Podcast | Paradoxes' brainwashing qualities in ordinary news

What I look at in Disinfolklore is particularly the system effects of specific memes. I’m also interested in the moment — how they affect us, how they affect our motivations, our intentions, our attitudes. But the whole thing, what’s special about the Disinfolklore universe, is that when I set this out in February last year in Munich, just as Vance was making his speech, I said that what I feared would happen is this.

For those of us who know people who have gone MAGA, I suppose it’s a bit like our Ukraine war universe by comparison to people we know who live a normal civilian life, who think about Ukraine maybe once a week, if that. It’s an all-encompassing system where you wake up in the morning — a bit like being in love or something — and it’s all you think about. Or being in grief.

But the Disinfolklore universe that Donald wields, that he was trying to wrap the world up in, which I witnessed in eastern Ukraine where the Russians wrap everyone up in it — that’s what’s unusual or unique or not that common in how I look at the system effects of particular memes: the aggregation of particular memes in a certain way, so that before you know it, you’re in the cult. Or you begin to think that Greenland belongs to America, or that Venezuela belongs to America, or that Ukraine belongs to Russia. That would be the result of an aggregation of thousands, millions of memes that transform your mind.

In a minute, I’m going to go back to the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska, which I talked about in the last show on Christmas Eve. Amazing — we did a show on Christmas Eve. I think this is our 32nd show, by my count. We’ll go back to that bridge in a minute.

What I’ve noticed is this idea I’ve been working on, what I call paradoxical brainwashing. “I’m a Ukraine supporter, but Ukraine will lose.” We had this caller on the show — I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who noticed them — who joined the show about a week ago. Will and I think James, you heard them as well. They were a total downer about any argument which was given as to why — actually, it was Alan Brewer and Will who were dealing with this person. They were speaking the whole time about how Ukraine was going to lose. Any argument from the reservoir of many good arguments, factually based, that Will or Alan Brewer offered, this person was like, “Yeah, but...” They were just going on and on with the negative vibe.

The paradox is: I’m a Ukraine supporter, but Ukraine will lose. That structure, that energy, was in everything they were talking about. Some of us sometimes need to be reminded — we get in a rut, a mental rut, a mental routine — and we need to be reminded: “Yes, but this. Yes, but that.” That’s the value of Volya Radio. It’s the value of Mokrushyna’s show, and hopefully the value of this show as well for people — that when we’re in these mental ruts, as perhaps some of us have been about Venezuela or about Greenland or about other aspects of this, or something going on in Ukraine at the moment, by having different people talking to us, we get out of the rut.

Because we’re genuinely Ukraine supporters, we’re not trying to fool or trick people. We’re not concern trolling to get into someone’s mind, to bring them down and demotivate them and fill them with dismay. Because we’re like that, we’re relatively easily able to move out of a particular mood, out of a particular attitude or state of motivation. But this person who was on the show couldn’t be moved. I found it a really interesting case study.

Another paradox recently was “Putler wants Ukraine to succeed.” This is something I’ve begun to notice everywhere. It’s an aspect of cult formation — these apparent contradictions which people say. For instance, when Donald was talking about Putin wanting Ukraine to succeed, he also said, “Oh, and Russia, Russia, Russia.” Then in almost the same breath, he goes on to talk about how Putin wants Ukraine to succeed.

He introduces this formula, this mantra, which is supposed to mean to his supporters that there is this big conspiracy against him about Putin — even though, as previously discussed, the Mueller report found six or seven different ways in which his campaign was purposefully adulterated and influenced by the Russians. And then we have all of these other bits of evidence. But he uses this mantra to diffuse and as a shorthand to dismiss anyone who references that. Then the paradox is: in the very same breath, he says Putin wants Ukraine to succeed, even though that very day he’s trying to bomb Ukraine. Paradox rolled over, folded into another paradox.

Now that I draw your attention to these apparent contradictions in speech — from Putler as well: “I love you, so I’m going to hit you” — those kinds of apparent contradictions which people speak, I see as characteristic not just of particular instances of Disinfolklore, but of particularly powerful instances of Disinfolklore that have the potential to have system effects. They’re part of a brainwashing. It’s not the one story which brainwashes you. It’s hundreds, it’s thousands, it’s day after day after day which does it.

Once you begin to see these paradoxes, I think they’re more than a rhetorical tick — they’re actually a powerful weapon. It sounds a little strange, but again, an apparent contradiction: you’re disarmed, you go in. That was from Donald. Before he says “Putin wants Ukraine to succeed,” he says, “It sounds a little strange, but...” — another paradox. And yes, it’s totally strange that Putin wants Ukraine to succeed. This hesitancy on Donald’s part is the indication that even he understands this is a paradox that will be too much for many, but the most willingly gullible in that moment, to swallow.

In certain moments, all of us are vulnerable to Disinfolklore and to paradoxes. Imagine how susceptible someone exhausted from two years of nights in a bomb shelter in Ukraine would be: “Oh, if Ukraine just surrenders all of Donetsk, peace will follow.” Again, another paradox. If you surrender, peace will come, even though you’re surrendering to the big bad wolf.

Donald said, “I was explaining to President Zelensky here — President Putin was very generous in his feeling towards Ukraine.” We all saw President Zelensky’s endearing response where he goes into character — his actor character — and draws the whole of Ukraine and all of us into his mind, looking at Donald, and manages to pull it off without annoying Donald. The generosity that Donald was talking about there is the generosity of a wife-beater and of Epstein’s greatest friend — of Donald himself towards his own sexual assault victims. We know there have been many.

The main point here is the use of apparent contradiction, of paradox, to brainwash, to assuage, to soothe. Over the short term, we may not fall for this troll. However, over the long durée, we become habituated to such contradictions and apparent contradictions, to such paradoxes. When the same trolls are repeated, amplified ad nauseam, they take on a truth of themselves. “Ukraine made Russia invade.” “Ukraine was wearing a short skirt.”

This guy called Andrey, a long-term KGB agent and author of numerous intelligence-related publications, argues that Russian cultural heritage, linguistic structure, perception of paradox, and abstract thinking provide Russia with a competitive advantage to successfully use socio-humanistic technologies, which he sees as the main weapon to control people in the digital age.

This charge of hypocrisy, which I characterise as part of these paradoxes — I’ve spoken about before how I’ve noticed that the charge of hypocrisy is very often immanent in Telegram posts that Mokrushyna reads out on Twitter, on the Volya shows, or from Simonyan and the other Russian propagandists. So much so that I began to notice a pattern and began to wonder: what are they doing? What are they trying to do with this?

There are a number of objectives, but really what they’re trying to do is get people used to paradoxes and inconsistencies. This week we’ve seen so many people, including many of us probably, including me as well when I’m not fully energised, going: “Oh, if America does this, then Putin will be that, or Taiwan will be invaded.” We’ve seen these mental routines in some of this old guard of commentators.

Famously this week, we saw the FT guy talking about how Putin will be energised by the Venezuela thing. Really, what they’re trying to do is sort through a lot of confusing, brain-sapping data through this rhetorical flourish. Because of Twitter, we see them putting it into a tweet. In this case, Gideon Rachman, the FT foreign affairs editor — some of us will remember seeing the responses to this from Ukrainians, because again, this shows how little attention people whose job it is to pay attention to these matters and to be able to interpret them in a way that’s better than the ordinary person.

They clearly haven’t been paying any attention. They just see perhaps Ukraine as a news story. They still don’t understand that everything going on in the United States, in my humble opinion, is a function of Russia’s decision to go all in on Ukraine in February 2014. When someone like Gideon Rachman responds to the raid or invasion, the occupation of Venezuela, in this way, it reveals so much of what a certain class of commentator hasn’t been paying attention to. They’re just pointing out the hypocrisy of something in such a stupid way that reveals so much.

These hypocrisies and paradoxes which they point out — “European politicians say they’re interested in human rights, but look, they won’t let Russian newspapers in — this is such hypocrisy” — I just draw attention to this everywhere. Once you get your eye into this, you begin to notice it everywhere, and something’s going on. A lot of people just do it as a matter of habit. They haven’t thought it through. I’m making a plea to pay attention to this and perhaps avoid it if we can, unless it’s really an interesting paradox, because it has these brainwashing effects, I believe.

“All politicians are corrupt.” “Europeans are corrupt.” “Russia just wants peace.” “Archaeologists are hiding something.” There’s a lot of conspiracy theories about archaeology which at the beginning my feed was giving me. If we can scan for the structure of paradoxes and contradictions inside memes, I think it’s a valuable discipline and can help us interpret data a bit more insightfully.

I gave the 2025 Positive Trolling Award to @TweetforAnna_NAFO, mainly because her long comprehensive threads struck me as being a really good example of what I theorised as positive trolling in February 2020 — being any communication that conforms to at least one or all of the six elements in the Code of Positive Trolls: generosity, ethical discipline, patience, joyous perseverance, focus, and insight.

These six elements, which we can use to determine what’s folklore from what’s Disinfolklore, and what’s positive from negative trolling — every single one of her threads has immanent in it this positive trolling energy. As indeed does Mokrushyna’s work, whether it’s these stories which I actually love. It really helps me come to terms with the fact that maybe my three cats aren’t getting on, but hearing Mokrushyna’s stories about her cats helps me see that’s quite normal. I like the interjection of these really horrific, awful things we’re coming across each day with the quotidian, with a bit of humour, with a bit of mocking laughter. That is the epitome of positive trolling. Mokrushyna should probably get the Positive Troller of the Entire War award from me. But @TweetforAnna_NAFO got the 2025 Positive Trolling Award — hopefully a more sustainable award than the Nobel Peace Prize.

Another idea I’ve had for quite some time, which I still think is on: this Ukraine bridge drop backstop. Putin’s residence troll was a premature ejaculation — that was Magyar Bird’s brilliant branding of that Putin’s residence troll. A premature ejaculation born of panic by the pretend-we’re-surfing-relaxedly Rushists.

If any of us missed that: the Russians were a bit scared that this peace process thing was going a bit fast. Instead of waiting for Ukraine to sabotage it, they decided they would sabotage it. But they did it — not only did they do it in a way that really worked two years ago, which almost looked like it was going to work with Donald and may well work with Donald in time to come. But the premature aspect of it was brilliant, because I had that sense as well.

I always believed that if anything close to peace came — if anything close to Donald or Putler’s 28-point plan, or 20-point so-called peace plan, was close to being forced on Ukraine — Ukraine would do something like drop the Kerch Bridge in order to sabotage it. It’s laughable that Russia ejaculated first, and such a pathetic, narcissistic, please-the-tsar-with-our-troll Putin’s residence troll as well. It was so obviously to please him that they came up with this specific one. It wasn’t like “Ukraine bombed a hospital” or something like that, which may still happen — we’re waiting for that.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s relentless destruction of Russia’s capacity to operate as a state continues. This is a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to complete what was begun in 1990 — the destruction of Russia’s capacity. Five to six sovereign states will succeed the Russian Federation, whether Donald, Xi, or any number of Russia experts like it or not. I don’t think Ukrainians are going to surrender this opportunity to strike into the heart of Russia and every Russian position until Russia’s capacity to operate as a state is done.

On the 30th of March 2022, I wrote that “Let’s compare trolls” tweet: President Zelensky is a 21st-century troll operating on communications frequencies 20th-century trolls like Donald and Putler can’t even conceive. For instance, like that wonderful moment in the press conference with Donald, when Donald says that Putler wants Ukraine to succeed and Zelensky does that amazing, just like Charlie Chaplin, amazing expression with his facial expressions. We’ve all seen it in his art as an actor, and then we see it in him as a president, so we recognise what it means and all Ukrainians recognise what it means.

That’s what I mean by a 21st-century troll — moving emotions just with an eyebrow, with a funny expression. Rather than getting really annoyed by such a d*****s statement, he just flicks his eyebrows and distances himself from it, keeps his integrity intact, and ensures that everyone watching — especially 42 million Ukrainians watching — understands that he’s not subjecting himself to this idea that Putler just wants success for Ukraine.

Dropping the bridge is still in Ukraine’s bank account, for use to tickle the Rushists so the Rushists can’t save face in so-called peace plans. That backstop is still there. I did think today, every day is a good day for us — we really need something pretty mega to shake us out of whatever’s going on. So that backstop bridge-stop is still there.

In response to that particular piece of writing, someone replied and said everything I say about Russia could be said about the West. I responded: well, then we have the Code of Positive Trolls. The second element is ethical discipline — is right. It’s the post-World War II legal order which determines what is right. What is right is that Ukraine has territorial integrity. We’ve seen all those tweets about Greenland. You can both-side the issue all you want, but once you apply what is right according to this standard that humanity decided after World War II, then you know Ukraine is in the right, and indeed Denmark and Greenland are in the right.

I still think about the danger of American troops in Ukraine. It’s looking very unlikely, obviously, but that was worrying for me. Russia’s weakness perhaps is a good security guarantee to not have Erik Prince run a mercenary force of 20,000 barrier troops with Ukrainians between them. I’ve had that on my mind this week — that Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv was discussing with Washington a possible presence of US troops in Ukraine as part of security guarantees. Certainly in the draft we’ve seen in the last day or two, it’s not in there. Unlikely, but just keeping an eye on that.

The shape-shifting aspect of the invasion rationales for the Venezuela operation always reminded me of — going back to the brainwashing, the system-wide effects of things — the Don’s shape-shifting Venezuela trolls disorientate, confuse, disarm. Their linguistic circumlocutions and enemy-making rhetoric: “Look at those weak Europeans.” Dominate the weak.

I spoke before about how I had seen this theme. What I remember from spending a lot of time in America in the mid-80s, particularly with a family I lived with — a close family that my mother grew up with, who then went MAGA — is how practically everyone talked about parts of the cities as no-go areas. That for me is a good solid reference point, from 1986, 1987. This idea of creating this dark forest, this part of the forest, and saying “Oh, you can’t go there” — that’s what they’re trying to do with Europe at the moment.

This is what MAGA was doing with Ukraine: archetyping Ukraine as a weak woman, with the characteristics of a weak woman that a MAGA masculinist, a particular form of masculinist paleoconservative, defines as weakness. When we look at MAGA Mike Johnson — certainly when I look at them — I just think you are the world’s weakest-looking person. Or Vance. But they adopt these particular routines to try and seem as if they’re strong. Obviously on an animal level, they’ll never convince me that they’re strong. They just seem weak, weak, weak.

They project this sense through their rhetoric onto whole countries, onto Ukraine. This is the value of looking at the archetypes and the archetyping in Disinfolklore, I believe. Because I see they’re doing it to Europe as well. Now we can see what they’re up to. They’re trying to prepare Europe to have part of the European Union occupied militarily and violently taken away. The European Union’s territorial integrity disturbed, with all the issues that would have for the euro and for everything.

I noticed that when they shapeshift — when Donald is talking about why he wants to invade Greenland — there’s constant switching. A good metaphor for that is the EW systems. While this constant switching between motivations plays out, with all these old guys writing for the FT using their 20th-century concepts and their understanding of Russia as a great power, unadulterated by data — the data we see every day — while all that’s going on, we’re being wrapped up inside a MAGA global Disinfolklore universe.

The disorientating, confusing, disarming shapeshifting — shapeshifters in folklore. Donald is an archetypal shapeshifter: the shaman, the trickster, the Odin character, the Indra character, the salesperson. They’ve always been shapeshifters. They model shapeshifting by giving different shapeshifting explanations for why they’re doing things.

Some of us here will have been listening to the show the other morning after the Venezuela operation. Somebody called in and you could tell they were quite excited by the whole thing. They even repeated this nonsense, this mythical nonsense, which I remember hearing in the context of the First and Second Gulf Wars, about these magical machines which the United States Army used. I could see in that how effective the Disinfolklore about the raid was.

Then I saw the polling that 60% of Republicans who yesterday said they wanted no more wars now need Greenland. There was 18% of Democrats as well. They’ve resisted so much over the past few years and then suddenly, five minutes after an invasion of Venezuela, they’re like, “Yeah, great, let’s do it.” Totally forgotten that five minutes ago they were saying no more wars and they only voted for Donald because he promised to get them out of Afghanistan and Iraq — and now he’s invading everywhere.

That’s quite unusual. But we should treasure when we see this happening to people in our lives and around us — it’s really good data. It’s like a mirror to the Disinfolklore universe that MAGA and Donald are trying to wrap us up inside. You’re like, “Wow, that’s really quick.” They’ve only done this raid a few hours ago and now this guy’s really excited about it. If I’d said to him yesterday, “We’re going to invade Venezuela,” he probably would have said, “That would be a terrible idea.” But now, within an hour of watching CNN or whatever, he was really excited and aroused by it. I found that really interesting. That told me something.

Seven years of thousands of Disinfolklore vectors in eastern Ukraine — I saw at the beginning of that in Russia-occupied Luhansk — you can see how that will really work on things. We’re on year nine of MAGA at the moment.

It’s really the complicity — there’s this great theatre company in London called Complicité. I went to some of their stuff 20 years ago, but it really stuck with me: the complicity between the audience and the artists, the artistry. This is the whole point of it. The complicity of Disinfolklore. The Don’s shape-shifting folksy stories about Venezuela, Greenland, moving you along, different reasons for doing it. The complicity between the storytelling and the actual events themselves, staged like invading Venezuela, goes back to what I talked about last time — the luxury sausage troll saga, that experience on the bridge where the staging of the event and then its reporting are like a spiral, a mutating double helix like DNA, twisting between the reality and creating these new realities in people’s minds.

That complicity we saw on Sunday — that’s a great case study to try and work out what’s going on and how it impacts people we know. MAGA was founded nine years ago: America First, no foreign entanglements. They’ve just spent the last four years ruining their country’s promise to Ukraine in the Budapest Memorandum because “we don’t want any foreign entanglements.” And then in the space of a few days — invading Venezuela, then invading Greenland, coming up with this vast trove of ready-made Disinfolklore, all these stories, all of these shape-shifting reasons for doing it, and now claiming sovereignty over part of the European Union and indeed over the whole of another continent, South America.

That kind of battering is again going back to the paradoxes, going back to the brainwashing, the cult-forming aspect of it. What I’m trying to do is give us a bit of a frame for looking at these events that lets us look at them from a bit of distance. Hopefully it’ll have some psychological impact on us in a positive sense, because we’ll be able to look at it as a piece of art on a wall rather than something visceral that we feel — because I’m sure all of us do feel it viscerally. It’s a real downer. The whole thing is a big downer. I’m also looking for ways of helping us understand what’s going on but deal with it in real time. Ways that we can use to stop us becoming overcome by it, because we’ve still got a long war ahead of us.

A good bit of humour was that picture of Hegseth with Twitter. Someone pointed out that there was a smiley character — not George Smiley, but a smiley meme — on the photograph when they were trying to recreate their Bin Laden Situation Room photographs in Mar-a-Lago.

So let’s take the joy where we can and get back to the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska and the Donets River. The Russian occupiers on one side of the bridge, of the river, and us on the other side. I used this illustrative story, the luxury sausage troll saga, where two and a half tons of sausages were dumped, somehow mysteriously — never got to the bottom of it — in the middle of the night. The Russians said they were going to annihilate them with artillery. Just at the last minute, they decided not to. There was going to be a war, a huge escalation over these sausages.

I found out about this on my way down to the bridge that day with a Russian colleague I was working with as a monitoring officer in the OSCE. We navigated this very difficult situation which could have turned into a really ridiculous war and escalation. Then we got filmed, and then we became part of the Disinfolklore of the Russian occupiers, which was used as part of their brainwashing process: “Oh, look what the OSCE is doing — it’s smuggling sausages.” Then: “The sausages are poisonous.”

I use this as an illustrative example of how this complicity between the stories, the storytelling, the way they’re spun, and actual real-world events works. I remember a very experienced French army officer I was working with at the time. We were speaking about the sausage troll saga incident, trying to work out what did go on. His reasoning was very good for how the sausages hadn’t been planted there to provoke this huge system of trolls which went on for weeks — because nobody would have sanctioned buying two and a half tons of sausages. He was looking at it purely from a bureaucratic point of view, and that really quite helped me understand.

What he did say was that after whatever had gone wrong with some sort of smuggling operation, after the two and a half tons of sausages had been dumped there, the Russians then had their ways of dealing with it — spinning out of what had accidentally happened events they could use to help brainwash the occupation, transforming their identities through this storytelling.

This was just one of thousands, tens of thousands of stories which I was part of, became part of, and encountered, that helped me see into the archetypal and original Disinfolklore universe — the entire information system that the Russians built inside the occupation. I didn’t understand its purpose until the full-scale invasion. The real purpose of all this storytelling, as with Donald’s, as with the MAGA Disinfolklore universe, is to transform people from the inside out by affecting moods, motivations, intentions, and attitudes in the short term and in the long term.

That, again, is a way of seeing the Venezuelan operation — seeing how particular people’s attitudes become transformed. They voted for MAGA for no more wars, and now suddenly they’re really excited, aroused by the war. When we see that going on, that is what is going on. That’s what I mean by a Disinfolklore universe.

Obviously, one story, one operation, isn’t enough to change someone’s identity. To change someone’s identity from the inside out — for those who’ve seen family members go MAGA or Brexit, for instance, or the way our identities have been changed in permanent ways — many of us who follow the minutiae on a daily basis of the Ukraine war, our identities have also been changed. We will not go back to the people we were on the 24th of February 2022. We’ve had too much training.

I called the last show, the one we did on the 24th of December when I published the podcast, “The Training Set, the Data Set” — because we’ve had this really intense training data set. We can sense, we can see an energy in memes which other people can’t.

I mentioned Gideon Rachman earlier. Until the 24th of February 2022, he would have been way out there in terms of being able to recognise and write about geopolitical events. But now all of us, just normal ordinary people who have subjected ourselves to this training data set — every day, day after day, reading what’s coming from the Russians, seeing the patterns, finding people who have insights, particularly people from central and eastern Europe whose perspectives on these kinds of data, on what the Russians do, we may not have encountered before — we’re permanently changed by it.

Certainly there are people in my life who we were equals when it came to Russia, even though I’d lived and worked there in eastern Ukraine for so long. Now they can’t see through the situation. What’s going on at the moment is really confusing for them. They can’t see a way through. This is the importance of understanding how Disinfolklore — which is the aggregation of all of these stories — can change our identities and how it does it to other people.

For instance, what we would have seen in people in England between January and July 2016, and then as we went through all of the sagas as they tried to Brexit — whether it was the suspension of parliament saga — we saw people’s identities changing, but then most people have snapped back. Even though people couldn’t speak about anything else apart from the European Union between January and July 2016, and then for periods after that, now I’d say it would be pretty hard to get anyone to talk about the European Union, and certainly not in a negative way. People just put it out of their minds. COVID as well — it’s a similar thing. People haven’t been changed by it one way or the other.

But when this is directed Disinfolklore, strategically directed, using the kinds of memes that the Russians use and which MAGA is using, this isn’t just a series of different stories and then everyone snaps back to the way they were before. This is actually a deliberate operation, I believe. This is what I spoke about at the Munich meeting when I talked about battling archetypes and the Disinfolklore universe and the danger we faced as a civilisation unless we understood how these stories concatenate, aggregate to change our identities — in the same ways that the Ukrainians living inside the occupation had their identities changed.

But then, as we saw, the Soviet Union operated on this level as well. And it didn’t manage to get rid of Ukrainianness, even though it really tried so hard. So it demonstrates, as does the work on cults, that you can escape it with the right tools. I try myself to provide user-friendly tools to help us deal with it in real time, but also over the long duration.

When I say our identities will be changed by the Ukraine war — when it’s over and when Russia de-occupies Ukraine — I hope it will be not in a negative way. We’ll have to find ways of gently speaking to people who weren’t paying attention so that they can begin to understand what’s going on. Perhaps the Venezuela and Greenland situations are so attention-grabbing that everyone is paying attention now.

I remember M.ockers saying something recently about her Christmas dinner with her brothers, who used to laugh when she’d say, “The Russians are going to attack us.” Now she mentioned how one of her brothers was saying, “Oh, apparently the Russians were flying those drones at Barrow and Furness,” which was one of the places that Medvedev talked about attacking, which would be attacked in any war.

Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe