Disinfolklore

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

Last night I spoke about Donald’s archetyping of America as mediator rather than participant in the Iran-attack and how we can better understand Iran-attack blowback on Bette Dangerous, alongside Jen Senko, Monique Camarra, Joni Askola, Dietmar Pichler and Dee Batiste. Many thanks to Heidi Cuda.The idea I'm working most with at the moment is what I call archetypal disinfolklore. So what I'm looking for in any form of data, whether it's on my feed or in a tweet or in a pronouncement by the President of the United States, I'm looking for what is the archetypal identity this person is trying to entrench in my mind? And so, for instance, today, Donald was trying to archetype himself as peacemaker. He attacked Iran in a breach of the US Constitution, a breach of international law. And then today, he tries to archetype himself very slyly as peacemaker between Israel and Iran when he is a protagonist in the war and he has brought the United States into a state of war. So because I'm looking for the archetypal identities that the author of such tweets or pronouncements is making, I'm looking for that. And so I find that quite helpful.And it's the first of 12 tools in this toolkit, which I've created for Disinfolklore. And I see... Well, I believe I see exactly what President Trump is doing today. And as many of us who may have been online today will have seen, very many astute geopolitical analysts are dumbfounded by what President Trump is doing.I believe what President Trump and those behind him are doing is extremely clever. And it's precisely what I witnessed the Russians do in eastern Ukraine, where I was between 2015 and 2018. And part of my job was to monitor about 180 ceasefires. And so what Russia was doing there was it was archetyping itself as adhering to ceasefires.And then every morning I was gathering evidence from Russian occupiers and from Ukrainian soldiers about how the so-called ceasefire had been breached. And this is decoupling the idea of ceasefires from meaning. And what Donald is doing today, and now I look back at his attempts to have ceasefire in Ukraine with wider eyes because he's archetyping himself as peacemaker. And he's decoupling the idea of ceasefire from an actual concrete absence of fire. And what he's really doing inside all of our minds is exactly what the Russians were doing in eastern Ukraine and elsewhere. And this is where I think he is.I wrote or I spoke about this in Munich in February 2025, where my big fear or my yeah my fear was what donald did inside MAGA he would manage to do to the entire human race and what we see today is a manifestation of this ceasefire ceasefire Israel Iran and so what I'm looking for is the archetyping, what he's doing, and that's in any text we can see this. People are archetyping themselves as particular people, with particular ideas, and that's a perfect example from today. So I'm looking for that in the data. What is he up to?And we see people, a lot of very clever people today are dumbfounded by this. They don't understand what he's doing. They think he's mad. But I don't believe he is. I think this is a very conscious strategy I've seen at work before. And I think we ought to be very wary of it. Well, I think in Europe...Ukraine is the key. So yourself, Joni, Dietmar, we're all engaged in the quotidian. We're watching the war unfurl, the 1200 kilometer contact line. We're reading Zarina's work in Kherson about first person view drones. We are looking and have been for the past two to three years at the Sha'id drones coming in and watching the nature of warfare change before our eyes in a very granular way. And when I then look at the conversation around the run-up to the attacks on Iran by the United States and chatter about blowback as if we are still in the 1990s where all Iran has and all Russia has and all China has are a few missiles. It does disappoint me because we have a lot of experts, people who get paid a lot of money and who have a lot of traction and a lot of clout, who don't seem to understand, because they are not focused on the granular detail of what is happening in Ukraine, and this is one of the great advantages we have by being enmeshed in this, is the idea of blowback for me is It's drone warfare on the streets of America. It's accentuating the division which is legislated into existence every time Donald tweets. It's an armed so-called pro-Palestinian movement, so not just the post-October 7th manifestation.It's a muddle between ICE with their masks, mass deportations of homegrowns and a whole soup. I mean, we couldn't imagine a better place for a civil war with telegram. created, executed, and run by the Russian security services, TikTok, likewise from China. And that is what I think the lesson for Europe is, if people are watching. But MAGA has successfully archetyped Ukraine as this issue that doesn't matter, or President Zelenskyy as someone who doesn't matter, or the war there as something that doesn't matter. And it's quite disappointing in England. We saw the attacks on Brian. So I wrote a piece last week because this is how I conceive of the blowback.Iran, China and Russia will be doing this over the last year. As Zarina makes the point, Heerson was liberated in September 2022. And all of us expected a blowback from Russia. None of us expected the blowback to begin a year later in July. We thought of in terms of shelling and the blowback there has been extraordinary.We've had two years of it. And most of the people we know in real life, you know, people who have normal lives who just tune into the news every now and again, have no awareness that in this part of Ukraine, people are being hunted, humans are being hunted by first person view drones, which cost $500.And when the NRA discover these and everyone else discovers these. So that's how I see things playing out over the next year or two. And in the streets of England, I mean, well, Europe is trying to distance itself as much as possible.I note the airplanes came from, I think they came from Missouri for the bombing in Iran. So Keir Starmer managed to keep England out of it. But the so-called pro post October 7th pro-Palestinian movement, I distinguish between people who are genuine and always have been genuine and useful idiots and people who are knowing useful idiots who are part of this giant troll which I perceive was created by Hamas with Russia and Iran to distract from Ukraine. and we will see something extraordinary. We've already seen protests in Times Square, we've seen the daubing of fighter jets in an English base, and now the government has reacted by prescribing a pro-Palestinian organisation.Nothing I have heard from experts or politicians suggests to me they perceive the threat in the same way that I do. So I'm just doing my best to try and raise this as a possibility. But Ukraine is ground zero in understanding where warfare is today. and how it's changed and how it will come onto our streets.And it's already in our information space. And sadly, the President of the United States is part of the problem. The key for everything for me runs through Ukraine. Things are going very well there. Sue me, Ukraine has massively defeated Russia, Russian forces there. They're still occupying part of Russia. NATO will give 45 billion this year, Mark Rutte said today, mostly to manufacture different weapon systems inside Ukraine. They have a better analogue than the HIMARS. They have great drones, hundreds of different iterations of drones. So the key to everything, including getting rid of the Russian occupation. And the key to the release of humanity from this curse is in the battle line, the 1200 kilometer battle line in Ukraine. And the more we personally can understand about it, apart from these massive attacks that we see, these spectacular attacks that Russia prosecutes, which have no impact on the battlefield, the more we'll be able to interpret reality and help people in Georgia and other countries, which, and indeed, this is self-defense,if my horrific prediction comes through over the next year. So that's my message of optimism is in Ukraine and everything that's happening in Ukraine. Out. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Today, the fabric of every aspect of our lives – our values, our work, our health, whether we believe vaccines work, that Global Warming is happening or that it can be mitigated, even the bond market- is permeated with story-borne artefacts (Disinfolklore) of an attempt to support authoritarian cultures. What I call ‘Disinfolklore’ is being pumped constantly into our inner minds through the Make America Great Again (MAGA), Russian State and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus that includes X, Telegram, Fox News, TikTok and even, now, the White House press team. Once Disinfolklore has infected our minds with expertly designed and targeted emotionally resonant communicable trolls, we also act as perpetuators of Disinfolklore. We repeat these trolls to others. Often unknowingly, we become Servant Disinfolklorists of the Russian State, MAGA and CCP cultural revolutions. If we are to confront and solve the problems that Disinfolklore and its diabolical siblings - disinformation, misinformation and other forms of propaganda - are causing inside our communities, we must first acknowledge that we are part of the problem…DECODING TROLLSI work on the intersection of anthropology, archaeology, psychology, and various different other disciplines. All of them inform my work. I worked in Ukraine between 2015 and 2022. For three years of that time I worked on a bridge in Stanitsia Luhanska which divided Russia-occupiedLuhansk from government-controlled Ukraine.It was there I, basically, experienced what would become what I now understand as being a Disinfolklore Universe, a Disinfolklore Galaxy that Russia created inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. Now I fear (and I see the signs, the indications) that what Russia did there and inside Russia itself is now spreading across the entire world. It's linking into the MAGA Disinfolklore Galaxy, and to a lesser extent for the time being, the Chinese Communist Party Disinfolklore Galaxy. So I see us being enmeshed in this entire system of, basically, trolling and trolls of untruth, of Disinfolklore, communicated through stories coming from the White House, coming from all of these voices we see. And that is what motivates my work is to try and help us see this Disinfolklore Universe, these Disinfolklore Galaxies that we are being enmeshed in. Ukraine is central, absolutely central to it, as everyone in this space understands.Ukraine has been on the avant-garde of this war since 2015. And thankfully, uh, now most people, uh, who have power understand this and, and it's a crucial, a crucial battle space, the information space around Ukraine. And that's, it's great Volya Radio is doing a fantastic job every day, trying to bring the stories, bring to light the stories often containing Disinfolklore. So this afternoon, the UN Commission of Enquiry based in Vienna has issued a report on the human safaris in Hyrsen that all of us are aware of, which have been going on since July 2024, and it has established that these are crimes against humanity. And part of thethe indictment of Russia and those participating in the prosecution of these crimes against humanity, interesting to use the word prosecution there, is that the Russia, the Russian state is sharing these videos of their human safaris of the 140 people they've murdered using first person view drones. The Commission of Inquiry determines that because they are first-person view drones,the operators of these drones are hunting individuals, chasing them and watching as they murder them and then sharing these on what I call the distant folklore apparatus, which is Telegram, X, Facebook, Instagram. And now, sadly, the White House press room. And so these videos themselves are a perfect example of dissent folklore.They breach all ethical guidelines, which is the second. I have six criteria to determine whether or not the story constitutes dissent folklore, second of which is right or ethical discipline. Obviously, it's morally wrong to engage in human safaris. There's no law anywhere which allows this, moral or otherwise.But now we have a determination by a UN commission specifically established by 184 UN member states to inquire into Russia's war crimes in Russia. Ukraine, and it determines that these are crimes against humanity, and there's no greater crime in the human family than crimes against humanity. And so therefore,the breach of the second element in the Code of Positive Trolls, which I use to determine what is distant folklore, how to distinguish between a unit of distant folklore and a unit of folklore, or any other kind of story. or narrative form. But now we have this determination. So that's a perfect example of distant folklore.Much of what is on Telegram, and of course Telegram is in Russian combat propaganda, in Russian military strategy, you have this concept of information confrontation in which the informational units and the environment are engaged in a confrontation. And here we have telegrams specifically established by the Russian state in orderto communicate distant folklore into the inner minds of humanity. And very successfully doing it is acting in concert with its military apparatus in Kherson. So it's not just killing these people. It is spreading the stories, spreading the images of these people being murdered. as part of its plan to dominate the inner minds of humanity and create terror,not just in the minds of the people of Hearson, and this is not me, this is the inquiry, but inside the minds of humanity as people gradually become aware that this is what's going on. So that's a good example of what dysphochlore is in actuality.JAMESLet's talk. That's a great example of something really rotten. And you'd think that they wouldn't be sharing this information, perhaps. The idea that somebody advertises their war crimes, which I think Russia sort of does, doesn't seem to make sense on the surface of it. But I think you have a way of explaining whatwhy they may send out such a negative message, and I wondered if you could address that.DECODING TROLLSYeah, 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 from the third report on foreign information manipulation and interference by the European Union, which was released.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 Blue Sky and other places. And But the fight is here and the examples are here of whether it's, I saw Maid Marian Simonian tweeting again in her folksy,her folksy distant folklore way where she does this a lot, where she tells these stories as indeed does Donald. they tell these stories of frankly horrifying things. This is going to your question, James, uh, really horrifying things. Uh, like for instance, the way Donald communicated in, I think it was March, 2024, that if, uh,that if the head of a major NATO country said to him, um, we can't pay for our NATO membership. Would you protect us? And he said, I'd say to do whatever the hell they want with you. And then this unit of information was then reported by CNN as a fact that Donaldhad 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. Simonian tonight, she's talking about how people in the offices and these terms really interest me.And they made me, 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, if it's a pattern that made me suspicious, something methodical was going on here, which is what I do use this folklore 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 distant folklore. 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's 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 John C. Putin himself on the days at St. Petersburg Economic Forum, dressed in green,which is why I call her Maid Marian Simonian, like a reverse Robin Hood. And this is an aspect of the distant folklore 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, 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 Dom Gioti or in some folktale. So the mad cap 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 analyze 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 would have seen 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.And so these are kind of folktale archetypes, folksy 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. And 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 distant folklore 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 distant folklore,don't poke the bear being one, but distant folklore means 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 means and through these means. And 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, Dress X, who, 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 ascharacters in our info space by referencing through their clothes superheroes or characters from folklore, from folktale, from our contemporary folktale. 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.JAMESWell, it is an interesting idea. I think there are many different ways to look at the information that's coming out and try to analyze it. I believe each one of us has to do that intuitively as best we can for our own defense. If we're interested in solving a problem, we're going to do this.I appreciate your take on this, and I'm glad that you brought up Jung's work. I think it's a really good place to start. For one thing, he is a person who recognizes that the unconscious, or recognized, I should say, He unfortunately has passed away a while ago.But he recognized there's a large part of our psyche that is, in fact, unconscious. And, you know, his Man and His Symbols book, I don't know if you've read that decoding. Probably you have. Excellent book. And just to tell you a little story about that.Someone approached Carl Jung late in his life and said, your theories are great. I think everybody should understand this better. Would you consider writing a book about this? And he listened to this guy's two-hour spiel about his arguments about why this would be a good idea.And he thought about it and he said, no, I think, you know, I've captured this. I don't know that it has a place. And then he slept on it. He went to bed and he had a dream. And as a result of the dream, he called the guy back and said, yes,I am way into this idea about the book. And I thought that was a good example of how the unconscious worked for the man himself. And I don't know about you, but perhaps you've had some dreams like I had some in my youth that kind of steered my life a little bit.You know, my reactions to the dream, it made me recognize something I needed to do. And, uh, so this is where this idea of archetypes come from, that there are common symbols that people recognize whether or not they mean to, uh, they recognize things, uh, coming in fours as a sort of an important theme or, uh,some other things that stand out as symbols, uh, triangles, um, various things, but they don't necessarily mean the same thing to everybody. Um, And these archetypes, is what he's calling them, are these things that come up in common across various people's dreams, even if they have differing meanings.And I think that's such an important idea that he was in psychology work, working with people enough. to know that this was happening independent of each other. This wasn't like a group discussion about memes and things like that that led them to have common dreams. This was independent people coming up with the same symbols.I really appreciate that you mentioned this because I think this is a good intro into things about our own nature. Now, what strikes me about this, and I particularly like your, you know, discussing even the clothing, the haute couture, as you called it, and sort of alluding to gangster days. I appreciate that. Now,I didn't pick up on that, the gangster part, but I'm glad you did. I think that's a fascinating take on it. I do think that it's also very interesting that, of course, people do not take the same information in and have the same response. That's very clear. And those particular things, I do believe you're right.There is kind of that outlaw culture that exists and to some extent justified in the sense that why shouldn't we drink liquor? And now that's a thought from the 1930s when it was illegal in the United States in the 20s. But, you know, Beyond that, why would it be popular to be in the criminal culture?That's a really good question, except the fact that we do love gangster movies and we watch them and they're enjoyable. And for some reason, we have some affinity to these mobsters, whether it's some of the classic movies or some of the classic TV shows. So how is it?Or how are we missing the boat when we do not recognize that this meme that I'm going to call it a meme, you may call it an archetype, but how is it that This meme that is so attractive, perhaps, to MAGA is pretty damned revolting.Now, for me, I don't care about fashion, so I just glazed right over what Melania was wearing. I did not associate it with what you were talking about. But now I can kind of see that. And I don't think it's beyond Russia's scope to, you know, I think they would catch on to this.So why is it that we're missing some of the messages? And again, I guess to hark back to the original question, um, that, that idea that the terror that they expose themselves, Russians do, um, it still works for them. And is that because it appeals to the MAGA folk or is it because it works to, uh,drive us away from confronting Russia? Oh, decoding Mike, maybe.DECODING TROLLSI'm here. Uh, So I took the idea of archetypes from, I'm a Buddhist, 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 tro, fundamental unit of information. That's another term I use, units of information or mean. 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 mind. 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 Vence, who wrote his PhD thesis at Oxford on fairy tales in WBH's work, and who was a follower of Madame Lavatsky, who's from Dnipro in eastern Ukraine. And Madame Lavatsky 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. But what we know, but that Carl Jung couldn't know, is that what he considered to be universal and part of the collective unconscious of humanity in this way,which has received a lot of criticism, actually, all the examples he gives are from Indo-European languages and religions. He did not know this then. He didn't really understand, and many people still don't understand Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, because it's It was transmitted from the Vedic into the Sanskrit, into the Tibetan,and now it's coming back preserved in Tibetan and non-Indo-European language. But basically its content is an Indo-European religion. So in all of my work, I am only ever talking about archetypes that work on Indo-European structured minds, the minds of those whose language one, whose native tongue, is an Indo-European language. So that's the only claim I'm making.I'm not talking about collective unconsciousness of humanity. But what I can say from my own experience of watching and observing and experiencing propaganda from the first moments on that archetypal bridge in eastern Ukraine, where I spent three years in a forest, is that I perceive the world through archetypes.And that when I read information that contains what I call archetypal identities, characters. So Ukraine can be archetyped as a weak woman. Putin does this. He did this when he spoke four days before the invasion. And he said, full-scale invasion, he said, like it or not, take it my beauty.So what he was saying to Ukraine as international lawyers, I'm also a lawyer by training. They interpreted this as they didn't use the word archetyping, but they intuitively understood it as archetyping. They said what Putin was there was doing was he was representing Ukraine as a corpse. And Putin got this particular phrase,which means a lot to Russians, because it featured its song lyrics. So songs are very much part of the beginning of folklore, which led to the foundation of nation states, the German, the first unified German state, the first Irish, modern Irish state, the first Greek state. modern Greek state.These are all the products of purposeful campaigns based around mythology and folklore to establish a unified identity that helped create community that resisted occupation. When the Herder in 1777 launched the German folklore, folksong movement, and inspired Goethe and the brothers Grimm, who all of us will remember as children,to collect folktales and inspired Wagner then and led to the first German, unified German state 90 years later. They set out purposefully to collect common culture in the form of stories. The same in Ireland. The Irish Cultural Revival, the first president of Ireland, was a folklore collector. And he, among others, created this sense, which was true,empirically true, but we didn't, Irish people didn't understand it until this 30-year campaign revived Celtic culture as a distinct culture from the Germanic-English occupier. So Germany under occupation in 1777 by the French. French generals actually living in Goethe's house in Frankfurt, which I visited. Very different kind of occupation to the one we're all aware of.Same thing in Greece against the Ottoman Empire. And what they did was they collected these stories to... to create a sense of community. And this is what I realized the Russians were doing and what MAGA is doing. So it's creating these arch in-jokes. If you've listened, and I'm sure you have, James and Wendy,you've listened to any of Donald's campaign speeches where he's talking about Hannibal Lecter, again, a fictional character, using an archetypal character in our modern culture that people of a certain age will understand. So people who are today between probably the ages of 50 and 70 will remember Hannibal Lecter as a film character.And so what Donald is doing is he's not linking into any archetypes that are embedded in all of humanity, in my humble opinion. he, he is ripping off the archetypes of which the cognition of a certain subset of Indo-Europeans at a certain moment in a certain culture, uh, are aware of, uh, Hannibal Lecter in that case, uh,Alphonse Capone for obvious reasons, uh, the man who was found guilty of 34 felony counts, um, and, um, and, uh, of acts tantamount to, um, to, well, I won't mention a horrible word, on E.J. and Carol. So Donald is counter-archetyping, which is what I try to do as well when I call him Duncy Putin or Druity Don.But what I believe they're trying to do and successfully doing is, and this ties in to my understanding of deep Indo-European religion. The Lord of Death is one of the primordial archetypes inside Indo-European's cognition, whether it's Jesus Christ, whether it's represented as Jesus Christ or Yama in Hindu religion and Vedic before it and in Buddhism.Odin, Woden's Day. Wednesday, Odin, Lord of Death. And these are all self-sacrificing first monarchs. And basically, I think what they're doing effectively is saying, and this resurrection of Stalin is saying, I control your death. This is what Donald is doing with whether it's vaccines or anti-vaccines or vaccines. all of these terrible policies that lead to people's deaths.And the same thing with Putin and Stalin. They're saying, we control the time of your death. And this is a very old, ancient, tried and tested formula for exerting psychological control over people. And I guess this is partly connected also to the drone safaris. Obviously, we see this as a harbinger of what is to come.And they can do this through various means. There's almost infinite stories that can be used to communicate these fears into people's inner minds. And that's what I believe they're at.JAMESThank you for that. Go ahead, Wendy.WENDYWell, that's really fascinating. Those are really fascinating connections to very different kinds of strands. I wanted to go back a little bit in that you've mentioned more than once Indo-Europeans. I did a little bit of looking at some of those origins in your work and in others.and they seem to trace back to the Yamnaya people in the Bronze Age, who they feel that the Indo-European languages originated from, and those Yamnaya people were in Ukraine, that area of Ukraine in the steppes and other nearby areas. There were, of course, not the current political borders.I wondered if you could give a little bit of background on that so that people have a better understanding of how it all connects to Indo-European archetypes andDECODING TROLLSMy favorite subject, and it all begins in Hearson, whether it's the UN Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes in Ukraine or the YAMNA community, who relatively small number of individuals created the language, the linguistic structures, the words we use almost in every sentence. the religions, the solid imminence in many Indo-European religions,including I would characterize Christianity as an Indo-European religion, and Buddhism created by this community, which just in itself is an amazing, just amazing, absolutely amazing, because most of us grow up, we have a mental model of Greece, Rome, maybe ancient Egypt before Greece and, and then our cultures. Um, and that turns out this is not true.And that, um, Greek, Greece and Rome, Greek, uh, well, uh, Italic culture, um, Italic and Celtic languages, as far as we know, formed in, inside a mixture of the Yamna community from this area in, um, Hirson, Mikhailov, Oblast, you know, right around the river where Russia and Ukraine, you know, this has been an intersection point,an interaction point for millennia. Out of an interaction between migrating Yamnaf from there after 2500 BCE westwards near Odessa, just east of Odessa, and this community of people there. Linguists and archaeologists have suspected, many of them have suspected this for decades, for a few decades.And Jung refers to the reason why Jung explains why he believes that these archetypes are part of the collective unconscious of humanity is He just can't understand how else they could have come from, where else they could have come from. And he talks, Jung talks about the wildest migration theories, which now we know since 2015,ancient DNA revolution, as it's known in the literature, is scientific facts. So the scientific fact of the genetic content of people from India to Ireland, whose genetic ancestry comes from what they call the steppe, what I call ancient Ukrainian. And so for me, a lot of my work is about re-archetyping Ukraine inside the mental models of humanity,because I realized, as many of us did, There was some problem that people had, whether it was the former German policy or the policy of many of our governments. They all were perceiving, and perhaps many of us did this as well before we became aware about Ukraine and its importance, not only in our current day,in our current moment, but its importance over time, that that there was something they basically, Russia was managing by, uh, by controlling, uh, the, by monopolizing the myth of Russia's superiority of Ukraine archetyping. Ukraine is not a real country. Um, By every time Donson Putin speaks, he's re-archetyping Russia as this great power.And many of us and many of our friends perhaps still will perceive Russia's culture as somehow justifying its genocide in Ukraine and activities in Ukraine or Dostoevsky or ballet. And I'm a great fan of those writers because I think they're very insightful and very helpful. to us.So I realized that basically from the very beginning of the war, of the full-scale invasion, without really understanding it as being archetyping at the time, but I realized that what I had to do, my mission was to try and at least campaign for parity of esteem betweenUkraine and other modern nation states which have won the monopoly by fair means of vow. Certain communities of people after World War II who had managed to become UN members, including Ukraine, which was the founding member of the United Nations, signed the UN Charter in 1945. So, um, so even,but then as I dug into it more deeply and followed these, um, this path from when I was in Eastern Ukraine, working in Eastern Ukraine, I accidentally discovered the Yamnia when some property developers were destroying, um, this extraordinary structure in a posh suburb of Dnipro.And it made the front page of the New York Times and all of the local people were protesting. And so I went to, in my capacity as a monitor, to monitor the security situation, I went there to try and discover what was going on. And what I discovered was these property dwellers had destroyed a Yamna burialmound in which was buried the local the local monarch and various other people throughout throughout the millennia including the last person to be buried in there was the head of the collective farm uh believe it or not in like 1932 so delusions of grandeur there and continuity andunderneath this mound when they destroyed it was found the stone circle uh which was created by by the one of the major ingredient cultures in in the yamna and And through that, I began to, from a position of extreme skepticism, that we could trace the linguistic, the journey of certain people carrying not just a language,not just the words, the vocabulary, the sounds and meanings which we use today. There's about a thousand sounds and meanings in what we call Proto-Indo-European. or I call ancient Ukrainian, which is the language spoken by the Yamna between 4100 BCE and 2500 BCE. And I recognize I'm throwing out these dates.For me, it's really chartered territory for most people. Most of us, our history kind of begins maybe around 1000 BCE with the first King David in the Bible or whatever. But again, what I'm trying to do, and part of my mission is to re-archetype our mental models, our idea of not just Ukraine, humanity,our human history and our European history and Ukrainians' position in it, but to create these new structures and these frameworks, because that's how what I call disinfolklore and disinformation does. It creates frameworks, untruthful frameworks in our minds, So, you know, people inside MAGA, in the MAGA disenfoked or galaxy, you know, they have all these in jokes.They know all about these different things which you and I wouldn't know about. And this is how it works, as I understand. This is how Russian disinformation is, why it's so successful. Because it's not a question of people's intelligence or their education. or anything like that. It's about how people's minds are changed.So I'm quite upfront about this when I outline these histories and all of this stuff, which is, you know, the ancient DNA studies is published in Nature and Science, the preeminent scientific journals that stay away from anything that's in any way unkosher or not backed up.Feel free to follow up on anything to do with the Indo-European thing, because it's key to my mission to re-archetype the idea of Ukraine in people's minds, but also it's the key to understanding how archetyping works, I believe, in our minds, in Indo-European's minds.JAMESWow, thank you. That gives me a lot to think about. Well, Carl Jung's work, as well as this idea of archetyping. I think if you can seize the symbols, if you will, of a country and do something with it, then you sort of are winning in a certain respect. And I certainly see that. Yesterday, for example,Vatnik Soup, my co-host at the time, mentioned the fact that the FSB, Russia's Foreign Services Bureau, the spies and journalists, bad actors there in Russia who go abroad, that their symbol is a bat. And so part of SBU chose owls because owls eat bats.And I thought of that as perhaps a crude or simple way of kind of controlling that, but I wondered what you thought about that as an example of the kind of things you're talking about, and have you ideas about how we seize the initiative from Russia in, if you will, re-archetyping things?I think that's an interesting term, by the way. I have some thoughts about it myself, but I think everybody wants to hear your thoughts.DECODING TROLLSYes, 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 ancient Celtic society. So I called Don is the Lord of Death in ancient Celtic culture, who according toIrish mythology, which was first written down around 1100 AD in the Common Era. But through the language, it dates from earlier and is about the Indo-European invasions of Ireland, the island of Ireland. And Ireland's pre-Christian Lord of Death was Don. And obviously you have the Donnieper River, you have the Don River.You've done Ypres River, which is the Dnipro, the Upper Don. And they've done Istres, I think it's Lower Don from the perspective, if you're looking at them from Crimea. And 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, of,deities and uh druidy donald you've got donald and druidy don so you see druidy 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 uh these are very umlike once you get your eye into what they're doing and how they are archetyping, it's very, it seems quite clumsy sometimes, but it works quite well at the subconscious level as of course Jung knew. And they clearly know what they're doing because it's not an accident that Melania was dressed by DressX,two Ukrainian fashion designers from LA 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 General Boudinov's, 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. And long before I worked out my, and came up with a portmanteau, just in folklore, I was, when I look back at my writing since the war and even before the war, but my public writing has only,like 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 the President Zelensky, obviously, as I wrote this piece at the end of March 2022, Let's Compare Trolls, where I set 20th century ideas who I call Duncy Putin now.And he's Duncy because he's like a folklore idiot. He's the idiot. He's the town fool. He's like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, kills two women to see if he can get away with it. And then it's just the stupidest thing ever. He's been tortured by it.And this is Dancy 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 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 durée. 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 embedded in war and peace tells us of the Marshal Kutuzov, the famous Russian general who resisted all attempts to make battle againstNapoleon, kept on withdrawing and everyone, the Tsar, and everyone said, come on, you must face them. 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 in one of his programs 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. 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 But when I saw President Macron make that speech, well, 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 means came out with a Napoleon hat. So, President,so you asked the question, what do I think about the owls and the Batman and the bats in FSB? Yeah, Ukraine is working on that plane and it is blessed to have President Zelensky who operates. It was his job. He didn't just, it's like second nature to him.He operates on this symbolic plane in such a successful way that he had the, he and his, his writer, his wife, who's a writer, and his friends from Krivi Rhee, 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 Krivi Rhee. And so I really understand this in a deep sense where he And when you hear us say MAGA people talk about Zelensky,or if I'm in England and in the shires and people are saying to me, what do you think about Zelensky? 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,a bigger mandate than probably any democratically elected leader in a free and fair election in world history. Like, it's literally at that scale. And 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 actually 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. And General Budenov and President Zelensky get this and 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. And 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 Volia Arabia does, what Mockers does, and Yeni and Joanna, I see you all there, what you do every day at Surdistan, Wills at Surdistan, and what you're both doing is, especially the Wills at Surdistan and these stories that Mockers tells from Chris Awicki and these people,Because the archetype of Russia is 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 Russian, great Russian literature. And we've fallen for that trail. We've imbibed it.And we've been drunk on its beauty and the amazingness of it. But then when you pull the... when the stage, when you, when you realize that actually it's just a stage play and then you, you know, the Potomacan metaphor is just so beautiful. Uh, so wonderful. Um,because what you're doing is de-archetyping Russia as this great culture as, as, as, um, and Natalia Ukraine's work does really well. So that, so that's really important work and 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 Owicki or whatever in normal, polite society, because people literally won't believe it. And yet, all of us have this kind of understanding of the absurdism, the lack of toilets, just the mad stuff they come up with to get people to sign a contract, which doesn't mean anything, becauseYou can't coerce someone into signing a contract. It's like what you do. Again, it goes back to Dancy Putin. It's one of the first things you learn in contract law. You know, if there's coercion, and yet every day we're reading about these crazy folktale-like tricks of getting people to sign the contract, torturing them.And 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. And it's absolutely insane stuff. It's no way to run an empire covering one sixth of the world surface. It's comical. It's absurd.it's um it's extraordinary stuff but uh the more people they used to have this program in england called euro trash where they basically seem to be based on you know bizarre things that happened in japan in the 1980s uh we need to continue doing that about russia uh because and this is the great work say that umWe 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. This is just rubbish on every level.And obviously all of our countries can be archetyped as rubbish, but we're not committing genocide and doing these horrific crimes. So that's, That's what we can do. But the War of Symbols, General Boudinov and President Zelensky and many of the people around them are operating on that level. And it's beautiful to watch.And it's part of the evidence that I parsed to work out what's going on. And what I can and then 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 and, um,and get, get, get the lenses of what I call the lenses of Disney profile.For the full range of Volya Radio’s excellent work rearchetyping Ukraine and Russia, you can listen on Spotify to its daily shows: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

I first noticed the Disinfolklore Universe now spreading through our neural networks, like triffids rewilding the garden of Eden, when it was in a more primitive form. In 2016, I was a diplomat posted to eastern Ukraine. Russia’s army, cosplaying as Little Green Men, Polite Folk and Odin-worshipping soldiers from the Nazi inspired “Wagner” corps, had occupied part of Ukraine in 2014. My job was to establish the facts in relation to security incidents related to Russia’s Disinfolklore-justified military occupation of part of Ukraine.One Saturday, my manager phoned me from inside the Russia-occupied and Russia-designated “Luhansk Folk’s Republic” (LFR). According to him, a “doctor” in LFR had walked into the MGB (Russian occupiers’ “internal security service” – so-named to conjure up the folk memory of the Stalin-era forerunner of the KGB: MGB). The Walk-In said his “common law wife and her underage daughter,” located in the non-Russia-occupied part of Luhansk province (where I was that day), were about to be “cut into pieces” by a Ukrainian “Nazi.” He tasked me with checking on the two damsels in distress.Something, intuitively, sounded artificial about the linguistic formula “common law wife and her underage daughter.” Working in that Steppe-land Locus Amœnus, I had already realised that I perceived part of reality through cognitive lenses (archetypes) that had entered my mind as a small child from folktale-inspired stories. Here, Russian Disinfolklorists were leaning into this aspect of Indo-Europeans’ cognition and riffing off what Karl Jung suggested are the primordial archetypal identities of the Mother and the Maiden. The perfectly pitched troll for a specific emotional reaction in protective males who would undergo any ordeal to rescue from an ogre such damsels in distress stirred my suspicion; triggering what I now call my “Incoming Troll Radar.” This book is to help you learn the tools I use as a professional Disinfolklore identifier and interpreter. So that you learn to counteract the Disinfolklore Universe descending upon humanity, like a curse. Honing our Incoming Troll Radars to identify trolls which have the potential to affect us in manipulative ways before we allow these trolls into our Inner Minds is the first tool in our Archetypal Disinfolklore arsenal.Tool 1 - Incoming Troll RadarSo let’s call our Incoming Troll Radar “Tool 1”! Later we’ll learn of what our Incoming and Outgoing Troll Radars consist – their elements - and how they work (clue: it’s all about the Code of Positive Trolls - Tool 4 in any aspiring Counter Disinfolklorist’s tool box). By the end of this book, you’ll be a fluent Counter Disinfolklorist, like me. So expect a bit of repetition which is a feature in Disin/folklore, and any good teaching material.The “cut into pieces” aspect of the threat facing the two damsels in distress also seemed off. Such primeval savagery outside Russia-occupied Ukraine only existed inside story-borne artefacts of Russia’s Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus (which it was, in the manner of a nineteenth century Antiquarian folk-tale collector, my job to gather together, analyse and parse into patterns that helped us understand the security threats facing us on the front-line). Later I discovered the primordial foundation myths in several Indo-European cultural traditions involved universes being created out of bodies cut into pieces. It is not clear if the Russian manufacturers of Disinfolklore items like this tale about the Mother and the Maiden are consciously reaching back into millennia of Indo-European tropes and trolls, or if, as is much more likely, they’re just following instructions in their Combat Propaganda - the name Russians give for what I call Disinfolklore – manuals.Tool 2 – Our “Look for the Mana in the Meme!” mantraIn Archetypal Disinfolklore, we don’t care too much about the intention (mens rea) of the purveyors of Disinfolklore, we focus mainly on what’s immanent in the memes, informational units, or stories we hear, see or feel. Sometimes it’s a Russian Disinfolklorist designing a meme to hack our rational thought systems (to bypass our Incoming Troll Radar – Tool 1). Other times it can be our family member or trusted news source conveying the meme into our minds, unintentionally furthering the Disinfolklore Universe designers’ ends. Since the effect is the same – manipulating us into activities that accord with the Disinfolklore Universe’s malignant designs for us and our communities - it’s better that we learn to start looking for the Mana / energy inside memes and informational units - rather than worrying about the intention of the communicators of specific items of Disinfolklore, we “Look for the Mana in the Meme!” (in this context, “Mana” means power or energy or immanence– we’ll, also, come back to this). Our “Look for the Mana in the Meme!” mantra, then, is Tool 2 in our analytical arsenal for spotting and then countering potential Disinfolklore trolls.Yet, in those details - the use of the archetypal bogeyman villain (having worked in eastern Ukraine at that point for over a year, I knew rationally that the “Ukrainian Nazi” was wholly the creation of Russian propagandists (Disinfolklorists)); the mythological sounding “cut into pieces;” and the folklore-borne archetypal characters of the Mother and the Maiden (manifesting in this Disinfolklore item as the strange-sounding “Common Law Wife and Her Underage Daughter”) - I intuitively detected part of what distinguishes the Disinfolklore genre of folktales from others: artificiality, strategic construction from archetypes, stock characters and tropes selected for their power to move Disinfolklore consumers’ emotions in predictable ways. Disinfolklorists sculpt and aim their trolls according to where their potential victims chart on, for example, the different dimensions on the Openness Conscientiousness Extrovertness Agreeableness Neurotic (OCEAN) or Myers-Brigg psychological personality inventory models’ scales. If you are lower than average on both the “Conscientiousness” and higher than average on the “Neurotic” scale, you’re a perfect potential recruit for Make America Great Again (MAGA) Disinfolklore about migrants coming to eat your pets. Disinfolklore is a mechanism that effected what Russian military theorists call “Reflexive Control.” Disinfolklore transports its carriers into promoting activities which unknown to we who are infected by it furthered the strategies of Disinfolklore Universe’s designers.Tool 3 - Inner / Outer Real switching quality immanent in items of potential DisinfolkloreIn such a Disinfolklore Universe as the LFR (as in the MAGA Disinfolklore Universe occupying the minds of millions of Americans today), the fabric of every dimension of our lives - work, personal relationships, life choices, fates - is infused with an Inner / Outer Realm division communicated through a polyphonic All Channel (media, mental, interpersonal) memetic onslaught. Once the Inner / Outer Realm division immanent in the item of Disinfolklore passes from that Informational Unit / meme into our minds, we begin to perceive the actual world through the threats to the sovereignty, security and / or prosperity / fertility of whichever Inner Realm this particular item of Disinfolklore has manipulated us into believing that we must defend. Our moods, motivations, intentions and attitudes are further formed by constantly iterating and repeating Disinfolklore so that the Inner / Outer Realm division passes from the items of Disinfolklore (and their component memes), through our minds, into the actions we take In Real Life. The power of Disinfolklore to create Facts On The Ground out of entirely made-up memes is then further mobilised by the Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus’s designers and operators (whether from MAGA, Russia or those behind Brexit Disinfolklore) to entrench further division between those in the Inner and Outer Realms and community among those inside the Inner Realm (who are expected to resist the threat by whichever witch or scapegoat is being featured in whichever item of Disinfolklore is being propagated or consumed at any particular moment). In our hyper-modern moment, Too Much, Never Enough characterises the Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus’s inexhaustible firehoses of falsehoods. Since this paragraph depicts the engine of the Disinfolklore analytical method for parsing Russian and other forms of Disinformation, Misinformation and propaganda, we shall label learning to see this Inner / Outer Real switching quality immanent in items of Disinfolklore as Tool 3.Throughout this book we’ll learn to identify as potential Disinfolklore any story, unit of information or meme (whether visually, audibly or linguistically communicated through any medium – air, text, video) which contains threats to our Inner Realm community or personhood from outside invaders in whatever guise. Naturally, threats to our community or sense of selfhood may be genuine and if so we need to react accordingly. Disinfolklorists – particularly in the guise of populist politicians - however, use this evolutionarily necessary aspect of our cognition to hack our minds. As we’re focussed on the bogus threat that a migrant will consume our daily bread or our child, we allow the Disinfolklorist to smuggle trolls passed our Incoming Troll Radar. Before we’ve Looked for the Mana in the Meme our emotions are so engaged the Disinfolklorist the item of Disinfolklore’s true meaning - surrender your liberty to the Big Bad Wolf - has worked their contagious magic and become embedded inside our Inner Minds. The moment you feel your emotions being engaged by a story or meme, be extra aware. Be mindful. Mindfulness is the essence of our Incoming Troll Radar.I derived Tool 3 - these three defining archetypal identities immanent (in whole or in part) in items of Disinfolklore - from a fusion of Dumézil’s three socio-religious archetypes that underpin Indo-European language speakers’ cognitive structures (sovereignty, security and/or prosperity/fertility) read in conjunction with Tangerlini’s three archetypal structures in the contemporary Danish legend-telling tradition:“Interaction with the Other falls into three broad categories in the contemporary legend tradition… [1] Sexual contact with the Other (e.g. Outer Realm-based common law wife of Inner Realm LFR “Doctor”)… including kidnapping and threats to the fertility of the Inner Realm (e.g. cutting her underage daughter and the “Doctor’s” step daughter into pieces harms the sustainability and fertility of the Inner Realm community); [2] The Other’s attempts to disrupt the food of the Inner Realm (e.g. in the archetypal troll tale, Three Billy-Goats Gruff, the three migrant Billy-Goat Gruff brothers attempt to migrate from their Outer to the bridge troll’s Inner Realm in order to consume the Inner Realm’s food); and [3] Narratives in which the Other attempts to maim, hurt, or kill an immediate threat to the individual (e.g. the function of the Ukrainian “Nazi” Disinfolklore archetype threatening to cut the two damsels into pieces is to entrench the idea in the minds of the LFR population that across the Donets river in non-Russia-occupied Ukraine, they will face mortal danger; best to stay inside the LFR Inner Realm inside the protective embrace of their Russian prison guards) and the social order (e.g. Russian Disinfolklore featuring bogeymen threatening to invade LFR had the effect of creating community and a sense of communal identity in LFR, an entirely bogus political entity wrought of Disinfolklore that created an illusion that it was real and that Outer Realm Ukrainians who were supposedly trying to kill, maim, hurt LFR’s population were monsters). In each category, communal integrity and survival is threatened from the Outside…”Gradually, on the basis of my ongoing analysis of thousands of items of Disinfolklore collected from the media in Russia-occupied Luhansk and from hundreds of interviews with those living inside the occupation (and who were living in that evolving Russian Disinfolklore Universe) I began to see that I could use this synthesis of these two complementary analytical schemes of archetypal structures immanent in Indo-European culture – Tool 3 - to identify and interpret any item of Disinfolklore, whether emanating from the Russian, MAGA, Brexit or perhaps any Indo-European Disinfolklore Generation and Propagation Apparatus.I recounted the contents of the phone call with my manager to my colleagues. I noticed the immediate change in intention and motivation that came over all of us. My aim was to avoid going to check on the damsels – it was a trap, I thought. A retired English Police officer colleague, with whom I usually never saw eye-to-eye, scoffed:“What does he expect us to do if we find them being cut into pieces?”with characteristic scorn for our office-based manager. Another colleague - a Bulgarian army general - was motivated to rush out to rescue the damsels in distress from the ogre’s jaws.I was surprised that my manager had treated as truthful the testimony conveyed to us by the MGB, famous as it was for its falsifications of history, manipulations and terror. But that’s how Disinfolklore operates. It changes our moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations in ways which are foreseen by the originator of the Disinfolklore but which are unforeseen by us before we allow the item of Disinfolklore’s constituent elements into our Inner Minds, where they work to alter our moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations.As we approached the cottage in the woods where the Mother and the Maiden supposedly were, I texted the Mission’s head of security in Kyiv:“Confirm manager’s order to approach house where Mother and Underage Daughter are reportedly being cut into pieces.”That linguistic formula, replete with its primordial archetypal identities triggered the normally reticent head of security to call me immediately. This was the first time I had consciously created Counter Disinfolklore using precisely the same archytypes Disinfolklorists use to further their nefarious schemes, and it worked.Tool 4 - The Code of Positive TrollsArchetypal Disinfolklore is a powerful method for destroying our civilisation. Using those same means and memes to preserve our post-World War Two communities governed by the Rule of Law and human rights protected as a matter of law is also a powerful tool. So we must use it ethically and properly. The Code of Positive Trolls (Tool 4) which we’ll learn more about later is our means of ensuring we do not ourselves become Disinfolklorists. Thankfully, the head of security wasn’t hypnotised in the manner of that Bulgarian general or my boss into falling for the troll. He immediately saw how unwise it would be for us, unarmed, to go to the cottage in the woods. I imagine he, like me, also understood it was so ridiculous that it must be a set-up. You see, we all have Incoming Troll Radars. The point is to surface them, fine-tune their sensitivity and learn, over time, to integrate them into the way we process any information. The head of security, mercifully, aborted the operation before we reached the cottage in the woods.We never heard of anyone there being cut into pieces. The MGB’s agents would have seen that we almost made it to the cottage where who knows what fate awaited us. Meanwhile, the MGB’s archetyping of itself as protector of the folk it was imprisoning manifested in many iterations of the story of its attempt to troll us into going to the cottage in the woods. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe