enables you to interpret thethe particular Disinfolklore this week, and then elements like the use of accusing Yulia Tymoshenko of, by association, being anti-Semitic, um by association with this tiny svoboda party which is no political sport which i have good reason to believe is itself a russian uh proxy a russian organizationunder the guise of ukrainian um nationalism you get a sense for how complicated these um these plans and these concocted plans are and if you explain this if you try to explain this stuff to normal people who don’t spend their time thinking about ukraine or thinking about Disinfolklore, you sound like a nutcase.But this is how they operate. And it’s well documented. And I’ll send you the stuff with the Times of Israel. And so then, if you know all of this, and someone tells you that October 7th, was a hijacking of the pro-Palestinian cause as well, and this could well have been planned by the Russians,then it all seems a lot more plausible. When you’re looking for characters and you understand characters, there is no purple space, which is fair enough. But anyone can find these documents. Oh, I’ll send them to you in a message and you can post them, James. with Paul Manafort. But that’s what I wanted to talk about,this idea of characters, and Paul Manafort specifically because of this news about Andrei Yermak, which is like the perennial troll popping up again and again and again, and has been at least since 2019. He almost came to blows with Surkov, who is Russia’s curator for Ukraine, at that time. meeting in Paris in 2019.And yeah, so characters in Disinfolklore. So I wanted to talk about that and the pro-Palestinian movement being a character, but also Paul Manafort-like characters in a film. that they grow and you learn more about them. And as you learn more about them, then when they pop up and different symbols pop up associated with them,you understand in the news, on Telegram or... I remember two days ago, if you’re online, the old ceasefire, there is a ceasefire, there isn’t a ceasefire. And this gave me very strong flashes of my time in Eastern Ukraine. where it was my job to monitor ceasefires and ceasefires within ceasefires, within ceasefires, hundreds.I think someone counted 180 different ceasefires at different times in the same geographical space. And so the idea of a ceasefire becomes decoupled from its meaning. And so, of course, we all went through this a few weeks ago when it seems like Ukraine’s allies said to it, can you model,can you archetype yourself as wanting to have a ceasefire? Because Donald says that he thinks he can persuade Russia to take a ceasefire if Ukraine will. So, of course, Ukraine archetypes itself as wanting a ceasefire. and nothing comes of it. And then we have this bizarre day after the bombing in Iran,where Donald is tweeting on untruth social, I’ve just arranged a ceasefire and... And now the ceasefire has been breached. The ceasefire is going to everyone’s just going to fire their missiles and then it’s going to then there’s going to be the ceasefire. I mean, it’s just absolutely seems absolutely insane. No pattern to it.But it did remind me of. of what I experienced in Eastern Ukraine. And out of that experience, I got the idea of archetyping. And I think what Donald was trying to do is archetype himself as not at war with Iran, because in his mind or in the mind of their supporters,they can now pretend that America is not a protagonist in this war. And of course, this is the mirror image of what Russia, to this day, is pretending it’s not at war in Ukraine. It’s pretending it’s a special military operation, and it’s pretending it’s doing this. Somebody asked, it’s the Ukrainian people.And in the Iranian context, we’re hearing exactly the same information stuff about how Iranians were going to rise up. And obviously, I don’t know if they’re going to rise up or not. But what I can do is tell you it’s exactly the same pattern we don’t believe in in reference to Russia.We are now being asked to believe in in reference to in reference to Iran. And the second thing which comes into this idea of character and characters. So ceasefires can be a character. And suddenly ceasefires were very much inside Donald’s tweets and in his discourse. And it’s decoupled from reality.So there isn’t an actual ceasefire on the ground. And the Russians... in eastern Ukraine never cared about this because the ceasefire is a character in stories, in the information space. It doesn’t correspond to actual actions on the ground. And now this attempt by Donald to disown the fact that he unlawfully, from an international law perspective,and unlawfully from a United States Constitution perspective, bombed Iran. And now, obviously, the piece de la resistance is the reporting today, which says that apparently it didn’t do anything. And Iran’s just going to be set back a couple of weeks. So basically, America is at war by all meanings of the word war. It has bombed Iran. Today,I heard them talk about how MAGA Mike Johnson was talking about how we took out the entire leadership in Iran. So there’s very little pretense. that America is not, along with Israel, at war against and with Iran. Yet in the tweets, which so many experts fell for throughout the day, oh, there’s going to be a ceasefire.And these are the people upon whom we depend to experts and interpret. And they really, they fell for the troll in a huge way all day long and probably are still falling for the troll. And I think the idea that Donald is doing this by accident or the effect of it is not strategic.It doesn’t hold water to me because it’s exactly the same pattern I saw in in eastern Ukraine and it is also the same pattern that is in like 1984 and all of these great texts that peace war peace of course is a character in Disinfolklore which doesn’t meanuh peace uh it means uh you know for tankies it means war basically and in russia it means war and now for donald and the people around him they’re pretending there is a ceasefire when there’s no ceasefire they’re pretending they’re not at war whenthey’re they are at war and this is exactly the kind of Disinfolklore galaxy the Disinfolklore universe that I feared and forecast and wrote about and spoke about at the Pirate Party Security Conference in February. And the means of wrapping us up inside this are days like we experienced two days ago. I think, was it Sunday?Well, it depends where you are. I think it was Sunday where I am. I can’t even remember what day it was. But anyway, while this is going on, if we can look at it and go, this is a bit mad, but there’s also a rhyme and a pattern to it.And the effect of it is to wrap us up inside what I call a Disinfolklore galaxy, in which up is archetyped as down, peace is archetyped as war, war as peace, ceasefire, and all of these different... words and meanings have a certain dynamism about them. And that is what Donald specializes in doing.And we saw a perfect example of it in his past time when it’s talking about celebrity gossip or, you know, stuff like that. But it’s the expansion of these techniques and tactics from uh from uh from things which really don’t matter into uh kinetic geopoliticalevents and into the minds of everyone that um that we as a civilization and as a community in the ukraine community we’ve been going pro-ukraine community we’ve been going through this up and down for for three years but now normal civilians who don’t pay much attention to things don’t know if America’s at war.In fact, I’m pretty convinced America isn’t at war. And when the blowback starts coming in earnest, no one will really know what hit them. So I just wanted to throw that out there. And I think I was able to do that relatively. Yeah, great. Out. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

In the Færy Tale, Donald and Ruschia always triumph.Notice the similarity in structure?That’s Disinfolklore. An illusion. Doesn’t correspond to reality. It’s promoted by Disinfolklore. Now, start reassessing ALL such “inevitabilities” (Ruschia always wins, Trump gets away with everything).Such “inevitabilities” are deliberate Disinfolklore injected through repetition into our minds by those wishing to hack our consent.Disinfolklore is an insight into how we perceive reality through concatenating levels of archetypes. Many picked up from Færy tales and folklore. It’s obvious while we watch a Disney film or are in an Arcadian biosphere reserve that the backdrop is Færy Tale-like. Our reference points are Ladybird or Brothers Grimm editions of folklore we remember from being children. When the same archetypes and archetypal structures, however, are immanent in “news” or opinion about international affairs, that we might be consuming purposely constructed Disinfolklore might never occur to us. Yet, in MAGA or Russian Disinfolklore galaxies stories are purposely wrought of archetypal elements whose effect to alter our moods/attitudes/intentions/motivation.Færy Tale structures are so hardwired into the minds of Russia’s leadership and propagandists that they actually believe everything in the end will turn out just fine for the state that has lost 20% of its oil refinery capacity to Ukrainian drones since 1 August 2025. With a Disinfolklore perspective we can perceive structures in data deliberately intended to deceive us and manipulate our Mana. With the Disinfolklore Analytical Method we can stand outside any data whether obviously Færy tale, folklore or concealed Disinfolklore in the guise of news. This enables us to parse such propaganda and respond appropriately.Hi, I'm Decoding Trolls. I was driving along in a former Soviet country today and I saw a sign for what they call the fairy tale museum. And so I came into it. It's closed at the moment, but people running it allowed me to come in and film this. It provoked the memory of the genesis of disin folklore, which was an insight I had when I first arrived in eastern Ukraine in February 2015, to this magical place, which is now under Russian occupation, called Stanitsa Luhanska. I had this insight from almost the first moment I was there that there was something folklore about the entire situation. And trying to understand what the aggregated parts of that perception were, has led me on this amazing journey, which many of you have been with me on since February 2023, when I coined the word disinfolklore. So it took me eight years to realize the distant folklore element of this way of seeing reality.And so the way I saw Stanitsia Luhanska was by perceiving there was something folklore about the situation. Now I understand that that's a kind of reciprocal intuition. So it's coming from me. I'm perceiving Stanitsia Luhanska, Eastern Ukraine, the former Soviet bloc, these magical places from a nature point of view, but also with the remnants of what I remember first encountering in folktales and illustrations of folktales as a small child and the reciprocity between me perceiving reality through folktale and folklore and folktale archetypes and the actual marshalling of this in the space itself. So the great Ukrainian writer, Victoria Amelina, who was executed by the Russians in 2023 in Pizzeria in Kramatorsk with an Iskander missile, she wrote shell hole in a fairy tale, which was about a kindergarten in Stanitsia Luhanska, where I worked for three years. And one of the opening salvos in Russia's war of annihilation against Ukraine, the full-scale invasion in February 2022, was to send a shell. It was the Wagner, the Wanger military group corps of the Russian army, who was given the task of moving in from the Russian-occupied so-called Luhansk People's Republic across the bridge at Stanitsia Luhanska, where I worked between 2015 and 2018, and to try and capture all of Luhansk.And as we know, Russia has still failed to capture all of the eastern oblasts of Luhansk. But one of its first salvos and its announcement of the war and the full-scale invasion was to send a shell into a kindergarten in Stanitsia Luhanska, which is... Located in this idyllic biosphere reserve where I first had the intuition that there was something folklore about the entire situation. I found myself in there and indeed about the Russian occupation of part of Ukraine. And they sent a shell into this kindergarten, which was called the Færy Tale kindergarten. And I'll post a photograph with this post of the shell hole in the fairy tale, which appeared on the front page the New York Times. So that was seven years after I first arrived in Stanitsia Luhanska and had this intuition about folklore and fairy tales. And having spent the last eight, nine years exploring this intuition and having developed the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, I now see the depth of this insight extends way far beyond the use of folkloric tropes and archetypes in what I today call Disinfolklore, which is a narrative form that is perfected by the Russian occupiers in eastern Ukraine, rolled out then across the whole of Russia since the full-scale invasion. And also used by MAGA in the United States to create an entirely internally coherent system of storytelling and tropes and archetypes, which are meaningless to many of us who are not involved in it. I caution anyone. who is operating in the space that I'm operating in, which is to try and interpret and understand how our minds are being manipulated and how these Disinfolklore, what I today call Disinfolklore galaxies, are being wrought of millions of concatenating, manipulative, psychologically manipulative, gamified stories and storytelling, which in fact create a whole system within which we operate. Not only is it very difficult to escape these Disinfolklore wrought galaxies and systems, as any of us who have been unfortunate enough to know someone who completely normal, completely clever, intelligent, bright has fallen into the MAGA Disinfolklore universe or indeed anyone who's fallen into the Russian Disinfolklore universe which they are desperately trying to wrap around humanity and around Europe and they have succeeded in convincing some people that the logic, the provocation logic cycle that NATO expansion, this myth about NATO expansion provoked Russia into occupying Ukraine and killing hundreds of thousands of native Russian language speaking Ukrainians because they decided to save them. So many people have fallen for this troll that we know. And it's very hard for any of us to actually see from outside it, to step outside the doors of perception, as it were, and see what is going on, that this is a completely inorganic MAGA Disinfolklore galaxy, or a completely inorganic Disinfolklore galaxy inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. This insight, which I had in February 2015, that there was something folklore about the situation, has mushroomed or unfurled into a whole theory of cognition.I realized that the identity between the actual setting in that biosphere reserve, which is a river, the Donets River, a river known since antiquity, over which willows hung a biosphere reserve where wild animals were running and often settled mines in the areas where I was patrolling as a monitoring officer for the international community. The identity between that scene where villages and houses all had wells, like the kinds of wells you would see in the illustrations accompanying folk tales and Færy tales if you grew up in Western Europe or America around the time that I did and grew up on a diet of folk tales and Disney stories and Færy tales.That the identity of the actual environment, the natural environment with the archetypes given to us as children, usually when we were seeing, was so close that it was impossible for me not to see the continuities between the folk tale genre of stories, the færy tale genre of stories, and this actual forested environment we're in.I've written extensively on the mother and the maiden archetype, which helped lead me towards understanding how Russian and MAGA Disinfolklore uses archetypes to embed ideas in our minds. These archetypes could be what Carl Jung described as the primordial archetypes of the mother and the maiden, for instance.So in this story that I encountered in around April 2016, when I was sent on a tasking by my boss, which had been set by the Russian intelligence services in Russia-occupied Ukraine, where they had spun this story to my boss that a mother and an underage daughter were about to be chopped into tiny pieces by an archetypal character that only existed inside Russian Disinfolklore the stock character of a mythical “Ukrainian Nazi.”We were sent, me and my colleagues were sent into a forest, to a cottage where the mother and the maiden lived. And this, at the time, I didn't understand that the mother and the maiden are primordial architects. So that was quite so obvious, just like the identity between the environment in Stanitsia Luhanska and the environment of folktales and færy tales was so obviously close to the environments that I encountered as a child reading stories in, say, Lady Bird renderings of folktales and fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. stories, that it was impossible not to see it.What is much harder to see is when we're reading news, what I call Disinfolklore, this narrative form, which will use stories whose settings are set in the same setting ans other news. So the myth will be woven that Ukraine for instance, shelled this or that place. So it's very hard to see in that the same idea of folktales. What they're trying to embed there is the idea that Ukraine deserves to be genocided, that Ukrainians deserve to be killed, and that Russia is actually rescuing a damsel in distress. So this initial insight from Stanitsia Luhanska led me towards over the course of years to understanding that precisely what Disney uses or what now MAGA uses and what the Russian occupiers use to create in the minds of the consumers of Disinfolklore, these folklore-born archetypes. extended into what we would normally think of as news, the news space.It's harder to see it there because these stories aren't set in forested places with willows hanging over trees and with kindly old ladies who are very kindly offering people bread and little children escaping from bears and wolves and all of that stuff. But the structure of those tales is immanent in the news which is being conveyed to us and it enters our minds and manipulates our minds using the same archetypal structures that we learn or imbibe through the folktales we encountered as children. Because my eyes were tuned into this, this use of folk tales and færy tales, so for instance, the kindergarten in Stanitsia Luhanska had been called the Færy Tale kindergarten.Russians chose to send a shell into it, they're - Who knows what they thought they would achieve by it - but it was a very purposeful and purposive action. It then appeared on the front pages of newspapers all around the world. Of course, when I first encountered the Færy Tale Kindergarten in Stanitsia Luhanska in 2015, I never imagined for a second it would play a starring role in the first stage of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine some seven years later. Indeed, that the aspect of cognition and the aspect of Russians' way of seeing the world through folk tale and færy tale archetypes would lead them to choose and select this particular spot, this particular institution, the kindergarten called the Færy tale. Then this great Ukrainian writer who the Russians would send a whole missile to execute and kill many other people, including twin children in the pizzeria in central Kramatorsk, after she published this story, “Shell Hole in a Fairy Tale,”becomes all part of the Disinfolklore content which the Russians then use. So they bombed the kindergarten with a shell. Then Victoria Amelina writes about this and publishes about this. Then Russia uses a missile to kill, to execute this female Ukrainian writer. Then Russia broadcasts its own Disinfolklore to say, oh, actually, we weren't trying to kill this writer. We were trying to kill Ukrainian military service people in a pizzeria in Kramatorsk that day. So the Ukrainians deserved this, and this was somehow justified. This is spun into the minds of Russians and indeed into some Westerners who would fall for such trolls.It becomes a whole system where the Russians' activities in Ukraine, their kinetic activities, their bombings, The writing about them, either by Ukrainians or by Russians on Telegram to try and scare Ukrainians, to try and scare us into surrendering Ukraine to the Russians, to the big bad wolf, are then spun by the Russians as stories.So that is just one cycle of a story. The Shell Hole in the Fairy Tale, Victoria Amelina, Then they execute her with a missile. Then they publish Disinfolklore about this. What we have is millions of Disinfolklore story cycles like that coiled up, wrapped around each other like triple infinite, triple double helixes in our information space surrounding us so that our entire mode of perceiving reality, which initially we gain through our parents and through reading folk tales and fairy tales to having them read to us as small children, this is substituted. This becomes like a jumping off point for an entirely new mode of reality which is created around us which the Disinfolklore analytical method that I've invented enables us to perceive. Because otherwise we are just turning on the news each day and it is manipulating our moods, our attitudes, our intentions and our motivations. These four elements of our perception - moods, motivations, intentions, attitudes- of our being are consciously manipulated, our energy, our Mana is consciously, purposefully manipulated, manipulated, it's shaken, its own Mana is pulated, it's moved up and down by these stories, by these elements of Disinfolklore galaxies, by these cycles, like that cycle I just described to you involving the Shell Hole in the Færy Tale, but of course we've got millions of these cycles all building one on top of the other, often repeating. So we see repetition in MAGA disinfolklore in America. We see in 2016, the Republican Party dropped the commitment to arm Ukraine in its manifesto. This was brought about by a guy called Paul Manafort, who had been funded by pro-Russia oligarchs for 10 years in Ukraine to divide Ukraine and to bring to preeminence and to power a pro-Russia anti-European leader. This guy, Paul Manafort, then runs away from Ukraine in February 2014 after his boss runs away from Ukraine, the then president of Ukraine, who was later impeached. And then Manafort pops up in public awareness again as Donald Trump's campaign manager in the summer of 2016.He drops, he causes the Republican Party, and I have the email I'll post in this podcast. He causes the Republican Party to drop their commitment to arming Ukraine, which is a commitment the Republican Party and American right, conservative right, had always had, which was to help the enemies of Russia. And suddenly this is dropped.Then a couple of years later, Donald Trump gets impeached for holding back weapons for Ukraine. Then flash forward to the present, we've got Paul Manafort who's advising He's been jailed in the interim for acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Ukraine, for the pro-Russian president of Ukraine at the time. And now he's advising Donald Trump again, and Donald Trump again is withholding weapons from Ukraine. So we see these characters, these same structures popping up. again and again. And obviously that's just one of thousands I could reel off, which the Russians, for instance, can constantly play up, for instance, about President Zelensky's so-called illegitimacy.So these pop up again and again in our information space as elements of Disinfolklore. If you get your eye in, if you understand what the Disinfolklore analytical method is, it uses the insights that we as small children gained from from learning about the world and our environment, about storytelling through folktales and færy tales, through Disney, through Lady Bird, through reading the Brothers Grimm. It uses insights from there and applies them to the news, to the Disinfolklore apparatus surrounding us, which is constantly spewing out stories with certain structures within them. That have archetypes in them. Sometimes they're extremely obvious archetypes, the mother and the maiden, like in that story I've just told. Other times, it's a bit more, it's a bit harder to see. And the Disinfolklore analytical method, which I've invented, enables us to see it and archetype these stories as elements of Disinfolklore and elements in the Disinfolklore galaxy.It enables us to perceive the reality which is being woven around us as constituting many, many, many different stories, distant folklore, which are quite purposefully being wrought to wrap our minds up in an artificial, inorganic form of reality. And if you can think of someone you know who has fallen into the MAGA cult, you will understand they live in a completely alternative reality universe, as indeed do Russians today. They did not always live inside this reality. In fact, even Ukrainians had a hope at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, that simply by revealing the truth of the invasion, they could wake them up from their slumber.It's the Sleeping Beauty tale where an entire kingdom is put into a slumber is a perfect metaphor for what Russian Disinfolklore apparatus, which was perfected in this area, just across the river, across the Donets River, where I worked for three years as one of the few Westerners ever to work in Russia-occupied Ukraine.I had the benefit of being enmeshed in one of the first Disinfolklore places. galaxies that was ever created. Now we see MAGA using the same techniques has created a similar Disinfolklore galaxy inside the minds of the MAGA cult members in America and inside a huge number of Americans who have no sympathy for MAGA but they are just being tossed and turned every day by these crazy stories which are being wrought around them and broadcast around them through the media through the Fox News. Notice Fox is an element from folklore and from folktales as well. The Fox is a perennial character in folklore through Fox News.Also through your best friend or your mother or your cousin or your godmother, your godfather, your Ivy League educated godparents may have gone MAGA because that is the power of it. Now some of the symptoms of the MAGA Disinfolklore cult membership, which were obviously MAGA, are wrought, are immanent in ordinary Americans who are not MAGA adjacent and not even sympathetic to MAGA. They have fallen to the troll. They cannot see, for instance, that their minds have been quite purposefully and consciously manipulating into accepting a mode of governance and a type of governance that five years ago if you'd said to them, this is what you're going to support, they would have laughed at you. But this is what Disinfolklore does. It manipulates our minds. It is generated from the ingredients of folk tales and the færy tales, which we read as children, and stories like Tolkien. So we see Palantir, which is this company, which is basically a company owned by one of the PayPal Mafia were begun by them, which was after, during the origin story appears to be after it was discovered that after the Second Gulf War, the The collection of intelligence on Americans was illegal and had been made illegal. So the government couldn't do it.This was outsourced to this company Palantir, which has created this amazing structure where it collects vast amounts of data and has the computing power to interpret it using the neural network algorithms that have been created out of the offspring of PayPal. So PayPal, when it was floated, it made a number of people who are collectively known as the PayPal Mafia extremely rich. They then reinvested that money through venture capital funds in Silicon Valley and Santa Clara County. And that money is what funded Google and Facebook and some of these huge Internet companies, which created the first non-toy size, bigger than toy size, neural network algorithms. Over the space of 10 years, computer vision and semantic technology. semantic structuring, automated semantic structuring of language. We have Google Translate, for instance, is one retail product of it. These tools are dependent on neural network algorithms, which is a vast aggregation of unimaginably huge computing power that companies now, like Palantir, can use to crunch all the data. So now, for instance, they have, since all the social security data for every American is now inside these computing systems and is being crunched and turned into actionable intelligence for the government and for the people that Donald has put into place, that PayPal mafia has put into place.Disinfolklore can be designed perfectly to perfectly match the minds and intelligences and emotional structures of the people. This is the reality we're living in today. Palentir gets his name from Tolkien, from these magic stones. So the Disinfolklore analytical method is predictive in a way. Once you get your eye in, you begin to see how it's not just the Russians doing it or not just... MAGA using bogeymen, trans, migrants, and these troll tales, the archetypal troll tale of three billy goats, Gruff, where three billy goats, who are the original migrants, went across a bridge over a river like the Donetsk River, where I worked between 2015 and 2018 in eastern Ukraine, just to get a bit of extra food. The troll, the first goat crosses and meets a troll guarding the bridge. And he says, oh, I just want to go across and have some food. So this is the tale of all economic migrants. But the next billy goat coming is much bigger than me. So don't kill me, let me go. And the troll allows them to go. And then the second billy goat says the same thing. And then the third billy goat says the same thing but kills the troll and then three billy groats cross the river and go into this new land as the migrants so this archetypal tale is immanent was immanent in the first moments of donald trump's uh campaign in 2016 when he talks about the uh migrants the criminal uh the rapists coming excuse me for using that word but he did use it the criminal rapists coming from Mexico, which is this idea of threatening the sovereignty, the security and the fertility. This is the importance of the sexual crimes. The fertility of the inner realm. So these are the three billy goats coming from Mexico into the inner realm of America. And Donald is situating, is archetyping himself as protecting it.This, of course, is exactly the same archetypal structure that the Russians use and that... Vladimir Putin used on the 20th of February 2022, when he used a folk song from metal, from Soviet folk culture, from a metal band called Red Mold, Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin. So Sleeping Beauty, again, another archetypal fairy tale.When Putin announced that he was saying to Ukraine, “take it, my beauty.” He was referencing this vulgar, this very vulgar song, which describes the necrophiliac rape, which features in this Soviet-era hard rock song called Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin. International lawyers looking for the intention to genocide the Ukrainians, in the minds of the Russian leadership, cite this reference by Vladimir Putin, this folkloric trope. So it's folkloric in the sense of it's part of Soviet-era folklore, this metal band, but it's also itself riffing off archetype folk tales, Sleeping Beauty, in a coffin. It's archetyping Ukraine as a woman and as a dead woman, as a corpse, who will be defiled, whether she “likes it or not, take it, my beauty,” by Russia. Soo this is the archetyping of Ukraine as a woman, as a corpse, who will be annihilated by Russia. Of course, those of us who have followed closely the war, and if you follow a Disinfolklore, you'll be following the war as closely as me, understand the war hasn't turned out hasn't had the fairy tale ending that the Russians hoped it would. Yet they still do believe in this fairy tale ending from their perspective. Their mode of cognition is so twisted that they think no matter how much, and this is the essence of magical thinking which contaminates their minds, they think that no matter how awful they behave in the end, they will prevail. But of course, those of us who are supporting the Ukraine and who understand where we are in the war at the moment, I think, are very confident that it will be a happy ending for Ukraine, but not for the Russians. This mode of cognition for the Russians and the Russians' leadership, because since I've had my eye in, by looking at Disinfolklore and how we perceive reality and geopolitics through folkloric tropes, through, for instance, Don't Poke the Bear or Lavrov, the current foreign minister of Russia, constantly references folktales to explain how. So, for instance, he recently talked about how the Russian measures eight times and cuts once. He's referencing a proverb. I counter that with counterdiscipline by saying, no, Anyone who's watched the war will understand the average Russian will cut seven times and never get around to measurement. So we can, once we perceive how they are perceiving the world through folk tales, we can counter Their Disinfolklore, their mental manipulations with counter Disinfolklore, which also consciously takes archetypes, which they use, and subverts them and throws them back at them. So we can design our Disinfolklore out Counter Disinfolklore to counter MAGA Russian and other forms of Disinfolklore quite consciously once we're aware that this is how their manipulative stories uh works.So from this place this Færy Tale uh museum which I'm not going to bring you around because I don't have a I don't have a thing for my phone camera. Take it from me, I'm in this Færy Tale Museum, which for me is more evidence that the Soviet mindset perceived the world through the lenses of folklore. They are to this day attempting, as Donald is, and as Palantir is, they are attempting to subvert all our lenses. So we see the world through this magical thinking through these magical stories about reality, which, frankly speaking, doesn't benefit ordinary people like you and me. It may benefit billionaires. They may even think it benefits them and not benefit them in the end. But either way, it's important for us to understand what they are to how they're mentally manipulating us.That's what my entire Disinfolklore project is about. I'm really happy that you're here and that you're listening and that you pay attention to the things I write. I constantly think about it, constantly computing the data through the lenses of Disinfolklore and constantly evolving it to match the new realities as it is evolving.Because this is the fight of our lives. If we surrender our world and surrender our perception to these Disinfolklore weaving ne'er-do-wells, then we will have the worst world. We will have the nightmare world of our worst færy tales and our worst folktales. I don't believe that's inevitable. I think we can, each of us individually has an impact on culture. Our culture is a function of what we do. And yes, there are people like Peter Thiel or Donald Trump or or Putin who have vast Disinfolklore propagation apparatuses around them and vast numbers of extremely creative, brilliant people who are trying to turn our world into a world of death and darkness and misery. On the other side, there's people like you and me, ordinary people, who have a role to play and to assert our own power to affect the culture in which we're embedded, in which we live, and to determine our own futures. So we... do determine our own futures, and we determine the social circumstances in which we live. And that is the mission of Disinfolklore as a project, the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, which enables us to see the distant folklore narrative form that I spotted for the first time.This is the embedded archetypes in data, whether that data is obviously about færy tales or folktales in a Disney film or a Grimm's færy tale, or much harder to see that that's what's going on because it's in the news. It's being read to you by the BBC or by Fox News.Either way, what we're trying to do is make... us, empower us to perceive when our moods, our attitudes, our intentions and our motivations are purposefully manipulated so that we enter, we start to read a newspaper article thinking we want to support Ukraine, for instance, or support this cause. But by the end of it… We're led to believe it's hopeless. So we support another cause or we don't do anything. We don't take action. We just sit back and go, oh, the world is terrible. That's not what Disinfolklore is about. Disinfolklore is about empowerment through perception of reality through the lenses of Disinfolklore and liberation by applying the Disinfolklore Analytical Method.I'm so happy you're with me on this journey because it is a journey and it will continue, believe me, for many years to come. And thank you. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Two Russian mafia dons meet in Alaska. As cover they chat about ceding territory, they don’t and never will control. Two Russian mafia dons trying to archetype themselves as Reagan / Gorbachev. Two Russian mafia dons meet in Alaska to condemn millions of humans in those territories to certain torture, starvation and death.Two Russian mafia Dons meet in Alaska.Druidey Donald Draumpf Disinfolklore rearchytyping reality by entertaining idea Sovereignty is malleable - Donald is trafficking in Ukraine’s Sovereignty without a mandate. Druidey don Don Draumpf Disinfolklore is attempting to sell a property - Ukraine’s territorial integrity - that he neither controls nor owns. Ukraine here is Don’s instrument. The purpose is to destroy the post-WWII legal and social order. Undermine UN Charter, International Law (UN Charter, International human rights law, international criminal law, Geneva conventions, law of the sea, genocide convention, 2003 treaty on state border). Political purpose is undermine Ukraine and European Union’s sovereignty, security, prosperity. “Nobel Peace Prize” motivation is a troll. It’s repeated ad nauseum by media outlets that have fallen for a troll. “Nobel Peace Prize” motivation is preposterous and consistent with a cartoonish representation of Don’s personality. Don and those in control of him - the Russian mafia - are very focussed and clear eyed. Ukraine is an instrument to destroy Sovereignty of states (magical/ trolling brainwashing aspect) to wrap us up inside a Disinfolklore Galaxy and Juridical aspect of Sovereignty (International law). To destroy the security of States (exercise of we’ll protect you/we’ll abandon you coercive control/ off/on NATO). To destroy the Prosperity of democratic equality-seeking post-WWII states.Ukraine’s only goal in tolerating America and Russia’s continued collusion is to troll the U.S. into providing it with weapons (in exchange for European money), so it can destroy Russia’s force power and the Russian state. Ukraine and European powers (upon whom US arms industry depends) have leverage in a very complicated information game being run by these two Russian mafia dons, and the Useful Idiots who are unknowingly working to archetype Putler and Disinfolklore Don as some dime store Reagan / Gorbachev. Meanwhile, Ukraine has resumed its destruction of Russia’s only source of foreign currency - its fossil fuel infrastructure. After America persuaded Ukraine to stop attacking these assets on 24 March 2025, in the past twelve days Ukraine has hit and significantly damaged five of Russia’s largest oil refineries as well as essential export infrastructure.I want to talk first briefly about something that has been on all of our minds for the past week, and I want to apply the DisinFolklore Analytical Method and some of the tools I've been speaking about over the past 12 weeks to help us cut through in one way the character Alaska.So if you remember in the very first show I talked about how disinfolklore imbues the character into stories and it's not just personalities which develop characters but it's actual places it's any phenomenon in a story and this is one of the genius discoveries of Russian propagandists that they can, and indeed of MAGA and Donald, that they can imbue personality into objects and phenomena in stories. And Alaska is one, Alaska Talks is one such character. Then I want to talk about the timeline of emotions and this timeline of emotions work which I've just sent this I tweeted about it a while ago it's a very important tool in the analytical toolbox that I am helping to make us all aware of and the timeline of emotions is the product of work, joint work, by the psychologist Paul Ekman and the 15th Dalai Lama. Paul Ekman, some of us might know that great show which is based on his work, Would I Lie to You? Maybe I've got the title wrong.But basically, Paul Ekman has an intuition as a genius, a brilliance, which he then evolved for seeing micro expressions and understanding what they signified about the people's minds on their faces. And the work he's done is extraordinary in the timeline of emotions tool I put into the distant folklore analytical method.But the first thing I want to really talk about, because it's on all of our minds, is to give a perspective on the character Alaska talks. So in the Disinfolklore analytical method, we can talk about Alaska talks as a character. in a story which provokes emotions, which has been provoking emotions in all of our minds.And in the Disinfolklore analytical method, we can perceive particular memes in our information space as characters, So this is in line with the idea that the news we are listening to is in many ways, including the structural, absolutely identical to folklore, to stories, books, novels, plays, music, in which we expect to encounter characters with personalities.Usually given a moniker, a name. And many of us, for instance, who've been lucky enough to go to university or study literature or critical theory, have had the opportunity to write essays on, for instance, English language novels or foreign language novels on characters in novels and films.But the Disinfolklore analytical method enables us to see how abstract concepts can be imbued with the character of personality. So by this I mean, for instance, the Russians and MAGA attribute aspects of personality to non-human entities. MAGA, say, to libs, owning the libs. Democrats are an abstract and they become archetyped and then individuals and othered and then individuals are used as fodder in stories according to whether or not they match the attributes, the personality, which these MAGA propagandists give to, for instance, a Democrat or a Lib or European or whatever you like. Russia, for instance, archetypes itself as a bear, and so this is the primary archetype in Russian self-identity and propaganda, which then begets other sub-archetypes like don't poke the bear. And these, as I've argued in my writing and before on this show, the don't poke the bear troll, the meme, ‘Don't Poke the Bear’, is probably the most successful Disinfolklore meme ever. And it's so successful that international relations majors and those who advised, for instance, both Republican and Democrat presidents in the United States, for decades were and are animated by this meme. And we sometimes think that the meme, Don't Poke the Bear, corresponds to some meaning system apart from the metaphor itself. But in my humble opinion, it doesn't. It is simply that. So the idea that you don't attack Russia, which of course Ukraine defies and stamps on every single day, it is all... is all there is to don't poke the bear. So it's a meme which is then imbued with the character of a serious geopolitical strategy that governs the conduct of nations that determines whether or not America or other countries will defend international law, their commitments under the UN Charter and a variety of other international legal instruments that were signed up to after the Second World War. And ‘Don't Poke the Bear’ is all there is to it. Often professionals talk about it as if it's... it's just a proxy for something else, but actually that is all it is.And so there we have Russia archetyping itself as a bear, so as an abstract concept. And it also archetypes itself as an innocent bear cub in many situations, as I spoke about last week. So the innocent bear cub Russia is forced, is compelled to respond to what it perceives as provocations.And provocations itself is another character, which is an abstract concept, which is... is almost alien outside of discourses involving Russian. We do talk about agent provocateur or crime passionnel in the context of Roman law or France where you can be justified in attacking your lover's suitor, and it's a defence. But of course, this is really only in literature, but Russia itself has used this, what I call the provocation logic cycle, as a character which enters our minds and determines our responses. to frankly, when we're not, when our brains aren't addled, clear situations in which if you're attacked, you're allowed to defend yourself, as in the case of Ukraine or any of our countries attacked. And so this phenomenon... of characters appears in the stories, the millions, the billions of memes which we're encountering at the moment, which I call Disinfolklore, because these stories themselves reach at least one of the six elements in the Code of Positive Trolls.The first element is really the only one one needs to know at the moment, generosity. And it's not generous of Don, Druidy Don, Druidy Don, this in folklore, Druidy Don, to offer the souls of millions of Ukrainians living inside areas temporarily under occupation. It's the very opposite of generosity. They don't belong to him.He's archetyping himself as a peacemaker. But this is not generous, it's most ungenerous to Ukraine. You could argue it's generous to Russia. And in fact, I would argue it's very generous to Russia. And then the second element of the code of positive trolls, which determines whether we're talking about disenfoked or counter disenfoked or is triggered, which is ethical discipline. And so ethical discipline is set by the post-World War II legal order, the United Nations Charter, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which governs the 2003 treaty between Russia and Ukraine, in which they recognized and set out an excruciating metre by metre detail their borders, that treaty itself registered in the UN treaty depository. I often tweet it because it's got Vladimir Putler's name, it's got a signature on it, this treaty. So you could argue it's very generous of Don to offer part of Ukraine to Russia. but it's not ethical because it's against the international rules-based order.But usually we don't need to really know anything about international law to understand that any story and any meme and any talking head speaking words which supports the absurd proposition that a power that Russia, which is losing the war on a large number of metrics, should be granted a legal title over land which it cannot conquer anymore.Through might, and it's Russia itself which asserts the idea that might is right, might is right, and now it is depending on another country, the United States, to deliver in a meeting in Alaska lands, legal title to lands and people, which it can't win on the battlefield.And so this is such a bizarre and unusual situation that I think we can work very hard to maintain our focus on how odd it is for any American president or Western leader to offer another country, part of another country, as part of so-called peace talks, without the other country being there, while that country, Ukraine, is winning the war and killing and eliminating a thousand Russian soldiers a day, and as we've seen in the last day or two, booting the Russians out of Sumy, and other parts of Ukraine and now Ukraine is back in fact to attacking the so-called Druzhba pumping stations in Bryansk and hopefully continuing to attack all of the rest of Russia's oil infrastructure. So this is such an unusual situation where against the wishes of 42 million Ukrainians, a foreign power is attempting to deliver part of their land to another foreign power while Ukraine is winning on the battlefield. So we have to then question what is going on.Now, many of our leaders from other countries say, from the European Union and other countries, are all name-checking President Trump and thanking him for his peace efforts. I have absolutely no insight into their inner thoughts, but I imagine most strongly that this is a verbal capitulation to Donald and it's how they've decided to deal with it.But essentially how I see these entire talks and the talks about talks, so all of the information warfare memes emanating from Russia, emanating from America and emanating from the chatter from people like us. risks archetyping Ukraine as weak. So that for me is the primary purpose of this entire enterprise.It's some irony that just at the moment, Ukraine is at its strongest. Donald and Putler are trying to archetype it as weak, as a supplicant, as looking for peace. And Ukraine must demonstrate in this Disinfolklore Galaxy that has been created by Donald and by Putler, Ukraine must demonstrate that it wants peace even though it is attacked. But ultimately, Russia and Donald are continually trying to archetype Ukraine as weak as indeed Donald did in the White House that time. And so that is what I essentially see all this waffle about the Alaska talks as trying to affect.And if we have this in mind, then we can be quite careful about how we talk about the Alaska talks so that we're not promoting it. the idea of Ukraine as weak. We're not using the limited oxygen there is to talk about this soap opera, which essentially is two Russian mafia Dons meeting in America,to talk about buying a skyscraper which neither of them owns. And neither of them has the power to own and never will own. They just don't have the military force. to force Ukraine into surrendering its land. And how anomalous this situation is can be seen in how normal peace processes go.And Donald himself has been claiming credit in a variety of different peace processes where he is playing a the role that you would normally expect in a piece process. And when I say playing the role, I mean acting in the role rather than playing a substantive role where he is attempting to be in the middle and an impartial role arbiter, whereas in the Ukraine case there isn't almost any pretence about archetyping himself as an impartial observer. He is and has been consistently since Paul Manafort's plan of 2016 to surrender eastern Ukraine to Russia. This is the consistent policy position of Donald Trump and the Russian mafia, mafiosi, whom he represents, works for and for all we know is. So we have Russia and Russia negotiating in America the fate of a country it cannot and never will control. But these are very resonant, emotionally resonant trolls. The Alaska talks everything Donald says about Ukraine, everything his advisors, Lindsey Graham, Putin, all of this chatter is very emotionally resonant. The Nobel Peace Prize troll is preposterous on so many different levels and it's repeated so frequently, as I wrote about yesterday, I presume it's put forward by Donald and his team as a motive to cover and conceal what is clearly the case is that the United States,It's probably the worst moment in America’s history, by far worse than Iraq. because of the long-term consequences of it. But what President Trump and America are doing is providing a motive to conceal the fact that they are working on behalf of a foreign power to sell out a supposed ally. And so what we can do, I think, is be aware of this and and try to resist being drawn into it and try to resist having our emotions, our intentions, our mood, especially our moods, our attitudes and affected too much by this play which is going on in our information space and in fact in our own brains and our own minds. And this is the worst case scenario I talked about in my February speech at the Pirate Party Security Conference in Munich at the same time as the Munich Security Conference. I set out how I believed what Donald and Russia would do now is to roll out their provincial Disinfolklore Galaxies globally. And we had a first taste of that, actually, while I was speaking in Munich and in the week afterwards with the White House meeting. and European and global leaders passed the test then, but now we see a similar structure in the situation now. So these things go in cycles and the strategy which Donald uses and which indeed Russia uses is to continue to bulldoze us with this nonsense every few months until we surrender to it.And my job and our job as Friends of Ukraine and as NAFO fellows and on Volia Radio is to keep a clear-eyed focus on what is real and what is an illusion, what is illusory. and the illusion here is Donald is peacemaker, that something will come out of these political talks.That's all I really wanted to say about the Alaska stuff. And so really what Donald and Putin and many of us unknowingly have the effect of doing is... When we're sharing memes, for instance, about Alaska, we're negatively impacting our own moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations.So I use those four terms to describe the overlapping aspects of our emotional spectrum. that Donald works on. So that is their primary objective, Donald, MAGA, the people behind him, the entire information space. It's to affect our moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations. And the content of the memes is immaterial, whether it's about Alaska, Ukraine giving up territory, or Russia's victory inevitable, or migrants or people eating dogs or dogs eating people, who knows what they're talking about. The whole point is to affect our moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations. And we have sovereignty over our moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations. And my job is to help give us resilience and myself build my own resilience to being affected in this way and to find little tricks. So, for instance, the trick I mentioned, I think it was on the third appearance of how I've stopped. I don't have images anymore on Twitter. I've the image preview. I think it's media preview. So I've cut that out.That's halved the amount of data which my brain encounters and which I need to filter out. And I can then just click on the picture and I can see it if something in the text entices me. And then other tricks that we all use, we probably see the first two words or three words of certain messages or from certain people, we can block them. or just filter them out. So that's one way we can do it. But when we're jumping into the pool, we need a way of noticing how our moods, attitudes, intentions and or motivations are being affected by a particular meme. And then if, as most of us do, and everyone certainly on Volya Radio wants to do, we want to counter distant folklore by consciously and positively affecting others and our own moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations with positive information.So positive information as defined by its conformity with any of the six elements in the Code of Positive Trolls. For instance, being generous, being ethically disciplined. So Peter Pomerantz wrote a book about the Second World War, a propagandist who used deception. to help undermine the Nazis. That's not my job. I do a different job.Ethical discipline is the most important element in the Code of Positive Trails and in my work. And I try to stick rigidly to that. Obviously I fail a lot, but that's my aspiration and what people pointed out. I try to make up for that. For me, the memes or the ends do not justify the memes.I know there's people in NAFO and co who don't mind doing all that, but that's not my role. And so that's what I mean by positive information. The memes conform either to all or most, I think actually to all of the six elements of the code of positive trolls, they're generous, they demonstrate patience.So we think about the difference between Donald and Putler as 20th century trolls and President Zelensky a 21st century. Troll. So both sets are trolls. Titanic struggle between the two. As far as we know, President Zelensky is generous. He's ethically disciplined. He's like ridiculously patient. I mean, I'm so ashamed personally.But he and all Ukrainians have to go through this drama over simply defending their country. It's extraordinary. And how he has to pretend, as I assume he's doing, to kowtow to President Trump. and pretend that these so-called peacemaking efforts are anything other than chaos sowing, and they've been chaos sowing for months now, for six months now, and they've completely tried to skew the battlefield and the information battlefield against Ukraine. And so the patience, which is the third element of the code of osterodrome, that President Zelensky and those around him are demonstrating is just, I mean, they should get the Dalai Lama Award for patience. Their focus is extraordinary, whereas we see with Putin and Donald Trump, nothing they do is generous, nothing they do is ethically disciplined, so they failed to first two elements, and nothing they do is patient. As we see these attacks around Pokrosk, this is about the 4,000th time We have seen Russia put everything it has into trying to create a tactical advantage, which they can then somehow spin into a strategic advantage in the information space. Whereas all of us know that Pokrovsk was supposed to fall a year ago. So we're already in credit. And as far as I can see from Russia, malcontent news, which I subscribe to, this Pokrovsk stuff is, yes, it's bad news and it's danger, but it's nothing of strategic importance, but it will be spun by useful, knowing and unknowing useful idiots into something which Donald will probably amplify very soon. So controlling, so that my method works on any sensory information. So it's not just about Ukraine or MAGA. It should work in our personal life. It should work on the source.Whether the source is the internet or your best friend or your mother telling you something about Ukraine or Russia or anything, really. But it's designed particularly to help us resist the mood-affecting disinfo-clore of Russian and Trump, Brexit, Disinfolklore. And really, whenever we feel this sense, our mood being altered by a meme, that should be our first indication that something funny is going on. And something potentially bad is going on. So with the Alaska thing and basically, well, by now we know that anything emanating from MAGA, Donald, or any of those people around him, like Lindsey Graham and all that, whenever they affect our mood positively, we need to be on guard. Yeah. And usually when they affect us negatively, that is when we should do our best, and I try to do my best, I don't always succeed, in avoiding amplifying the nonsense, whatever the particular mood-altering nonsense they're purveying is.And so the best tool I've come across for helping this comes from the Nobel Prize winning Peace Prize, someone who actually won the Nobel Peace Prize, Dalai Lama and the psychologist Paul Ekman. And they developed this three-step timeline of emotions model. So timeline, it's a nice play on words here.They didn't mean it because they came up with this before we had timelines. But the timeline of emotions helps us find a pattern that in the oodles of emotional journeys we're stimulated to participate on each day and each hour, minute and second. Almost all the stimulations in our environment trigger an experience of an emotion and often a concatenation of emotions. And sometimes we have difficulty interpreting the meaning of these emotions in real time, but how we react to such triggered experiences has a huge impact on the way we live. And we can read this timeline of emotions, cognitive model, trigger, experience, reaction. So it's just three words.Donald would probably even be able to remember it himself. into a huge variety of emotionally resonant storytelling forms, from Russian disinformation to contemporary films, advertising, courting strategy, memes, and really any accidental or strategic measures that we or others use to affect emotions. I'm going to labour this point because it's so important to understand how Disinfolklore works and how we can work to counter it. so please be prepared for some repetition and if you take away anything from this hour it's trigger experience reaction so every meme and by meme I consider any informational unit a meme so Alaska is now a meme but any of the memes, any of the informational units about Alaska, they are themselves informational units which have the power to rigor our emotions which we can then experience consciously and then how we react to them, whether we share the meme whether we allow the meme to depress our mood, and then we allow it to depress our mood, and then we go on and depress someone else's mood, which is the purpose of these memes. So the first, the step one in this model, which we can use for interpreting any data, is something in your environment, our environment triggers our emotions. And we experience a feeling or feelings with a certain set of qualities.And this is Paul Ekman's great contribution to science and to psychology, where he reduces and has this model of the five most important emotions. and obviously you can have any number and you can have different emotions here but he's spent decades on this and is just and is brilliant, if anyone's seen Lie to Me that, I think it's two seasons, it's well worth watching, you really learn a lot about psychology from it. Anger, fear, disgust, sadness or enjoyment? So whenever we feel these emotions which underpin our moods, our attitudes, our intentions and our motivations, anger, fear, disgust, sadness or enjoyment, this is one of the core teachings in distant folklore and in positive trolling which is once we feel our emotions engaged that's when we can raise our incoming troll radar to try and triage whatever this informational unit is and to try and work out what's going on here. So anger, fear, disgust, sadness or enjoyment, the same meme will provoke in will enjoyment as in mockers sadness or disgust or in a MAGA cult member will enjoy the meme. but i will get angry about it um but the point is that we're triaging what's coming into our heads and then we react in a particular way either reflexively automatically which is how many of us operate on twitter and things or carefully to that feeling and that's what what we with the alaska troll for instance and all of this nonsense that's going on at the moment uh we can be quite careful about it but only if we recognize what's happening and we work out what is the trigger what's our experience of this trigger what emotion are we feeling fear disgust sadness or enjoyment and then we have a separate reaction to that we decide how are we going to react and So rather than the impulse, which would be all those three trigger experience reaction in one millisecond, that we do this deliberately and it's practice we can use. So for instance, suppose the idea that outer realm immigrants are a bad thing has been promoted relentlessly in our culture's information space. Such immigrants are portrayed as a threat to our inner realm's cultural sovereignty, security, and sustainability. So this inner realm, think of the princess's fairytale castle surrounded by a moat, or MAGA's idea of America, or Brexit's idea of... of England and outer realm division is usually imminent in most forms of effective distant folklore. And basically, whenever we're taught to feel that immigrants are going to threaten our inner realm, then any meme or story about immigrants coming to steal our sovereignty, they're going to take away our votes, our security, they're going to be criminals and do unspeakable things, or fertility, which is upon which the sustainability of our cultures depends, which is when Donald talks about Immigrants doing unspeakable things to female or male members of our community.Then we feel this anger, this sense of threat, and we react emotionally. And it's this emotional reaction. So trigger, experience, reaction. This emotional reaction. We vote for Donald. or we go out and do bad things to immigrants or we just vote for anti-immigrant parties or our moods change, then that is giving power to the propagandists.So that's really the timeline of emotions, trigger, experience, reaction is just what I wanted to leave with you today. So that's all I had really to say today.Many thanks to Volya Radio (.@Volya4UA on Twitter / X spaces and Spotify. I appear weekly at 19:00 Kyiv time for an hour. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

So another so another busy week in the Disinfolklore Galaxy that we are currently being wrapped up inside. I don’t use the term Disinfolklore Galaxy lightly. It is a technical term. I can define it scientifically. The easiest way to understand what’s happening to us, if you are not MAGA, then just look at MAGA and see how people were wrapped up inside MAGA. You think ‘gosh, that’s really odd. That would never happen to me.’ But now we as a participant in Ukrainian info space, we are now experiencing this same process. So this is really one of the main frames - Disinfolklore Galaxy - which I would like to use to interpret the data coming from a whiplash week within which Donald stops deliveries of Patriot Interceptors. No he doesn’t. That person did. No that person. He didn’t know. Now he wants to arm Ukraine, using Europe’s money. But he didn’t ask Europe. No-one in NATO was warned about Donald’s announcement. “Controlling or coercive behaviour” by individuals of other people became a crime in England in 2015. Among examples of what such Coercive Control behaviour involves in English law include the following, which also apply to how Russia acts in occupied parts of Ukraine towards Ukraine and Ukrainians: isolating a person from their friends and family; depriving them of their basic needs; monitoring a person via online communication tools or using spyware; using digital systems such as smart devices or social media to coerce, control, or upset the victim including posting triggering material; taking control over aspects of their everyday life; depriving them of access to support services, such as specialist support or medical services; forcing the victim to take part in criminal activity … to encourage self-blame and prevent disclosure to authorities; economic abuse including coerced debt; controlling the ability to go to school or place of study; taking wages, benefits or allowances; threatening to hurt or kill; threatening to harm a child; threatening to reveal or publish private information; threatening to hurt or physically harming a family pet; assault; sexual assault or threats of sexual assault; reproductive coercion; limiting access to family, friends and finances; withholding and/or destruction of the victim’s immigration documents, e.g. passports and visas; and threatening to place the victim in an institution against the victim’s will.I’d like to talk about today this whiplash feeling I first experienced this feeling when I worked as a diplomat in eastern Ukraine. I worked on a bridge that divided Russia occupied Luhansk from government controlled Ukraine. I physically passed into a space. Russia-occupied Luhansk in which what I now understand as a Disinfolklore galaxy was being unfurled, revealed and entrenched not just in the geographical space that is Russia-occupied Ukraine but in the mental space of every single person who lived there and the Disinfolklore Galaxy that was created inside Russia-occupied Ukraine and inside the minds of everyone inside Russia-occupied Ukraine was a function of several different aspects of the same communications techniques that Donald today is using. The energy. The Mana of Disinfolklore is coercive control and coercive control can be exercised using physical violence, sexual violence, economic violence and psychological violence.Often Coercive Control through which Disinfolklore Galaxies, like the MAGA cult and inside Russia-occupied Ukraine and inside Russia itself is a function of all four types of violence. The result of it is that the people who live inside these - I use the metaphor of Spider-Man‘s web which some of us might remember if we’re of a certain age where you’re just covered in this web and it’s just sticky sticky sticky and you can’t get out but you can see through it ‘cause it’s translucent and this is how I see the Disinfolklore Galaxy descending. I saw it descending over the people living in Russia-occupied Ukraine it took me a long time to understand what it was. Today I see Donald attempting to descend this web this Disinfolklore Galaxy over the whole of humanity…I don't know whether anyone's counted them, but thousands, tens of thousands, as we glance through specific visual memes that communicate many different ideas at once and which provoke us on different emotional journeys, thousands, tens of thousands that we, as those of us participating in the X, Telegram, TikTok, Insta, information spaces are experiencing.And this is aside from our in real life interactions with our pets, friends, family, work colleagues and people in shops. And throughout all of this, we can detect the vibrations emanating from two particular Disinfolklore Galaxy-creation. mechanisms: one Russia and two - for want of a better way of summing it up - MAGA.So now MAGA which was for most of us it was an object outside us. 2015, as perhaps we saw family members fall into that Disinfolklore galaxy, now it is entwined with whether or not our social security check will arrive, whether or not Ukraine will get Patriot missiles and the same thing with Ukraine and Russia. So I really try to communicate this idea of how Disinfolklore is wending its way through our consciousness, through our minds at all times now. We are out on the extremes. I mentioned this last week, how I perceive those of us who are participating in X and the Ukraine information space, but other people are in other discourses. You know, even football. We heard someone talking about how Donald met Chelsea Football Club this week before we saw him meeting. I think it was Barcelona in the White House, and he asks them these preposterous questions which they have no idea about.So the Disinfolklore Galaxy is intervening in all sorts of other discourses. So I try to stay aware of that. What I'd like to talk to you about today is this experience that we're inside, not from the outside perspective, because I'm part of it.And it's a fundamental tenet for me and for all of my work and for many of our work that... Disinfolklore is not something - disinformation- that happens to other people. Trolls are not things which other people fall for. Weak people, unintelligent people. They are a phenomenon in our mental space and our information space that all of us are being constantly enmeshed in, hit with, provoked by. I first experienced this feeling when I worked as a diplomat in eastern Ukraine between 2015 and 2018. I worked on that bridge, that physical geographical, that physical space that divided Russia-occupied Luhansk from government-controlled Ukraine. As I physically passed into Russia-occupied Ukraine, Russia occupied Luhansk every day, I became enmeshed in what it was impossible to avoid seeing as a Disinfolklore galaxy. Of course, I didn't have that nomenclature then. I didn't coin the term Disinfolklore until around the 15th of February, 2023. Basically in that world was filled with false stories being broadcast from every possible medium, in every possible style and mode into the minds of the people living there and then being broadcast onwards from them into their friends' and family's lives and then having an impact because, of course - I've talked before about Mana, the energy, the Mana of MAGA and Russian disinfolklore is coercive control.Coercive control exercised in these four forms of violence, which I find quite useful model, physical, sexual, economic, and... physical, sexual, economic, and the fourth one will come to me in a second. And psychological, did I say that? Physical, psychological, economic, and sexual. I think the four are there, but hopefully you'll get what I mean.Coercive control is immanent in in every meme and in this idea of the 48 days Donald’s given to Russia to murder Ukrainians. Obviously, most of us are also connected to other discourses, whether it's US politics. or other countries of interest.There too it's the same dynamic. It’s the same energy/Mana of coercive control in all of those processes. We see today Israel, as I understand it, bombing Syria in quite a serious way, again allowed by Donald and facilitated by Donald. So we see this coercive control is not just a metaphor, it's not just happening in man and female relationships within the patriarchal evangelical community. It's being projected from that micro to the macro on a geopolitical scale in every sphere. NATO is now trying, Donald is having ensured that Europe or most European powers now understand that America is no longer our protector and that we need to be independent of it. Now, Donald, they concocted this preposterous plan where Europe will pay for weapons from America and then pass them on to Ukraine with these preposterously complex import and export and legal agreements and all that. And France rightly and Italy rightly have said, ‘no, we're not playing this game.’I'm assuming what's underneath that and immanent in there is this understanding which has arisen, hopefully in those of us who have remained clear-eyed, that America as a secure, reliable security protector is dead and gone no matter how many times we're lured back into the family home by promises that our wife or our husband will no longer hit us. No matter how many times we're told, they've turned over a new leaf. They're no longer drinking. They're putting the violence behind them. They're just so sorry. We're not going back into this coercive control relationship. But we can't… We can't get out of it completely. We have to play the game.We have to pretend to a certain extent that we're still part of it. I hope I see that immanent in the actions of France and Germany and obviously the Baltic states and Poland and Germany I don't see it in the Nordic countries, but I imagine it's there, this understanding that we are still backing out of the family home. We will not be lured in with these trolls of NATO weapons. We'll buy a few American weapon systems and give them to Ukraine, but we're not relying on them anymore. It was good to hear Latin yesterday on Volya Radio on X spaces talking about how Ukraine would be unwise to depend on the F-16 platform for the future. So the future is French. The Disinfolklore galaxy itself was created inside Russia-occupied Ukraine and inside the minds of everyone inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. It's a function of several different aspects of the communication techniques that were being used. Their energy is always discernible if we look for coercive control, whether it was from the internet trolls forcing us to think what we don’t even want to contemplate or from bosses telling their staff that they either needed to support the regime or leave or people being disappeared. The Mana of Disinfolklore Galaxy is this coercive control. I used this metaphor in my February 2025 speech in Munich, which was very important, marked a very important moment, not just because what I talked about there, where I declared the Disinfolklore Universe made up of many different concatenating Disinfolklore Galaxies.I declared it was open at precisely the time JD Vance was hitting, slapping us all on the face, was exerting psychological violence against us by attacking our democratic systems and say Germany’s means of ensuring Naziism remains dead by regulating by law certain speech acts inside its jurisdiction.Then on my way back from Munich, was that many of us probably will never forget the moment we first heard and saw the images appearing on our timelines about the meeting in the White House between President Zelenskyy. So I used the metaphor of Spider-Man's web, which some of us might remember if we're a certain age. We're just covered in this web, and it's really sticky, sticky, sticky, and you can't get out, but you can see through it because it's translucent and there's light. and you think you can get out of it. And I use that to communicate what I mean by a Disinfolklore Galaxy, which we saw descending on friends of ours in MAGA and which we - those of us who've been looking at what happened in Russia-occupied Ukraine, and obviously we see it has happened to people in Russia as well. It took me quite a while to see what it was and to find its constituent. elements. But from the very beginning, there was what I call a Family Resemblance between MAGA and Russia-occupied Ukraine -the communications techniques. So both arrived at the same time. They're genetically connected, as those of us who read the Mueller report and who read the House and Senate Intelligence Committees’ reports on Russian interference in the 2016 general election, presidential election in the United States. Those of us who read the Grafica reports, which were done for the House Intelligence Committee and other work which set out the tactics and tropes used by Russia to ensure that Donald was elected in 2016. This was all arranged and organized under the auspices of Prigozhin and to this day most people probably haven't mainstreamed an understanding of how much of an impact this particular individual and the Disinfolklore propagation apparatus which he financed had on the lie, all of our lives, whether it's in Brexit, England, on the migrants and the political parties like in Hungary, in Poland and in Slovakia and other countries had on that.So there's that genetic connection between MAGA and Russia. There's also the technical connections in terms of the same techniques, the same cult building techniques. The manipulative storytelling. The use of memes in newspapers. The impact of these billions of memes on us. It's a system.It's not just individual daily news which goes on the next, but immanent in it is a really complex, well-planned out, highly effective system, which now doesn't just impact our favourite aunt who went MAGA, or someone we know, our favorite influencer who went pro-Russia, this impacts all of our lives.So I've worked on it to try and develop my 12 analytical tools. I didn't set out to do that. I set out to try and understand in the fall of 2019 what Donald was doing. And I didn't understand it then, and I didn't really have a theory on it. I wasn't on Twitter.I didn't go on Twitter until June 2021. And this was while I was in Ukraine. It was during the whole first impeachment over Ukraine. So again, there was always these connections for me in my work in eastern Ukraine. At that point, I was in Dnipro, working where I worked for four years from 2018 to 2022 for the OSCE covering Zaporozhzhia and Dnipro and Kirivohrad for them for the OSCE for the international community and all along that coast of Zaporozhzhia which is now under occupation and my job there I basically went along and spoke to hundreds of elected officials in all of the villages and what they call the hromadas, the decentralized villages, all in areas which are now under occupation to try and understand the impact of the of the uh of Russia of the attack and what was going to happen in in the future and that was my day job.But at night I was trying to parse the data in Russia-occupied ukraine and connect it with uh what was going on in the world and what was going on with with MAGA at the time and the Republicans in the America. Of course, at that time, many of us will remember we thought a few javelins would make a difference. And yeah, they made a great difference for a few days, but we need a lot more than that. And so the 12 analytical tools which I developed out of all of this work, which I hope will help us in a daily way, I use this. Most of us will understand what a Venn diagram is. We have the two circles. One is MAGA Donald. The other is Russia. And in 2018, 2019, when I started really in earnest looking at these separate areas, the Venn diagram representation of MAGA and Donald, there was only a little bit of crossover in my conscious awareness. Now, if I can flash forward to this week, we see these circles are quite synonymous. The space, the common space between them is vast. and they're meeting at every geographical point in the world, whether it's in Kosovo and Serbia or in just everywhere.Everything Donald is doing to help China and to help Russia is this joint space. The techniques they're all using from my perspective are quite similar. I see the patterns in them. I feel quite lucky that I chose to focus on this. I thought after the 2020 election that, you know, that was it. You know, I'd done quite interesting work. Now that was all dead and gone. Here we are the same phenomenon - trolling and trolls - is back into impacting our whole lives. The trolling element was the first metaphor which I used. So my definition of trolling is emotion-moving activity of body, speech and mind.So this can be Donald trying to troll NATO countries now into spending European money on arms (which probably will never arrive or will arrive in dribs and drabs or there'll be all sorts of supply problems, you name it). So it's about trolling us with the hope that this is going to happen.We see the response of the nation states of France and Italy to this trolling, which is to say, no. We're not playing this time. But that trolling is also in Donald's latest untruth from untruth social, which has all of the archetypes in it. We talked about that the first few weeks, which he has used to troll people. So a MAGA adherent, a MAGA member's brain will just be triggered by all of these trolls, like these mantras, these energies wrapped up in language like ‘Hunter Biden’, ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’, ‘China’, all of these mantras which he he established it. This is how you get people into a cult. This is what happened to our relatives and friends who became cult members, MAGA cult members. This is what happened to all the Russians. This is what happened to the Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Ukraine.Coercive control is the technique. This is what happened to people we might know in our own lives who got into abusive relationships, who got involved with pickup artists. It's a technique. It works time and time again. And now it is happening to our civilization. The good story here is that I have the belief that Ukraine is led by somebody, what I would call the 21st century troll. He is a master of all kinds of communication techniques. He is a master of emotional understanding of the emotional spectrum and how language and imagery interact to affect our emotions, at scale. He’s also a master of organisations, as well as the juridical element. So he's a master of the magical element of leadership - trolling - and of sovereignty. The juridical, the formal, the procedural, the boring parts, the nuts-and-bolts of sovereignty. So Ukraine is playing, as I predicted and many of us predicted, is giving us a masterclass in how you deal with this.Their dominant strategy is, and we saw it this week, Ukraine, the instruction went out, and I read the instruction, and I'm obeying and adhering to the instruction as well, went out to all Ukrainian leaders and everyone in Ukraine from the Ukrainian government, from President Zelensky, is we have one job. Our one job is to get America on on our side and to keep America on our side.So there's no space for cussing America or going, oh, really, you know, it's really annoying. And it was interesting hearing the Ukrainian lobbyist yesterday on Volya Radio, brilliant show, encourage everyone to listen back on that. Someone who's really connected to all of this and him saying, look, after the White House visit, there was no kind of backlash and recriminations, it was like, what can we do to get America back on board? But how I would see it is 95% of Ukraine's success factor and its victory plan doesn't depend on America or Donald. They can afford this 50 days. It's not nice. Horrible things will happen. But they're taking the bet. They can manufacture drones.They can plan better their attacks on energy infrastructure in Russia. The bet is that Russia can't effectively spend those 50 days defending against them. So it's a bet. Ukraine has taken that bet. So they're giving us a masterclass in how you keep America on board, not just for the Patriot missile, defense missiles, and all the other millions of other things America can do. But for the future and also for the sake of their allies in Europe, the Baltics, and because none of us are ready for America to physically withdraw. And that's still on the table. All of us expect it to happen and have to plan for it to happen. So that's how I see their strategy. their strategy fitting into this 50 days. Coercive Control is about cult formation. Many of us will not have consciously experienced being... Well, some of us might have, actually, if you...I remember once walking down the street, and I ended up in... I didn't know it at the time, but they were the thing that John Travolta's part of. And before I knew it, I was sitting in this office on Henry Street in Dublin, and they were asking me all these questions. I was doing this somehow. I got out of there. But... that now this is happening to us everywhere everywhere we go and so we are being wrapped up in i use the metaphor Disinfolklore galaxy because it's a bit less um intimidating than uh cult.The purpose of the coercive control of everyone in the MAGA US government cult - everyone who is left - from Druidey Don Disinfolklore himself. Everyone down the hierarchy from Don. Everyone who succeeded in that world is is both a recruiter and a victim.This is something we have never seen uh before. It’s unfamiliar to us. Those of us who studied or lived or worked in Russia-occupied Ukraine will have seen it before. This is what's helped me recognise it. What Adolf Hitler did… What Mussolini did was very effective. But they did not have the techniques that are available today. Skinner’s work on behaviourism at Harvard, which is integrated into these kind of aspects of our internet and our computers and our computer programs, the nudging, trolling of us using effective techniques. This provoking of emotions so that we act in particular ways. This wasn't... this wasn't scientifically grounded for Hitler and for others. They didn't have the internet and Telegram or TikTok. So this is the experience of all battered spouses. Sadly, we are now going through it. What I'm trying to do is provide us with a product - Disinfolklore Analytical Method - that we can use in our heads, a mental algorithm we can use in real time as we're dealing with all this data. To cut through this whole mass of confusion, which in the autumn of 2019, I was looking at just as an external object.It was in Trump world. And prior to that, I was looking at it as an external object. I wasn't in America. When he got elected it was still external to me. Now it's everywhere. But the same unit, this idea, the unit, the fundamental metaphor, the fundamental unit for me is troll and trolling. This emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind. That activity can be anything Donald says, anything his sons say. It can also be the activities of all of those people working underneath him. The 50 days mantra now, which is just so preposterous. Now we see what's happening around Pokrovsk. On the battlefield. The fifty day troll gets even more… It’s even more horrid. There's no, we can go, oh, well, maybe he's expecting Russia to run out of steam. It's not, like, I suppose when it came to President Biden and his administration and many of us, believed after a while, we thought, ‘okay, there is a method to their madness. They are trying to wear Russia down. And yes, it's totally immoral, but they have a plan. And at some point, they're going to go all in.’ Then many of us realized at the end of it, there wasn't a plan.This is different because we have the data about what MAGA governance is doing to America. It’s coercive control. So what it’s doing to Ukraine fits that pattern. However misplaced President Biden and his advisors, were, they weren't consciously, actively malign people who closed down all of USAID and have left what is it, something like 100,000 people have died as a result of this already and have destroyed the American system of governance. They are hunting people in parks and 3,000 people a day being seized on the streets. So we can't just look at Ukraine as an independent space and hope, okay, Donald will do good by Ukraine, while in every other domain he’s acting for Russia and China in destroying America. It's part of this entire system.We can't come to any other conclusion when we look at the data than that he is in league with Russia and indeed with China and the interests of these countries. He’s ancting against our interests. Somehow though Ukraine has manoeuvred through brilliance. It's maneuvered itself into a space where it's no longer like that White House visit.We cannot however hope that in 50 days, like we will end up in 50 days, we will end up totally inside the cult of being subjected to this if we believe that. That would be my take on that. I listened to the words Donald said very closely the other day. He hardly mentioned Ukraine.So we're reading into it a lot. When he made the speech announcing how Europe was going to buy American weapons to use in Europe, you know, he talked about all the conflicts which he solved - none of which was true. He talked about all the money America had given to Ukraine. It wasn't true. And he hardly mentioned Ukraine. Now, obviously, that's a positive that he wasn't talking badly about Ukraine. We will bank these successes. It's a huge success of Ukraine's diplomacy operation and an achievement by all Ukrainians. And we've all paid a minor part in this - to get the situation back from how it was in the White House visit in February. But there's nothing to hope for here, really. We just need to plan as if America is no longer there and will never come back. Take what we can from them, but there's nothing good coming from that.The problem is we're vulnerable to this hope. That’s our vulnerability which they take advantage about or we think things will always come right in the end (although most of us probably no longer think that um sadly since at least since the full-scale invasion). Or we're encouraged by MAGA or Russia. We’re looking at MAGA people as victims, those poor souls. It's while we're falling for those trolls we're being wrapped up in something very, very, very similar. The people we're dealing with are very clever and just working on a different plane, as Zarina Zabrisky (see her latest film at https://khersonhumansafari.com/). She’s talked about her time as a linguistics student in St. Petersburg. How she did a course. Linguists had to do a mandatory course on combat propaganda. So this is in the 90s. So this is what we're up against. And I worked with a lot of people, army people in Ukraine, senior officers and they have an amazing skill set. But what we all have to acquire is a very different skill set, is to reconceptualize, for instance, the war in Ukraine as a proxy war by China. It may be, it may not be. But that's the kind of conceptual framework we have to look through the framing. Agilely look at it Like you might look at some 4D or 3D space in a computer program, you know, kind of move around it and look at the diamond from every angle.That's partly how we can avoid getting embroiled further in this Disinfolklore galaxy. What we can do to try and keep ourselves free. But every day is a struggle. We can't avoid this struggle if we are going to participate in the Ukrainian information space or actually now at this point in any information space. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Here, Decoding Trolls speaks about hunting for patterns in data. Disinfolklore is one such pattern that recurs in multiple different voices in forms of geopolitically relevant discourse that we do not associate with folklore or child-like emotionally resonant story-telling. Yeah, part of what helped me see this pattern, this is what I really do. I hunt for patterns in data. And I assimilate, as many of us do, who participate in X. And X, as we now know from the third report on foreign information manipulation and interference by the European Union, which was released recently.I highly recommend anyone to read, along with the first two reports, which was published a couple of weeks ago. X is where on a data set, I think it was over 40,000 FIMI instances of FIMI that were collected by the European Union. X was involved in 86% of them. So this is where we all are.And I know many of us have ethical dilemmas about should we be here, should we not? And most of us are also part of BlueSky and other places. But the fight is here and the examples are here of whether it's, I saw Maid Marion Simonyan, Russia’s chief government propagandists, tweeting again in her folksy Disinfolklore way where she does this a lot, where she tells these folksy stories as indeed does Donald. they tell these stories of, frankly, horrifying things. Like for instance, the way Donald communicated in, I think it was March, 2024, that if the head of a major NATO country said to him we can't pay for our NATO membership. Would you protect us? And he said, I'd say, you know, to do whatever the hell they want with you. And then this unit of information was then reported by CNN as a fact that Donald had told this head of state that America wouldn't protect him. But we're not clear whether this ever, ever happened, but it was reported as a fact by CNN. And so you see these folksy stories get taken up. Simonyon tonight, she's talking about how people in the offices in Moscow saying this or saying that, and these terms really interest me - “folk in the offices.” I've seen them for years now. And if it's a pattern, which is what, along with the horror of what they're saying, it's a pattern that made me suspicious, something methodical was going on here, which I use Disinfolklore to explain and to interpret. She says, oh, people in the offices in Moscow are saying that if Germany gives their weapons to Ukraine, that they will, Ukraine won't be able to do anything with them without Germany's help. Therefore, Germany is complicit, and so we'll have to strike Berlin. And so this is a classic piece of Disinfolklore. There's a distancing in the narrative form.It's presented as a folksy story. People in the offices of Moscow, as if she's just been, and the image in our head is she's just heard this gossip. And she said this before when she's spoken, the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June 2022. Many of us will remember this here.Where she said, people in Moscow are saying that all our hope is in the famine. And then she interprets what these folksy people are supposedly saying. And she's sitting beside the head of state. She's sitting beside Duncey Putin himself on the dais at St. Petersburg Economic Forum, dressed in green, which is why I call her Maid Maryon. Like a reverse Robin Hood. And this is an aspect of the Disinfolklore analytical method that we can use these folklore archetypes to interpret those who are themselves using these folksy archetypes to combat them.And she said, the people in Moscow are saying “all our hope is in the famine.” And what they mean by that is, this is her saying that she understands what the folk what the ordinary folk in Moscow are saying, they are saying that there will be famine in Africa and the migrants will come to Europe and then the European Union will release the sanctions because it's impossible for us not to be friends. So this is the folksy banter of the schoolyard. This is you speaking, your seven-year-old child speaking to their seven-year-old friend, best friend, and they've had an argument.It's impossible not to be friends, but this isn't a micro chat in a schoolyard. It's a conversation sitting beside the head of state of a country at war, which is planning to famine millions of people in Africa in a madcap attempt, which would really only You'd only see it in literature in Don Quixote or in some folktale.So the madcap plan to win in Ukraine is to starve millions of Africans. That will provoke the Europeans into lifting the sanctions. And then Russia will become friends with Europe and Ukraine will be abandoned. so the way she tells the story it's very solid Russian strategy but it's told in a folksy way and it's absolutely horrifying when you analyse what it's saying but it passes most people by it enters their inner minds.As indeed does this stuff archetyping the former president of Russia as drunk so many of us, many sensible people tweeting today the content of the former president of Russia's tweet, once again threatening WW3 if something happens. I think it's related to the Germans. So these are, um, kind of folk tale archetypes folks and stories, which communicate really horrifying, things when you parse the data and it's a pattern that they use and it's really effective because people like us share these, because they provoke something in us, in our emotions. Even if we think we're harming the former president by characterizing them, by archetyping them as drunk, we're still repeating the meme. And this horrifyingness is slyly communicated and the energy is continued and it's pinging around the world. Thankfully, now today, as many of us will know, because we're tuned into this, we see great advance in our political leadership over what we have experienced since February 2022. But this method of communication has had the impact on President Biden's policy, don't poke the bear, is a Disinfolklore meme, probably the most successful one ever, that actually impacts on... foreign policy, it stopped America properly helping Ukraine, and international relations itself, the entire discourse is full of these metaphors and Disinfolklore, “don't poke the bear” being one, but Disinfolklore memes that are represented as being a means of communicating foreign policy and strategy affecting the lives and deaths of millions of people. Whereas in fact, these strategies are only communicated by means of these memes and through these means. So what I have spotted, which as far as I'm aware, no one else's or no other writers have really noticed is this continuity across multiple narrative forms, discourses. It's obvious in anthropology or in folklore studies or in psychology, in Jungian psychology, when they're referencing myths and archetypes and storytelling. But the same dynamic is at place inside international relations discourse, inside the speeches up until recently of many of our leading politicians. And obviously everything Donald says, he speaks this in folklore fluently. It's these folksy stories from the Jan 6th anthem of the Jan 6th insurrectionists, organized by the current head of the FBI, the songs which were used in his rallies, which many of us, the talk, the folksy way of speaking about Alphonse Capone, the archetyping of Melania as Al Capone's wife, using, wearing this, the clothes, haute couture clothes made by Ukrainian fashion designers in LA, DressX, who supply haute couture interpretations of comic book, chic comic book aesthetics for people like Elon Musk and Melania Trump, who want to archetype themselves as characters in our info space, by referencing through their clothes, superheroes or characters from folklore, from folktale, from our contemporary folklore.So that's kind of a sample of the scale of what I believe I've identified with distant folklore in this narrative form. But to answer your question, it's at basic, it's a narrative form. which as far as I know, I'm the first person to spot it. 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President Zelenskyy's fluent in 21st century emotion-moving activities (trolling). He’s a master of what experts call the “magic-religious” aspect of the mysterious practice of leadership and sovereignty. He’s also an expert in the other aspect of the sovereign: the juridical. Duncey Putin and Don Disinfolklore Trump, by contrast, are stuck in the twentieth century. Let’s break them down into the constituent elements of the Sovereign Archetype which all three fit inside. Sovereignty has two functions, according to Dumézil (who discovered the tripartite structure immanent in Indo-European linguistics, cultures and communities): the Magico-religious and the juridical.Druidey Don Trump – Don Disinfolklore - is brilliant at forging a mythos that convinces people he has a superhuman ability to make the unexpected happen. Druidey Don – as I shall refer to him - may seem to have magical powers, yet what he does and what those around him amplify is in fact as I shall show a mechanical process that uses archetypes deeply embedded in our culture and in our minds in ways that are quite familiar to those of us who study Indo-European culture within the timeframe of the last 6,000 yearsThe Zelenskyy effect for the archetype of The Comedian: a much closer match between archetypes at various levels (the artist, the actor, and ordinary peoples’ emotional triggers, as evidenced by creating one of the post-Soviet space’s most successful entertainment companies)…I'm quite optimistic. So I still believe there will be a moment when America goes all in, Germany has gotten it all in. And I marked the moment, I think it was in April 2023. It was too late. I marked the moment in a tweet. I just saw it yesterday or next.So I still believe America will go all in. Certainly President Biden went all in a few days ago in his Valley Forge speech in the context of fighting Trump and Trumpism. And in pointing out that the theatricalness of Trump's use of the Jan 6th insurrectionists now in his rallies is, and President Biden referred to it as a fairy tale, a bad fairy tale. And then he went on to say, if you were reading about an ex-US president saying these things, saying that he pardoned these insurrectionists, you'd think it was a bad novel. So President Biden gets this disinfolklore element that these are just kind of stories.And I think what is going on with the Russian government, disinformation, as well as with what I call Trump Brexitism, which is a part of it, this Trump Brexit disinfo-clore as well, is they are, through this carnival, through this PT Barnum spectacle, they are turning us in from being mere voters, from electors, from participants in our own destiny. We have a human right of public participation and decision making. It's one of the core human rights. And what they're trying to do is using media to turn us from participants in this into watchers, into, you know, we just see the The theatricalness of it.It's just over the top. Everything is over the top. And it's a dictum I came up with relatively recently, but it's basically the media is not mediating. The media is creating the reality. It is using, it is creating the reality, it is reporting the reality it is creating.But in many cases, it only exists as a phenomena on that particular medium at that moment. It doesn't, so polling is used as this magical chrysanthem to say, oh, so what is completely made up only exists in the minds is said, oh, polls say this and polls say that. But what that is actually, we are thinking of that this is reporting reality, but actually is creating reality. And what also gives me optimism is that we have in President Zelensky a master, an absolute master of communication. So he, as we know, he was chief executive of the most significant privately held entertainment company in the post-Soviet space, arguably. He is an actor.I, in my experience of Eastern Ukraine, I got to know the actual building where he grew up. I used to go there to speak to an LGBTQIQ group who who operated out of there and who suddenly weren't getting persecuted by Russians, by Russia's infused far right when President Zelensky became president because there was police around.And so President Zelensky has probably one of the best ideas of how the narrative arc of this conflict. And obviously with the resources, all of us as individuals fighting for Ukraine in the information space have, and even Ukraine has, it's not enough to always defeat these vectors and these stories that are coming out.And so even this story, which I've seen as well, and the White House logs showing X and Y person has gone there to advise. And now we, I didn't understand what the word tanky was, and these are the Westerners who are sympathetic and empathetic, and I plead guilty as charged in certain moments of my life. But Crimea, the invasion of Crimea did change everything, even before I ended up working there in my mind. But these tankies going there, the people who are willing to surrender our civilization to the big bad wolf, because the big bad wolf says if we don't, they'll do x and y and of course it makes no sense um but they are you know inside this visiting the white house can itself be used as a story to depress sentiment and the core tenet where Zarina Zabrisky who's who does great work and who actually studied philology in saint petersburg um so i've studied philology i've gone back into linguistics and it it because I needed to understand what was going on in this world in Eastern Ukraine. And then I discovered that actually the Russians creating this content are philologists. And as part of your philology degree, which is an alien word in the Anglo-Saxon sphere, but linguistics, they study combat propaganda as part of their university course. And so I, almost by accident, have ended up in the realm of these particular sounds which work, like right, writ, rt, rt, rach, reich, these sounds which come from very deep Indo-European roots, meaning what is.RTA in Sanskrit, what is, and Russian Disinfolklore creates this artificial reality and it tries to claim what is. So there is a danger that even when we're reporting about these people visiting the White House, that we are knowledgeable as us are where our sentiment has been depressed and so for me an early insight for me was that when I feel my emotions being triggered then i go on guard so it's obviously hard to keep um you know this watch on your mind what's going into your mind but when i feel my you know fear anger disgust sadness happiness being triggered then My aspiration, I don't always achieve this, whether it's on Twitter or watching TV or reading a newspaper or hearing a story like this, I try to say, okay, this is triggering my emotions. I'm on guard now. And I'm wondering, am I going to end up in the state of mind that... Who wants me to end up in this state of mind?And if it's depressed about Ukraine's prospect, if it's depressed about America, or whether America will go all in, then I realize the manner of that is Russian, that's benefiting them. On the other hand, when I hear President Zelensky's speech, or just talking because he is the master communicator, and I feel happy, then I know this is Counter Disinfolklore. And so I have this sense that there's no better head of state to have, who is this genius of communications. He studied Charles Chaplin. He knows how to provoke emotions.As he said recently, you know, I spent most of my career trying to make Ukrainians laugh. And that was my raison d'etre. And now I'm trying to stop them from crying. And so you have this. So I like it. I wrote early in March 2022. I said, let's compare trolls. And I wrote this piece about Putin.know we see this as genius no he's a 20th century troll he knows the mechanics of it uh if i do this if i torture this person they will cry they'll fear they'll surrender they'll be vulnerable but president zelensky is working on a much different uh level he's a 21st century troll he has the full uh control troll is in this the sounds going in there of his emotions and the effect of his emotions, because he created these works of art. I mean, it was quite bawdy and populist stuff, but they were able to leverage a way of making comedy.And of course, He got into comedy, and Krivyi Rih, maybe you've been there, Jonathan, I've been there a lot, and it's a rough place. It's a tough place. He grew up in a place his parents were and are academics, but they grew up in a really tough town, and he used humour from the beginning to avoid getting beaten up. And then they turned this in this entrepreneurial way, and this is again why I'm optimistic, is because Ukraine had this, their core competency is you give them X and they'll turn it into this universe of amazing things.Give them a few javelins and they'll defeat the second army of the world. They'll push them back from Kharkiv, from Kherson, from Kiev. And President Zelensky and himself and his friends embody this sense, characteristic of Ukraine and as many of us who love Russia and loved Russia and had spent a lot of time trying to understand Russia through its literature that often folklorically inspired Dostoevsky's you know about but anyway know that Russia doesn't have this core competency so I suppose when we hear these stories, we become part of this story, we become a part of the spectacle.And if we can just withdraw a little bit and see if our emotions are triggered, then the Disinfolklore perspective helps us. 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It's 1942. You live by the railway. You see the trains travelling to Auschwitz.Would you know you're witnessing genocide?Between 2015 and 2018, working in eastern Ukraine as a diplomat, I witnessed a stealthily prepared and executed genocide. Even though I had studied the holocaust. Read much of its literature. It was not for several years after leaving that place, after the full-scale invasion, that I realised what I had seen and participated in. Disinfolklore as a topic of study is my response to the attempt to understand how I missed what Russia was doing through its brain-washing operations in Russia-occupied Ukraine: preparing Ukrainians to kill or be killed by Ukrainians.Disinfolklore can be used to conceal through stealth a genocide. Disinfolklore also can be used to conjure into being either a mythical or actual genocide. This is the importance of learning to see Disinfolklore and of integrating the Disinfolklore Analytjical Method into our every day thinking.This is the Mana of Russian Disinfolklore. It's about borders, inner outer realm. Let's protect the inner realm of England from the outer realm Syrians. They're males. They're dark. They're going to come in. And Russia, as we know, for instance, carpet bombed Syria in the autumn of 2015. So it's a totally integrated product.They create the refugee crisis, one million migrants to North Macedonia, and then they either fund directly, or say in the case of in Poland, where you have very antithetical government to Russism and see through it all, but they still benefited from the 2015 refugee crisis. But for the Russians, it's all tied into what I call the stealth genocide, which is now we see it. in plain sight, those of us who are tuned into what's going on in Ukraine. But the preparatory moment to it was from 2015 and to 2022. And I had a ringside seat to it.And despite all my vaunted education, I never, I didn't realize it. I didn't realize I was in a genocide. And I liken it to this, I use this example. a lot where I say you know it's 1942 at the end of your garden there's a railway track and you see the cattle cars going by on the way to Auschwitz you know you're witnessing genocide of course you don't you're just seeing a moment in it um and we look we were i was always scanning for these signs in ukraine 2015-2022 never imagined i was i was part of it i was participant that's just a precursor. so i happened to have been i studied international cambridge university which is famous for international law and i was inside what I now understand was a genocide. I've studied, I've read Primo Levi, I studied the Holocaust, I went to Auschwitz and Dachau and different places. I'm a great scholar of the Holocaust. And yet I found myself inside a genocide for three years, ground zero of a genocide and I never realised I was in it. In fact, I didn't realise it until I marked the moment on X at Decoding Trolls on the 1st of March 2022 and I realized, oh my God, this is what they were doing. They were preparing all the time and how they did this in this amazing information space that was literally like I liken it to an IKEA kit that was brought from Moscow into Russia occupied territories and it's unpacked some of it looks really clumsy it's it's like newspapers it's letters it's um radio stations it's uh online you know 30 different online broadcasts it's television that looks production values that looks like it's cnn to really um soviet um stuff which jonathan you'll remember from your time in in russia just really old-fashioned gray gray man and all of this to my eyes when i was there from early 2015 was this is mad, I don't understand what they're doing, but imminent in it, the Mana of all of this was to create this, and this is again where folklore comes in, and particularly in our culture, where they were creating this inner and outer realm. So we remember from these child stories, you know, the king's castle, the kingdom, the countryside, so this inner outer realm, which is matched by geography. So there's a river, this Russia occupied Ukraine. And then there's Ukraine.And of course, inside Russia occupied Ukraine, they call the Ukrainians, the usurpers, of the power of the man of the kingdom. And so that's outer realm. And you create this sense of inner outer realm. You get the geography, but you also do it by saying, Ukrainians are trying to kill you.And you begin in early 2014 thinking, I'm a Ukrainian. Why would the Ukrainians try to kill me? But it's everywhere. The entire universe of the space is telling you that Ukrainians are trying to kill you. And the vectors of this are a million stories every single day about mythical shellings, which never happened.I know they never happened because I was there. when they were supposed to have happened, and even when I was right next to it, and this gets to one of your points, Jonathan, about how you verified, you know, I was in situations where I heard the explosion, I saw a Ukrainian soldier polishing his RPG, which throws these grenades kind of thing, and I asked him, did you hear that explosion you go no and then i go to russia occupied across this bridge smith this this and i suddenly meet a russian um syria like a senior officer who immediately conducts me on this whole odyssey of showing me where they exploded what exploded the ukrainians did it and i see what looks like blood on the ground but it's blackberry season and tens of thousands of tons of blackberries have been brought across this border. And so everything looks like blood on the ground. And then for weeks afterwards in the media, they're talking about the Ukrainians killed three people.And so you could not have been closer to these explosions than me in actuality, but I don't know whether they happened. I don't know whether anyone was injured. I heard stories, two people brought to hospital, two not. And when you zoom out of this, you're left with stuff in the information space that you're reading on Twitter, or you'll hear it in a Donald rally or any of these things, and you're thinking, did this really happen? I don't know. And so how do I discern whether it matters whether it happened or not? And if I'm looking at it, people are creating the sense of other it's this what i call stealth genocide and this is core and disinfo because this is what the russians um were up to and i checked this yesterday actually president zelensky used the term genocide on the 5th of april 2022 for the first time and like me president zelensky is an international lawyer so you don't use the word genocide lightly.And the President of Poland used the term on around the 15th of March 2022. And I had already noticed in Ukraine, I used, before Disinfolklore was born, I used this you would often see these protests, what I call these fake demonstrations. And I was able to discern, is this from a genuine organic demonstration of villagers annoyed that the gas has been cut off and so they're blocking the road, which is a model of protest that applies in that part of the world. Is it real or is it provoked by Russian agents?And one of the indicators I used was they would liken some issue over the gas to genocide. This is genocide. I mean, it's a core tenet. I write about this a lot. that we often think disinformation or disinfolklore happens to other people, happens to stupid people, people who aren't educated, non-Ukrainians, Ukrainians or people who've been to university.But it's a core tenet that the moment you start to think that, We need to check, check, check, as the Dalai Lama would put it. That is the moment when you become susceptible to it, because we are all susceptible to it. And in the Russist combat, and I'm going to use the term Russist because I have nothing against Russians, as none of us do, but a Russist is somebody who believes in imperial Russism and believes in the genocide in Ukraine. A Ruscist will have different vectors. So I talk in terms of vectors rather than narratives because you have a meaning.The meaning is we will kill all Ukrainians or we will win the war in Ukraine. And the vectors are just thousands of articles telling us to lay down our arms. Ukraine can never win. Russia will keep on going forever like a transformer. they have vectors for everyone from president biden president biden's uh things they have them for that next they have them for uh people that i used to that i still know in eastern ukraine who are ardent ukrainian uh patriots today and will fight to the death to defend their land and their villages from but the russians are still targeting them with uh with with these vectors which will um manipulate their minds and their, as the French would say, their volonté, their motivation, their intentions. So you start reading the article and you're thinking, I support Ukraine. Ukraine will win. But by the end of it, this New York Times journalist is telling you, Ukraine can't win. Oh, so we must make peace. So it's really...important for me anyway to always remember that I'm just as susceptible to it than others. I've just created this set of routines, mental routines, which help me see through it and see where my mind is being affected. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

So I took the idea of archetypes from Tibetan Buddhism where the entire practice is about embedding archetypes in our minds and very scary images of the Lord of Death, Yama.And what I noticed in Jung's work, which he takes it, he says he took the idea of archetypes from St. Augustine. So again, it's the similar idea of trying to embed these tropes.I use the term, so for me, the fundamental metaphor is “Trolls”, fundamental “unit of information.” That's another term I use, units of information or “meme.” So those three for me are synonymous and I use them interchangeably. So I'm very happy to use the word meme, visual, audible. It's an informational unit of any size. It could be a whole book or it could be just a flash of a color in my conception. And archetypal identities can be attached in my, I suppose, philosophical anthropology for want of a grand term. But we're among anthropologists here! In my philosophical anthropology, the archetypes can be identified with these means. And so for Jung, he didn't have access to the same, for instance, archaeology or linguistics and ancient DNA that we had. So when Jung was writing about Tibetan Buddhism, he wrote the introduction to the second edition of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. which was found by Evans-Wentz, who wrote on færy tales in WB Yeat's work, and who was a follower of Madame Blavatsky, who's from Dnipro in eastern Ukraine. And Madame Blavatsky created the religion of theosophy, which fused ancient Egypt and ancient Tibetan and made up a lot of stuff. But she would have picked up a lot of the stuff there from Ukraine… Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Troll, the clue is in the “trol” element of “control.” So again, it's going back to this idea of movement, which if we look in Shakespeare's English, “trole the bowl,” meaning “pass the bowl.”This is the idea of the pipe being passed around, you troll the bowl. And so control and patrol, we were on patrols in eastern Ukraine. These aren't mere coincidences, I realised. And eventually, after a lot of work, I basically started in earnest around February 2020 looking into folklore, really, because all I knew about folklore was I recognised a family resemblance between what was going on at Bridge and folklore, but I didn't know much about it apart from what I remembered from childhood. And it opened up this whole universe, including this idea of the TR sound, which is obviously in trans as well, which the far right love to use. And I think it's probably the best example of its early use in an Indo-European-European language is in this idea of Rta, which means truth in Sanskrit and means what is. What is not illusory:So this is also the origin of the right, the writ, right writ, it's in authority, it's in sovereignty, it's the Rit sound in security, integrity, territorial integrity, and fertility…With thanks to Heidi Cuda, and the crew at Radicalised Pod for stimulating this conversation. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe