Iran, Inevitability Farming, Reflexive Control

Munich Speech Forecast

It’s a very interesting day, a very good day for Disinfolklore and for what I forecast on the basis of data back in February in my Munich speech, February 2025.

I see what Donald is doing to all of us, to the markets, to the whole of humanity really, through the medium of all these various things which most of us have never really heard about, like helium and fertiliser and all these things. Basically, Donald is wrapping us up inside a Disinfolklore universe. This for me is the primary purpose of everything that is going on at the moment. It’s good to be able to voice this and talk about this.

I was going to talk today — I was on the fifth episode of the five speeches which I prepared after James asked about reflexive control about five weeks ago. This is the final speech. The most perfect example ever of reflexive control is in our information space at the moment, with Donald starting an unlawful war and then expecting everyone else to come and rescue him from it.

This is what I’ve called inevitability farming, which is beloved of authoritarians, where you create the inevitability. That, in its essence, is reflexive control.

We don’t consider it part of military doctrine as such. If you consider everything that Donald is doing as part of a combat strategy to occupy, dominate our minds and to exercise coercive control over every choice we make in our lives — whether that’s about women over their bodies, whether it involves family, whether it’s about shopping, whether it’s about millions of people potentially starving to death in Malaysia unless they do something — then the reflexive control which we’re watching happen on a global scale now is precisely what I watched operating inside Russian-occupied Ukraine, 2015 to 2018.

I was going to talk about that. James’s question five weeks ago is completely relevant today, and the structures which the Disinfolklore analytical method provides enable us to interpret the news which is going on today just as much as five weeks ago, and hopefully onwards into time.

Disinfolklore.eu is the main website. That’s where my oeuvre going forward into the future will live, along with disinfolklore.net, where there’s the newsletter.

That was my proposal. I had a couple of tweets this week. I was inspired again this week by all of this malarkey, and I wrote a few things which I could talk about briefly and then go on to the main part.

Re-archetyping Ukraine

Obviously my main project, and many of our main projects since the beginning of the war, was to — now I have the language to describe it — re-archetype humanity’s perception of Ukraine. My ambition for this, as many of you know, is to re-archetype humanity’s perception of Ukraine and ancient Ukraine and the past 6,000 years.

What we’re obviously seeing this week in the Middle East, which is bringing joy to many of our hearts after a very hard, metaphorically hard winter for us by comparison to Ukrainians, is President Zelensky in the Middle East, bringing arms and bringing hope and modelling how you act as a superpower.

The Comedian, the Druid, and the Dunce

Yet again, in my March or February 2025 speech, the Munich speech, I archetyped the entire war in Ukraine as a titanic struggle between Druidy Don — Disinfolklore — Duncy Putin, and the Comedian.

Druidy Don: he’s truthy. He’s not really a druid, but he certainly models one.

Duncy Putin: he never learns, wakes up each morning like Pangloss or like your favourite folktale hero with no memory of what he learned — or your favourite AI chatbot — with no memory of what he learned from the day before.

The Comedian, the arch-comedian: the Russians obviously tried to archetype him as the comedian, as a bit of a joke, but the joke is on them because he’s a great actor, a proper comedian, a proper master of the juridical realm of sovereignty, which is the archetype going back thousands of years in Indo-European culture, and also of the magico-religious.

Whereas Don, Druidy Don — no one can doubt his magical powers to wrap humanity, including the markets. I’m following the apocalyptic FT Financial Times app on my phone. It’s quite funny, they keep falling for these trolls that the war is going to be over in five minutes. These are the money people, and every corner of humanity is being wrapped up inside this Disinfolklore universe.

On the other hand, we have the Comedian, President Zelensky, who is using his powers for good. No one can doubt he’s got the powers. You see him in Saudi Arabia and all these countries, with the greatest army humanity has seen, blowing up Russian oil wells like there’s no tomorrow. There certainly is no tomorrow for Russia. The next day he arrives in Saudi Arabia, casually as you like, and Don and Rubio and everyone trying to cast negative spells all over him, but they bounce off him like raindrops off a Mackintosh.

The Sorcerer and His Apprentice

I made this prophecy using the Disinfolklore analytical method. Am I looking at the archetype of the apprentice and the master? I made this a month before Prigozhin’s coup because it seemed to me, looking at the data, that Prigozhin, the Chef, the Chef Sorcerer, was in fact Druidy Duncy Putin’s, the Chief Sorcerer’s, successor — anointed successor.

That was just looking at this archetypal story of the sorcerer and his apprentice, which reappears in different Indo-European traditions. At a certain point, the apprentice is ready to take over from the master, but the master is afraid that the apprentice will kill him. That is, as expressed by Georges Dumézil, one of my great influences, the plight of the sorcerer.

It just so happens that the Russians archetyped Prigozhin to try and disguise and conceal his role inside the power vertical — maybe not always intentionally, but it had the effect of doing it — as the Chef. An archetypal identity. I then archetyped him as the Chef Sorcerer, as in sauce. The Chef himself had published a book of fairy tales and got Donald elected the first time with his Internet Research Agency and his Disinfolklore propagation apparatus.

Prigozhin’s Changing Character

One of the indicators I had for why Prigozhin’s role was suddenly changing, his character was changing, was when we started to see him being quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other conventional media operations as a kind of truth-teller, the counterpoint to Putler. Even if Ukraine said this or that, or one of us said this or that on Twitter, no one would listen to us. Prigozhin was being used as a kind of ventriloquist for the truth in these media organs.

It seemed to me that this was a change in character, because up until that point, for people like me who had been following Wagner since 2015, when I first physically came in touch with them in eastern Ukraine, this was a brutal operation, a Nazi operation, part of the Russian army, coupled with this Disinfolklore propagation apparatus that managed to get Donald elected and Brexit done and didn’t quite drive humanity nuts.

Through the medium now of Donald, they are succeeding down the line and driving humanity nuts with all of this blowing hot and cold, ten-dimensional chess or whatever they’re archetyping Donald’s nonsense as today.

It was that change in role of Prigozhin — suddenly from Putin’s chef, someone who was always archetyped as being outside the power vertical, wasn’t quite proper, wasn’t part of the establishment, the security establishment, was an oligarch, archetyped as Putin’s chef. He wasn’t in charge of Rosneft and all that. It was his being given these plum jobs in Ukraine, such as the Kyiv region — assassinating all the political leaders, assassinating President Zelensky — and then given the plum job of Bakhmut or Artemivsk to conquer, which was supposed to be taken by the end of July. He was given Popasna, killed thousands of people in Popasna, and then got bogged down in Bakhmut.

Obviously most people in the real world weren’t following this. I was watching how his character was changing in the media. I see that same pattern today with President Zelensky. I wrote a piece about that because I think this kind of magical process is going on with President Zelensky at the moment. Obviously dark days lie ahead and there are dark days on the front in Ukraine, but at the same time I see the same signs that I saw then: that something’s going to happen.

Putler Dials Don Up to Eleven

I couple that with my insight that I think Putler is on his last legs. I wrote a piece today about how I think Putler has dialled up Druidy Don Disinfolklore to eleven, riffing off Spinal Tap. This is what we’re seeing now. He’s kind of maxing out on it, because he or she who controls Druidy Don Disinfolklore will rule Russia.

Whoever has the Epstein kompromat or however they’re controlling Don — the chip in his head, God knows what it is — whoever in the Russian power vertical controls that will control Russia. Putler is hanging on for dear life to it.

We see this acceleration of madness: the selling out of all of the allies, permanent changes in our global security architecture, and as far as I can see, the inevitable destruction, sadly, of the American military, if, as I strongly suspect is going to happen, they’re going to do a ground invasion of Iran, which is going to turn into, I believe, a worse disaster than even Iraq.

Of course, all that suits Duncy Putin: this chaos. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s bombing Isluga and Yalabuga and all of these things. Long may that continue. As ever, anything Russia touches turns to rubbish.

Preliminary Thoughts: Where We Are Today

Those were just some of my preliminary thoughts to set the context of where I think we are today. I’m hyper-aware I don’t want to contribute to this craziness that has entered all of our brains. It’s exactly the same craziness we saw in MAGA people in America at election time, that we’ve seen Donald doing on Page Eight in the New York Post in the 1980s. Now things have got really real and it’s in every corner of humanity’s mind.

I was talking to builders in Ireland a couple of weeks ago, and they were already talking about how insulation people — it was hard now to order insulation because everyone went through this with COVID and with other supply chain collapses. There’s a kind of rehearsed routine. Donald’s nonsense is affecting people’s lives everywhere.

That’s obviously far away from two years’ time or a year’s time, when people are talking about famine in Malaysia or Indonesia and all of that malarkey. I don’t want to add to any of that. I do my best with Disinfolklore to try and help us cut through it and see what’s happening. I’m trying to maintain my mental health hygiene, and one way is through this five-part series, which I’ll finish tonight with an answer to the question: what unites Donald, Netanyahu, and Putin?

What Unites Donald, Netanyahu, and Putin?

Over the course of the five speeches, I’ve shown you a weapon system. Reflexive control: the doctrine. Provocation logic: the delivery mechanism. That’s my original addition into the canon, as it were. Nuclear blackmail: the force multiplier. Ukraine’s counter-deployment: proof that the weapon can be turned against its creators.

Tonight in the final speech, I want to take the argument to its conclusion, because this is not only about Russia and this is not only about Ukraine. This is about all of us.

What unites Donald, Netanyahu, and Putler? The conventional answer is that they are so-called strong men, which is, of course, an archetype. As many of you will understand, archetyping and archetypes are one of the main eminences in my work, because by looking for archetypes inside data, I believe that can help us maintain mental hygiene, mindfulness, and spot manipulations.

Donald’s Archetypal Language: Cuba, Chicago, and E. Jean Carroll

On the Hoof last week, I raised the issue of how Donald was talking about Cuba in the same way that he talked about women. Most of us will have seen on our timeline in the last day or two — everyone has noticed how Donald was talking about when the World Cup comes, he’s going to take Chicago. Suddenly people pop up their minds and make the link between that and the way he speaks about E. Jean Carroll, which is the link I made last week about Cuba, which is actually a much more blatant example than the Chicago one.

Relatively few have perhaps spotted what is actually going on there. They see the family resemblance between the way Donald treats women and talks to women and the way he’s talking about Chicago, a city. What is going on there, the eminence, is what I call archetypal Disinfolklore.

Donald speaks fluently in archetypes. If you can understand that that is what’s going on there — Donald has the shadow, this phantom archetype of women, eminent in his mind, and he projects that phantom into any character, country, person, situation, inanimate thing, abstract thing, and all those fancy words from English grammar.

The eminence in there is not just the way he treats or perceives women. It’s a prediction about the future, about what he’s going to do. He’s going to take Cuba. He might make Cuba free. He’s going to take Chicago and do to Chicago what he did with E. Jean Carroll.

I’m happy to see that people are now making that link, and what I can add to it is perhaps precisely what’s going on there.

Strong Men Are Abusers

Every activity, policy, and speech contains the mana of coercive control. I use this term mana to describe energy, the eminence, the meaning of something — the M-N- sound, and that’s in the Finding Manuland part of disinfolklore.eu. If you want to look into it more, that’s the 6,000-year history of Indo-European linguistics which is eminent in all of my work and in helping us to monitor the quotidian ebb and flow on our timeline.

They’re not strong men. They’re abusers. They practise coercive control. They start a war with Iran and then expect France and Britain and Italy to rescue them from it. They expect us to put up with whatever it is — four-dollar petrol, which may affect how we can get to work, how we can feed our family — because it’s just on a whim what they’ve decided to do. This is the activity of coercive control.

I think we’ve got to stop calling these weaklings strong men. They’re abusers and it’s abuse. Not strong men. Again, another archetype.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat does a lot of talk on strong men and we see the similarity between these people modelled as strong men. Then we see in the media they will repeat: the guy in Hungary is a strong man. Of course, he’s nothing of the sort. He’s just modelling himself as a strong man.

Putler got a photograph taken of him with a tiger, which then died because he was late and they had to euthanise the tiger twice, and then the tiger died. He took a few photographs with his bare chest on steroids on a horse, fishing. Somehow fishing — I really don’t get how putting a rod in the water is supposed to be modelling strong men. That picture is constantly repeated, even when they’re trying to do a negative article about him. Those were three moments in Putler’s life. The rest of the time he looks like he does in that 1990s or 1980s picture of him with Prince Charles and the overcoat: just an absolute total weakling.

They managed through Disinfolklore and their Disinfolklore propagation apparatus to project themselves as this archetype: strong men. That’s a very common archetype in our information sphere. Now that I draw your attention to it as an archetype, you’ll obviously see that. I’m also interested in the more subtle archetypes, like the way Donald talks about Cuba as if it’s a woman, as if it’s E. Jean Carroll, or all the other women he is alleged to have abused and appears to have abused.

Archetype as Response Module

The distinction between a strong man and an abuser matters enormously. The label strong man, the archetype, installs a response module. This is how archetyping works. Treat this person with deference. They’re powerful. They must be managed. Their mana must be treated with kid gloves: managed, accommodated, appeased.

The label abuser installs a completely different response module. This person is exercising coercive control. The correct response is not accommodation. The correct response is to leave, or to confront, or to call the police.

The Comedian Is the Real Strong Man

The irony is: the Comedian is the strong man. He arrives in Saudi Arabia to meet MBS on the day that his forces had completed a four-day project to destroy fifty per cent of Russia’s fuel exports. That’s as strong as you get. He is the commander-in-chief of the most powerful army — certainly, possibly one of the most powerful armies ever.

Yet the common person and the media will be archetyping Netanyahu or Donald or Putler as the strong man. That just shows the ridiculousness of these archetypes. We can see the puppet strings there of what’s going on. You can also tell through any journalist who is falling for this archetype or perpetuating it: even if they’re cynical about Putler or Donald or the guy in Hungary, if they’re perpetuating this archetype, you know they’ve fallen for the troll. They’re under the spell.

It gives us a good way of measuring them and how much of their output we should lend to our brains. When we call Putler a strong man, we run the strong man software. We send Macron to negotiate. We send envoys with olive branches. We offer off-ramps. Remember Macron before he came to his senses in February 2023? He was always talking about off-ramps. Now Donald’s looking for an off-ramp in Iran, and I don’t think he’s going to get it.

When we call Putin an abuser, when we recognise that his governance technique is structurally identical to the coercive control exercised by a domestic abuser, we run different software. We stop trying to reason with him. We start treating his behaviour as a pattern to be escaped, not a puzzle to be solved.

This is something that probably most women are better at understanding intuitively, because most women have probably had bad experiences with so-called strong men and coercive control. We’ve all suffered from it. Frankly speaking, we’re all going to be bound together in this community because Donald is exercising coercive control on all of our lives now across the world. Eight billion people, amazingly.

The word strong man is itself a piece of Disinfolklore. When a newspaper headline reads “Putin shows strength” or “Donald projects strongman image,” these are not neutral descriptions. They install the archetype of strength in the reader’s mind. Once the archetype of strength is installed, it determines the response. You do not confront the strong. You accommodate the strong.

We all saw the picture of Donald falling asleep yesterday in a meeting. Preposterous. Yet he’s archetyped as strong. Change the label and you change the response entirely.

Call a man who isolates his partner, controls her finances, monitors her movements, and punishes her for disobedience — call that man a strong man and the neighbours close the curtains. Call that man an abuser and the neighbours call the police.

I took those examples from the legislation in the jurisdiction of England and Wales which made coercive controlling another a crime. They list about eighteen different patterns of behaviour, some or all of which can constitute a pattern of behaviour that constitutes unlawful coercive control.

That’s the kind of re-archetyping we need. An abuser, not a strong man. Not at the level of a neighbourhood — at the level of a civilisation.

Provocation: The Data

It’s quite helpful to be giving this talk at the moment because we’re going through this community-uniting event, as we all did indeed after President Zelensky’s White House visit in February 2025.

Before I take you on the specifics of how this system now operates in America, let me show you the data. Yes, this is Ukraine space, but this does bear on the wider picture, because President Zelensky is the antidote to this. We in this space are particularly gifted with having followed the ebbs and flows of how President Zelensky has been perceived in the public sphere and among our friends, and also in the media.

I looked at the exponential growth curve of documents containing “provocation” on the Factiva database from 1969 to 2020. 95,300 documents in the Factiva database contain the word provocation. It’s an exponential curve. From 1969 to the mid-2000s, it’s slow, steady accumulation. Then the spike begins at the time Russia invaded Georgia, and Georgia was being accused of provoking the invasion — which may actually empirically be true in some senses.

The spike begins and accelerates exponentially through the 2010s, reaching over 8,000 documents a year by 2020. That exponential growth maps almost perfectly onto Russia’s escalating deployment of what I call provocation logic as a governance tool: from the invasion of Georgia in 2008, through to the purported annexation of Crimea in 2014, to the full weaponisation of provocation logic in the approach to 2022, and indeed today in the Strait of Hormuz.

The main institutions where this word provocation was being used, according to the Dow Jones Factiva database of 33,000 sources: the UN Security Council, 2,142 mentions; Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1,018; NATO, 629; Russia’s Ministry of Defence, 556. The word provocation runs through Russian governance like a river through a landscape.

These are not my impressions. I had the impression about this from my time in eastern Ukraine, from my time on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska for three years, and also afterwards in Dnipro. This is data: 95,000 documents mapped by Factiva, showing empirically that provocation is the dominant trope of Russian state communication.

Look at the subjects. International relations: 17,000. Domestic politics: nearly 17,000. The word provocation saturates both domains equally. It’s not confined to geopolitics. It’s the operating grammar of both international and domestic governance. The same logic module — A accuses B of provoking A — runs at every level in every domain.

As far as I’m aware, I’m the first person to have noticed this and to have gone into this in this detail. I’ve been looking at this question for ten years now, ever since the word kept on popping out from Ukrainian soldiers I was dealing with, Wagner mercenaries I was dealing with, Russian soldiers I was dealing with in eastern Ukraine. Each morning I would go there and one set of soldiers would accuse the other of provocations. Then the other set would do the same thing. It just went on and on. That’s what spurred me into thinking about this. We see this pattern in geopolitics, and that’s what prompted me to look for empirical data to back it up.

The Mechanism of Provocation

Now let me show you what I wrote in my notes in 2020 when I first began mapping this.

“I provoke. I can say ‘you provoked me’ as a provocation to someone who didn’t consciously do so. I’m stopping the other person from deciding themselves what to do. I’m saying ‘you provoked me,’ but that’s my perception. Maybe you didn’t mean to do that. Maybe you just wanted to look nice that day.”

“I slyly use a stratagem to mobilise a universal or particular aspect of their personality to trigger a reaction. I neg them. I put them under this kind of spell. I put them on the defensive. I just say ‘you provoked me’ and they’re thinking: no, I didn’t. I just brushed my hair. I’m just trying to look nice. I wanted to look handsome tonight. I wanted to wear a suit.”

“I provoke them into deciding on instinct or their System One, as Daniel Kahneman would put it.”

It actually took me quite a long time to see this. Whenever you hear someone accusing someone of provoking them, it’s that accusation itself which is the attack. That’s a little saw which you can use, because the whole thing is very disorientating, and the Russians seem to have discovered how disorientating it is. They’ve mainstreamed it through their own society and through geopolitics, through the UN, through our information space.

One way to see through it in real time, because that’s what I’m trying to help all of us do with the Disinfolklore analytical method, is to just consider the accusation of a provocation an attack. Sometimes that is a just judgement: it’s someone who’s intentionally attacking you. Other times on the facts, they are not.

We can say pretty clearly that Donald is attacking everyone by accusing them of not helping him. He created this situation by attacking Iran and then expects that to provoke, and use reflexive control, to get France and Britain and Australia and Italy to bail him out in the same manner that his father used to bail him out. It’s all inevitability farming.

We see the same pattern with Duncy Putin in Ukraine. It’s Putin who needs the off-ramp. He’s provoking President Macron, up until February 2023, into releasing him, giving him an off-ramp. He can see this from the beginning. It’s all planned out.

Reflexive Control and System One

When I am provoked, my defences are down because I’m angry, I’m feeling emotion. I can’t see the signs or hear the triggers. I’m operating on my System One, which is my automatic system. It senses danger, and I get angry or sad or fearful. I think I’m deciding to do this when really I’m being helped along the way, because the other person is provoking my fear, provoking my threat. They’re saying to me: the provoked is reflexively going to troll me because they know somehow how my reflex response to certain stimuli will go.

That’s what Donald’s trying to do to Britain, to France. He’s saying to them: you’re on your own now. You didn’t help me out in my war. You’re on your own.

This is the mechanism of provocation mapped against Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on biases. Kahneman’s System One and System Two thinking: System One is your emotional response and System Two is your thoughtful response. The provoker targets your System One — your reflexes, your instincts, your emotional responses — and bypasses your System Two, which is your rational analysis, your deliberation. This is the cognitive architecture that reflexive control exploits. It’s the same architecture that Donald exploits.

Birthright Citizenship and the Troll on the Bridge

It’s all about fear. This birthright citizenship: at this moment, he’s in the Supreme Court trying to stare down judges over birthright citizenship, which is basically, as he sees it, archetyping himself as the defender of the inner realm, the American inner realm, as he did when he announced his candidacy in 2016 on the escalator.

He talked about Mexican rapists, where he’s talking about defending. He’s the troll on the bridge, defending against the goats crossing the bridge looking for pastures new. The goats coming across the bridge in the archetypal troll tale: they’re coming to adulterate the inner realm. They’re coming to affect its sovereignty, its security, and its fertility, its prosperity. It’s going to harm the women. It’s going to take away the men. It’s going to take away the fertility.

This birthright citizenship troll is a perfect one for this because it covers all three. These outsiders, these outer realm people, will come across the bridge and they’ll take away your sovereignty, your personal sovereignty. They’ll affect it. They’ll take away the sovereignty of your state because they’ll basically get Mexico to annex it. They’re also going to lock up your daughters, basically. These are very primal things, very clever. This is what he’s up to today, operating on all of these different domains at the same time.

January 6th as Reflexive Control

Donald was able to reflexively control his supporters into committing crimes in furtherance of his conspiracy to defraud the United States. Any of us who have read Jack Smith’s federal indictment against January 6th — again, stunning parallels with what Donald is doing at the moment on a global scale.

Tweets or untruths here, there, and everywhere; blowing hot and cold; creating this climate of fear; creating tensions; creating a stir. It’s exactly the kind of pattern which Jack Smith and the people who drew up that indictment catalogued in literally forensic detail.

It’s not rhetorical. It’s a precise description of January 6th, 2021. Donald used the architecture of reflexive control: arousing fear, installing a false archetype — “the election was stolen” — and triggering a reaction: storm the Capitol. He made thousands of Americans act voluntarily in his interest, believing they were acting on their own.

Jack Smith’s indictment makes an extremely strong case, as indeed did the Georgia case, that from the very first tweet — “January 6th, it’ll be wild” — and then all the lies about the election being stolen for three months, this was all leading up to the insurrection.

This was all about coercive control, reflexive control: knowing these not very conscientious people, very patriotic people, making thousands of Americans act voluntarily in his interest, believing they were acting on their own. The trigger was constructed over months. “The election was stolen. They’re stealing your country.” Those are from his tweets. Every rally, every tweet, the same trigger repeated until it achieved the density of an archetype — not an argument to be evaluated, a reality to be defended.

Note how at that time, Twitter, which was publicly owned, banned him after January 6th. Whereas this week, Rubio has tasked US embassies around the world to promote X as a means of confronting censorship — really as a means of brainwashing people. This is why all of us have to look after our mental hygiene at this precise moment. We’re at peak danger for all of us.

It’s not an argument to be evaluated. It’s a reality to be defended. The experience was patriotic rage, visceral, gut-level. Amygdala hijacking. System One. Manufactured by the same technique I described in Speech One: arousing fear to hack rational thought.

“You’re not going to have oil in the next few weeks. It’s going to run out.” Then smuggling in the troll while the mind’s defences are down. System One overwhelms System Two. The reaction was the one that Donald wanted: storm the Capitol.

The terrifying elegance: the enemy acts voluntarily in your interest, believing they act on their own. This goes right back to James’s question about reflexive control. Those words, my definition of reflexive control from Speech One, applied to Donald’s relationship with his supporters as precisely as they applied to Putler’s relationship with the West. The MAGA supporters who stormed the Capitol believed they were saving democracy, when they were destroying it, and they were doing so voluntarily, they thought.

Donald and Putler are only masters of the magical dimension: disinformation, coercive control, reflexive control. The word “troll” obviously is in “control” as well. It’s part of that moving together, basically.

Archetypal Linguistics: Troll, Trump, Control

If you dig down into the archetype, the linguistic meaning of these TRA- words — Trump, TRA-, troll, traverse, travel — it’s all about movement. Troll in Old English: it’s all about movement. Control: move together.

President Zelensky is still a master of both the magical and the real.

The origin of MAGA: again, the G, the ghost, the G from “magical,” whose earliest manifestation in Indo-European written records is in the Greek goēs, “countries with strange powers.” It’s in Homer. It’s in Aeschylus’s plays from about 400 BCE. In one of his plays, a son accuses the father of controlling him with strange words — like hypnotism.

It starts off: the first meaning of it is a nation, in reference to nations with strange powers — like Ukraine, basically. I’m not saying MAGA was planned, the initials, the GA, but it’s there anyway: the goēs sound, which is in magic and magus and majesty.

The Origins of MAGA

The origins of MAGA reveal the MAGA mechanism. Steve Bannon and Christopher Wylie’s Cambridge Analytica focused on trolling for internet users who are high on the neurotic, low on the conscientious dimension of the psychological spectrum: anxious, emotionally reactive, less likely to verify information before acting.

When the group was large enough, they brought them together in rooms purposely a little too small. They used long-tested Russian combat propaganda techniques to create community by igniting division. These are the people who formed the core of MAGA, the acorn seed, out of which emanated the community that would mature into the January 6th insurrectionists.

Cambridge Analytica’s techniques were not invented in Silicon Valley. They were adapted from Russian combat propaganda techniques, the same techniques I encountered on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska. I’m one of the few Westerners ever to live and work inside Russia’s occupation of Luhansk, 2015 to 2018, inside Russkiy Mir. I know what it smells like. I know what it feels like — not obviously as much as the Ukrainians do. I know what it does to people’s minds because I watched it do it to my mind and to others.

I see the same patterns in DC, in America, and now I see them globally.

Trumpsky Mir: Russian Occupation by Other Means

Trumpsky Mir. Russkiy Mir, the Russian world, went to Washington — not because Donald takes orders from Putler in any simple sense, but because the techniques are identical, the architecture is identical. The energy, the mana, coercive control: identical.

In Luhansk, Russia used local proxies — Ukrainians who served Russian interests while believing they served their own. In Georgia, Russia uses Georgian Dream. The clue is even in this kind of dreamy title. In America, Russia uses MAGA: Americans who implement a Russia-compatible agenda while draped in the Stars and Stripes.

James, thanks for that shoutout on Will and that show “Accidental Ukrainian” this week, because I really believe this. Obviously everyone can see that everything is always benefiting Russia at the moment from Donald. It’s the only consistency, the apparent consistency, apart from the one I’m pointing out: coercive control. America is under Russian occupation, and because they’re operating through Americans like Rubio, the wannabe Spanish aristo who seems to be totally under the spell now — like they’re operating through Georgians and Georgian Dream — it’s hard for Americans to understand.

The significance of my position is this. I’m maybe one of the few Western analysts who lived inside both Disinfolklore universes — inside Russkiy Mir in Luhansk, 2015 to 2018, and watching from the outside, with the trained eye of someone who has lived inside, as Trumpsky Mir takes shape in Washington.

Patterns aren’t similar. Patterns are identical.

In Luhansk, the first thing Russia did was control the information space: shut down Ukrainian television, replace local media with Russian state media, make it impossible for people under occupation to access independent information. Sound familiar? The result: people who had lived in Ukraine their entire lives began repeating Russian talking points as if they were their own thoughts. Sound familiar? We hear it today from House Republicans. We hear it from Rubio every time he speaks now. It could be Lavrov speaking.

In America, the mechanism is different in form but identical in function. You do not need to shut down television when you can buy the platforms. You do not need to censor the media when you can flood the zone with so much disinformation that the signal disappears in the noise. You do not need to imprison journalists when you can label them enemies of the people. The Disinfolklore is installed not by force, but by volume. That’s a nice use of the word volume, if I do say so myself.

Those of us who’ve studied Russia’s modes of governance now see stunning parallels. Pardoning the January 6th insurrectionists, who are now in charge of ICE — Putin elevated the leaders of the 1991 putsch, like Surovikin, who was in charge of the tanks outside the White House in 1991. A household name for all of us, obviously not for normal people. Purging civil servants: the Soviet standard. Weaponising the courts. Donald has got a lot of resistance from the courts, but let’s see how long that lasts. Russian Governance 101: the systematic dismantlement of independent institutions. The same playbook I watched in Luhansk.

Everything was a performance.

My base assumption is that Donald is working for the same set of Russian oligarchs who funded Paul Manafort’s work in Ukraine from 2006 to 2014 — which, as we see, didn’t work. They tried to establish a Disinfolklore universe in Ukraine, and look what has happened, thank God. They want to be unsanctioned.

Manafort’s work in Ukraine, building the political infrastructure that Russia used to control Ukrainian politics, was the prototype for MAGA. The same techniques of oligarch-funded political manipulation, deployed first in Kyiv, then in Washington. Manafort’s still there, and I see his signature in almost everything that’s happening.

Elon Musk and Donald should be seen as Russian oligarchs — not because they take orders from Moscow, but because they function as Russian oligarchs function. They use captured wealth and captured platforms to exercise coercive control over democratic institutions.

Hacking every country’s archetypes of national consciousness yields Russia-directed fig leaves like Georgian Dream, Brexit, MAGA, Ireland for the Irish, Free Palestine, and a bunch of flag-waving, palaeo-conservative, misogynistic, anti-immigrant, riot-creating movements globally.

The Axis of Misogyny

The axis of misogyny — and this is where archetyping Cuba as a woman or as E. Jean Carroll is so relevant — it’s so helpful to look with gender lenses, the lenses of gender. It’s one of the core tools in the Disinfolklore analytical method: not solely out of sympathy or empathy for half of humanity, but mainly because these people, these ne’er-do-wells, are all misogynists. It runs through them like fluorescent dye through artificially created DNA in cells.

They’ve got one aim in common: a neo-traditional prison reich. The same palaeo-conservative ideology that drives Russia’s war in Ukraine drives the rollback of women’s reproductive rights in America. Remove fifty per cent of the people from public life and you’re halfway to authoritarianism. Selling misogyny is authoritarians’ stock in trade.

Obviously it’s not enough, because you’d think Donald would get on very well with the mullahs — and he probably would if he just wasn’t such a crazy negotiator, up against a much older, longer strategic tradition than Donald represents.

Hybrid Warfare as Disinfolklore Success

The word “hybrid warfare” is itself a Disinfolklore success. Re-archetype acts of war as “hybrid warfare” and get the most knowing people in your chosen enemy’s chains of command to take on that archetyping. The word “hybrid” was adopted by NATO, by the EU, by Western academic institutions. In adopting it, they accepted the frame: these acts were not quite war, something in between, something that could be managed, tolerated, absorbed.

As yet, we’re not even archetyping what Donald is doing to humanity’s minds as a war, as combat. We need, I humbly suggest, to get to that point. He is fighting all of us.

Calling it a hybrid war is the operation succeeding, although I would welcome us recognising what Donald is doing as a hybrid war against all of us, not just against Iran obviously. Concealing its war against us from Russia’s chosen enemies.

Perception is an instrument of contemporary warfare. The Novichok in Salisbury, MH17 shot down, election interference in America and Britain, France, Moldova, and Germany, mercenary forces in Syria, Libya, Africa — each treated as an isolated incident. The cumulative effect: treating twenty acts of war as twenty separate incidents rather than as a single ongoing war was exactly what Russia wanted, and what Donald wants. The West’s own analytical frameworks prevented it from seeing the pattern.

Russia has been at war with the West since at least 2014, and the West calls this “hybrid warfare” — as if there was something hybrid about it, as if it were something other than war.

The Counter-Weapon: Six Steps

Here is the counter-weapon. Building up mental resistance to manipulation through Russian Disinfolklore and MAGA Disinfolklore, Donald’s Disinfolklore. What Russians call reflexive control is the main goal. Building that resistance is the main goal. That sentence contains the entire project, my entire project: not merely understanding Disinfolklore, but countering it, making it harder for the trolls to work, making it harder for the fear to hack our minds.

Arouse your audience’s fear, hack their rational thought process, then once hacked, almost any troll can be smuggled into their minds. This is the core tool in reflexive control operations. Every MAGA rally uses this architecture. Every Russian nuclear threat, every Netanyahu speech — the mechanism is universal. The specific content changes, but the architecture is always the same: trigger, experience, reaction. The Disinfolklorist hijacks your own psychology. Your own psychology generates the experience, and the reaction is the one the Disinfolklorist wanted all along.

Here is the method. Six steps. Anyone can use it.

Step One: Scan for the mana in the meme. What is the emotional charge? What am I being made to feel before I have a chance to think? If a piece of content makes you feel something intensely before you’ve evaluated it rationally, you’ve found the mana.

Step Two: Identify the archetype being deployed. “Russia is strong. Ukraine is weak. Cuba is a woman. Donald is tough. Immigrants are dangerous.” Name the archetype. Naming interrupts the installation.

Step Three: Characterise the Disinfolklore tool. Is it provocation logic — “they made me do it”? Is it accusation in a mirror? Is it the witch switch, redirecting legitimate anxiety onto a manufactured target? Knowing the techniques makes them visible.

Step Four: Evaluate the source and the chain. A story that begins on a Russian-controlled Telegram channel gets picked up by a far-right blog, gets amplified by an influencer, and ends up as a question on a mainstream news programme. That is meaning laundering. Trace the chain.

Step Five: Make the call. Is this Disinfolklore? What is its operational intent? To install a specific logic module? To trigger a specific reaction?

Step Six: Intervene. Deploy a counter-archetype, re-archetype. “Putler is not a strong man. He’s an abuser. Russia is not invincible. It’s a meat grinder consuming itself. Ukraine is not weak. It’s the most innovative military force in the world.” Each counter-archetype is grounded in data, and truth has a resonance that lies cannot sustain.

The foundation of it all is patience, which is the third element in the six-element Code of Positive Trolls.

Patience Counters Reflexive Control

Reflexive control is the military doctrine that patience counters. Again, this is all at disinfolklore.eu if you look up the Code of Positive Trolls there. If you respond reflexively, you are doing exactly what reflexive control was designed to make you do. If you pause, assess, and apply the tools, the doctrine fails.

The Argument of Five Speeches

I began this series five speeches ago with a screenshot. A senior British defence official, Chris Mayordomo, describing the mood in the room where intelligence about Russia’s imminent invasion was being discussed. The room was paralysed — not by a nuclear weapon, but by a folksy meme: “don’t poke the bear.”

Five speeches, one argument. The argument is this: Russia’s military doctrine of reflexive control, delivered through the provocation logic cycle, amplified by nuclear blackmail, and powered by the mana of coercive control, has colonised the minds of the free world. It has prevented the West from arming Ukraine adequately. It has cost a million lives. It has emboldened abusers in every country and has now been adopted by MAGA as the operational playbook for the dismemberment not just of American democracy, but of our global world order and of the peace of mind of humanity.

The counter-weapon is this: see the troll, name the troll, refuse to run the software the troll installed. By “troll,” I mean any emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind.

Patience, data, re-archetyping, counter-Disinfolklore.

The Post-World War II Legal Order Under Attack

Russia and MAGA flood our societies with Disinfolklore aimed at destroying the post-World War II legal order — whether that order is NATO, whether it’s human rights protected as a matter of law, whether it’s rules against discriminating on the grounds of sex or political viewpoint, the Refugee Convention, the laws of war, the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions. We’re seeing Donald, through his untruths, rhetorically destroy that order.

That order — the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Genocide Convention — was built on the principle that human dignity, the revolution of dignity, is not negotiable.

The UN Charter, signed in San Francisco in 1945, Article 2(4): “All members shall refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity of any state.” Russia and America have violated this article every day for the past year or two. Donald, by undermining the principle of collective security, violates its spirit every day.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” The axis of misogyny in Tehran, in Moscow, in DC is a project to make that sentence inoperative.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine. The forced transfer of, it admits, 700,000 children alone meets the legal definition. The word “genocide” has itself been subjected to Disinfolklore, re-archetyped as mere rhetoric or exaggeration, as “both sides.”

These documents are the immune system of civilisation. They are what separates the post-1945 order from the pre-1945 order of empires. I remind you that the post-1945 legal order is the content of the second element in the Code of Positive Trolls for me, which is ethical discipline or right. It defines what is right: not colonies and extermination.

They’re under systematic attack, not by tanks and missiles, but by Disinfolklore, by the manipulation of archetypes, by the installation of logic modules in our minds which make us act voluntarily in the interest of our enemies, believing we act on our own.

The generation that built the post-World War II order is almost gone. That responsibility falls to us. Counter-Disinfolklore is a civic duty, not a hobby, not an academic exercise — the fundamental skill of democratic citizenship in the age of reflexive control.

Every person who hears these words has a responsibility not merely to understand Disinfolklore, but to counter it, to use the six-step method, to apply the twelve tools, to refuse actively, consciously, deliberately to be trolled.

Conclusion: The Bridge Still Stands

Here is the final truth, the truth that connects all five speeches. If you respond reflexively, you’re doing exactly what reflexive control was designed to make you do. If you pause, assess, and apply the tools, the doctrine fails. See the troll, name the troll, refuse to be the troll’s instrument. Then, and only then, act.

The bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska is destroyed now. Russia blew it up to stop the civilians from crossing. The idea of the bridge — the crossing point between truth and falsehood, between the inner realm and the outer realm, between the archetype and the re-archetyping — that bridge stands. It stands wherever we are sitting or hearing this tonight, in every person who refuses to be trolled. It stands in the twelve tools at disinfolklore.eu and the nineteen concepts and the five mechanisms and in the million-word archives at disinfolklore.eu. It stands in all of us, if we choose to cross it — the bridge to refuse to be trolled.

In 1945, the generation that built the post-World War II order understood something we have forgotten. They understood that civilisation is not a default state. Civilisation is an achievement: fragile, contingent, and requiring active defence. They had seen Auschwitz. They had seen Hiroshima. They said, “We’ll build institutions to prevent this from ever happening again,” and they did that.

Now that entire architecture is under attack — not by arms, but by Disinfolklore, by the manipulation of archetypes that make people willing to dismantle their own protections. That is the genius of the weapon. It does not need to destroy the institutions from outside. It gets the people inside to destroy them voluntarily, believing they act in their own interest.

See the troll, name the troll, refuse to run the software.

Thank you. That’s it.

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