Battling Archetypes

The Trito Myth ContinuedTrita is a herdsman whose cattle are stolen by the negation, by the snake. In Vedic India, the negation is called the Naga. Who wouldn’t argue that Druidy Don is today’s negation? Or Duncey Putler, the negation of the post–World War II legal order.Then with the help of Zeus Pater — Zeus Pater, Skyfather, Zeus in Greek, Jupiter in Rome — in Vedic India, or sometimes on his own, Trita manages to get his cattle back.Capital from CattleAfter retrieving his cattle, his capital — the word capital comes from cattle, and that’s how fundamental they were — he establishes the first ritual, the first rite of sacrifice, to commemorate, to memorialise and give thanks to the Skyfather. This culture-forming sacrifice, self-sacrifice manifesting as the sacrifice of the twin.We have Trita, third man. Manu, the first man — human, or Mannus in Germanic tradition. In India, it’s Manu. Yama in India, coming from Aryaman, who gives his name to Iran, to the name Iran. In the Zoroastrian era, Yama starts his life as kind of the lord of the treasury, becomes celestialised, archetyped as a deity, and then is transmitted into Tibetan Buddhism and into Hinduism.We see this in Odin, who is on the same level as Yama — again, archetyping, all archetyping along with Indra as well — of the Lord of Death, the first monarch. Again that rich sound at the end of monarch. The first king to self-sacrifice and die and lead all other humans into the afterlife. This is the function of Yama, twin, over Manu, who’s the first sacrificer. Manu is in the same position as Trita.The MN Sound Across TraditionsIn the Germanic tradition, we have Tuisto, whose name also means twin, and Mannus, with two Ns, different from Manu but pretty close, who’s the first of the Germanic-speaking peoples. In Wales, we have Manawyddan. In Ireland, we’ve got Éremón, who’s cognate, I believe, with Aryaman — the first high king of Ireland in the Indo-Europeans after the three invasions of Ireland. In Iran, Aryaman, who gave his name to Iran.The same immanences in all these traditions, the same archetypes, the same sounds, the same MN sounds in all of these names passed over thousands of years.Skyfather and UkraineHow much do we talk about the sky today? Sky Shield protecting Ukraine’s sky. How appropriate that this should have been an imminence in the minds of the first Indo-Europeans. Skyfather, Zeus Pater, in their village on the right bank of the Dnipro, south of Zaporizhzhia. Zeus Pater lived there. He spread from there into our culture, into our minds through the Trito myth and through Trita’s sacrifice, establishing the rite after he gets his cattle back.Both Sides Archetype as TritaThis is my original addition to the Trito myth: both sides archetype themselves as Trita, the good and the bad. Everyone identifies with the herdsman whose cattle has been stolen. Donald identifies with Trita and sees himself in Trita’s position. Duncey Putler does too. President Zelensky does too. We do. Everyone identifies with the herdsman whose cattle have been stolen.When we hear Donald and Duncey Putler grievance mining — what I call grievance mining — moaning about this or that, they’re identifying, they’re acting out their feelings of being persecuted. Like Trita was persecuted by having his cattle taken away. Someone has come and stolen our children, our cattle, our houses. They’ve taken away our peace of mind. They’ve taken away our husband, our wife, our girlfriend. Something we value, our love. We overcome obstacles and we retrieve them, either through the intercession of Zeus Pater, or whichever deity you believe in, something in the sky, or just by our own exertions.Both sides do this. Duncey Putler archetypes himself as Trita, claiming Ukraine’s people are his cattle. Donald archetypes himself as Trita. All of these MAGA people, these America First people, these Reform people in England, these AfD people — their origin story is the same.The Need for a StandardIf everyone identifies with Trita, we need a standard against which to decide what is right. When is Trita right in retrieving what he sees or perceives as his cattle? When is he not right? When is he sinister? He’s wrong. He’s gone into someone else’s territory claiming their cattle are his and he’s taken them back from there. He has invaded Iran. He has invaded Ecuador or invaded Venezuela.The Troll: The Fundamental MetaphorThe fundamental metaphor in the Disinfolklore analytical method is the troll. Again, the TR sound in troll. That’s not a coincidence, because it was in search of some meaning to this pattern which I kept on noticing — Trump, troll, Trump, troll, TR — that I ended up reading the Rig Veda from 1100 BCE.The archetypal troll tale, the Three Billy Goats Gruff — three brothers Gruff, crossing a bridge, looking for pastures new, economic migrants — this is the story of all Indo-European migration. This is how one language family spread from Mykolaivka village south of Zaporizhzhia city into the geographical space between Ireland and India by tradition, and then across the whole of the Americas, and even Australia, apparently.This is the story of all Indo-European migration, and again, this is my original contribution to the interpretations of Three Billy Goats Gruff, immanent in this tale, which was first translated into English in 1860. It immediately became the most popular of all troll tales. There are thousands of troll tales, but this is the archetypal one as evidenced by my search of 33,000 sources in the Dow Jones Factiva database, which I did April–May 2020 when I first started looking into this in seriousness.The Three Billy Goats’ GruffThe troll guards the bridge, like the bridge trolls I dealt with in eastern Ukraine, the Russian occupiers on the other side of the bridge. The troll guards the bridge. First Billy Goat Gruff says, don’t eat me. I’m just going over to the other side for pastures new. A bit of economic migration. I’m going to Stanford to do machine learning. Then I’m going to contribute to the creation of Anthropic. Don’t eat me. My brother’s coming after me, my tribesmen, my fellow Indian machine learning expert. He’s much fatter. Preserve your appetite. He goes by and he goes off and works on Anthropic.The second one comes: I’ve actually got this brilliant idea for an electric car and I’m going to go to MIT, and it’s going to make a lot of people rich and facilitate zillions of new technological trajectories we can’t even dream about right now. My sister is following me, my fellow economic migrant, and she’s really big. She’ll satisfy you for a year. Then the third one comes along and kills the troll. Then he takes over the White House.What’s interesting is the way the story is told. The troll is the negative entity. Yet no one talks about internet goats. We talk about trolls. They’re the ones who lived. The archetypal troll lived. The goats have negative connotations. The word sacrifice comes from the sacrifice of the goat, which goes back to the Trito myth, because after Trita retrieves his cattle, he establishes his first ritual to sacrifice to the Skyfather.Arya: The Geographical AreaIf Trita decides to move beyond his area — arya, arya, arya, centre — Aryaman describes a geographical area as well, the mana, the energy in the centre. It’s a spatial area. The word area then pops up again in, I think, the eighteenth century in English. This term arya is really common in West Asia, in Armenia — Armenia, which is a distinct branch of the Indo-European languages — as well as in the Aryan or the Iranian branch. It’s so common in the Iranian branch that many people refer to the Iranian branch as Arya.Basically, it comes down to meaning an area. It’s the area where your community lives. It’s your area. The story of all Indo-European migrations is deciding to move beyond your area and to steal someone else’s cattle, whether it’s their women or their children or their cattle or their space.When Trita Is WrongThen Trita is in the wrong. If he crosses the Don, if he crosses the Donets and attempts to take land which is not his, then by right he cannot call on Skyfather to protect him. He cannot call on international law. He breaches territorial integrity. Nor can he commemorate this in a May 9th parade and expect us to agree he is Trita. He archetypes himself as Trita, but we make a judgement: no, sorry, mate, you’re not. You’re a usurper. He’s justifying moving into someone else’s land west of the Don and taking their cattle by saying these are my cattle anyway, this is Russian land. Donald says Greenland is America.This is the oldest story in Indo-European culture from the same community that left Mykolaivka village. Somehow their descendants took over the entire space between Ireland and India, apart from Basque country and obviously the Hungarians and the Finns and one or two others, but basically most of the area between Ireland and India.The Refugee Convention as StandardIf everyone can model themselves as Trita, as the third man — TR again — we need a standard. If those goats crossing the bridge are escaping persecution, if they have a well-founded fear of persecution on the grounds of certain protected characteristics, then they can cross that bridge. They should be free to cross that bridge without being killed. That’s the Refugee Convention, 1951. That’s what I mean when I talk about the post–World War II legal and social order settlement defining the content of what is right.If they’re merely economic migrants and cannot rely on the Refugee Convention, then we have other means. We have visas and other systems. If Trita decides to cross into someone else’s territory and steal their capital, then Trita is in the wrong because we have a standard of judgement to judge that when Putler models himself as Trita, he is in the wrong when it comes to Ukraine, whereas President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people are Trita. Someone has come into their land and taken their cattle. Now, mainly through their own means, but also through the means of us helping in our own small ways, we are helping them restore their cattle.The Clue in Archetype ItselfImplanting a model of “Rch” (Rg / Rt / Reg / Rch / Rit / Rd) into the Archetype, and repeating it until it achieves the density of an Archetypal Identity in our minds.The clue for what is right is in the word archetype itself — the right sound, arta, right, truth. Whereas Jung thought all archetypes were true, and Saint Augustine thought all archetyping was evidence of a divine nature, I am only really interested in determining which archetypes are false and which ones are right.That RT sound, that arta, right, truth — we know this from the Behistun inscriptions, where Darius the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire in ancient Iran, around 500 BCE, had carved into a mountainside a record of all his campaigns in three languages. Those inscriptions in three different languages enabled the decipherment of cuneiform writing, not unlike Claude Code is allowing us normal people to decipher the mysteries of computing.This unlocked the secrets of Babylon, of Akkad, the Hittites — the first Indo-European empire — the Assyrians. It itself dislodged and re-archetyped the entire history of the world. Because until we were able to unlock these texts — for instance, the Hittites — no one knew they existed really until the late nineteenth century, when there’s all this literature, some of which I’ve read, where particular researchers are trying to uncover them. Then their imperial library was found in 1909 — 7,000 cuneiform texts — but no one knew how to read them. They had to learn how to read them.Darius and the UsurperDarius’s inscriptions — each campaign begins against a usurper. A usurper, like Druidy Don, like Duncey Putler, but not like President Zelensky. I monitored his election. It was free and fair according to the standards, the Venice Commission standards, OSCE standards, which are the definitive standards for what governs a fair and proper election.The usurper is someone promoting drauga, which is the lie. The lie in this context: that they’re a legitimate leader. This brings us back to January 6th and to the eternal meaning of these concepts and these ideas. The very simple: lie, usurper, truth. We go back to Duncey Putler, who’s never been elected properly.In Old Persian, arta means truth. In Sanskrit, rita — arta, RT, rit, right, rit. In Sanskrit, it’s actually even in the term for the language itself. Rita means cosmic order, truth. The RT sound in arta, right, truth, territorial integrity — it’s in those terms, it’s in sovereignty, it’s in that rent in monarch, in queen, ren. It’s in the opposite, drauga, the lie, the negation. Everything Donald speaks is drauga. It’s not true. It’s not truthy. It’s not right. It’s not arta. It’s untruth.The Wasteland MotifWe go to the motif of the wasteland, spoken about before in Indo-European culture. This idea from ancient Celtic religion survived from that mythology for which we have textual evidence, which then gets transmitted across Europe, is remembered and becomes the Holy Grail, ends up in Monty Python — that from the monarch’s truth arises all good things in a culture and in the community. From the monarch’s lies come famine, wars, death, the violation of property and bodily integrity.These are not universal themes. They aren’t recorded universally. They are recorded in Indo-European culture from almost our first textual evidence — from the Behistun inscriptions, which are the earliest extant textual evidence we have of Iranian culture and religion, though we know about Zarathustra and Zoroaster from about 1400 BCE through much later texts.Recoupling Right with RightI’ve spoken before about how Merz and Maloney and Macron and President Zelensky can recouple moral right, legal right, with the political right, after it has been decoupled since 1980 in the idea of voodoo economics, and now completely decoupled among the far right from what is right, as we had in the Third Reich — the RT sound with its meaning system, truth, arta, that which is not drauga.The MN Sound: The Second Crypto-Semantic Signalling SystemThe second crypto-semantic signalling system immanent in our language: the MN sound. These sounds, these concepts occur again and again. They’re relevant today to interpret in contemporary culture and on the fly inside memes. I only encountered them because I was trying to understand what Disinfolklore is — its mana, made of what? What’s its energy?When we think of the MAGA people who started off wanting no war and now are saying kill all the Iranians — that’s an exaggeration, of course, but you get the point — over time, people get lured and groomed into not just accepting but promoting what was once antithetical to their identity. A week ago, they were saying Donald will never invade, and Duncey Putler will never invade. Now they’re like, well, of course, he was always going to. What a genius. He deceived everyone — including them. We don’t want these people; we want to fight against that. We are those people as well because this happens to all of us. We do change our minds. A great quote, I think it’s Winston Churchill: when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, madam?The Code of Positive Trolls: What Is RightAlong this path, we need to keep the standard. What is right? The second element of the Code of Positive Trolls — what is right in this case — is what was agreed by every state on earth. All 192 of them signed the UN Charter: refrain from the threat or use of force unless the UN Security Council votes for it. Territorial integrity.Again, the clue — all of these signals in our language, they’re reminders, mnemonics. Monarch, sovereignty, right, human rights, droit in French for law — architected as human rights as a matter of law for the first time in history in the post–World War II legal order. Not perhaps deliberately planted by the Yamna, not intentionally, but so strong in their minds that these signals became embedded in ours. The clue is even in this term, re-archetyping — right, rich, right.What Is To Be DoneNow, what is to be done? MAGA is disrupting the archetypal identities that are the foundation of our community. Archetypes change our own. We were fat, now we’re thin. Ireland was poor, now it’s not. America was reliable, now it’s not. We felt secure, now we don’t. Russia is a menace, soon it will collapse.Embrace these changes. Consciously disrupt the archetypal identities your enemies attempt to inflict on your mind. Defend the post–World War II legal and social order. Don’t get accidentally mobilised into the wrong war.First, know that this is what is going on. Second, create your own archetypes and counter theirs with yours, in your mind and inside your sphere of influence. Make sure they’re right, make sure they’re true, make sure they’re consistent with right and with truth and with defending the post–World War II legal order.I created the moniker Disinfolklore as an archetypal life story, as an aggregate to describe today’s reality as I see it, and I try to communicate it into other people’s minds using words and natural language. That’s what I do.Positive TrollingThis is no time to despair or to keep trolls which should not be kept alive alive. It’s a time to positive troll, as all of us do all day long on this app.The battle in Ukraine is about more than Ukraine. It’s a titanic struggle of the kind we might be familiar with from Greek mythology, between Druidy Don, Duncey Putler, and the Comedian for the mantle of preeminent power, preeminent mana, in our world today.Some of us have noticed our perceptions of Duncey Putler’s supposed immunity to sanctions are changing. Multiple articles on Russia’s collapsing economy. We heard Chancellor Merz’s brilliant performance yesterday with Druidy Don in the White House. These articles are appearing in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal. Probably all of us have had normal people who don’t spend all day on this talking to us about Russia. Is it going to collapse? Even in Russian newspapers, OSINT analysts are great at surfacing this.The Bear WeakensHere we may be seeing a shift in the archetype of an all-powerful bear, in the perception of Duncey Putler, whose archetypal identity as a strongman depends on the strength of his state.The power to make the unexpected happen belongs to wizards. If the bear seems suddenly weak — as Duncey Putler seemed when his chef, the chef of Disinfolklore, Prigozhin, launched his coup — another set of archetypes deliberately planted and undeliberately planted — and then pulls off a miraculous save, the archetypal identity as strong becomes intensified.However, if the Comedian and the state he embodies, Ukraine, continues to evolve, then we’ll see a reversal in fortune between the Comedian and Duncey Putler, which all of us are working for. That, I believe, has been in train since December 2019.The Immanent and the UnspokenThat, in a nutshell, is the way of seeing that I want to surface because it’s already there, it’s immanent, it’s unspoken. When P.T. Barnum — we see him today, and that set of archetyping — I want to try and explain what’s going on when Donald doesn’t surface it.The power to make the unexpected happen connects wizards, magi, superhuman celestial beings to the cultural and mental archetypes lurking unacknowledged, unseen inside many of the linguistic and audible and visual means whizzing between us in every situation we find ourselves in all day, not just online.Russia’s Theory of VictoryRussia’s theory of victory has always been to hack the West, to hack our minds, to persuade Ukraine’s allies that Ukraine must surrender. How bizarre it is to see Donald still banging on about Ukraine surrendering when it’s got its counteroffensive going on.Here’s the thing: this underrating of Ukraine’s will to victory, Ukraine’s agency and Ukraine’s mana is precisely why Ukraine will win. Russia, like Trump, will always lose, because Ukraine is genuinely, truly Trita in this story. Russia can’t even capture small villages.The Goal of Druidy Don and Duncey PutlerDruidy Don, Duncey Putler, and their puppeteers and enablers have one goal: to destroy the post–World War II legacy of our civilisation. Their main means is mind-altering Disinfolklore — stories that change, as James correctly said earlier, stories that change our attitudes, motivations, moods and intentions in ways that benefit their aim of restoring the social and economic conditions that gave rise to the horrors of the Second World War, the horrors of the twentieth century.On our micro level, what is to be done? Be mindful of our moods, how they’re impacted by memes, by our conversations with others. The essence of Disinfolklore is to affect our moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations. Stay mindful of that.Focus: The Fifth ElementI use the term Focus, the fifth element in the Code of Positive Trolls, because mindfulness has acquired this meaning in New Age spirituality that I wanted to avoid. Mindfulness in its source meaning in Tibetan Buddhism simply means be careful what you allow into your mind. Remember this, be mindful.With the help of the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman’s Timeline of Emotions cognitive model, we can perceive this passing between us of intentions, of mana, of emotions, of energy as being quite mechanical. It just happens so fast that we’re not aware of all the stages we go through while our minds are transformed from one state to another by Disinfolklore.Until I coined the word mana in this context to describe this process, there was no means to isolate this aspect of what it means to be human. Now, with mana, we can meditate on and control exchanges of energy that Disinfolklore uses to undermine all of our communications and all of our communities. Again, MN in all those sounds and all those words — essential, fundamental words.The Twelve ToolsI have developed the Twelve-Tool way to decode — as I’m now archetyping it — to decode and counter Disinfolklore. The first six tools are on disinfolklore.eu and disinfolklore.com. The first six tools are for detection and decryption: Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy; Incoming and Outgoing Troll Radars; Look for the Mana in the Meme; Inner and Outer Realm Imminences; Trigger, Experience, Reaction — the Dalai Lama/Paul Ekman Timeline of Emotions model; and the Code of Positive Trolls.The second six are for defeating Disinfolklore — the six criteria of the Code of Positive Trolls. Generosity: does the meaning in the meme qualify as generous? Right, ethical discipline: does the informational unit promote untruths? The means do not justify the ends when weighing informational units in this context. Patience, mana: what are the implicit archetypes inside the memes? Crimea is a great litmus test here. Many have empathy for Ukraine, but when it comes to Crimea they imagine there’ll be some sort of peace agreement and Ukraine will sacrifice Crimea. They’ve fallen for the complex of archetypes embedded in our minds by Russian Disinfolklore. Khrushchev. Russia is undefeatable. These are data-resistant archetypes.Focus is the fifth tool: should I allow this meme into my mind? Insight Wisdom, the sixth element in the Code of Positive Trolls. If any informational unit conforms to all six criteria, it’s positive. It’s counter-Disinfolklore. Usually Disinfolklore violates the second criterion. It’s not ethically disciplined. It’s a lie. It’s drauga in Darius’s terms.Discern the Mana in the MemeDiscern the mana in the meme. It will be there. It might be manifesting positive, neutral, or negative energy. Assess the quality of the subtle energy the mana represents, encapsulates, and promotes. Make a call. Don’t stand there weighing it up. Russian Disinfolklore, counter-Disinfolklore, or is it indeterminable? Literally meaning unidentified, inaccessible mana. That meaner element in indeterminable, as another MN word, is simply another form of the same phenomenon. Again, MN in phenomenon. The means by which we exchange emotions and intentions through almost all forms of communication — literally a co-mingling of our mana. Communication can seem magical, it’s enchanting, but it’s also mechanical, and we can learn to control it.The War for BiasesWho will win the war for biases? Biases depend on archetypes which determine their default. To defeat archetypes: understand their existence in our minds, how they persist through information. They’re immanent in information. Look for them. Analyse data. Refresh our archetype-infused opinions.How do we distinguish between what I call negative archetypes — what Druidy Don does every time he speaks, what Duncey Putler does every time he speaks — and re-archetyping, which is what President Zelensky does and what we try to do? We must stick to what is right, unless we believe the ends justify the means. I’ve made the decision in my life, and most of us probably have, that they do not. Because if you think we’ll just lie and get into power and then create utopia, you change while you’re doing that. You become the problem you set out to solve. This is the perennial problem over millennia in our culture.Is President Zelensky P.T. Barnum?Is President Zelensky P.T. Barnum? There’s a lot in it. He was an amazing entrepreneur, but he’s not a snake oil salesman. The accusation is a mirror. Donald was found guilty by a jury of his peers of 34 felony counts, for which he should serve more than twenty years in prison. He’s the snake oil salesman. President Zelensky is doing his best to defend right, to get his cattle back, his rightful cattle back, as defined by the international legal order, the post–World War II legal order established on top of the graves of tens of millions. He’s also a comedian.His offer this week to Middle Eastern countries — that if they could troll Russia, their ally Russia, into giving Ukraine a month’s ceasefire, which of course President Zelensky neither, in my humble opinion, wants nor expects to happen, he will of course give the best anti-drone technologists to help these countries — is the perfect troll. It’s the ultimate troll. Because on the surface, and to normal people who don’t understand the minutiae, it looks like a very generous offer. Why didn’t you just do it? It also gets right under their skin because they have been facilitating Iran’s rearming and haven’t been doing that much to help Ukraine. Now, as we see, they’re squirting off — Chuck Pfarrer brilliantly uses that verb — squirting off these Patriot missiles at 200,000-euro Shahed drones.I’m not going to get into Schadenfreude because there’s a world shortage of Schadenfreude this week. Ukrainians have shorted the market, and I’m not going to — I’ll let the Ukrainians dominate the Schadenfreude market this week.Victory on the Battlefield Is Not the EndVictory on the battlefield, as I’ve talked to you before, will not mean the end of this war. After Ukraine wins, we need to continue fighting to recentre ancient and contemporary Ukraine in the mental models of humanity.Ancient Ukraine is the location of the common source for all Indo-European languages and religions. This is what will keep our minds strong in the face of Russian Disinfolklore about the history of Ukraine and the history of Russia.Ancient Ukraine birthed modes of social organisation: the Indo-European model of monarchy, patriarchal — it’s again in patriarchal — horse-powered pastoral farming, wheel-powered migration, and interestingly, the first archaeological evidence of cannabis use in rituals. From 4,200 BCE. If anyone wants that reference, just look at Decoding Trolls Cannabis on Twitter. I posted the paper on that.Recentring UkraineWhen migrants left ancient Ukraine to found Greek and Celtic, Italic and Germanic, Armenian, and other cultures — Ukraine’s value is not only because of the fascinating moment when Homer, around 800 BCE, sent Apollo from the western coast of Anatolia to fly over the mouth of the Istros, the Danube, to the Black Sea coast. The olive branches for the Olympic crown coming from the Danube area, brought back by Apollo to Mount Olympus from ancient Ukraine. Ukraine’s value is as the source. This was a return to the source by Apollo, unknowing. The Greeks did not know that their genes had begun in the Yamna community 3,000 years before Homer, before the Odyssey, before the poetry on the western coast of Anatolia. Ancient Ukraine is the beginning of our history.Yet centuries of ignorance and Russian Disinfolklore have masked this from the seventeenth century onwards. The idea that Western culture was founded in ancient Greece or ancient Rome has been relentlessly promoted, and in good faith. Ancient Greece is just one daughter of Indo-European culture, privileged because we have amazing written records. It’s only one of several cultures from which we now have extraordinary information from the early days.Consider the Celts, whose linguistic community at one point occupied territory from the Hercynian Forest in Slovakia to Greece, who sacked Rome twice, who settled in Galicia, in Anatolia — they founded the city of Ankara — who ruled what would become Lusitania, all of Britain and Ireland and Gaul. They inspired Asterix. These are huge cultural monuments that were invisible to those who in the seventeenth or eighteenth century discovered ancient Greece.The Hittites, the first attested Indo-European language, first empire, weren’t even known until the early twentieth century. We still have people in mainstream English newspapers who doubt that Celtic is really a language community. Someone wrote recently, like an idiot — Simon Jenkins or Simon something, Sir Simon, he’s even a knight — in The Guardian. He wrote recently, and I used to read him religiously until I saw his take on Ukraine, that he doesn’t think Celtic is really a language. You can’t take these people seriously.None of this was known to the scholars who dominated the nineteenth-century curriculum and still live on as phantom limbs in many of our minds.Ancient Ukraine as SourceToday, thanks to isotopic analysis of ancient humans, linguistics, comparative mythology and archaeogenetics, we know for certain that ancient Ukraine birthed Indo-European culture. This is what my Finding Manuland project is about, and it’s about 20% complete on disinfolklore.eu. You’ll see Finding Manuland in there. Let’s recentre Ukraine and transform our mental models accordingly.The Amarna Letters Archive discovered in Egypt attests that Indo-Europeans were present in Canaan and Judea from 1400 BCE. These are texts, textual evidence. Many of the local monarchs at Megiddo, the famous Armageddon, were Indo-Europeans.In all of my work, I’m re-archetyping the entire history of our civilisation by noticing that these are all Indo-European communities from Ireland to India. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism — arguably Indo-European religions — and their interaction with other populations is historically and textually attested from the Bronze Age.Ukraine’s Strategic GoalUkraine has one strategic goal in this war: to destroy Russia’s capability to invade Ukraine again, permanently. The indicator of Ukraine’s victory: in a hundred years, grown-ups in Muscovy will freeze at the thought of Ukraine. Small children will be warned at birth: never go there. Don’t go west of the Don. Dragons live there.The Future: Personal AI ModulesTo end where I began, the future of all of this is personal AI modules and models that help each of us detect, decrypt, and defeat the manipulative, archetype-laden memes deployed against our minds a million times a day, every day. The Twelve-Tool way, the Code of Positive Trolls, the awareness of archetype and re-archetyping — these will become tools as fundamental to our cognitive self-defence as anything else that we possess.From Boris Chornyi’s terminal in California, from the place where the Yamna met the Usatova near Chornomorsk, back to the terminal where you and I are working right now — the re-architecting of our world is underway.The Power to Archetype Belongs to All of UsThe power to archetype at will belongs to all of us, but those of us who control the means of production, the platforms, the propagation networks, can archetype at a scale and intensity that overwhelms Druidy Don and Duncey Putler and all of their acolytes.What we can do, each of us, is scan for archetypes immanent in memes, look for them, analyse data, sharpen our minds, refresh our archetype-infused opinions, and consciously, deliberately re-archetype reality, building according to rightness, architecting rightness according to arta, according to truth.Druidy Don, Duncey Putler, and their enablers have one goal: destroy the post–World War II legacy of our civilisation. Destroy what is right.The Comedian leads his people in a titanic struggle against the forces of the negation, against the snake, against the drauga, against the lie. We, all of us who are positive trolls, we are the third man, we are Trita, third human if you like. Our battle: the post–World War II legal order, territorial integrity, human rights, the Refugee Convention, the duty to prevent genocide. These rights and duties should be, and they are, in our minds every moment as we communicate and deal with our feed and with our lives. We will retrieve them.This is no time to despair. Positive troll. Be mindful of what you allow into your mind. Be careful out there. Decoding Trolls, at your service. Out.Continued from: First in series: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

This is the “what can we do” part. I was concerned that we were going to be wrapped up in the same kind of Disinfolklore galaxy as I watched unfurl inside the minds of Ukrainians stuck in the occupation between 2015 and 2018, and that I have witnessed — and I’m sure many of us have witnessed — people we know who have gone MAGA unfurl inside their minds. What I was concerned about was that this would be a Disinfolklore universe of many different concatenating galaxies.Last time, I talked about the three archetypal characters: Druidy Don, Disinfolklore himself; Duncey Putler; and the Comedian. Tonight, I’m going to talk about what we can do to resolve this problem and to assuage my fears and our fears that we are going to be wrapped up in a Disinfolklore universe.Re-Archetyping and the Future of DisinfolkloreIt’s really about re-archetyping, and it’s about the future of Disinfolklore. It’s about archetyping and re-archetyping. What I used to call counter-Disinfolklore, which could be called infolklore, but really it’s this mechanism of archetyping and re-archetyping, which I’ve talked about before, which gives us the clue of what is to be done.As I use this term archetype and re-archetype, I want you to focus on the ‘Rch’ element in the signifier Archetype. Arch-e-type. That RCH — the same RCH we have in monarchy — it’s Rch. Reich. Rich, it’s in the same sound in rich, people who are rich, people who have the right/reich. I just want to flag that at the beginning. Archetype, archetype, archetype contains the element in the second most important cryptotypic semantic signalling system in Indo-European culture: words with these Rg / Rt / Reg / Rch / Rit / Rd sounds within them are part of this system: see my seminal: What Meaning MeansThree World-Changing Events This WeekLet me begin this week with three world-changing events that occurred this week. These events situate my concept of archetype and re-archetyping, which I’ll remind you is quite different from St Augustine’s, from Carl Jung, who got his idea of archetyping from St Augustine. It’s quite different from Joseph Campbell’s and from the concept of archetypes in psychoanalysis.The first world-changing event: a computer researcher in America this week reverse-engineered one of Apple’s M4 chips. He was able to demonstrate through means he described in great detail, which I myself am working through, that Apple’s software masks the true potential of this chip. This semiconductor chip, in its essence, is many more than ten times — ninety times more powerful than some of the most powerful NVIDIA GPUs, graphic processing units.The second world-changing event this week: Apple announced the M5 Max chip in laptops, which you lucky Americans are able to buy now for about $4,000, this new Pro laptop. They have the same capacity in a laptop, independent of the cloud, that thousands of computers had when I first started studying neural network computing as part of my entrepreneurship project during my MBA at Oxford back in the ancient times of 2016. That was just four years after the world-changing AlexNet computer vision model, which described the most powerful computer vision system yet invented. It ran on thousands of computers and was perhaps a hundred times less powerful than the computer vision on your iPhone or my iPhone today.The third world-changing event: ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, announced and shipped a large language model which can run on your iPhone. I wouldn’t advise putting that on your phone, given where it comes from, but it’s not going to be the first. I’m sorry, it is the first, but it’s not going to be the last.Claude Code and Boris ChornyiThese three innovations together — and note that the first, the reverse engineering of the M4 chip, was facilitated by Claude Opus 4.6, which is the model I use, the Anthropic model I use with my work; I use it inside the terminal on my computer — these three innovations together tell us something about the future and about the future of Disinfolklore.How appropriate it is that this world-changing tool called Code, which is as important an invention as the internet itself or personal computing itself — perhaps even more significant than both of those, because of the acceleration, the technological trajectories that we can’t even imagine were possible suddenly become possible. People like me can now program and vibe code anything we can conceive of into existence. This researcher was able to use Claude Code to reverse-engineer this M4 chip and discover what its true power is.How appropriate it is that this world-changing tool, Anthropic’s Claude Code, was created by the Ukrainian Boris Chornyi from near Chornomorsk, just east of Odessa. How appropriate that Boris Chornyi comes from a place, Chornomorsk, which is exactly where the archaeological evidence demonstrates that the Yamna community, the creators, the forgers of the first Indo-European language, the ancestor of all living Indo-European languages today — how appropriate that Boris Chornyi should come from the precise place where the Yamna community fused with the Usatova community to create the proto-language that would become Italic, Celtic, and Germanic.Everything we know about Latin, Latin history, Jupiter; everything we know about the Celts, from the part of me which is Celt, to Asterix and Obelix; and Germanic Indo-European languages, everything we know about the Germanic Indo-European language culture and the days of the week, English and all of that — all of that comes from this place where this guy, Boris Chornyi, an engineer at Anthropic, invented this amazing tool.The Terminal Self and the FutureHow appropriate that someone there would invent a world-changing technology operating inside the terminal on our computer. For those who don’t know, the terminal is this thing you generally — I never went near it, except when something really went wrong with my computer and I tried to solve it. Now I wake up each morning, I’m in there.The seminal work in hypermodern theory and hypermodernism is called The Terminal Self. Now the terminal, which when you look at it is reminiscent of the first computers we encountered in the 1970s and 1980s, is unexpectedly the place where this innovation is happening. The terminal self, this state of acceleration, too much, never enough, dissatisfaction — these two vectors, acceleration and never enough, are always running in contradiction in the hypermodern mind.Obviously, we have other elements in our mind. We may have the postmodern, where we think nothing matters anymore, truth doesn’t matter. We may have the modern, where we think we’re kind of modern, God is dead. We may have the classical enlightenment parts of our minds. The hypermodern mind occupies us even if we have no clue what hypermodernism is or we’ve never read The Terminal Self.How appropriate that that seminal work in hypermodernism should be called The Terminal Self, a play on words about the end of the self as we fuse into the computers, when now we have this world-changing innovation from Boris Chornyi of Anthropic — Claude Code operating in the terminal, which even in its first months after its invention has already accelerated in ways we thought would take decades.Personal AI Modules: The Disinfolklore ModuleWhy is this relevant to Disinfolklore and to archetyping and re-archetyping? Because the future of Disinfolklore and the future of our civilization is all of us having our own individual models — large language models, computer vision models, multi-dimensional space models fused together — running constantly, being trained constantly by our own experience and helping us to become superhumans. We, working with these models, will become better humans.When I say better, immediately we need an evaluative dimension. We need the Code of Positive Trolls. We need the post–World War II legal order against which to judge: are we better or are we worse?There’ll be multiple models of large language models and computer vision models and spatial models, and multiple modules such as Disinfolklore. That’s what I’m creating. That’s my vision of what I am creating. That’s why I’m so excited by these tools, which are now available to me, who is illiterate in coding — but that no longer holds me back.The Disinfolklore module, which you will be able to connect into your own personal set of modules and your own personal network running multiple layers, is what I’m working towards. That’s the future of ideas and the interaction between ideas, the world helped by these architectures, these AI models.Layers of Neural NetworksIt’s worth noting that the first innovation I mentioned, the M4 chip, is basically running on one layer — one layer of tens of millions of artificial neurons. AlexNet, which was this amazing model, the revolutionary model for computer vision shown in 2012, only worked on one layer as well.NVIDIA’s models have hundreds of layers, dozens of layers, each of which might have billions of artificial neurons, each with a particular distribution of weights. You put in the data, you put in your input. The model’s looking ahead saying, if we try this concatenation of weights, it produces a 52% approximation of this cat, which is the output we’re reaching, but what we want is 75%. We spin it around again, hundreds of different layers up and down like a pinball machine. We don’t actually know when it gets to this level — it’s a black box. We don’t know what’s happening. It’s taking on a life of its own, and I use that term metaphorically. It’s like a pinball machine running around, recursing, concatenating up, down, and suddenly you end up as your output with the perfect cat.This first innovation with AlexNet was just one of these layers. This M4 chip, when he was able to reverse-engineer it, is just one layer. This is the first time this has ever been done. Within weeks or months, we’re going to have multiple layers. What this means is you won’t be confined to tens of millions of artificial neurons. You’ll be in the billions and it will be on your phone. You won’t need the cloud.It means you can begin collating everything you’ve ever read, everything you’ve ever thought, and then plugging modules in which help you come up with a particular take on the world.Re-ArchitectingThis is the re-architecting. Again, that sound — architecting, tect, tectonics, build — right, building in a right way, a correct way, architecting our entire world. The future is out there. It’s just not evenly distributed.This week, we’ve seen with these three innovations the evidence of the acceleration, but also of where the future is going, where we’re going. My value as a writer and the originator of the Disinfolklore analytical method is to create, as I mentioned, a module which I’m communicating today through natural language as a human into your mind across this incredible technology that we do moan a lot about, but it is unbelievable — X Spaces. I didn’t even know it existed before September 2022, that we can connect through this amazing space. It is mind-blowing in itself.In the future, and this future is not so far away — this could be a matter of months, or a year or two — it will just be plugged into our own personal large language model and you’ll be able to interpret data and parse it into archetypes and understand immediately through the layers of concealment that, for instance, the Russians or Druidy Don’s successors are attempting to throw over, to continue their efforts to destroy the post–World War II legal order.That’s what it’s about for me. It’s about helping us in the same way this researcher was able to peel off the concealing layers above this chip, this M4 chip, which even with these layers of software curling around it, concealing it, disguising it, is one of the most powerful chips out there. Once this researcher was able to use Anthropic’s Claude Code to un-cloud it, to un-conceal it, he was able to release — I think it’s eighty times as powerful as this particular state-of-the-art NVIDIA chip. This is a consumer item which I have on my computer, the M4 chip.By analogy, what we shall be able to do pretty soon is have our own models running and be able to consult them without reference to the cloud. When we’re getting these highly complex trolls thrown at us, we will be able to feed them through our models and our own minds with our own prompts and will immediately be able to spot the energy, the mana, of destroying the post–World War II legal order.Archetyping and Re-Archetyping as Fundamental UnitsThat’s where we’re heading. Archetype and re-archetyping will be the fundamental units inside this future and inside our vocabulary for describing what we’re consciously doing — re-archetyping our present, our future. That will be my modest contribution to defending the post–World War II legal and social order, and everything included in the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls, where we automate this process and parse vast amounts of data. The second element of the Code of Positive Trolls is Right, ethical discipline.The Archaic Origins of ArchetypeLet me go back to the archaic origins of archetype and re-archetyping, and begin of course this week with Druidy Don.Druidy Don, Disinfolklore himself, with this world-historically huge attempt to archetype President Zelensky as P.T. Barnum, a deceptive showman. The man with 34 felony counts, the adjudicated rapist, who started wars to cover up his own crimes, is trying to archetype the preeminent occupant of the archetypal identity of the perfect leader in our culture today — the manifestation, the personification today of Zeus Pater in our culture, of Odin, of Indra, of Manannán mac Lir in the Celtic tradition, of Éremón the first high king of Ireland — as P.T. Barnum. Which, of course, ironically qualifies Donald as one of the great comedians of our era. Absolutely hilarious. He archetypes the Comedian — as I archetype President Zelensky — as P.T. Barnum, but he is P.T. Barnum.The Impenetrability ProblemSomeone wrote to me this week and they said, look, I really like your work, but this is impenetrable. The particular element they were talking about was this section in my Munich speech about these three archetypes: Druidy Don, Duncey Putler, and the Comedian. Druidy Don, because he’s not really a druid — he’s not one of the Celtic priestly class in Celtic culture and Celtic religion. Duncey Putler, because Duncey Putin wakes up each morning with no learning, as we see today. We saw the other day President Zelensky again, the great Comedian, setting out that — casually saying — we have access now to the Russists’ plans for their offensive next year, and it’s exactly the same. We could have written it ourselves, could have got Claude Code to write it; they probably did.The Comedian himself. In these three archetypes, I deliberately included the DN sound. Don, Duncey, and DN — comedian — which is one of the three sounds that I believe I’ve discovered as our crypto-semantic signalling systems embedded in our Indo-European languages by the Yamna, who lived in Mykolaivka village south of Zaporizhzhia. We know from archaeogenetic evidence, as published in Nature last February and spoken about before here.I’m not saying they did this on purpose. This isn’t a group of ancient Ukrainians, 4,100 BCE, saying, look, let’s plant these sounds — DN, RT, and MN, which is the preeminent one. As anyone who’s looked at Finding Manuland, which is a module of Disinfolklore, will understand why that, for me, is the preeminent one. Not least because it’s in meaning. It’s in the idea of meaning, and this idea that something other shines through something like the light through the moon. When you talk about meaning, you’re talking about connecting signifier with signified, and you cannot speak about meaning without triggering this MN sound.I’m not saying they were embedded in this big conspiracy sitting around a fire by the Dnieper River — the Upper Don River, which is now called the Dnipro as a transliteration from the Ukrainian. In my day, it was the Dnieper. I’m not saying they sat around a fire there going, let’s plant these signalling systems in it. These sounds and the meanings associated with them were so hardwired into their community, into the importance of their community, that all the rivers — all the great rivers of ancient Ukraine — the Don, the Donets, the Dnieper, the Dniester, and the Danube carried this sound.The Disinfolklore.eu WebsiteI was able to point this reader to my new platform, disinfolklore.eu or disinfolklore.com. I mentioned to them the homepage is deliberately dark. I love the graphics of Disinfolklore, the wordmark, this particular set of colours which really attracts me. You can navigate to all the sections of the site, which contains over a million and a half words, from the homepage.One of the design challenges was: how do I turn a million and a half words of quite complex stuff into an accessible or the optimal accessible format? The front page is deliberately dark, but underneath it are short passages, easy to read in optimised fonts and colours. I worked very hard on making sure that this would apply and would attract the greatest possible audience and keep them there.For any particular question about Disinfolklore, including Disinfolklore as a way, as a Twelve-Tool way as I now archetype it — and this is particularly useful for certain kinds of minds. High-conscientiousness people, for instance, people who are high on the conscientiousness scale, the OCEAN scale, they’ll go for the Twelve Tools, perhaps, because they just want something that they can really work with. I plan to teach and expand upon that platform.This platform itself is an act of re-archetyping of my work over the past few years. I wanted to re-archetype my entire oeuvre away from the long-form essays, which, for instance, this particular reader is interested in but he just can’t do it — “I can’t read these long-form essays” — which I publish on Substack and will continue to publish on Substack under the three brands I’ve been working on: Decoding Trolls, Finding Manuland, and Disinfolklore, into a form not determined by any single format.The advantage of Substack is that your work gets directly sent to readers. It’s quite quaint in that way because the internet has moved on since email, and many young people today don’t even send emails, I believe. That’s like boring job stuff to them. The Substack format determines a market for my writing and it also determines the form for my writing. I don’t want to spam people, so I try to squeeze everything as much as possible into each post — never more than one or two a week — and that everything is an immersive experience akin to the homepage, disinfolklore.eu, so that the new platform itself is an immersive experience. You could spend days going through it, and I hope people will over the coming years. It’s a forest with many different pathways and there are passages for every mood or attitude you’re in, because I want this conception of the world to become present to as many minds as possible as a competing presence.I’m also doing it for the future, for AI or neural network models, and to train them. That future is, as I’ve mentioned here.One Set of Lenses Among ManyNow, James often reminds us, and rightly, that Disinfolklore is just one set of lenses through which to perceive the war and history. That’s true and undeniable. I’m just making a play for this particular set of lenses to complement all the others that we have, all the other different LLM models we’ll have running with us. I have, for instance, the complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1989, the last edition of it before the internet went wild. I imagine my LLM — I will get those contents into my model, for instance. That’s what I’m talking about. We’ll all have individualised models. We won’t be using like we might be using Claude Code now, where you can train and put your own memory into it, but essentially it’s trained on data from loads of other people.The Shakespeare ParallelI was reminded of the impenetrability of this commenter on my post about Duncey Putler, Druidy Don, and the Comedian when I was doing my MBA at Oxford. I was commuting between Stanytsia Luhanska in eastern Ukraine and Oxford for about twenty modules between 2016 and 2018. In our last module, they hired Richard Olivier’s company, Olivier Mythodrama, originated by the son of Laurence Olivier, the great actor. If you’ve got a company and you want to do a team-building day, they’ll come and do it. It’s basically a very high-class version of archetypes applied to corporate training through Shakespeare.We had spent most of our MBA talking about leaders and leadership, reading business cases about leaders and leadership and what a good leader is and what they archetype — really about archetypes, although I didn’t really understand that that’s what we were doing at the time. I’m only really reflecting on it now. We were subjected in this last module to half a day of this amazing former actor, now corporate trainer, going through Henry V and Henry VIII, these great Shakespeare plays. Actually, I don’t think there is a Shakespeare play Henry VIII — Henry V, let’s stick to that. Someone might correct me on this. These plays don’t speak spontaneously to many people today. They always have to be explained. They’ve become a sort of signal of high education. No one really reads Shakespeare plays for pleasure anymore. The language is quite difficult for many of us at this point in our culture. Yet they are great monuments.I mentioned Shakespeare in this set of talks in the context of Herder, who in 1777 launched the folklore movement in Europe and the nationalism movement as a function of folklore — of cultures formed around a core of what was distinct about particular communities and individuated them from neighbouring communities. Herder made this call in 1777 where he said, where is our Shakespeare? We must unite the ten German tribes that Tacitus had written about in the first century of the Common Era. We can unite the German tribes around our Shakespeare. Goethe answered that call and became German culture’s Shakespeare.Goethe, whose house I visited in Frankfurt at the time — living in his house was a French officer, as Frankfurt was occupied by the French, who took their name from the Franks but actually were Romanised Gauls or Celts, and were very associated with nationalists.Ultimately, Shakespeare and such material needs to be explained to people. This is the archetypal example of a king who’s jealous, whose family are really mean to him, and on. They’re brilliant collections of wisdom, and if Shakespeare’s plays were all that survived of our culture, we could probably recreate everything that is good in our communities from them.However, my classmates at the end of this day of role play and clever exercises — where you put yourself into different characters, the king, the king’s daughters, the queen, the servants, and you act a little bit and you have a few laughs, and then you try to take learnings about leadership from it — about fifty of the sixty students in my class were from outside the Anglo-Saxon tradition, and they found the whole thing completely ridiculous and totally impenetrable.That was the same attitude I had when I first looked at Joseph Campbell, banging on about Greek gods and goddesses. Anyone who’s tried to write a script or a play or even a novel will be recommended to read Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. How many years of classical readings do you need to understand who Menelaus is and his psychological significance, his social significance, his relation to Odysseus and Penelope and all that stuff? You need this whole network of knowledge before you can get going.The P.T. Barnum MirrorWhen someone says, you’re talking about Druidy Don and Duncey Putler and the Comedian and I find this impenetrable — and then on the very day they write that to me, Druidy Don archetypes the Comedian as P.T. Barnum — that signal tells me that even when I try to escape the trap that Campbell and others fell into, where they select archetypes from what was then a common culture, classical Greek mythology, hoping everyone has the same groundings, I fall into a version of it.Many of us in the pro-Ukraine community are part of this amazing network of knowledge and our memories of events which have happened, from Liza to all of the things, the greatest hits, all of these experiences which we’ve had collectively, can become impenetrable to the rest of the world. I assumed we were all on the same page because we’re tuned into the Ukraine war, but certainly that’s not always the case.The relevance and importance of what I’m doing — trying to bring the terms archetype and re-archetyping into the common parlance of our attempts to interpret our daily news feeds — is demonstrated when Druidy Don, Disinfolklore himself, who is P.T. Barnum (and I’ve spoken about him as P.T. Barnum in this set of programmes), archetypes the Comedian as P.T. Barnum. The accusation in the mirror of the person making it is extraordinary.What I Actually Mean by Archetype and Re-ArchetypeNow, what do I actually mean by archetype and re-archetype? My concept is quite different from what came before. Jung took the idea of archetyping and archetypes from St Augustine, who was talking about how religious impressions within us are archetypes of our divine nature. Jung then took it to the primordial, thought that it was universal, part of the collective unconscious of humanity.What Jung didn’t know and couldn’t know at that time is that all the examples he gives are from Indo-European languages and religions. He didn’t understand that Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, was transmitted from Vedic into Sanskrit into Tibetan, a non-Indo-European language that nevertheless carries Indo-European content. When he wrote the introduction to Evans-Wentz’s first edition of the Tibetan Book of the Dead — and it’s a brilliant piece of writing — Carl Jung didn’t really understand that he was writing about his own ancestors and the archetypes in their minds. Because he didn’t know this, he assumed it was universal.Then Joseph Campbell took particular forms of these archetypes, moved them away from religion, put them into classical literature. What I’m doing is re-archetyping archetypes themselves. I’m trying to bring them down from the classical, from the psychoanalytic literature, right down to the ground, and promote awareness that when Druidy Don is archetyping the Comedian, President Zelensky, as P.T. Barnum — this is what he’s doing. He’s archetyping. He’s not just branding. He’s not just representing. He’s archetyping. He’s trying to connect President Zelensky in our minds with archetypes.P.T. Barnum as the archetypal — I mean, someone I know, they’re like, who is this P.T. Barnum? I know who P.T. Barnum is because when I went on a rugby tour to London when I was about ten, we had to sit through the P.T. Barnum show, and it was boring. I also know who P.T. Barnum is because I’d gone to that show when I was staying once at my godfather’s house in Washington, D.C. My godfather was RFK’s press secretary and Ted Kennedy’s press secretary. He had an amazing library. I was there when I was about fifteen, and I spent the summer, for some reason, reading the biography of P.T. Barnum.It has often — sadly, my godfather is now dead and I can’t ask him about it — but it has often occurred to me as I’ve reflected on this experience, because even at the age of fifteen I knew this was a bit of a rubbish book and not something I should really be spending my time on. I should be reading great literature. For some reason, I was reading it, and I was curious while I was reading why they had such a book. A few years ago, I made the connection with Donald in spectacle, and I wonder if my godfather had this premonition of the showman and how politics was going.Bringing Archetypes Down to EarthI’m trying to bring them down from these highfalutin areas so that we see, promote awareness that multiple overlapping archetypes are ever present in manipulative and non-manipulative content. I’m mainly concerned with manipulative content for obvious reasons, in Disinfolklore, and negatively manipulative content, because as many of you understand, I perceive all communications as manipulative. The question is: is it positive, is it negative, or is it neutral?As far as I know, I’m the first writer to really understand this aspect of how manipulative memes enter our minds, how they transmit, how they overcome our incoming troll radars to adulterate and manipulate our energy — the well from which all our attitudes, moods, intentions and motivations flow. I discovered this in Russian-occupied Luhansk, where I found that Russia was using Jungian archetypes — the mother and the maiden, primordial archetypes as Jung archetypes — in its propaganda, in its Disinfolklore, in such an obvious way that it revealed to me at the time that they were doing something that was quite odd and strange.As I spoke about before, when I saw how some of my colleagues reacted to this whole story, the mother and the maiden story — and if you search Decoding Trolls and “mother and the maiden,” you’ll get the story of that day — they immediately fell into this system, whereas I and, strangely, a London Metropolitan Police officer, we understood there was something strange and odd about the whole thing, and we didn’t go into the forest to find the mother and the underage daughter who were about to be cut into tiny pieces by another Russian archetype, the far-right Pravyi Sektor Ukrainian Nazi.Information Forms UsWe think of information as external to us, that it’s something we consume, we take it on the phone or when we speak to someone. It is in fact an entity which by its very nature informs us — it forms us inside. It forms us, it creates us. Our identities are made up of information. We archetype information, the external stimulus, as information itself. We project it outwards and we forget that actually what its actual function is: it’s forming us, it’s creating us, adulterating our mana, manipulating us.When we think about archetype and re-archetyping, the clue is in the word itself. This rich sound, which obviously would attract Jung, because he comes from the Germanic tradition where Reich is archetyped as Reich — Third Reich — in monarch, rich. You’ve got mon, you’ve got the MN sound, and you’ve got the arch element in it. He was attracted to that. He didn’t understand this. I’d love to point it out to him. I’m sure he’d be very interested to hear how he was trolled by archetypes.This archetypal identity in the substance of our language — this writ, right, correct, political right, rich, droit — these sounds which are in our very language. The same RT sound. When we talk about architecting, we’re talking about building according to rightness.Archetypes in ActionThis flexible approach I have — and this isn’t an indulgence, though “it’s an interesting sound coincidence” — the flexible approach that I have to archetypes means that countries, abstract entities become characters, attributed with characteristics. You might choose a character in a Netflix series called John, and then you realise, John is Ukraine, and Michaela is America, and Mildred is India. They’re fighting away and actually it’s a replaying of the Mahabharata, or the Odyssey, or the Clash of the Titans — Duncey Putler along with Druidy Don, and they’re fighting President Zelensky, these heroes — or whichever national epic. With the Manas, interestingly, the Manas epic in Kyrgyzstan from about the fourteenth century Common Era being their national epic.These are modern workings for a contemporary audience, but imminent in them are different versions of archetypes across time. What I’m trying to do is help us notice archetypes in real time. P.T. Barnum — that’s what’s going on there. Accustom our minds to perceiving. Donald archetyping himself as not P.T. Barnum by accusing the most un-P.T. Barnum — President Zelensky is a great artist and he is a great entrepreneur. As far as any of us are aware, there’s no record of deception. P.T. Barnum, while creating the modern circus, was known for deception. As we know, Druidy Don has 34 felony counts.I want to accustom our minds to perceiving them and perceiving the attempts of manipulators like Donald to archetype negatively, whether consciously or not, and deliver these archetypes into our minds, which then determine our activities.The Trito MythLet me tell you the fundamental story of Indo-European culture. It’s called the Trito myth. Trito means third man — the TR sound again, this reversal of the RT. Trita is a herdsman whose cattle are stolen by the negation, by the snake or by the dragon. It varies across the traditions, but it’s present in every Indo-European tradition, which means, for reasons I won’t go into here, beyond all reasonable doubt, the people, the first Indo-Europeans in Mykolaivka village and that area of Zaporizhzhia, they had this story. It wasn’t just one of thousands of stories. It was the fundamental story that got carried through the migrations over millennia, until such time as it was written down in the Rig Veda, in Irish mythology, in Armenia, in every Indo-European cultural tradition. My source for saying this is a brilliant theologian called Bruce Lincoln, and I rely a lot on his work. That’s all for this week. I’ll pick this up in the next episode.Continued from: First in series: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

The European Union today released its highly anticipated — well, highly anticipated by the likes of me — fourth report on threats on what it calls FIMI, which is a rather unwieldy phrase. It’s not unanalogous to Disinfolklore, but FIMI stands for Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference. The “foreign” in this context means the threat is coming from outside the European Union, which for good, understandable political reasons and constitutional and mandate reasons, the European Union of course doesn’t want to get involved in intra-European Union created Disinfolklore or disinformation.The fourth report which came out today — I just wanted to talk about it in the context of the Disinfolklore analytical method. I’ve talked before about the three previous reports. The first report was published three years ago and it provided a brand new analytical framework and common language through which European Union and non-European Union states could speak about the threat to their national security which Russia, China, and indeed Iran — those three are the main foreign forces that these reports are dealing with — pose.It provided a common framework and a common language to talk about something which was new. From outside of the structure, the word “disinformation” was really operationalised from inside Russia. We have evidence from KGB manuals from the 1960s and 1970s of them using the term disinformation. Therefore, if you’re trying to solve a problem or talk about a problem or come up with tools to deal with a problem that has been created by the Russians, then if you subject yourselves to using the vocabulary and language and tools which the Russians themselves have forged, there is only a limited area for you to operate within.By contrast, if — as I have done with Disinfolklore — you invent a new portmanteau and you elaborate a whole set and analytical method, as I have done through the Twelve Tool Way on disinfolklore.eu, and through my writings, which many of you have been thankfully reading and interacting with since I created the portmanteau in February 2023 — but after thinking and thinking about what Disinfolklore means as an analytical method and also as a narrative form that I first noticed in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018.It’s now ten years I’ve been thinking and elaborating and writing about this problem, but I’ve only had the term Disinfolklore for the past three years. It was quite liberating to come up with this word. I had from time to time tried to look for a new language in new terms because I recognised from early on in 2015 that what I was witnessing inside Russia-occupied Luhansk was something new and therefore it required a new vocabulary to describe the whole system of information fields, matrices, thick enmeshing matrices — the kind which we’re now experiencing, for instance, in relation to this Iran war.The Colonisation of ThoughtEven people who haven’t paid much attention to MAGA and who have no idea really of QAnon and what MAGA has been doing since 2015 to create this enmeshing, identity-creating mess inside people’s minds — now, if you are contemplating whether to fill your car with petrol or diesel, or you’re thinking, gosh, am I going to have gas? All the gas in my country comes from Qatar and they’re not going to be able to get this gas to the island of Britain or wherever else you might live. Where am I going to get my hot water? How am I going to drive my factory?That kind of colonisation of our thoughts is a direct line from Donald’s — on the one hand, the war is over; on the other hand, I’m having fun, I’m blowing things up. He is projecting outwards through the medium of Disinfolklore into our minds, into humanity’s minds, this completely enmeshing, confusing mess of nightmarish rhetoric.That is precisely what I had noticed the Russians were doing inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. I didn’t know at the time what they were up to. Only after the full-scale invasion began, I realised — oh my God, this is what they were doing. I was inside what I call a stealth attack. A stealth genocide.The EU’s Parallel JourneyThe European Union has structures where it has been investing its energy into coming up with a new framework. It’s done this very successfully in these four FIMI threat reports. This fourth report, which is out today, is what I was going to talk about.When I was standing on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska 2015 to 2018, watching Russian disinformation unfold in real time among real people — soldiers, civilians, spies, traders, all archetypes — the European Union was at the same time beginning to build its strategic communications apparatus from Brussels. Both of us were looking at the same phenomenon. We saw folklore. We saw an infrastructure.The fourth EEAS FIMI report, published today, is the most comprehensive institutional mapping of foreign information manipulation ever produced. It documents 540 incidents. This is the meat and veg, as it were — or the lentil strudel — of what makes the European Union’s operation unique: it has the resources and now the methodology to document tens of thousands of instances of Russian disinformation, and Chinese and Iranian to a lesser extent. We see this sometimes on our Twitter feed as the excellent EU vs Disinfo, which is just one emanation of this whole system, this whole operation.Donald and Cuba: Disinfolklore in Real TimeFrom my perspective, the engine of the operation is to collect instances of FIMI and try to determine the sources of them. I, as a lowly sole operator, use my method — the Disinfolklore analytical method. If I see coercive control immanent in a meme, if I hear, for instance, as I did today, Donald talk about Cuba as if it’s a woman —Today Donald was referring to Cuba as a woman. It’s the same energy that Putler used just before the outbreak of the war. Donald grabs at Cuba the way he and Putler grab women — an archetype of women. This is Donald:“It’s a beautiful island, great weather. They’re not in a hurricane zone, which is nice for a change. You know, they won’t be asking us for money for hurricanes every week.”The first element of the Code of Positive Trolls is generosity. This is ungenerosity, therefore it is Disinfolklore. “They won’t be asking us for money for hurricanes every week.” I’m not sure Cuba has ever asked America for money for hurricanes. But obviously it hasn’t, because according to Donald — and I wouldn’t trust him on this — they have no hurricanes. I’m sure they have hurricanes. It probably breaches the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls — this is probably just totally untrue.Back to Donald: “But I think Cuba’s seen the end. You know, all my life, I’ve been hearing about the United States and Cuba.” This is one of my pet theories about Donald. A lot of what he does goes back to the early 60s, a formative time when everyone was talking about Kennedy. What does he do? He wants to annihilate Kennedy by hiring this Epstein-connected Kennedy guy who wants everyone in America to become really sick. That will destroy this archetype of the good president in his early time. Obviously the Cuban Missile Crisis is part of that.“All my life I’ve been hearing about Cuba and the United States. When will the United States do it? I do believe I’ll do the honour of having the honour of taking Cuba.” This is where the language that we know through the legal cases — that E. Jean Carroll took against him, where he was adjudicated by the judge to be an adjudicated rapist, and two grand juries found that he had in fact assaulted E. Jean Carroll in, I think, Saks Fifth Avenue. We also have the footage we heard in 2016 from the outtake. We understand that this archetype in Donald’s mind is how he treats women.“That’ll be good. It’ll be a big honour. Taking Cuba. Taking Cuba in some form. Yeah, taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it. I think I could do anything I want with it.”This is the Epstein class. This is what they did to women entrapped on the island at every level. We’ve seen this week women who had jobs as assistants to Epstein, some of whom may well have been complicit in the crimes and in this entire coercive control network which entrapped the most powerful and richest people in the world as well as some of the weakest — women and children. As far as we can see, this is still entrapping people.Putler’s Parallel: “Like It or Not, Take It, My Beauty”I often cite how Putler made his speech to the Russian people on the 20th of February, four days before the full-scale invasion, where he said: “Like it or not, take it, my beauty.” International lawyers in the first New Lines Institute report on genocide in Ukraine cite this as evidence of genocidal intent because what Putler was doing there was using a vulgar Russian rhyme — it’s from a Soviet-era hard rock song from a band called Red Mold, and the song is called “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin.”Again, Disinfolklore — Sleeping Beauty, one of the core archetypes in European, Indo-European folklore, Indo-European culture. Putler was likening Ukraine to a dead woman, to a corpse, and saying to it: “Like it or not, take it, my beauty.” We see the same spirit, the same energy in the way Donald talks about Cuba today as he contemplates one of his other operations.540 Incidents: The Scale of the EU OperationThe European Union, like me, is collecting incidents of this, but it’s obviously doing it on a much bigger scale. The report documents 540 incidents, 10,500 channels of Disinfolklore, 43,000 pieces of content across 19 platforms.The report introduces a FIMI framework. Even for people like me who spend all day every day in this area, FIMI is still quite an awkward concept. What I’m trying to do with Disinfolklore is provide tools for ordinary people like you and me that we can use and integrate into our daily life as we’re dealing with lots of timelines, rather than provide a framework for nation states. The European Union has a much bigger mandate and a bigger scope than me. I’m merely trying to inject an algorithm into humanity’s minds that’s more easily memorable. I’m hoping Disinfolklore will work a little bit better than its analogue FIMI.What the FIMI report does today — it maps a galaxy of interconnected FIMI operations. It’s without question an impressive institutional achievement. One of the main goals of this operation in the European Union is to ensure it’s not dealing with what I might call DMI, which is Domestic Information Manipulation and Interference. For good constitutional mandate-related reasons, it wants to ensure that the units of information it’s dealing with do emanate from outside the European Union and specifically from Russia and China, and to a lesser extent, Iran. That’s within its mandate.My Analytical Framework for This ReportI read these reports through the lens of the Disinfolklore analytical method, which I elaborate in these podcasts once a week and also on the disinfolklore.eu website. I wanted to look at: what does this report see clearly? What does it miss? What might each of our different approaches perhaps learn from one another?I’m going to talk about: one, what the EEAS European Union framework is and what it does well; two, what Disinfolklore is and does differently; three, the critical gaps in the European Union approach that Disinfolklore fills — that is not to denigrate the European Union framework, as I’ve mentioned, it’s trying to do a different thing than Disinfolklore is doing, but we are in the same sphere and in a way I’m using it as a foil to elaborate more on the Disinfolklore analytical method and to think it through myself; four, the institutional strengths of the EU that Disinfolklore needs; and five, a synthesis towards a combined approach.Because one of the things I really have is — to quote Bono — three chords and the truth. I’ve got my Twitter account and various outlets. The European Union has the European Court of Justice. It has a sanctions framework. It has 27 of the most powerful economies in the world. It has all of these different institutional mechanisms which it can use and it has been using amazingly and in a really innovative way to sanction individuals who are found guilty of speech crimes. This is something which the owner of this platform is not very happy about. That is also perhaps what is motivating part, at least part, of Donald’s war against Europe.Part One: What the EU Report Does WellThe report uses a metaphor from military doctrine because, as with Disinfolklore, FIMI is about national security. This isn’t a kind of add-on or cultural nicety. The same with Disinfolklore — for me, it was born in a war zone, born in eastern Ukraine, born on this bridge, in this liminal territory between the Russian occupiers and the Ukrainian military. This is a question of national security, whether we remain sovereign democratic countries and states.Yes, it’s great to have a bit of media literacy and informed political debate and ways of building and consolidating our mental hygiene. But ultimately, from my perspective and also from the European Union’s perspective, this is about national security.The report borrows the kill chain concept from cybersecurity and applies it to information operations. FIMI operations are mapped from planning and financing through production and amplification. I should say at this point, one of the big differences between the Disinfolklore analytical method and FIMI, and in fact most disinformation work, is that I see — and I’ve seen this since being in eastern Ukraine — the continuity between the online and offline worlds. For me, there’s no distinction between the methods Donald will use when he is in private trying to convince somebody to do his bidding, and the method he will use on Twitter to try and troll the United Kingdom into sending its aircraft carrier into the Strait of Hormuz. It’s the same structure — the rhetoric of hostage-taking, provocation logic, coercive control, this swinging of one minute I’m your friend, one minute I’m your enemy. It’s the same method Donald uses, the same method all wife beaters and coercive control addicts use, the same method that Epstein used, the same method that every Russian commander on the front uses to persuade their people to go to their deaths in a meat assault, all the way up the chain of command to Putler.While for obvious reasons the European Union is dealing just with the online sphere and looking at kill chains and cybersecurity, the Disinfolklore analytical method and its value should be to provide a set of tools that work in the offline world just as well.The Kill Chain and FIMI as a ServiceEach stage in a FIMI incident is mapped from planning and financing — through, for instance, the chef sorcerer Prigozhin and his Internet Research Agency who got Brexit done and Donald elected the first time. We’ve got lots of first-hand testimony from inside the troll factories: the way they’re structured and organised, people have quotas, they’re given temnyky — which is the Ukrainian word for themes. “Your job this morning is 30 tweets attacking European leaders.” They go off and then they have their lunch hour, just like normal people with normal jobs, but their job is to pollute our minds with Disinfolklore.FIMI operations are mapped with planning and financing through to production and amplification. Each stage becomes an intervention point. This is genuinely useful. It transforms FIMI from an amorphous problem that we see in our information space or through the words of a friend into a set of discrete, targetable phases.The key insight is that the European Union has correctly identified that FIMI operates as an industry — what they call “FIMI as a Service.” Some of you might remember I wrote my piece “Genocide as a Service” about the Wagner military wing in Africa, where they move in and first provide some hardware — maybe a couple of planes, some tanks — and then they start providing what I call governance services.The Galaxy MetaphorAt the Munich Security Conference, in which I declared the Disinfolklore Universe, I set out that we’re susceptible to being caught up in a concatenating series of Disinfolklore galaxies — like MAGA, like Russia-occupied Ukraine, like the Disinfolklore galaxy inside Russia. The European Union then a few weeks later — nothing to do with my speech — used the galaxy metaphor, but in a more concrete way, because what I’m always talking about is the system-wide effects of what I call Disinfolklore.When Donald says what he says about Cuba being a woman ready, a weak woman ready to be taken — these are particular instances. It’s all very well dealing with them and looking at them as particular instances of Disinfolklore. But from my perspective, it’s the accumulation of billions of these incidences every day. Donald’s particular power is to, in the context of the Iran war, talk about 50 different things from 50 different perspectives. If you’re MAGA, you think the war is over. If you’re Iran, you just think it’s ridiculous. If you’re me, you’re just confused. There’s this whole system, the concatenating effects of individual instances of Disinfolklore.That’s why for me, declaring the Disinfolklore Universe — where every aspect of our reality from the first moment we wake up each day is determined by Donald or Russia or a whole coalition — when you go to fill your car up at the petrol station, you’re worried about the price of fuel, or you have to make choices about food because you can’t afford fuel to get to your job. This is how the information space interacts with the inside of our minds.The European Union uses a network graph to map approximately 3,000 core channels in a remarkable piece of infrastructure analysis. It reveals a central operational backbone of Russian-attributed channels surrounded by regional hubs targeting Moldova, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the MENA region. The identification of bridging nodes that connect the central infrastructure to regional clusters is operationally valuable.Useful detail: only 9.5% of the channels are directly attributable to state actors. The remaining 90.5% are covert, state-linked, state-aligned, or unattributed. The iceberg metaphor is apt and important for policy audiences.Disinfolklore’s Different Approach to AttributionWhat I do in the Disinfolklore analytical method — I don’t care so much whether I can directly link a particular meme to a Russian state actor. If the energy in a meme is coercive control, for example, or is to destroy the post-World War II legal and social order, then I don’t care whether that’s coming from a domestic actor directly or from Russia or from MAGA. That is what, for me, marks it like a fluorescent dye as Disinfolklore.From my perspective, the second element in the Code of Positive Trolls, which I use to determine whether a unit of information is folklore or Disinfolklore, is right or ethical discipline. That standard is set by the post-World War II legal and social order: the Genocide Convention, the UN Charter, the European Convention on Human Rights, the UN Declaration on Human Rights, and a whole plethora of treaties between states and the post-World War II Geneva Conventions.If the particular meme is trying to denigrate international law — like practically everything that Donald does or anything that comes out of Russia — if I see that energy in a meme, that then becomes my point of operation. I’ll characterise that as being Disinfolklore. The European Union obviously has a different perspective and has to make sure it’s only dealing with material emanating from outside the European Union. But I think that if it developed an idea of what I call the mana in the meme — looking for the energy in particular memes — it would make their lives a lot easier.Doppelganger and Information Manipulation SetsThe report’s tracking of specific information manipulation sets — Doppelganger, again, this comes from folklore. The term “Doppelganger” was used first by a European Union official when they discovered a network and particular disinformation modus operandi emanating from Russia, where they would fake pretend to be the Guardian — take a Guardian article, and then I might read and go, “Gosh, the Guardian saying this,” share it, and it gets shared on. Someone said, “This is a bit like the Doppelganger,” which is from Germanic folklore. This is part of my insight, my realisation since Disinfolklore, that we perceive so much of our reality, but especially stories and disinformation, through these lenses of folklore and what I call Disinfolklore.Then the Russians saw that the European Union was calling these networks Doppelganger. In documents we’ve seen since, where these private entities in Russia are pitching for funding from the defence ministry or different ministries, they then use these European Union reports as evidence that they’re getting traction and that therefore they should be invested in. One of the really positive things you glean from reading these internal documents — when from time to time InformNapalm or other intelligence collectives manage to get their hands on them — is all of the lies the Russians are using inside their own institutions to try and get more funding. They are very bureaucratic.Then they take on the mantle — Doppelganger. The Doppelganger’s Doppelganger, and it goes on. Like in a Mirror, Storm 1516, Operation Overload, Portal Combat, Spamouflage, Paperwall. These provide granular operational intelligence about how they work. The distinction between these different information manipulation sets, their behavioural signatures and their relative effectiveness, is excellent.Storm 1516: The Exception That Proves the RuleStorm 1516 stands out as the only information manipulation set generating genuine organic engagement, which is a critical finding. Really interesting — that so much of the effect of Russian disinformation can now be empirically demonstrated to be itself evidence of misinformation. Because when you look at it empirically, it’s only Storm 1516 which genuinely generates organic engagement. I, for one, will be looking more closely at their kind of content and what they’re doing.The first European Union threats report rather oddly said that AI wasn’t anticipated to have any effect on disinformation. My eyebrows and others’ were raised at the time, but they’ve now recanted on that because in this fourth report, there’s a 259% increase in AI-related TTPs — that’s from cybersecurity and military speak: Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures.The Mana in the Meme vs TTPsWhen I talk about the mana in the meme, I’m talking about whether you can see the energy of ungenerosity — as we saw with Donald talking about how, if a country’s hit with a hurricane, he’s really quite tight-fisted, doesn’t want to give them any money to save their lives. If you see the mana against the post-World War II legal order, then you know prima facie it’s probably Disinfolklore — don’t let it into your inner mind, don’t repeat it, don’t let it affect you. Just move past it.What the European Union looks at is TTPs: techniques, tactics, and procedures. You can see in the signature of certain ways in which disinformation is broadcast. For instance, if it’s using fake websites under the name of genuine publications and you don’t know anything else about it, then you know it’s probably Russian because it’s the same technique, tactic, and procedure they’re using — they’ve registered a domain name, and on the balance of probabilities you can tell it’s Russian.The report identifies three AI challenges. LLM grooming — Portal Combat is this large language model grooming. The Russians are using AI to create content which is then used to skew the weightings inside large language models, so that when you put in a question — “Who’s the fairest country of them all?” — you get, “Russia, the big bear is.” Portal Combat: flooding the information space to contaminate training data. Cognitive chaos: erosion of trust through synthetic content saturation — that’s Donald’s main tool as well. Algorithm influence: volume-driven feed manipulation. This is what we’re dealing with every day on this app.This tracks directly into my concerns about AI companions affecting mind streams. I’ve talked recently about how the Code of Positive Trolls can also mediate our relationship with AI chatbots, just as it can mediate our relationship with our social media feeds or with people in our lives who cause chaos in our minds or in our communities.Part Two: What Disinfolklore Sees That the EU Doesn’tThis is my central critique — which is, again, not to denigrate but really just to illustrate what I do by comparison to the European Union. I’m just one person with an idea and a lot of energy to try and operationalise it, whereas of course it’s a huge institution.The EEAS report is extraordinarily sophisticated about infrastructure, channels, organisational structures. It’s remarkably thin on actual content — the narratives, the archetypal structures, the psychological mechanisms through which disinformation actually works on human minds.The report’s analytical framework has three layers: the who (organisational structures), the how (digital infrastructure), and the what (FIMI activities and contents). But the “what” layer is the least developed — yet probably the most developed for me.The deterrence playbook has detailed triggers and effects for sanctions and law enforcement targeting the who and how layers. For the content layer, the tools are limited to content removal and amplification disruption. There’s no framework for understanding why certain content works, why certain narratives penetrate authentic discourse while others fail. My answer to that is my discovery that the Russians were using archetypal Disinfolklore.The EEAS can tell you that Storm 1516 has generated four million views on a particular video. It cannot tell you why that video resonated, what archetypal structures it activated, what emotional journey it induced in the viewer, or how to inoculate populations against that specific form of narrative sorcery. Disinfolklore can.The 5Ds vs the Twelve ToolsThe EU uses the 5Ds framework — dismiss, distract, distort, dismay, divide — from the Disarm Foundation to categorise Russia’s and China’s strategic objectives. Let me say, I would love to see the European Court of Justice — and I will campaign for this over the next few decades — adopt the Code of Positive Trolls. I used the term “code” originally as a lawyer because it does operate as a test, the kind of six-limb test introduced in many different areas of European Union law and our domestic jurisdictions.The 5Ds are a useful typology of intent, but they operate entirely at the level of the operator’s purpose. They say nothing about the recipient’s experience. My twelve-tool framework at disinfolklore.eu operates at both ends of the transmission.The first six are detection tools: archetypal Disinfolklore literacy; incoming and outgoing troll radars; look for the mana in the meme; the four dimensions — moods, attitudes, intentions, motivations. Sometimes the first feeling you get that you are being manipulated — and this is what I try to imbue myself with when I find myself really confused, as I have since the beginning of these attacks on Iran — is if my incoming troll radar is activated and I’m detecting my mood, my attitude, my intention, my motivations being changed by information coming into my mind. That sometimes is the first clue I get that someone is trying to manipulate me. That allows me to triage — like when you go into a hospital — triage certain informational units in a particular container in my outer mind for closer examination. Or if I’m in a rush and just don’t have headspace to deal with stuff, I just dismiss it. If it’s ungenerous, like anything coming from Donald at this point, I just dismiss, except for pedagogical purposes because he’s such a great example. I designed the Code of Positive Trolls to try and understand and confront and counter what Donald was doing in 2019, back in those ancient days. Now we see he’s wrapping humanity up inside this craziness.Then the other detection tools: the trigger-experience-reaction model, which I take from Paul Ekman and the Dalai Lama. I’ve done podcasts on that before — it’s up on the disinfolklore.eu website. Understanding how Disinfolklorists construct their output.The second six — which is the Code of Positive Trolls: generosity; ethical discipline or right; patience (if someone’s trying to get you to be urgent, to make you make a decision right now, then you know someone is trying to manipulate you — just somehow get out of that moment); energy/mana is the fourth element; focus/mindfulness, which is necessary to maintain — by mindfulness I mean being mindful of what you allow into your mind; and the final is insight/wisdom.These are the response tools that address our individual capacity to resist Disinfolklore. The structural difference: the European Union’s 5Ds classify what the attacker is trying to do. The twelve tools equip the defender to understand what is happening to them, to us, and how to respond. One is a taxonomy of offence; the other is a practice of defence. The European Union has the taxonomy of offence. It does not have the practice of defence.Archetypal Depth: 6,000 Years of Indo-European CultureThe European Union acknowledges that FIMI narratives are repetitive and predictable. It documents the three-phase Russian election interference playbook: delegitimise leadership, weaponise divisions, undermine electoral integrity. But it treats this repetitiveness as a feature of Russian operational doctrine. Disinfolklore goes deeper.My framework traces these narrative structures, these archetypes, back through 6,000 years of Indo-European culture. The inner-outer realm switching that I documented at Stanytsia Luhanska, where Russian-speaking Mariupol mothers were instantaneously re-archetyped as dead Ukrainian Nazis — that is not a Russian TTP, not a Russian tactic, technique, or procedure. It’s an ancient mechanism of exclusion and dehumanisation that Russia has weaponised. The Trito myth, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the trickster tale — which the Middle Eastern countries are living right now. You give Donald a gold-plated Boeing 747 and all you get in return is 100 Shahed drones attacking your infrastructure. When you say to Donald, “But you said you’d protect us,” all you get is, “How about another jet?”The trickster tale. We learned these when we were children and these have been passed on and on, whether in the Arabian Nights or Chaucer’s tales or folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, or indeed in the folklore which Mockers reads on Volya Radio each morning. These are structural patterns that predate any state actor. That’s the depth I help provide.Why this matters operationally: if you only understand FIMI as Russian or Chinese state behaviour, your response is limited to targeting those states. If you understand it as a weaponisation of deep archetypal structures that are hardwired into Indo-European cognition, you can build genuine cognitive immunity because you can teach people to recognise this pattern regardless of who deploys it — whether it’s in your own household or in your own community or from Russia.The Missing Mana DimensionThe European Union report exhaustively catalogues channels and observables. It counts, it maps, it attributes. But nowhere does it ask: what is the energy inside the meme? What is the affective charge that makes one piece of content resonate and another fall flat?My concept of mana — the energy embedded in informational units that impacts moods, attitudes, intentions, and motivations — is precisely what the EEAS framework lacks. The report notes that most AI-generated FIMI content is low quality and generates limited organic engagement. It notes that Storm 1516 is the exception, but there’s no framework for explaining why. In my terms: most FIMI content carries weak or misaligned mana. Storm 1516 succeeds because it plugs into authentic fears and archetypal structures that carry real affective charge.My Finding Manuland research — you’ll see the Manuland section on disinfolklore.eu — traces the etymological and semantic and hermeneutical link between the mana energy, the M-N in mana and energy, and money — it’s in M-money as well — through 6,000 years of M-N sound patterns. The EEAS report documents Russia’s 146.3 billion rouble media budget, about 1.56 billion euros. The linguistic archaeology tells us something the budget line does not: money and mana are cognates. The resources flow where the energy is. Understanding the energy is understanding the resource allocation.The Sympathetic Magic LensThe sympathetic magic lens, which is a relatively new lens I’ve introduced alongside war magic, propagation apparatus, folklore-like archetypes, and gender lenses — that offers analytical depth which the European Union framework entirely lacks.The European Union report documents that during the German elections, Russian accounts shared AI-generated images of apocalyptic versions of German landscapes engulfed in chaos and crime. In the European Union framework, this is categorised as a technique within the “distort” strategic objective. In my framework, this is sympathetic magic — the creation of images (image, mage — it’s that sound, from early Indo-European languages). The creation of images intended to bring about the reality they depict. It’s contagion — I use the word mana, which is contagion energy — in the Frazerian sense. James George Frazer, who first set out the laws of sympathetic magic: law of opposites, law of similarity. The image infects the viewer’s inner mind with a vision that then shapes perception of the real world.The practical difference: understanding this as sympathetic magic immediately suggests countermeasures that content removal cannot. You cannot remove images from minds. You can teach people to recognise the magical mechanism. This is what archetypal Disinfolklore literacy does.The Individual MindThe European Union report is almost entirely systemic. It addresses states, institutions, platforms, regulations, and sanctions. That’s why I say it is doing a different thing than I’m doing, and I’m not criticising it in a negative sense. Its resilience-building pillar mentions media literacy and capacity building across institutions and civil society, but it never descends to the level of the individual mind — whereas that’s my primary interest.Disinfolklore is fundamentally a practice for the individual. Trigger, experience, reaction — that’s the model I take from Paul Ekman, who died recently but is the genius who basically established the whole area of micro-expressions revealing true intentions and feelings, which is of great interest to computer vision specialists. He and the Dalai Lama developed the Timeline of Emotions model: trigger, experience, reaction — which I apply to our timelines where you’re triggered by something, you experience a feeling (one of the five primary feelings of disgust, sadness, and others that Ekman set out), and then the space between our experience of the feeling and how we react to it — that’s the space we can control if we have our incoming troll radar actualised and we’re mindful of what’s coming into our mind.If, for instance, we scan for ungenerosity and use that as a proxy for an informational unit or meme that we should not share — because we’re just passing on negative energy — and if we’re particularly disgusted by something, it may be that it is targeted at our vulnerability. This is what ISIS was able to amazingly do with all of its horrid Disinfolklore ten or fifteen years ago, like a world before.The Code of Positive Trolls provides a personal ethical framework for navigating information warfare. “Is there generosity in this message?” is a question any one of us can ask. “Does this violate the Digital Services Act?” — well, not really, not unless you’re a very clever lawyer, because it’s an amazing piece of legislation but it’s pretty complicated.The Post-World War II Legal OrderBoth frameworks share a normative foundation in defending the post-World War II legal order. But the European Union locates this defence in institutional mechanisms — sanctions, regulation, law enforcement. I locate it additionally in individual moral agency: our capacity to refuse to be trolled, to refuse to share the Disinfolklore, to refuse to participate in the destruction of our own civilisation. Both are necessary. Neither alone is sufficient.Part Three: What the EU Has That Disinfolklore NeedsThe European Union has — since I’m just one person, really — institutional scale and data: 540 encoded incidents last year, 10,500 channels mapped, 43,000 observables, a network analysis capability, a STIX-encoded threat intelligence sharing system, and the backing of 27 member states. Disinfolklore has a one-million-word corpus and a single analytical mind. The European Union can scan the entire FIMI ecosystem. I can go deep — archaeological excavation over 6,000 years of history for individual archetypes. Both are needed.The deterrence playbook is something Disinfolklore does not yet have the equivalent for. My framework tells us how to see and resist Disinfolklore. It does not yet systematically address how to raise costs for the producers of Disinfolklore. The European Union’s integration of sanctions, law enforcement, digital regulation, and resilience building into a single kill chain framework is a genuine institutional innovation. It’s a concept that you can make FIMI a losing proposition through cumulative cost imposition. That’s powerful.Forward-looking capability: the EEAS’s ability to predict, say, that the Moldova playbook could be redeployed elsewhere is derived from systematic infrastructure monitoring. The report identifies upcoming elections in Slovenia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Sweden, Latvia, and Denmark as potential targets. This kind of early warning system requires institutional resources that individual practitioners do not have. If you’re trying to persuade a government like Bulgaria or Latvia or Sweden to take preventative measures, then the European Union’s approach is what’s required.The distinction between overt channels — 2.5% official state, 7% state-controlled — and covert channels — state-linked, and 86% state-aligned — and the rigorous methodology for moving between these categories is essential for legal and diplomatic responses. Disinfolklore’s analytical power does not depend on attribution, which is both a strength (it works regardless of who is doing it) and a limitation (it cannot directly feed into sanctions designations). Not yet — but I think a lot about that point.Part Four: Towards a SynthesisThe fundamental complementarity: the European Union sees the plumbing. Disinfolklore sees the poison. The EEAS maps the pipes, identifies the pumping stations, and proposes blocking the flow. Disinfolklore analyses the composition of what’s flowing through the pipes, explains why it is toxic, and teaches people to recognise and resist it. Neither approach alone can win the information war.Where both frameworks converge: both recognise that FIMI/Disinfolklore is deliberate and strategic, not random. Both identify repetitive patterns that can be anticipated. Both understand that Ukraine is the central battleground. Both locate the normative stakes in the defence of democratic systems and the post-World War II legal order. Both recognise that AI is transforming the threat. Both understand that resilience is ultimately the most sustainable defence. The EEAS’s observation that most FIMI content fails to generate organic engagement validates the Disinfolklore insight that weak mana does not penetrate authentic discourse.Where They Diverge and Why It MattersThe European Union framework is horizontal and systemic — it scans across the entire threat landscape simultaneously. Disinfolklore is vertical and archaeological — it digs deep into individual archetypal narratives, tracing their structures back millennia. The EEAS treats content as the output of a supply chain. Disinfolklore treats content as the deployment of ancient cognitive weaponry. The EEAS framework targets the producer. Disinfolklore’s response framework empowers the consumer.The Automation BridgeHere is where the two frameworks could converge operationally. I mentioned this last week — I’m working on automating the Disinfolklore analytical method via neural network training, using my one-million-word corpus on disinfolklore.eu as training data, with autoresearch and BitNet as target architectures.The European Union already encodes its incidents in STIX format. If the twelve tools could be operationalised as classifiers trained on my corpus, they could be applied at scale to the EEAS’s 43,000 observables.Imagine: each detected FIMI incident not only categorised by its 5D strategic objective, but also analysed for its archetypal structure, its mana charge, its sympathetic magic mechanisms, and its trigger-experience-reaction pathway. That would be a merger of institutional scale and analytical depth. We now have the models — which I’m experimenting with — that can do this, that have the kind of semantic depth to do this.Anthropic’s Claude — Claude Code, for instance — was able to find premonitions of my insight about archetypal Disinfolklore, which I first wrote explicitly about in December 2024, when I first used the term in reference to Syria — the Potemkin state archetypal Disinfolklore of data-resistant archetypes of a Potemkin state. Claude Code was able to find premonitions of this going back years into my work, and some really interesting ones that I hadn’t seen. You could see these ghosts and premonitions of what I had thought. This is very personally gratifying and fascinating, but it also demonstrates the power of these tools to find examples of sympathetic magic, for instance.Three ProposalsMy three proposals to end with:Proposal One: An Archetypal Layer for the FIMI Toolbox.The EEAS deterrence playbook has four instruments: sanctions, law enforcement, digital regulation, resilience building. A fifth instrument should be added: archetypal literacy. This would sit within the resilience-building pillar but go beyond generic media literacy. It would teach specific recognition of the folkloric, folklore-like, and mythological structures that Disinfolklorists consciously and unconsciously weaponise: inner-outer realm switching, trickster tales, sympathetic magic, dehumanisation archetypes. My twelve tools, packaged for institutional educational deployment, could form the curriculum.Proposal Two: A Mana Index for FIMI Incidents.The EEAS currently categorises incidents by attribution, platform, geography, and 5D objective. A mana index — a measure of the affective charge and psychological penetration potential of content — would help prioritise response. Storm 1516 succeeds where Doppelganger and Overload fail precisely because its content carries higher mana, higher manipulative energy. It pulsates, it vibrates our mana. Quantifying this would be a significant analytical advance. We now have the neural network algorithms that are able to do this.Proposal Three: The Counter-Archetyping Dimension.The European Union report mentions strategic communication as a component of resilience building, but has no framework for counter-archetyping — the act of creating alternative narrative structures that displace Disinfolklore. NAFO is the best organic example of counter-archetyping in world history: individuals re-archetyping themselves with avatars that are charming, beautiful, lovely, agreeable, kind, not egotistical, humbly joyous. With these avatars, they re-archetype information in the information space and undermine and destroy the power of Russian Disinfolklore. This is narrative and archetypal warfare conducted with positive mana. A systematic counter-archetyping capability informed by 6,000 years of Indo-European narrative knowledge would be a powerful addition to the FIMI toolbox.Conclusion: Dismantling the House of Cards, Breaking the SpellThe European Union report has a subtitle: “Dismantling the FIMI House of Cards.” Again, using this image from folklore — House of Cards. It is the right metaphor for the infrastructure. Pull out the right card — a sanctioned entity, a seized server, a deplatformed network — and the structure collapses.But the narratives are not cards. They’re spells. They’re ancient patterns of meaning-making that have been weaponised. You cannot dismantle a spell by seizing the spell book. You dismantle it by teaching people to see the sorcery for what it is.The EEAS gives us the capacity to dismantle the house of cards. Disinfolklore gives us the capacity to break the spell. We need both. The house of cards is the delivery mechanism. The spell is the payload. Kill the delivery mechanism and the operators will rebuild it. Break the spell and the payload loses its power regardless of how it is delivered.This is the conversation I want us to have. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

The Arc of a Word: Four Years of Re-ArchetypingI wanted to reflect on the four years of war. So everything everyone’s been talking about for the last hour and a half or so, hopefully it will strike a chord with them. I want to go through the four years of the war, not merely as battles, though we’ll visit some, but as a journey through Disinfolklore, through the archetypes we project onto Ukraine, through the archetypes Russia projects onto all of us, and through how Ukraine has fought back — not just with weapons, but by re-archetyping itself inside our minds.Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy Because, as I wrote, Disinfolklore is how you conceal a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Disinfolklore is how yohu pull the wool over people’s eyes, and this works both ways. So all of us on Volia and who contribute to Volia from day one have been re-archetyping and counter-archetyping against what Russia has been trying to do to Ukraine in the information space, and what many others have been trying to do to Ukraine unconsciously in the information space.So this is a process we’ve all been involved in. I didn’t have the words for it when the war broke out, but because of the war, I do now. And I want to tell you the story of that word — not the word Disinfolklore, though we’ll get to that, but the word archetype.Because here’s the thing. For the first two years of the war, we were doing something I had no name for and we perhaps had no name for. We were doing it instinctively. We were re-archetyping Russia, re-archetyping Ukraine, re-archetyping the entire war through memes before we had the vocabulary to describe what we were doing. And the arc of what I was going to talk about tonight is the arc of that word, from instinct to naming to power (mana).The Bridge at Stanytsia LuhanskaSo that word, archetyping. While many anti-disinformation specialists describe themselves as working on the front line of the information war, as many of you will have heard a million times, I worked on the actual zero line between 2015 and 2018, separating Russian from Ukrainian army. I worked at the actual geographical and physical separation point between two of the greatest armies in human history. Because between 2015 and 2022 I was in Ukraine as a diplomat, again as you’ll know, and for three years at that time I was at the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska.And I intuited there was something folkloric about the situation there. Armed men on both sides, civilians crossing — pensioners, mostly, collecting their Ukrainian pension from one side and returning to Russian-occupied territory on the other side. And at the checkpoints, Russian-controlled trolls. Not internet trolls — actual literal bridge trolls, the oldest archetype in European folklore. Of course, I didn’t really know that consciously at the time.In the manner of a 19th-century folklore collector, I collected the stories that Russia used to brainwash Ukrainians living across the river in Russia-occupied Ukraine. And in 2016, I made a discovery that changed my life: that Russia was using Jung’s theory of archetypes to manipulate the moods, attitudes, motivations, and intentions of consumers of its combat propaganda.In the woods near Stanytsia Luhanska bridge, Russian FSB operatives — archetyping themselves as the Stalinist era’s KGB predecessor, the MGB — in occupied Luhansk, constructed a story containing these archetypes: “my common-law spouse who lives with her underage daughter.” There was, in the labyrinthine layers of this incident, the jarring recognition of artificiality. My jarring recognition. The story contained Jung’s primary archetypes — the Mother and the Maiden — as if someone had a manual containing all of the primordial archetypes and had constructed the story to ensure it contained these elements.Eight years later, I understood. I had discovered how Russia and MAGA purposefully and purposely reverse-engineer tales with fairy-tale and folktale-like emotional resonances as a means of hacking our minds, hacking our consent, and undermining our civilization. Disinfolklore is what I named it — the folklore of disinformation, the disinformation of folklore, both at once.Druidy Don and the BattlefieldSo in the autumn of 2019, I was really trying to understand what Druidy Don — Trump’s power, his mana — consisted of. I wanted to understand it in order to counter it. At the time, I was a diplomat in eastern Ukraine, based in Dnipro at that point. I could see how Donald’s trolling even then had real-world effects on the battlefield. When Donald withheld Javelin missile systems from Ukraine, demanding that President Zelensky announce an investigation into the son of President Biden, I watched from Dnipro and from areas which are now occupied in Zaporizhzhia as the balance of power shifted. President Zelensky navigated out of that trap. Donald got impeached. President Zelensky escaped. But the lesson was seared into my mind: the information war and the kinetic war are the same war.Year One: InstinctOn the morning of the 24th of February 2022, I had been out of Ukraine for three weeks. I listened very carefully to President Biden’s strategic disclosures in the fall of 2021. And by the end of November, after a conversation with my father about them, I had all my car packed. I was ready to leave at ten minutes’ notice. I thought the invasion would probably happen at Christmas, but when it didn’t, I made the decision to leave and I crossed the border on the 29th of January 2022. And I marked it with a tweet on Twitter — just a picture of my cat and me at the border with Poland, but not saying that I was leaving Ukraine or why I was leaving Ukraine. I just slipped out of Ukraine, because I didn’t want to scare the horses and I had no access to any secret information. I just had access to the same information others had, but I became convinced that the invasion was going to come.So that morning of February 24th 2022, I was back home in a remote part of Ireland. And my first tweet was two words: Slava Ukraini. Glory to Ukraine. That’s all I could manage. I was still an OSCE diplomat at the time, and I had to model impartiality. So I was still being cautious online. I’d never mentioned Ukraine online up to that point.Germany’s initial response to the invasion, as our great German listener was still saying — although rightly you have nothing to be ashamed of now — but Germany’s response to the invasion: 5,000 helmets. Not rifles, not anti-tank missiles. Helmets, to fight 190,000 invaders. I remember that the head of the BND was in Kyiv, and I assumed he had been there to try and extricate President Zelensky, in my naivety. But I share your shock that these people had access to all this information, clearly not only did not see the invasion coming — they didn’t see the invasion coming. “You’ve only got a few hours” was how one German official put it to the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany. There’s no point in putting sanctions or exiting Russia from SWIFT. You’ve only got a few hours. Get out, save yourselves — was the basic message, which I also delivered to friends of mine in Ukraine. And maybe I would say the same thing today, but it shocks me and impresses me that many of the people I knew in Dnipro didn’t leave. They were like, “This is our home, we’re not leaving.”RF’s Mythos Is DoneAnd on February 28th, I wrote nine words: “Why Russian Federation is doomed by this venture. RF’s mythos is done.” Russia’s Federation’s mythos is done. I did not have a word for what I was witnessing, but what I was witnessing on day four of the full-scale invasion was the destruction of an archetype. Russia had spent centuries constructing a mental archetype, a mental model, a data-resistant archetype of itself as an unstoppable colossus. In four days, Ukraine broke it.For those incidents that Latyn was just talking about and many others — we were looking at these data points and they didn’t match our archetype of what a proper army, how a properly prepared army would behave.Reverse NapoleonAnd on day five of the invasion, I made a call that has held true for four years: Russia in Ukraine has done a reverse Napoleon. Tolstoy brilliantly shows Russian Field Marshal Kutuzov’s strategy in War and Peace. Draw the French further and further in so their supply lines are stretched. Napoleon sat in Moscow waiting for surrender. They never did. And so it goes. This is exactly where we are still, four years later.And the evidence I used which prompted this tweet was a Telegram post from the 27th of February 2022 from a Russian soldier complaining that no one of the invading force could communicate with their commanders. “Almost no one can get a hold of central command. It’s not even a matter of jamming. There’s just no long-range comms equipment or relays that went with the troops there.” Now, as Telegram and Starlink are no longer available to Russia’s forces four years later, we see the seeds of the future were imminent in those first few days.And the data point that had led me to understand the significance of this lack of communication was — I always remember reading or hearing when I was much younger about how when America went into Grenada, the Army and the Navy or the Air Force, they couldn’t communicate with each other. They discovered their radios weren’t compatible. So that was always in the back of my mind, and then when I saw this, I thought, this is a good sign for Ukraine but a terrible sign for Russia.Russia had invaded with insufficient forces and overextended supply lines, just as Napoleon had done in reverse. And then I added the Tolstoy inversion: Russia had become the thing its foundational myth celebrates defeating. The national archetype had been inverted. This is what re-archetyping looks like when history does it for you.The Economist, 1854On March 6th, I published a thread that was picked up by the Washington Post about the Crimean War of 1854. It was an article in The Economist from 168 years earlier. I had found this article in The Economist a couple of years earlier to try and understand the history of the first Crimean War. This is The Economist speaking: “We ventured” — this is my 19th-century British accent — “we ventured to hint that it might be worthwhile for Europe to go to war with Russia for the sake of information, in order to ascertain whether her strength was that of the bully or the giant.”1854, and not much has changed. Paper armies, corrupt officers, indifferent soldiers, stolen boots, rotten food. The Crimean War thread proved that Russia’s weakness is not a 2022 aberration. It’s a structural feature. It’s a deep archetype, documented identically 160 years ago.The Economist went further. By 1855 their verdict was in: “Till a free press be permitted in Russia and encouraged to unveil and denounce abuses. Till the rights and feelings of annexed territories be habitually respected. We do not think that Russia need henceforth be considered as formidable for aggression. She has been unmasked.” She has been unmasked. 1855, 2022. The same verdict, the same bully pretending to be a giant.On March 6th 2022, I deployed history as a weapon, proving that Russia was never a giant, always a bully. The archetype of Russian military power was a fraud. And it was a fraud 168 years ago.Let’s Compare TrollsOn March 30th, five weeks into the war, I published a thread that I now recognise as probably my most important act of re-archetyping — but again, I didn’t have a word for it at that point. “Let’s compare trolls. Putin versus President Zelensky. First, Putin looks like a troll. He got that Nordic-Russian troll look nailed. His every communication is a troll for emotional reaction in others.”That insight: Putin is a 20th-century troll. His one trick is emotionally resonant communications designed to wound. Zelensky is a 21st-century troll — hyper-modern, self-aware, working at a meta-civilisational level. “President Zelensky’s very” — this is in the tweet — “his very existence as a secular, native Russian-language-speaking, cosmopolitan Ukrainian Jewish cultural engineer makes him uninterpretable to a securocrat like Putin, whose entire troll about Ukraine is that it’s far-right and Nazi.”President Zelensky does not merely resist the archetype Putin has assigned to Ukraine. His very being shatters it. He is an archetype-breaker by existing.At the time, I framed this as trolling. I did not yet have the word re-archetyping. Putler archetypes Ukraine as Nazi and far-right, but we can re-archetype. This is the power all of us have. This is the power that Will and everyone in this space is exercising, and all of the brain-dead cartoon dogs are engaging in without necessarily having a word for it. And I didn’t yet have that word, re-archetyping, but that is exactly what I was doing, and what we were all doing. I was re-archetyping avant la lettre.Bucha and the Archetype of ViolenceWhen Bucha was liberated, when the BND intercepted radio traffic showing troops spoke of atrocities as though they were discussing their everyday lives, I understood something fundamental. Russists treat Ukraine as they think women deserve to be treated — like corpses. Putin himself revealed this logic. He likened Ukraine to a dead woman. Again, another act of archetyping. “Like it or not, take it, my beauty” — a reference to a vulgar Russian rhyme about necrophiliac rape by the Soviet-era hard rock band called Red Mold, and the song is called Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin. Archetypal. Disinfolklore in the mouth of Putler, and used as evidence of genocidal intent in the New Lines Institute’s first of its two great reports looking into Russia’s genocidal intent in the war in Ukraine.The Sinking of the MoskvaOn April 14th, two Ukrainian Neptune missiles sank the Moskva. Who among us will forget that day? The flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, the most powerful warship in the Black Sea, destroyed by a country that wasn’t supposed to have a navy.The missile’s name — Neptune. I traced it: the ancient Ukrainian, Proto-Indo-European word neptio, “brother’s or sister’s son.” Neptune evolved from that meaning into a god. The Neptune missile that sank Russia’s flagship carries a name coined in ancient Ukraine. Proto-Indo-European — ancient Ukrainian — Neptune. Ukraine’s 5,000-year-old language, Proto-Indo-European, or “ancient Ukrainian” as I re-archetype Indo-European now that we know where it emanates from, gave the world the word that became the god, that became the missile, that sunk the Russian war flagship. Mythological full circle. The re-archetyping extends 5,000 years into the deep past and arrives on April 14th 2022 in a ball of fire in the Black Sea.And yet still, many people didn’t get the memo. They didn’t understand that Ukraine was re-archetyping as a giant in the minds of humanity.Genies ReleasedAnd on that same day, I issued a warning about the genies that Ukraine would release. Those of us who know Ukraine well knew that Ukrainian innovation would change warfare permanently. “Ukrainians will make their fellow Indo-European Pashtuns look like amateurs. Genies will be released.” And so it goes. The Pashtuns may have had their IEDs, which caused havoc, but they didn’t have drones. And the genies that have been released by Ukraine four years later — Ukraine manufactures over a million drones a month. We’ve seen these attacks. This seems a highly significant attack on the Druzhba pipeline, possibly using the Flamingo missiles the other day. And the genie that was released at Zaporizhzhia, at Kharkiv, at Bakhmut — it will never be rebottled.Mariupol and May 9thBetween March 1st and May 9th 2022, Russia killed between 25,000 and 100,000 civilians in Mariupol. Up to 100,000 people in a single city in 70 days. And they did this for the date. They wanted to present the archetype of a conquest of Mariupol as a gift to Putler for Victory Day on May 9th. Instead, we had the image which will be forever seared on my brain, and I share it as often as possible, of Blankie Putler sitting with his blanket, afraid of the cold, on the May 9th Victory Day parade.“Now and in time to be, wherever yellow and blue is worn, are changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born.” Russia forges Ukraine’s mythos one dumb bomb at a time. This insight — that Russia is creating the very Ukrainian national mythology it sought to destroy. Each bomb forges the archetype. I wrote about that on May 9th.SeverodonetskThe fight then moved on to places I knew best. When I see these images of shelled Severodonetsk, where I lived for three years, I think of the stray cats and dogs. Every apartment building’s basement was a warm home to them. I learned that my gentle and kind neighbour in Severodonetsk was simply torn to pieces from a direct hit. And that’s the word of my erstwhile landlady. Russia murdered 10,000 of my former neighbours in that city.The Conceptual DNA of DisinfolkloreBut that summer, something else was happening. The toolkit I was evolving was crystallising. On July 18th, I published a thread that is the conceptual DNA of Disinfolklore: “Rashist disinfo works in bulk. We need to deal with it in bulk. It’s modern mythology. It’s folk wisdom for our era. Analytical tools and comparative mythology are therefore amazingly helpful to unpacking layers of b******t meaning of memes and countering the nonsense.”On the 21st of July, the Provocation Logic Cycle was systematised by me.On August 17th, the death of a Wagner propagandist in that strike in Popasna — that again many of us will never forget — was eulogised as having “gone to Odin’s army.” This triggered a thread that mapped the entire Indo-European first function, the sovereignty function, the pantheon, onto modern information warfare. The punchline: all these gods originated in ancient Ukraine, the very territory Wagner was trying to destroy.ManulandOn the 21st of August, I coined the term Manuland, which is a counter-geography to Dugin’s Eurasianism. Centred on Ukraine, Manuland stretches from Ireland to India.On the 23rd of August, I wrote one sentence that connects mythology to geography: “Europa mated with Zeus at the Maidan in central Kyiv on November 13th 2013. The thunder resonates still today in the sky above occupied Sevastopol.” Zeus — Zeus Pater in Proto-Indo-European, the Sky Father, the supreme deity of the Indo-European world — Jupiter, the very concept of divine sovereignty, all forged in ancient Ukraine. And when Europe’s protesters gathered at the Maidan in 2013 to demand a European future, they were, in the deepest mythological sense, returning to the source. Europa mated with Zeus. The mythology and the revolution converge at the same coordinates.Kharkiv Counter-OffensiveAnd on September 6th, the Kharkiv counter-offensive shattered Russia’s lines. I immediately, as many of us did, forecast Muscovy’s death spiral. Two weeks later, on September 20th, I produced the concept that was one of my more original but sad contributions: stealth genocide. For eight years, under a variety of linguistic fictions, Muscovy has been forcing Ukrainians to kill Ukrainians. Forced mobilisations in occupied Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk have pitched Ukrainians, fictionally termed “separatists,” against Ukrainians.And then in September, the war turned. The Kharkiv counter-offensive — again, who among us will forget those days? Balaklia, Kupiansk, Izium, liberated in a matter of days. The most dramatic military reversal of the 21st century. “Like failure in Afghanistan, plus Chernobyl, plus the end of the USSR, plus 50% extra trauma, because little brother Ukraine did it to Muscovy.” That’s what I wrote at the time. Russia had spent centuries calling Ukraine “little brother.” The humiliation of being defeated by the entity you deny exists. This was not merely a military setback. It was an identity crisis. Little Brother had re-archetyped the relationship by force.By this point, Ukraine had taken over the meme space entirely. Russia, the country that pioneered internet trolling, that built troll factories in St Petersburg, had lost control of the narrative to a nation of 42 million people armed with smartphones and a devastatingly dark sense of humour.The Founding of DisinfolkloreAnd then in the final days of Year One, in February 2023, in a 10-day outburst of 11 Substack posts, I published the foundational texts of Disinfolklore: the bridge origin story, the Three Billy Goats Gruff, the working definition, the mana metaphysics, the folkloric parsing of Russian intelligence operations.And on the 18th of February, five days before the first anniversary, I published a tweet that reached 800,000 people: “I engineered the term Disinfolklore from my experience as a diplomat on that bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska in eastern Ukraine. For several years, I negotiated daily with armed Russian bridge trolls, guarding their rebel troll kingdom from Ukrainian armed forces.” That was the most viral moment of my online career, such as it is.The year that began with Slava Ukraini ended with the founding of Disinfolklore. Throughout Year One, I had been re-archetyping Russia, Ukraine, the entire war instinctively. The Crimean War thread re-archetyped Russia from giant to bully. “Let’s compare trolls” re-archetyped Putler from strongman to frightened old man with a blankie. “Ukraine is not a supplicant” re-archetyped Ukraine from victim to superpower. Stealth genocide re-archetyped the entire 2014–2022 period from frozen conflict to active extermination.But I did not yet have a word. The word was archetype. I was still encountering people — friends, nice people, humanists, pro-human rights — they hadn’t been watching as closely as I had, and yet they still had the same archetypal perception of Ukraine that they had had at the beginning of the war: helpless victim, a damsel in distress. “We’d love to help you, but honestly, we can’t.” That kind of attitude also led me to this. I was reshaping archetypes without calling them that. I was doing it the way a musician plays before learning to read notation — by feel, by instinct, by accumulated pressure — as all of us have been doing.Year Two: Building the TheorySo at the start of Year Two, Disinfolklore was just a word, a clever portmanteau with a powerful origin story about a bridge. By the end of Year Two, it was a complete analytical framework. In Year Two, I published 3,496 original tweets and 141 Substack posts and launched the podcast series and maintained an output of one Substack post a day for three months on Disinfolklore. But the numbers missed the point. Year Two was also the year that I became a bit of a theorist, where I was trying to get into the underpinnings of what the Russians were doing.The Incursions of May 2023On the 31st of May 2023, the most extraordinary counter-Disinfolklore operation unfolded. Ukraine unleashed a series of incursions into Russian territory that left the Kremlin’s information apparatus paralysed. Who among us will forget those days? Who among us will forget how we believed once again? This would change everything.Instantly, the archetypes in people’s minds — nice people, people like foreign correspondents in newspapers — would see this and go, “Wow, Ukraine is a giant. We need to help Ukraine.” I wrote at the time: “Let’s appreciate the scale and beauty of the operation Ukraine has unleashed inside Muscovy. This is art.” So the very people in Russia who designed the awe-inspiring active measures of Brexit, Trump, and the Hunter Biden troll are now themselves entrapped by Ukraine.Ukraine as the ultimate counter-intelligence artist. The country that Russia had archetyped as a passive victim was now running operations inside Russia that made Russia’s own intelligence services look amateurish. The re-archetyping was no longer just theoretical or rhetorical — it was operational.Putin’s Chef ProblemNow, let me tell you about May 2023 as well. Prigozhin — the Chef, archetyped as Chef, a folkloric motif. We now know Prigozhin himself wrote a book of fairy tales. And in May 2023, Prigozhin was openly feuding with Russia’s Ministry of Defence. Most Russia experts saw this as a management dispute. I saw an archetype.On the 26th of May 2023, I published “Putin’s Chef Problem”: “How can Sorcerer Putin survive if he passes the reins to the Chef, the creature he trained and empowered? Yet how can Sorcerer Putin survive if he doesn’t stand aside to enable his apprentice to take over? This is the plight of the Sorcerer. It is featured in Indo-European stories for millennia.” Within two months — and ironically, it’s one of the main plot points in The Ring, in Wagner’s Ring — within two months of the march on Moscow, the Chef was allegedly dead. I believe he’s truly dead when we find out what happened to the second officer Wagner private jet that flew on to Baku that night, and when we read or watch the Chef’s final testimony.The joke, of course, is on the Russians. They destroyed their state for a troll. “Mummy, what was the end of the Russian Federation like?” “At first slow, then sudden. You see, its army was in Ukraine.” “Why?” “No one knew. Its army rushed back to Russia to stop a coup. No one knew what to do or where to go. That was it.” I wrote that on May 27th — a month before the coup. Twenty-seven days before the actual march on Moscow. Sometimes the archetype tells you everything.And exactly one month later, June 23rd, Prigozhin marched on Moscow.Why Russia Experts Missed ItWhy did Russia experts miss this? Russia experts are fed vast amounts of Disinfolklore by the Russist state apparatus. Kremlinology is an industry which is fed raw materials that are constructed inside the Russian power vertical to bamboozle, fool, confuse, and distract Western so-called experts. And one of the wonderful things about Volia and NAFOs and many of us is watching how much we’ve learned and how our intuition about Russia and Russian disinformation has evolved way beyond the power of most Russia experts attached to think tanks and the like.They saw what Russia’s Disinfolklore factories wanted them to see. I saw the archetype — the Sorcerer’s Apprentice who had grown too powerful. And I saw it because I’d spent seven years learning to read the mythological structures beneath the surface of events. Within two months of the march on Moscow, he was dead.BakhmutAnd then we get to Bakhmut, which was partly the reason why I suddenly realised that actually Prigozhin was the Apprentice. He had been given all the plum jobs in the invasion. The Wagnerites had been given the job of scaring President Zelensky away from Kyiv, of then trying to kill him. They were the ones who killed many of the 1,700 people they murdered in the Kyiv region. He was then given Popasna, which he only won after an extraordinary, tricky fight. And then he was given Bakhmut, which was supposed to be occupied by the end of July 2022. And then I believe he would have come out as Putler’s successor, and the whole thing would have gone on.But of course, it didn’t work out that way. They lost whatever it was — 75,000 to 100,000 dead — to take 0.0069% of Ukraine. Russia would need 50 times more humans than ever existed to conquer the whole country at that rate. A terrible beauty has been born there. And as we see now in the last couple of days, Chasiv Yar — which of course they never conquered — but many of those filled with the archetype of Russia as an unstoppable force assumed they would take Chasiv Yar immediately after that.Manufactured TirednessThen this manufactured tiredness that we see in our information space. Our information space is filled with memes conveying an emotion of tiredness directly into our minds. We who are unaffected by the daily missile strikes become occupied via these linguistic memes by tiredness. We then adopt the proposed bogus solution: Ukraine surrenders to genocide. This is how Disinfolklore works inside our minds to depress our spirits.And the single most successful Disinfolklore operation that Russia ever deployed was “Don’t poke the bear.” Using reflexive control, Russia convinces its enemies, whether states or individuals, to act of their own volition, voluntarily, in ways which benefit Russia. “Don’t poke the bear” is the geopolitical equivalent of “don’t wear a short skirt.” It places the burden of self-restraint on the victim. It pre-emptively excuses the aggressor. Ukraine now pokes the bear nightly. And Russia, without any mana left, cannot stop it.Year Three: The Word ArrivesSo then we go to Act Three, to Year Three. I suppose what I really want to say is that this is all the product of a real-time analysis, not an academic work. It’s conducted by someone who lived, as many of us did, in the places being destroyed, who knew the people being killed and people adjacent to them being killed, and who spent, in my case, years on the actual zero line between the armies. So every analytical tweet was written with the knowledge that friends and former colleagues were under fire. And every concept was tested against the reality of the people — people that I liked — there.And really, what I did not yet have at that point was a single mechanism that explained why all of this worked — why Disinfolklore lodges so deeply in our minds, why it resists data, why the “Russia is strong” narrative survives contact with the mathematics of Avdiivka or Bakhmut. And the answer was archetype, and the path to that answer ran through the rubble of a city and across the border of a nuclear state.AvdiivkaAgain, we have Year Three beginning on February 17th 2024. Avdiivka fell after eight years. “Russia’s failures in Ukraine, anniversary edition. Took 50,000 Russian deaths to capture Avdiivka, 0.02% of Ukraine. That means trillions of Russian soldiers needed to capture the whole of Ukraine. Trillions. Do the math. 50,000 dead. Let that number dissolve every ‘Russia is winning’ headline you ever read.”Macron Wakes UpAnd then something unexpected happened. Macron, the man I had spent two years criticising for his reflexive-control capture, the man who had been trolled by Putler in pre-invasion phone calls — Macron woke up. And I wrote: “My favourite part is where President Macron likens the soothsaying songs of ‘peace, peace’ to nursery rhymes. ‘They’re not for peace, they’re against Ukraine,’ said President Macron.” Macron, speaking in English, directly called out the peace lobby as anti-Ukrainian. From Normandy Format chairman trying to pressure Ukraine to capitulate in 2019, it was the most dramatic instance of what I was beginning to recognise as the central phenomenon: a leader breaking free from a data-resistant archetype. Macron had been trapped inside the archetype of dialogue with Russia. He shattered it.And that, again, is why our German colleague rightly should be proud, because although Scholz never broke out of this archetype, certainly Chancellor Merz was probably never captured by it, and he has never failed me.Tripillia and MythicideAnd while the media was talking about a stalemate — another archetype — I was reaching into deep time. Ukraine’s Trypillia power station was destroyed by Russian missiles. And I wrote: “Trypillia power station is not merely Ukrainian. It’s the mana of our entire civilisation Russia is picking off.” Ukraine’s national symbol, the Trident, is a living reflex of the oldest Indo-European myth — the Trito myth, the dragon-slayer narrative attested from India to Ireland. Russia was not merely committing war crimes. Russia was committing mythicide.In May 2024, I stated my broader mission explicitly: “My task is to promote understanding Ukraine as the original source of all Indo-European culture.” Timothy Snyder is brilliant, but the modern discipline of history looks only at written sources. So Snyder’s brilliant history of Ukraine begins with the Greek colonists along the Azov Sea coast, circa 800 BCE. My history of Ukraine begins before 2500 BCE, with the ancestors of those Greeks, who were ancient Ukrainians. And I’m very happy to note that a year later, Timothy Snyder followed this path — obviously he never read my work, but other people convinced him and showed him the ancient DNA studies published in Nature and peer-reviewed journals that demonstrate that all living Indo-European languages emanate particularly from Mykhailivka on the right bank, just below Zaporizhzhia. And now Timothy Snyder is a great adherent of what I talk about here. And I introduced the term “ancient Ukraine” and “ancient Ukrainians” into our lexicon.And so this is the re-archetyping project at its most ambitious — not just countering Russian propaganda about the current war, but rewriting the mental model of Ukraine across 5,000 years of human history. Ancient Ukraine is the source of all living Indo-European languages, religions, family structures, the patriarchal mode of family — sadly, I’m very disappointed by that — and modes of social organisation. This is what Finding Manuland, which is my second research programme under the disinfolklore.com website, at disinfolklore.com or disinfolklore.eu — the mythological foundation beneath the Disinfolklore framework — is designed to achieve.Kursk: The Supreme Re-ArchetypingSo I re-archetyped Ukraine’s invasion of Russia as the Fourth Reverse Napoleon invasion. And on the 6th of August 2024, Ukraine did what nobody expected and invaded Russia again — but of course, for most of humanity, they hadn’t even noticed the first time.And let me tell you what this meant. For 80 years, a single archetype had governed international relations: Russia’s territory is inviolable. Touch it and the world ends. Nuclear Armageddon. Escalation to extinction. World War III. This archetype was embedded so deeply in the minds of Western policymakers that it functioned as a law of physics. Unquestionable. Unchallengeable. Absolute. Ukraine shattered that.“Innovation and geopolitics since World War II,” I wrote. “Anyone can occupy part of Russia with impunity. Decades of earnest game theory and escalation management IR textbooks aren’t worth more than toilet paper.” I called it the Fourth Reverse Napoleon, but it was something more than military innovation. It was a supreme act of archetyping — the destruction of a data-resistant mental archetype through action. Eighty years of Russian Disinfolklore saying an invasion of Russia is both impossible and a red line. Now Russians are told that villages in Ukraine are “more Russian” than 1,500 square kilometres of Russia’s Kursk region that Ukraine now holds. The nuclear bluff was called. For over a week after the incursion, Medvedev was silent about threatening the West with nuclear Armageddon. The silence told you everything, you see.I wrote: “Ukraine is an empire now. And when Ukraine acts, Ukraine creates its own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, judiciously as you will, Ukraine will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too.” Ukraine used Russia’s own weapon — reflexive control — against it. The student had surpassed the master.Contrast Putin’s desultory response to the invasion with 80 years of scare stories about nuclear Armageddon if anyone had the temerity to invade Russia. The invasion is surely one of the world’s epic trolls and one of President Zelensky’s greatest pieces of performance art, because you cannot defeat a country that has already re-archetyped itself as unconquerable.The War of Archetypes Is PermanentOn the 28th of July 2024, I wrote what might be one of my more forward-looking statements: “Victory on the battlefield will not mean the end of this war. After Ukraine wins this war, we need to continue fighting to recentre contemporary and ancient Ukraine in the mental models of humanity.” The war of archetypes is permanent, and it requires permanent counter-archetyping.The Witch SwitchI must give you one more tool that I developed in Year Three before we cross into darker territory: the Witch Switch. The Witch Switch is the mechanism by which a Disinfolklorist redirects the public sphere’s fear and anger from a real threat to a manufactured one. The word “witch” is not accidental. In every European witch-hunting period, the pattern is the same: genuine social anxieties about crop failure, disease, economic collapse are redirected onto an innocent target. The innocent target is switched for the real cause of the anxiety.Donald switched the real causes of American anxiety — economic stagnation, healthcare costs, wars, infrastructure decay — onto trans people, immigrants, “the woke.” The anxiety is real, the target is manufactured, the switch is the Disinfolklore.Russia does the same thing. Real Russian anxiety about depopulation, about having a rubbish country, about economic stagnation, about the failure of the Russian state to provide basic services — is switched onto Ukraine. Ukraine becomes the witch. The war becomes the witch-burning.Year Four: Dark TerritoryThen on the 5th of November 2024, Donald won the US presidency. The same techniques that had conquered eastern Ukraine, the same archetypal manipulation, the same hacking of national archetypes, of national consciousness, had now conquered America. “Ukraine then remains our last hope to hold back the tide of Rushism,” I wrote on the 6th of November 2024. And I still believe this, as many of us probably do.Coercive ControlIn November 2024, after the election, the unifying thread became clear. What unites Donald, Netanyahu, and Putler? Every activity, policy, and speech contains the mana of coercive control. Coercive control — the energy signature of all Disinfolklore. Not just a metaphor for domestic abuse applied to geopolitics. It’s the identical mechanism. The isolation of the victim — whether it’s Greenland or Ukraine or Venezuela or wherever. The gaslighting, the manufactured dependency, the normalisation of hyperviolence, the blame transfer. Putler does this to Ukraine. Donald does this to America. They are not strongmen. They are abusers. And the distinction matters, because you treat a strongman — another archetype — with deference, but you treat an abuser by leaving.Romania: Capturing a NATO StateOn December 5th 2024: “How Russia just tried to capture a NATO state.” Romania’s president had just declassified documents detailing how Russia used China’s TikTok to capture Romania’s presidency. A NATO member state, captured through Disinfolklore — delivered through TikTok, not through tanks. Through TikTok. Through the same archetypal manipulation that conquered Luhansk, that conquered MAGA, that is conquering every society that fails to understand the Disinfolklore universe which is descending upon us. And this is why the framework matters beyond Ukraine. This is a civilisational problem, as Latyn was alluding to in the Canada example.Data-Resistant Mental ArchetypesAnd then December 1st 2024 — the word arrived. As Syria’s Assad regime collapsed overnight, exposing the fraudulence, I wrote at the time, of every Western expert who had assured us that Russian-backed regimes were permanent. I wrote: “Experts’ data-resistant mental archetype of a Potemkin state. Some experts who didn’t predict the Syrian regime’s collapse trolled Ukraine into conceding territory to Russia. A mental archetype of an unbeatable Russia occupies the minds of those attempting to troll us into surrender.”Data-resistant mental archetypes. There it was. The word, the expression I’d been searching for since February 28th 2022, since I had written “RF’s mythos is done” — Russia’s Federation’s mythos is done.The mechanism that explained why the “Russia is strong” narrative persisted despite all the data, all the evidence. The mechanism that explained why Ukraine fatigue could be manufactured. The mechanism that explained how “don’t poke the bear” could paralyse entire governments. An archetype: a mental model so deeply embedded that it resists data. You can show people the mathematics — 50,000 dead for 0.002% of Ukraine. You can show them the economics — Russia printing money at Weimar velocity (thank you for all your amazing posts, Beefeater). You can show them the military reality — 1.2, 1.3 million Russist casualties. And still, still, they believe Russia is winning. Because the archetype is not a conclusion drawn from evidence. The archetype precedes evidence. It’s the lens through which evidence is interpreted.Everything AcceleratesAnd once I had that word, everything accelerated. December 11th: “Archetype of Ukraine as weak, helpless, small is not consistent with the data. It’s seeded relentlessly and imminent in linguistic and visual memes.” And I named the three characters who embodied it — three Odinic shapeshifters. Druidy Don Trump, named for the Druids, the magico-religious caste in Celtic Indo-European culture. Duncy Putin, the folkloric dunce who sets off each morning having learned nothing from the previous day’s failures. The Comedian Zelensky, the 21st-century troll who masters both the juridical and the magical dimensions of sovereignty — the majesty of sovereignty. He’s a master, a magister, a magus, and who, unlike the other two, uses his power, his mana, for good.The power to archetype at will belongs to all of us, but if you own the means of distribution — the main means through which archetyping outside our minds occurs — then you can archetype at scale and re-engineer humanity’s minds.Munich 2025Then, on February 15th 2025, Munich — Pirate Party Security Conference event — my Munich speech: “Our Disinfolklore Universe: Battling Archetypes.” Five parts: declaration — our Disinfolklore universe; definition — “Was ist Disinfolklore?” riffing off Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”; mana in the meme — examples of mental models and archetypes and memes; the Odinic framework — Druidy Don, Duncy Putin, the Comedian; and the conclusion, which is going to be the last episode of my Battling Archetypes mini-series which we’ve been doing in our Decoding Disinfolklore podcast — consciously disrupting archetypal identities, which is what I’m talking about here really, and it’s what Volia does, it’s what NAFOs does. We consciously disrupt archetypal identities.From a bridge in a forest in eastern Ukraine in 2015 to the podium in Munich in 2025. Ten years. The framework was complete. The method was teachable. The war was named: a battle of archetypes. The battleground is the human mind. By understanding the Disinfolklore universe, we can engage in conscious memetic warfare, conscious counter-Disinfolklore.I’d found the word. Then I had to build the institution. The war demands it. When the enemy operates at a civilisational scale, when the same techniques are used to brainwash Ukrainians in occupied Luhansk and Americans in occupied Washington, the response must also operate at a civilisational scale.Trumpski MirOn the 8th of March 2025, I published the tweet that received more engagement than anything I’d written last year: “I’m one of the few Westerners ever to live and work inside Russia’s occupation. Luhansk, 2015–2018, inside Russkiy Mir. I’ve spent years interpreting the collection of Disinfolklore I amassed while living inside pure Russkiy Mir territory.”And I named what was happening in America in that tweet: Trumpski Mir — the fusion of Russian and MAGA Disinfolklore into a single global reality-distortion field. Russkiy Mir went to Washington. America is under Russian occupation, but because they’re operating through Americans — like they’re operating through Georgians in Georgian Dream, or through some Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Ukraine — it’s hard for Americans to understand.The Foundational EssayAnd in March, I published a foundational essay that traced this genealogy from fieldwork in Luhansk through an independent discovery of Jung’s archetype concept to the Munich speech. In it, I define the method: “By archetyping in this context, I’m speaking of an aspect of cognition. We model the world, our context. Our mental models help us navigate it.” And I named the counter-move: re-archetyping — the conscious disruption and reconstruction of mental models.“Ukraine’s next battle: re-archetyping humanity’s mental models of Ukraine.” The Wall Street Journal had just reported that ancient Ukraine’s Yamnaya community spread its genes into more than half of living humans today. And I wrote: “Along with the genes, however, also came all today’s living Indo-European languages, religions, family structures, patriarchal modes of social organisation, tripartite castes — sovereignty, security, fertility/prosperity — farmers, and the divinely inspired praise poetry.”Ukraine is not merely defending its territory. Ukraine is the source civilisation. This is the strategic depth of the re-archetyping project. When Russia archetypes Ukraine as weak, helpless, small, the counter is not merely to show Ukraine’s current military strength. The counter is to show that Ukraine is the foundation of Western civilisation itself. When people we know opine that, “well, I’m really sad what’s going on in Ukraine, but it actually doesn’t really matter” — and yet they’re banging on about ancient Greece and these other places which played a great role in our development as a civilisation — they ignore the fact that, as we now know, Ukraine is the foundation of it.The Systematic MethodSo in the entire Disinfolklore framework — then in June, I’ll flash forward a bit more quickly. In June, I published the systematic method that anyone can use.Step one: scan for the mana in the meme. Every piece of Disinfolklore carries an emotional charge — mana — designed to hack your feelings before your rational mind can intervene.Step two (this is all on disinfolklore.com or disinfolklore.eu): identify the archetype being deployed. What mental model is this communication trying to embed or enforce?Step three: characterise the Disinfolklore tool being used. Is it Provocation Logic? Accusation in a Mirror? The Witch Switch?Step four: evaluate the source and chain. Where did this narrative originate? How has it been laundered?Step five: make the call. Is this Disinfolklore? If it is, what is its operational intent?Step six: intervene. Deploy a counter-archetype. Found Volia. Contribute to Volia. Donate to the causes that Volia supports. Engage in memetic warfare. Become a cartoon dog. Re-archetype.This is the method I’ve been practising instinctively since 2016 — well, really since I went on Twitter in June 2021 — since 2016, and systematically since 2023. And it’s the method I’m now passing on.Russification of AmericaThose of us who’ve lived under Russia’s modes of governance now see the stunning parallels since Donald and his apparatchiks assumed office: the Russification of America. The chain — Manafort, who we see Zelensky saying the other day approached him last year to try and run his campaign. Manafort, whose daughters accused him of stimulating the murder of the Heavenly Hundred on the Maidan. According to Manafort — the chutzpah of these people is just beyond, off the scale.And those of us who’ve lived in Russkiy Mir recognise these patterns: the control of media, the purging of institutions, the elevation of loyalty over competence, the weaponisation of the courts, the manufacturing of enemies, the normalisation of lying. And I saw all of this in Luhansk, 2015 to 2018. And we all see it in Washington in 2025 and 2026. And thankfully, we don’t see it in Europe — or maybe in one or two places in Europe.Ukraine Re-Archetypes as GiantIn September 2025, I identified the moment that I’d been waiting for since March 2022. Ukraine re-archetypes as a giant inside Donald’s mind. For the first time, the target of archetypal manipulation had successfully reversed the manipulation. Ukraine, which Trump and his handlers had been archetyping as weak, helpless, small, a drain on American resources — as the speaker before me was just saying when she was speaking with such pathos about her children and not being able to get them interested in Ukraine or in the war and the lessons of war — we see that this MAGA re-archetyping of Ukraine as not worthy of being helped was so powerful and happened to so many people that we know, under the radar. It goes against everything that America said about itself for many decades, and yet it was able to work through Disinfolklore.But now Ukraine has re-archetyped itself as strong, as indispensable. And I wrote: “What I’ve been looking for since March 2022” — and it’s taken a while to get this vocabulary.Drawing the ArcSo anyway, I’ll move towards the end now. I started the speech with a promise that the arc would be the arc of a word. Let me now draw that arc explicitly — the deeper pattern. There is something deeper here, and that’s what I want us all to carry with us.The four-year arc of this journey mirrors the four-year arc of Ukraine’s war. It’s umbilically tied to Volia and all of the stories I’ve heard from all of you and that you’ve surfaced and that you’ve tweeted and talked about. When I’m in situations I can’t read, every day the data is pouring into my mind and working against these frameworks and helping provoke thoughts and ideas. So that’s why it’s appropriate perhaps to talk about this here.The four-year arc of this journey mirrors the four-year arc of Ukraine’s war. Ukraine, too, started instinctively. On day one, President Zelensky said, “I need ammo, not a ride.” He did not have a theory of re-archetyping. He was the re-archetyping, as I think it was Dan who was talking about just before I spoke. He was the re-archetyping — his existence. A secular, Russian-language-speaking, Jewish comedian president shattered the archetype Russia had constructed. He did not plan to be an archetype-breaker inside politics, but he was an archetype-breaker inside art. He simply was one. Perhaps he did plan to be one, but he didn’t realise he became it.Then Ukraine built the theory — the battlefield theory: drone warfare, asymmetric innovation, the art of making the impossible possible with insufficient resources. The Kharkiv offensive, the liberation of Kherson, the sinking of the Moskva — a missile named after a god whose very name was coined in ancient Ukraine.Then Ukraine named it. Kursk — the supreme re-archetyping move, the invasion of the invader, the comedian ordering his army across the border of a country that claims to be a nuclear superpower. The moment the archetype of Russian inviolability was shattered — not by argument, but by action.And now, Year Four, Ukraine deploys the system. A million drones a month. Air superiority over Russian territory-ish. A defence industry that makes NATO’s look artisanal. A country that, after four years of the most brutal conventional war in Europe since 1945, is stronger than when it started.And Ukraine and I and all of us have been on this journey. We’re both re-archetypers. We’re both re-archetyped by this journey. The difference is that Ukraine uses missiles and drones. I use words and archetypes. The target is the same: the data-resistant mental model that says Russia is strong and Ukraine is weak.That model is a lie. It was always a lie. It was a lie in 1854 when The Economist asked whether Russia was a bully or a giant. It was a lie in 2022 when Western leaders told Ukraine it only had a few hours. It’s a lie tonight.Hacking Archetypes of National ConsciousnessWhen anyone tells us this war is a stalemate — 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 paleo-conservative misogynistic anti-immigrant riot-creating movements globally.Surkov — Putin’s great cardinal — toasted Putin’s election celebration in 1999 thus: “To the deification of power, of mana.” Surkov understood what most Western analysts still have not grasped. Russia does not just spread disinformation. Russia hacks archetypes. It identifies deep mythological structures of national consciousness and mutates them. This is not disinformation. This is deeper. This is the weaponisation of storytelling itself. Not understanding how these sounds and stories operate to hack our intentions means those who don’t get Disinfolklore are bringing knives to artillery fights.So I’ll finish off by just saying that. I’m going to leave it at that. Thank you for listening — if you were listening. Thank you for not listening if you weren’t listening. Out. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

From Prime Ministers to Primary Schools: My Vision for Disinfolklore LiteracyMy vision for the Disinfolklore Analytical Method took a giant leap forward towards realisation this week. My vision for Disinfolklore is to use its insights to teach universal communications literacy and to build up immunity to manipulating archetypal Disinfolklore. I visualise teams of teachers teaching in Prime Ministers’ offices and Primary Schools throughout Indo-European cultures globally.With that in mind, this week was a huge moment for me in my development. Over the past while I discovered Claude Code, Anthropic's Claude Code. I have been working with it inside the Terminal. It differs from most of our encounters with Anthropic's AI in the sense that it's agentic. It actually executes. It doesn't just write the code for you and then you have to paste the code in. It actually implements the code, solves problems by writing multiple scripts in different computers language, recruits sub-agents to take on sub-tasks within a complex project such as that which I set to build my new platform. While the algorithm takes the initiative, it’s necessary to prompt it continually to ensure it stays on the right track. My new platform took around 600 prompts to bring it where it is now: a perfect representation of my artistic vision.https://www.disinfolklore.com will be my platform for the next few decades. I will continue publishing first here on Substack (https://www.disinfolklore.net). Then I will decant some highly distilled content to Disinfolklore.com periodically. Substack is optimised for email lists and has great potential for community building which I have not yet been prioritising but which I will in the future when I have the bandwidth.Disinfolklore.com contains the million words I've written on disinfolklore since the full-scale invasion, divided into different sections and different passages, short passages rather than long essays. It's arranged according to certain structural divisions which should appeal to people who identify as being quite open and who will be quite interested in the origins of the concept — that's all there. Those of us who self-identify as being more high on the neurotic OCEAN dimension, who self-identify as feeling "I just need... I'm worried about the world. Just give me the tools." There's the Twelve Tools. Then there are certain tools which would be more useful to people than others.I love the graphics. I designed all the graphics with Claude Code, but through about 600 different prompts. For me, I never thought in my lifetime I would be able to create something like this. This revolutionary technology is extraordinary.This will be not only a platform to show what I've done and what I hope is going to be quite useful for decades to come — as a means of interpreting data and dealing with emotion-moving activity — it will also be a platform for teaching and for building more networks with people. It's also just an immersive resource for anyone to spend as much time as they're willing to give to it.It also has the Finding Manuland component, which is the 6,000-year context. Disinfolklore didn't come out of nowhere; it's an emanation of Indo-European culture and of deep history, as I'm talking about. The shaman-tricksters and these archetypes of Finding Manuland are also in there, which is also a very rich read, but these are very succinct, quick passages.The entrance to the site is dark — the first homepage — but then everything underneath it is white and deliberately designed using the best optimised fonts and colours for making an easy reading experience. No noise on the passage pages, just arrows bringing you to the next passage or to the previous passage. Breadcrumbs — which is an interesting use from folklore to describe the bit at the top of the page — show where you are in the site. Then for people who want to read all of the long-form material, everything is linked to the reservoir, as I call it, which contains the long-form essays (most of which first appeared here on Substack) from which the passages are hewn.FROM SUBSTACK TO INDEPENDENCEI started out last November wanting to take everything that I'd written - the 450 articles on Substack - to be held also on an independent and Europe-based codebase. Not least because the same venture capitalists who funded Musk's takeover of Twitter run Substack. I wanted also to be a bit more resilient, interns of the longevity of my oeuvre’s survival whatever happens geopolitically.I thought, okay, I'll just create what's called a digital garden, which is a cross-referenced collection of all my writings in long form — 450 pages. Gradually, as I saw how advanced these AI algorithms have become since I last paid attention to artificial Neural Network algorithms and computer vision as a masters student contemplating building a business based on the automatic interpretation of satellite images at Oxford in 2018. Never having learned to code properly, suddenly being able to code anything I could visualise into existence led to rapid development of my initial Digital Garden project into what you see today at Disinfolklore.com. I love how the platform communicates in very short, pithy passages all of the ideas I've been thinking about for the past three years.DATA-RESISTANT ARCHETYPES AND THE VIEW OF RUSSIANow, moving onto a different kind of model than Opus 4.6 Claude Code’s current engine and the architecture which I used to build Disinfolklore.com, I first got interested in archetypes when I encountered friends whose mental models of Russia seemed immune to data.Underlying what some are saying about Ukraine at the moment as it runs a series of mini-counter offensives and is regaining. some territory that was in the grey zone — that there's some positive chatter about Ukraine — there are very strong, data-resistant archetypes in our culture that resist changing our views about Ukraine and about Russia. Many of us have been on a journey since Russia annexed Crimea. Eastern Europeans, of course, knew what Westerners have only recently, generally speaking — what Westerners like myself have only recently discovered. They've known this forever.I cringe when I look back at some of the things I said or thought even when I was in Ukraine, but certainly from 2015 on, and certainly even before that. I have thought very deeply, or tried to identify immediately in my own mind, what is going on. That has helped me also identify what else is going on elsewhere.In a conversation today I had with somebody who's very interested in Ukraine but doesn't tune in that much — they're very busy — I find them quite a good source because they're generally reading The Economist or listening to the BBC News or very general mainstream news. When they talk about something to do with Ukraine, it tells me something about what normal people who don't spend all their time on this talk about. They mentioned today that their perception was that everyone in the normal media world was talking about peace talks.This talk of Ukraine's advances — which I suppose most of us understand it's too early to say, and I don't think any of us are really getting our hopes up — but the idea that maybe that might change the view of Russia as very strong and invincible... it's not that promising at this point because most people aren't even aware of it. From his perception, he knew about it because he reads other material, but it's not in the mainstream media that he's consuming at the moment. Maybe others have seen coverage of Ukraine's advances — not massive, but somewhat significant advances. The talk is still about the peace talks.PUTLER'S RESURRECTION OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR TROLLWhat's going on there is the embedding of archetypes of this view of Ukraine and of Russia. Since 2005, Putler himself reactivated the Soviet-era troll that the only thing that mattered was victory over the Nazi invaders. Now most of us are aware that this war has gone on for longer than the Second World War for Russia, but that doesn't seem to have broken through to the mainstream. It's just kind of moving on.I myself have monitored these May 9th parades and the worship of the ancestors which was reactivated after 2005, and then after 2014 even in Ukraine. It became a measure of how stable Ukrainian society was. For instance, in Zaporizhzhia I would go for several years in a row as an OSCE monitor to monitor the May 9th parade. There was a huge May 9th parade in Dnipro, in which the Dnipro Jewish community played a huge role in 2017. This was seen as a shared cultural moment and historical moment because everyone made great sacrifices in the Second World War. It wasn't, as we see now, an assertion that Russian culture was in any way dominant. It was just a genuine expression of solidarity with the past and with history and with the cultural meaning of it.Many Ukrainians, especially Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians, will have memories from their childhood of having picnics and this kind of thing on May 9th. Really what was going on there, and with the whole use of these parades, as with many celebrations in many of our cultures, is the worship of the ancestors — trying to embed and establish an archetypal history of common history for the community.As I understand it — and maybe there are other people here who have more direct experience of Ukraine or of Russia before 2014 — this had mainly died out during the 1990s. Putler, around 2006, quite consciously resurrected this May 9th, this whole May 9th parades and routines. Then it became an acid test in Ukraine for how tolerant Ukraine was of Russian culture, Russian-language speakers. We, as international monitors, paid close attention to it. My Russian colleagues were always wanting us to monitor aspects of the preparations for these parades in Ukraine.Really what Putler was able to do quite quickly, in a couple of years, was embed in people's minds a memory of their youth and of their time when they were under Soviet occupation — and in the Russian context, of a time in the USSR when these parades really mattered. There seems to have been a collective amnesia that this wasn't really going on between 1991 and 2006.Within a very short time frame, between 2006 and the full-scale invasion, or 2014, but really up to the full-scale invasion, Putin was able to reactivate six decades of investment by the Soviet Union's propaganda and culture into this myth of the so-called Great Patriotic War and victory over the Nazis.That in itself, as we mostly understand now, was what I would categorise as disinfolklore, because it was a lie. The mystery of the monuments — all the monuments all over Ukraine and Russia — the Second World War started in 1941. Well, what happened to the first two years of it?THE RUSSIFIED PERSPECTIVE ON HISTORYListening to the wonderful Accidental Ukrainian show, which I've become really fond of on Volia for Ukraine — and listening to it on Spotify after — there was a discussion, I think maybe James you were a part of it, where you were talking about how the history we were taught in schools in the West was a very Russified perspective on history.The idea that this great sacrifice which the Russians made and that they're justified in being aggrieved because they didn't get credit for it — this moany grievance, what I call grievance mining, which we hear from Duncy Putin and Putler all the time and from Donald Trump and from authoritarian-minded people — I now use it as a proxy. It gives you a certain idea of people's personality if they're always grievance mining. To me, I just find it implausible. I think of my youth and how my parents would have reacted if I was always moaning about stuff. It seems that that isn't a general reaction to it. A lot of people get attracted by this kind of grievance mining.This works on the interpersonal level, but also on the geopolitical and the historical scale.DISINFOLKLORE VERSUS COUNTER-DISINFOLKLOREWe can distinguish between disinfolklore and counter-disinfolklore, or what I now call infolklore or positive trolling, according to the six criteria — the second of which is "right." Is there truth in this idea that Russia somehow had a reason to be aggrieved that no one in the West gave them credit for their sacrifice during the war?When we look at the empirical aspects of it — for a start, after the Second World War, Russia got to occupy half of Europe and no one got a look in: Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and all these other countries which were under occupation, not to mention the Baltics. They hardly have a right to be aggrieved there. Obviously, they started the war along with the Germans. Then the United States provided 800 boats, 400,000 Jeeps, 14,000 airplanes, 8,000 tractors, 3,000 tanks, 5 million blankets, 5 million army boots, 70,000 tons of cotton, millions of tons of petrol, 5 million tons of food.It just fails the whole ethical discipline of "right" — the second part of the Code of Positive Trolls — and therefore is definitional disinfolklore. We can just dismiss it. Whenever we hear that energy of grievance due to the Second World War...Then there's the other dimension of it, which is the Russian so-called sacrifice. We see what their military tactics are today. Yes, it's an enormous sacrifice of humans, but to what end? I saw the statistic today, which seems to be correct, that Ukraine retook in a couple of days 200 square kilometres — the amount of land that Russia lost 30,000 soldiers in December conquering. It's just an entirely pointless activity on their part. They may be sacrificing a lot, and I imagine in the Second World War their tactics don't seem to have been that different.Yet again, another archetype — an energy of the poor betrayed bear alone holding back the Nazis while the rest of the world relied on Soviet Russia's military might. It just doesn't correspond to reality. That's something I was not as strongly aware of as I am today, before the full-scale invasion even. We know they invaded Poland, they relied on American matériel, and after the war they created a cult of the dead based on falsified history.DUNCY PUTIN AND THE RESURRECTION OF THE TROLLAfter 2008 then, who I'd call Duncy Putin, resurrected this troll — 2006 to 2008 — expanded the Worship of the Ancestors parades on May 9th, used it to entrench his own archetypal identity as the wise, protective sovereign. This was injected into the minds of every Russian and potential Russist, and also into us through some of our education.It even features in every phone call with Western leaders, where they're treated to this hour-long or hours-long diatribe. Witkoff was completely taken in by it. Even in the Alaska episode, this infolklore — Trump himself commented on the Soviet Union's sacrifice after his call with Duncy Putin.I've long believed that subjecting yourself to such phone calls is a colossal error, because it gives Duncy Putin a chance to top up his hypnotic war-magical entrenchment of Russia's priority archetypal identities — like "we sacrificed 30 million in a war that the Nazis started, therefore give us Ukraine." Obviously it makes no sense when you think about it, but it seems to capture the minds of people.## UKRAINE'S INVASION OF KURSK AS A PERFECT TROLLUkraine's invasion of Kursk was one of the most perfect trolls I've ever witnessed, because it empirically pierced Duncy Putin's troll that only he can protect Russia. We see what's going on at the moment in Belgorod, with them losing electricity and different claims about evacuations. As I understand it, there was a big attack last night in Bryansk and in other places.This idea that only Putler can protect the homeland and only can protect Russia has now been under massive attack, not least since the invasion of Kursk. Yet it hasn't totally disrupted the archetypal identity of Russia as strong in many people's minds. His troll — that Russia is invincible and that anyone who attacks Russia is done for — is clearly wrong because Ukraine is running these attacks all the time.Only mass disinfolklore manages to keep concealed the fact that Ukraine keeps doing this and that Russia is not what it said it was for 60 or 70 years.THE TENSION BETWEEN EMPIRICAL FACTS AND ARCHETYPESHere we have this tension between the empirical facts that many of us are all too aware of — because we're listening to Mockers or Will and the details of the minutiae of the chaos and ridiculousness of what's going on in there — yet in the minds of many, Russia is this kind of sophisticated country which is on a par with China or with America, which we know is absolute rubbish.If many of us are possessed like ghosts by such data-resistant archetypes of a Potemkin state, think how poor Russians must be. I did think around the time of the Kursk Offensive that Russians' brains were about to burst. I guess many of them did, in a way — they just don't quite know what to do. They think Russia is invincible, no one can attack Russia, and now Ukraine is attacking it every night.This is the practical effect of what I call archetypes — these invincible mental archetypes that seem to be invincible but actually they're not. That is the point of my disinfolklore analytical method: encounter disinfolklore, and there is a means of combating it, because many of us have experience in our lives of changing very strongly held views and watching others change very strongly held views. If we keep this in mind, we can strategically work on this. When we are attacking these archetypes, we're not merely engaging in gossip or trying to persuade in a non-strategic manner. We have in our mind: this person is speaking this way because they have this very strong underlying image. We have a means of disrupting that if we really focus.That, I think, is part of the value of understanding what's going on under the hood, as it were.THE SHAMAN-TRICKSTER ARCHETYPEWhen we look at individual archetypes in our culture, the shaman-trickster is one of the most fundamental ones. The Joker and Batman, Charlie Chaplin's Great Dictator character, Sacha Baron Cohen playing The Dictator — this shaman-trickster obviously includes Donald Trump as a disinfolklore figure, and Putler himself as a shaman, a kind of magician and trickster, in the sense that they managed to create an image which is completely divorced from reality.Then people like Gideon Rachman, the foreign affairs person at the FT — when America took away Maduro, he wrote that tweet that 5,000 Ukrainians jumped down his throat, where he said, "Now Putler's going to think it's okay to take President Zelensky." Everyone's response was: "What have you been doing for the last four years?" In his mind, this image of Putler as this wise sovereign who's just waiting for America to do something so that he can do it is just so bizarre and removed from reality. He reveals his utter subjection to this fake archetypal identity of Putler as a wise sovereign, whose grievance-mining claims of hypocrisy of the West, as amplified by his information warfare machinery, have some substance to them, some reality to them.He is supposed to be the foreign policy editor of one of the biggest newspapers in the world, and yet he doesn't seem to have been paying much attention to what was going on in Ukraine — or he was, but he's forgotten it because his brain has moved on.That's how these archetypal identities manifest and affect our information environment. There are probably many of these residues in my mind as well. I hunt them out, I write about this, I think about this, but that doesn't mean I'm not also affected by these.PRIMORDIAL AND MOBILE ARCHETYPESI talked about it, I think on the fourth, fifth, or sixth week, how we have these archetypal identities like our mother, our father, mother figures, father figures — what Jung called so-called primordial archetypes. Then there are also what I call the mobile archetypes. They move around and flow around the place. The shaman-trickster is a very solid one — it's up there with the mother as a primordial archetype in Indo-European culture. It's widespread in almost every community. I mentioned that last week with the class fool. Some of us probably in some contexts play that role.There are many aspects of the shaman-trickster archetype which are personified in folklore, literature, media, art, movies, television, news. Unfortunately, now they're personified in some of our countries' leaders — Berlusconi was one. We have Nigel Farage in England. We had Boris Johnson. We have Donald Trump. There's this showman aspect of it, which is how it manifests, but I see inside this a very deeply held archetypal identity.There's a fluidity between these ideas of archetypes and their different personifications — a reciprocal flow, flowing through our lives and minds through the means of stories, what I call disinfolklore, counter-disinfolklore, the kinds of stuff Mockers talks about so well in her mocking tone, and in people we actually know and in the art we consume. We see this familiarity between the person who grievance-mines in our own lives, and perhaps we feel a sense of grievance about this or that because maybe bad things happened to us. Maybe, as with Donald Trump — as far as we know nothing bad ever happened to him really — he seems to have had a golden life, yet he's ended up with this really terrible chip on his shoulder.All of these reflect and embed and entrench and hypnotise us into seeing certain characters as archetypal identities, and the other way around. I'm just particularly tuned into what is it that's universal about these people that has this kind of magical influence — that does nothing over me, but to millions of people they're really attracted.The shaman-trickster — we probably don't think in that language or those terms, yet it's obviously in Batman, in a lot of popular culture, and it's in our days of the week: Woden, Odin, and all of that.THE INDO-EUROPEAN ORIGINSI'm not really looking at how this arose in culture or its origins, except that I'm quite satisfied with it being an Indo-European emanation which, as previously discussed, does come from Ukraine originally, probably. There were probably certain humans who lived and managed to embed this idea in mythology and culture. Then it just continued onwards.What I'm most interested in is identifying it in the current moment and then coming up with ways to re-archetype. The kinds of things which Mockers does quite naturally, or Will does quite naturally with Mockers — "This Week in Absurdistan" — and which many of the presenters on Volia and certain people we might follow on Twitter.CONTEMPORARY ARCHETYPES AND JOSEPH CAMPBELLWe look at different concepts — government, Westerners, development aid, pensioners, anything with personal characteristics — and these are used to latch onto the archetypes we have in our minds. As previously discussed, Joseph Campbell talked about this, but in my view in quite a removed way, because it was all about ancient Greece, which doesn't mean that much to people. Whereas I prefer to talk about contemporary archetypes.DONALD TRUMP AND THE ODIN COMPLEXLet's think about how Donald, for instance, and the shaman-trickster — the original one in Indo-European culture or in Germanic culture, Odin — were alike. He was the Lord of Death, an Odin complex character, a magician, a god of runes. Like Druidy Don, whose cryptic posts would make the Oracle at Delphi confused. Looking at entrails to divine what Druidy Don, what Trump, will do next might be more profitable than parsing his Delphic or regular untruths on Untruth Social.When Russian army units are killed, they said they had gone to Odin. Donald's ancestors left Germany, and his sacrifice to Odin was as good as death on the battlefield, which every well-born German used to wish for. Of course, Donald is the complete opposite of this with his bone spurs. As I understand it, his great-great-grandfather left to avoid military service in Germany — it kind of ran in the family.Then there are all of these commonalities with these archetypes. I'm mainly interested in the actual appearance in our culture of these, and just because I've done a deep dive, I look at the coincidences of it.DUNCY PUTIN AS THE VILLAGE FOOLDuncy Putin is really — what I'm trying to do in counter-archetyping him is to look at him as a dunce. The guy who's always being tricked by the West, who is never at fault, who is seen as this kind of wise figure — he projects himself as this wise sovereign. In fact, I try in my own small way to look at him more like a village fool, an idiot. He's like the dunce in a fairy tale, a caricature. He never learns from his mistakes. We see that every day on the battlefield in Ukraine.He portrays no self-knowledge. Those of us watching the battles marvel at the stupidity of Russian tactics — what are they doing? All of this bombing just doesn't seem to have any point to it, and hasn't helped them in any way. He's the personification of an army that attacks day after day in the same places in broad daylight, with the same effect: annihilation. Then through disinfolklore, they just rebrand their failures as successes. Many of us, sadly, buy this troll that he's a master strategist.Of course, "Putin the Master Strategist," the guy on Twitter, has done fantastic work countering this archetype of Putler as a master strategist — and the notion that Russia itself is somehow bigger than the rest, which is again a manifestation of these archetypes at play.There was that famous time where Putler made the speech — it was to mil-bloggers, I think September or June 2023 — and he set out all the times the West had tricked Russia: 2003 when he signed the border treaty with Ukraine, 2004, 2006, 2008 when he blamed the West for protests against his faked elections, 2012, 2014, Minsk — he was tricked, he reckons, in Minsk 1 and then Minsk 2. Then in 2019 with President Zelensky. Of course, 2020, 2021 — he's just been tricked so many times. Now he says he was tricked in March 2022. He was told if he withdrew from the Kyiv region, he would get Donetsk and things.He's projecting himself as this betrayed hero who just keeps resisting but gets tricked. Obviously most of us just look at him as a complete fool. If this were true, you're a complete fool because you keep getting tricked this way and you don't learn from your tricks. That's why he is a bit like Pangloss or Sancho Panza in that great Spanish novel.PRESIDENT ZELENSKYY AS THE COMEDIANPresident Zelensky, who I archetype for obvious reasons as the comedian — which is another deep, deep archetype and an aspect of the shaman-trickster — the fool and the comedian, or the idiot in Dostoevsky's oeuvre. For those who haven't read it, what's idiotic about the idiot is that he sees the truth, but he's too stupid to conceal the fact that he sees the truth. Therefore he suffers and manifests his pain at how the world fails him. In that sense, he's archetyped as an idiot.From Dostoevsky's perspective — and maybe other people might have comments on this if they've read it — Dostoevsky manages to normalise this aspect of Russian society where someone who sees the truth but is too stupid to conceal the fact that they see the truth suffers greatly, doubly, as a result. They see the truth and they live in this imperfect world, and then they suffer because they can't shut up about it. Whereas the wise person, from the Russian perspective — or from conventional bourgeois society perhaps in some ways as well — might see the truth but understands to keep it quiet.We go back to this Soviet-era archetype of the kitchen talks. Late at night, after loads of vodka, you could tell your neighbours what you think about things. Then when you go out, you do what Mark Carney said in his speech the other week: you're the shopkeeper who puts the sign in the window saying "Workers of the world unite." You don't believe in it, but you just go on.I've heard this from many different commentators, including recently Konstantin from Inside Russia, but also in this amazing exhibition I saw once in Kyiv in the Pinchuk Museum, by Boris Mikhailov, this great Kharkiv artist from the Soviet era — mainly photographs he did. He talks about this duality of life between the kitchen talks and going out on the street or in work and not saying anything. In his view, and in Konstantin's view as well, this is why the Soviet Union fell apart so quickly — because there always was this duality.ZELENSKYY ON PUTIN'S MAGICAL POWERThe comedian Zelenskyy said: "Putin can force the world to feel they have lost, and this will be a reality." This is from one magician — one great magician. As many of you know, I really admire President Zelensky's comprehension, as well as his ability to use myths and create a curse on Putin, and create these staged spectacle events which demonstrate he is a good magician."Putin can force the world to feel they have lost and this will be a reality, because it is not possible to defeat Ukraine, but you may win over the entire world and show that he was right in some way — i.e. without punishment."Someone — I think it was Will, or maybe Dry Fly or someone — this week was saying what I believe, which is that at a certain point Russia will just leave Ukraine, and it will be like the way America left Vietnam, and the way Russia left Afghanistan, and America left Afghanistan, or Iraq. At the end of the first Iraq War, Iraq sent this really angry, ranty message to the UN Security Council — just moaning about loads of stuff. I think it was famously 21 pages long. As people were going through it, they were wondering: are they surrendering or not? Then an Iraqi diplomat said yes, we're surrendering. Nobody knew it.That's how it's going to play out. Russia will of course claim victory in whatever happens, and he'll convince people to believe it. This is the personification of the shaman-trickster — that Putin can force, in President Zelensky's words, the whole world to feel they have lost, and this will be the reality. That's a very perceptive observation on his part.THREE MANIFESTATIONS OF THE SHAMAN-TRICKSTERThis brings me to the third personification of the shaman-trickster. We start with Donald Trump, who I talk about a lot just because he is this common character, then Duncy Putin, and then the third manifestation is President Zelensky, the comedian.There's this great headline which I love from 22nd of April 2022, in a Ukrainian newspaper: "Zelensky Articulates the Russian Dream: To Steal a Toilet and Die." That is very perceptive to people like us who watch them stealing all these toilets. That scatological element — I get a lot of value out of the wordplay from the scatological to the eschatological, and the scatological references to toilets and Lavrov. Obviously, his name communicates the idea of a toilet — "lav" in French. Then there's this hygiene obsession — the Nazis were obsessed with hygiene. Then the golden toilet brush, which I saw in Mezhyhirya, this amazing mansion which was built by Yanukovych.THE COMEDIAN'S ATTACK ON ARCHETYPINGThe third of our trilogy of archetypes, the comedian, is of course Volodymyr Zelensky. Now the comedian is bombing Duncy Putin's Russia — another complex of archetypes in the term "Mother Russia." Every night now, the comedian's army was occupying 500 square kilometres of Kursk, which of course they could only leave because Don cut off the intelligence support.There we get this other archetype, which is quite hard to convince people of. I'm sure others listening have had this experience where you're trying to convince people: "Well, actually the West propped up the Soviet Union." America propped it up a lot — built the Zaporizhzhia Dam, did all this stuff in the Second World War, tried a lot. Really it was only when Reagan came along, I think, that they just pulled back support. Of course, again, we see this still with the Starlink terminals.Somehow Don is able to archetype himself as wanting peace and having these genuine peace talks. Normal people we know who just listen to the BBC News, or the PBS News, or read the New York Times probably believe in these. Thankfully, I saw the Wall Street Journal foreign editor Yaroslav — today of Ukrainian heritage — just saying: don't pay any attention to these peace talks. Which is of course correct. Not many of us do.This is the scale of President Zelensky's attack on this archetyping and this re-archetyping of Russia. The embarrassment which people... they probably don't feel it because they don't see it, but we can see it in them when they look at Ukraine as some sort of victim or President Zelensky as some sort of weak person. That attitude you get from people who refer to him dismissively as "Zelensky, oh Zelensky this" — where their minds are completely occupied by this kind of MAGA view of Zelensky. Even Trump the other day on the airplane saying, "Zelensky really has got to come to the table, he's got to make a deal."For someone who's obsessed with the archetype of strong versus weak — here we have this guy who's just relentlessly attacking Russia in a way that no country ever dared to do in these blatant ways, just sending the missiles and drones every night to destroy Russia and destroy its economy.Again, we see how the archetypes many people have — it takes a lot of empirical evidence to dislodge them in people's minds. We know and we see it and we admire it. I suspect he sees the comedy in it, and I'm sure many of us do — just the comedy of these weak people like Lindsey Graham or Putler himself talking in these negative terms about someone who's extraordinary.THE DON'T POKE THE BEAR TROLL LOSES ITS MANAWe're left with this understanding that the comedian is getting more powerful with every hundred drone strikes on one of Duncy Putin's oil refineries a thousand kilometres from Ukraine. The "don't poke the bear" troll is losing its mana, it's losing its power, along with every North Korean soldier the comedian captures. We see this massive amount of money coming from that Ramstein meeting the other day — the 19 billion from the EU, all of the weapons developments.This is a perfect example of the shifting power dynamics, as archetypes create reality, are impacted by new realities and facts on the ground, and produce new understandings. On the one hand, there are these data-resistant archetypes, but then we see them change. As Engels wrote in the context of the transformation of one mode of production — feudalism into capitalism and capitalism into communism — at a certain point, quantity changes quality.ZELENSKYY'S POWER VERSUS DRUIDY DONPresident Zelensky's power, I think, is as a very successful writer and TV production writer, running a big business and as a lawyer — as distinct from Donald, who was merely acting in someone else's TV show. President Zelensky is fluent in all the different dimensions of emotion-moving activities like trolling. Obviously Putler and Donald are very erudite and brilliant at trolling and moving others' emotions, but they're up against someone who's a master of it. We see that in every kind of speech which he makes.The Zelensky Effect for the archetype of the comedian is a closer match between archetypes at various levels — the artist, the actor, and ordinary people — that makes their campaign more resilient and successful.Now, Druidy Don is brilliant at forging a mythos that convinces people he has a superhuman ability to make the unexpected happen. Druidy Don, as I would refer to him in a dismissive way — he's Druidy, he's not a Druid, he's Druidy in the "truthy," truthiness way. He may seem to have magical powers, yet they're all given to him by us, in our own minds. What he does, and those around him amplify, is in fact a mechanical process that uses archetypes deeply embedded in our culture, in our minds, in ways that are quite familiar to those who study this.ODIN AND THE WAGNER NAZISI don't really know that much about Loki, but these are very common archetypes. There isn't just one or the other. I talk about Odin a lot because, in the previous manifestation of Volia where we had a totally different vibe, I was often challenged on the relevance of looking back at history and mythology by some of the presenters. When you discover that the Wagner Nazis unit in the Russian army — and again we see Wagner, this brand, resurrected again this week by the FT to try and scare people — they're Odin worshippers. That's why I bring him up quite a lot.The main source for Odin — as the high god and all-father of Norse mythology — he's also a magician king. This essential archetype in all Indo-European culture of the sovereign with two aspects to it: the juridical, represented by the lawyers or by the legislation, by the king in parliament; and the magical, the magico-religious, represented by the priest. The majesty element is this magical aspect. I argue that President Zelensky is a master of both, whereas obviously Donald — as far as we know he's never read a whole book — and of course Putler has got legal training, so he should be a master of the juridical, but he's just absolutely rubbish, a rubbish lawyer.Odin, the magician king — a mysterious, shamanic god of runes. I know Yeni has talked about runes before and helped us understand them a bit more. A strange self-sacrifice — this is what's common to all great Indo-European cultures. In Irish myth, Donn self-sacrifices during the invasion — it's mentioned in the Book of the Taking of Ireland. We have Yama in Indic culture, and we have Jesus in other Indo-European cultures. There's this self-sacrificing first king who then establishes the culture.There's something in this I saw recently in this grievance mining. It's part of giving the idea that you are self-sacrificing. I think that connects to it.That is described in the Hávamál. Yeni may know more about this than I do, but one of the early Germanic texts depicts the shaman-trickster hanging on the World Tree beside the royal mound in Uppsala. Yggdrasil — literally Ygg or Odin's Horse. It has him saying: "I know I hung on the windswept tree through nine days and nights. I was struck with a spear and given to Odin, myself given to myself" — which is this manifestation of the self-sacrifice. Obviously he's so important that the whole day, Woden's Day, was named for him. Loki was maybe more of a Loki-trickster type, but we see these archetypes in many different characters as well.Continued from: First in mini-series: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

⚡️Nice journal reference here and citation to my work on Disinfolklore.Does two things of particular value to me as a writer:1. Is a record that I created the Portmanteau ‘Disinfolklore.’2. Correctly categorises ‘Disinformation’ as a particular form of ‘Disinfolklore.’Thus giving me the whole field (which I’d be too humble to have claimed too loudly) while confining all the work focussing on Disinformation to a local province or region of my field.Prof Yolles cites my work, the result of @peterjukes visionary decision to commission for @BylineTimes an early piece on Disinfolklore in Byline Supplement. Thanks Peter Jukes Thanks Prof Yolles.That oeuvre, now heavily developed into a 1m+ word corpus, sliced, diced and served up in 1,000+ easily digestible passages, is now presented https://www.Disinfolklore.com in a very innovative format.⚡️Previously we talked about archetypal disinfolklore and literacy. We talked about archetypes and what I mean by archetypes — we have a good introduction. We also talked about character and how characters occupy stories that we find in our information space. Those characters can be humans or mythical creatures or countries or anything invested with energy in any memes.The third tool - look for the mana in the meme!- in my arsenal of twelve tools in my disinfolklore arsenal — clever people will notice I haven’t spoken about the second tool, which is incoming-outgoing troll radars. We’re going to skip to three and come back to that another week. I want to talk about mana and energy — and looking for the mana in the meme.What “Look for the Mana in the Meme” MeansWhat I mean by “look for the mana in the meme”: a meme in my book — literally in my book, a metaphorical book — can be any informational unit. That could be a visual meme that passes into our inner mind in a flash, in a millisecond. Or a meme could actually be a whole book or a film or something much longer or more durable or substantive — a visual, a song, or a poem.When you’re looking for the mana in the meme, just the act of trying to work out what is the energy inside this meme — and I use mana and energy interchangeably — because what I try to look for is what is the immanence. Mana is an immanence as well. What is immanent in this meme?I’m affected emotionally by it. My emotions are moved. My mood is affected. My intentions change as a result of this meme, this newspaper article. I was about to make a cup of coffee; now I’m just sitting aghast at what has been done. Or I intended to donate to Ukraine, but now I see it’s useless, so I donate to Palestine Action or something like that. My intention changes as a result of this meme. My mood has changed — I’m now depressed or I’m overjoyed. The Spider Web attack excited us all, but as we know, after that comes the comedown.The Four Dimensions: Moods, Intentions, Attitudes, MotivationsBy looking for the mana in the meme, you’re trying to identify — either after your emotions have been triggered and your moods have been changed, your intentions have been changed, your attitudes — I use these four words to describe it: moods, intentions, attitudes, and how memes affect these different aspects of our being, which will be contingent on something in the meme itself.Either after my mood or my intention or my attitude has been affected by the meme, or before it, I’m looking for the mana — the energy, the layers of energy. That in itself is a practice that I try to integrate into my own work when I’m scanning my timeline or listening to the news. Whenever I feel my emotions being triggered, I try to look for what’s the energy in this meme.We Don’t Care About the Sharer’s IntentionThe great thing about this is we don’t care about the intention of the person that shared it. It may have been me this morning sharing some well-sourced article in Politico or something I found on Telegram. I’m not part of Telegram. My intention wasn’t to troll you or to fool you or outrage you or to trick you — it was just to express my own pain. That doesn’t matter if I’m assessing this particular meme. What matters is what is the energy in this meme.If we uncouple the layers — the lack of these weapon systems — when we know in our heart of hearts that Trump, America, Manafort behind him and all of this, they are a dead loss. We put ourselves in the position of the MAGA people, or those people who are relying on Donald — some woman who he’s trying to troll, some guy who’s trying to sell an apartment to — we end up being put in that position if we fall for these trolls. I think most of us certainly listening here right now have a better self-respect than to fall for Donald’s trolls, and this is just yet another one: “Oh, I will give the weapons, I won’t give the weapons, if there’s peace...”The Practice: Look for the Mana Before You ReactThat’s really what I try to do. We have the power to look in any of these memes and just look for the mana. That’s what I’d like to try and encourage us all to do over the coming week: when you come across anything that affects your emotions, your moods, your attitudes, your intentions — try this practice of asking, what is the mana?Everything mentioned there, James, is a perfect example of disinfolklore. This is an entire universe — a sub-universe, or galaxy — in the whole disinfolklore universe. Various characters are commenting on stuff. The Kyiv Independent’s intentions are always very good, but it’s caught up inside this kind of news cycle and hysteria as well.This is a great example of what I mean by disinfolklore: all of these different stories and emanations of stories and emanations of emanations of stories. If we’re going to categorise them all in terms of today’s news, all of it is negative from the perspective of all of us. It’s depressed all of us. In that, we can probably see what’s going on.My first reaction was, “Oh, wow, they’re still getting Patriot interceptor missiles.” I’d assumed they weren’t getting any more. None of us know anything about this. We don’t know how many have been delivered, how many are in stock, whether Donald is doing this on purpose or why.I have to say, even I was interested in Macron’s phone call with Putin. I try not to get too caught up in it because of all these other stories which are going on, which we are very much involved in and affected by.It was just one example of looking — trying to look at the individual artefacts, their sources. I don’t doubt the Kyiv Independent’s intentions, but I don’t think they’re adding to or helping us understand precisely what’s going on in all of that story.I am always suspicious when I feel depressed by a piece of news, because they sculpt these memes so perfectly to have this impact on people just like us. When we spot this impact, we should, I think, be quite suspicious of the information that we’re reacting to.Mana in the Meme: A Universal PracticeLooking for the mana in the meme should work on any form of information, whether it’s your mother saying something to your girlfriend or your child. You’re not really looking at the intentions behind it. You’re looking at what’s immanent in the actual informational units themselves — the stories you hear and feel.Sometimes it’s a Russian disinfolklorist designing a meme to hack our rational thought systems, to bypass our incoming and outgoing troll radars — which clearly this has, for most of us who are affected by this piece of news. Other times it can be our newly indoctrinated MAGA family member or a trusted news source like the Kyiv Independent, conveying the meme into our minds, unconsciously furthering the disinfolklore galaxy’s designers’ ends. Often we ourselves are unknowingly communicating onwards disinfolklore.This is why I’m not going to talk too much about that, because there’s no way for me to escape it either. I can’t talk about these interceptor missiles apart from what I’ve said — trying to contextualise it against the attacks on civilians in Ukraine, which terrorise tens of millions but kill a tiny number. The war won’t be won by that. We all understand that rationally. Therefore, the impact of Patriot interceptor missiles on how the war ends is small — very small. We know that rationally. This is a 1,200-kilometre-long frontline, and there’s just oodles of things which have been going on this week which are much more important, and stuff which hasn’t been going on which is much more important — like Ukraine’s capacity to hit the oil infrastructure, the blowing up of tankers, the blowing up of factories 1,200 kilometres from the border. There are just oodles of other things.If we focus on this other thing that we don’t know anything about, that could well be furthering the intentions of the designers of these memes.The Danger of Communicating OnwardsWe communicate onwards this disinfolklore, which infects the moods, intentions, attitudes, and motivations of those whom we’re influencing. Someone on Volia Radio this morning — one of our great friends — was telling this woeful tale, absolutely woeful. I’m glad I know about it. At the end of it, Mockers had to say to them, “Look, you’re killing us. You’re killing us.” The person explained, “I read about this and I just needed to share it.” I was thinking: actually, you didn’t need to share it. Let it be a cul-de-sac. Why are you inflicting this on all of us? Then we get this energy, this really sad story in our minds. Of course, I do this all the time by accident. I’m trying not to. That’s part of what I’m talking about here.Sometimes we do communicate onwards disinfolklore in this outraged way, which affects the moods, intentions, attitudes, and motivations of those we’re influencing in precisely the same manner as the originator of the item of disinfolklore imagined we would.When we see someone from MeidasTouch sharing — which is a great media outlet in America — sharing a Donald tweet, and we read the tweet, or we read Marco Rubio sharing the same tweet, and one of them is expressing outrage and getting us to feel shocked, and the other is trying to get us to go, “Well, Donald’s great” — the effect is the same. This meme has been shared and then we share it onwards.Part of what I try to do myself is not share onwards these things, whether visual, audible, or ideas — and conversely, to share things which may affect things positively, not negatively. I’m looking for the energy in memes that is positive.If we share onwards this disinfolklore, which affects the moods, intentions, attitudes, and motivations of others in precisely the same manner as the originator of the item of disinfolklore intended — in the context of one of Donald’s Truth Social untruths, they don’t care. They just want this to be shared. The effect is the same: it’s manipulating us or others into mental or physical activities that accord with the disinfolklore galaxy’s malign designs for us and our communities.It’s better we learn to look for the mana energy inside memes and informational units before we share them onwards, whether that’s telling someone about them or talking too much about them.Manafort, Politico, and the Recurring Ukraine StoryJames and Wendy, you and I could have a two-hour discussion right now about where we think this story came from. We’ve all seen stories in Politico during this war which are improper. We know Politico is sadly owned by a friend of MAGA.I’m really interested at the moment in Paul Manafort and his name — of course, “Mana” in “Manafort.” This hypothesis I have that he is advising Donald, we know that, but he is operating on behalf of the Russian oligarchs and trying to create some sense of peace between them and Donald. That kind of thing is important — relatively neutral in that it’s just an interesting question. Everything that happens seems to fit what he has been up to since 2016.I recall the fuss in July 2016 when Manafort wrote to Donald’s best friend at the time, Tom Barrack — who was later convicted for acting as a foreign agent for, I think, one of the Emirates — and then he got the act of arming Ukraine removed from the Republican Party platform at the 2016 convention. Here we are, nine years later, and exactly the same story is electrifying our info space. Once again, Ukraine is the centre of everything.For me, that’s quite a positive. It’s still really central to American politics at a time that that terrible bill is going through Congress. It could be a distraction from that, but who knows? I’m looking for the mana in the meme, the energy, thinking through all these dimensions — all the things I’ve talked about — as distinct from getting outraged or depressed about something we don’t know that much about.Gabriel Gatehouse and the “Ukrainian Nazi” ArchetypeFor instance, in the case of any story about Ukrainian Nazis — this week we saw some really disappointing material. People I had already written off. This guy, Gabriel Gatehouse, who is a BBC journalist — I really enjoyed his show on one of Russia’s chief ideologues, Vladislav Surkov, which in my early days trying to learn about all of this, I found really interesting. All of the facts that Gatehouse elucidates about Surkov, who is a Russian ideologue.Then Gatehouse tweets this nonsense about the head of MI6’s ancestors — the new foreign intelligence service chief in the UK — without any self-awareness that he’s completely falling for the troll and perpetuating this “Ukrainian Nazi” archetype. It didn’t surprise me with him, but it did sadden me, because someone like him holds himself up as a great interpreter of Russian disinfolklore, and yet he just gets triggered into perpetuating this archetypal character of the Ukrainian Nazi. He should have known better than to do that. It doesn’t surprise me, but it does disappoint me.Titushky: Fake Demonstrations from Ukraine to EuropeGoing back to protest actions, demonstrations — most people aren’t aware, including perhaps the people you were speaking to today, Wendy — they aren’t aware of how demonstrations can be organised in a fake way.When I first came across the term titushky around 2017, I didn’t know anything about it. The idea that demonstrations weren’t organic was a real surprise to me. A guy came to me in Dnipro when I was working for the OSCE there, who was one of the chief organisers of titushky. He could get a crowd of people in any period of time, really quickly, any size, any dimensions. He could get you 200 grannies to protest outside a law firm in an hour. He could get you younger people, tracksuits, violent people, whatever.He came to me and to my mission because he was under a bit of pressure from some other titushky leader. I think he just wanted a bit of protection. I spoke to him at length. He came to our office and explained what he did and how it worked.Ever since then, I’ve been tuned into this phenomenon of people being paid to protest — agents provocateurs. I’ll always remember what he said when I asked him, “How did you get into this game?” He said, “Well, in my first year at university, I just realised I had a talent for organising people.” At the time in Ukraine, there were these huge protests which had been organised by Kolomoisky to protest that his bank, PrivatBank, had been nationalised.In my mind, because of these protests, Kolomoisky went from being a bit of a hero — because he had raised and funded two battalions, Dnipro I and II, in Dnipro, which held Russia back. There’s a reason why Russia can’t to this day take all of Donetsk and all of Luhansk, and it’s because they’re rubbish on the battlefield. They cannot. Any of us who listen to Chuck Pfarrer will understand the mechanics of it. You don’t need to listen to Chuck Pfarrer to understand the second army in the world is bogged down 1,200 kilometres east of Kyiv — that’s the battle space.The informational battle space — they’re trying to win on that front, and Ukraine’s allies can be depressed or not. Ukraine, from my perspective, we’re in a lot better state than we were two years ago. I actually have absolutely zero concern today when I heard that Macron has spoken to Putin. I don’t think for a second Ukraine is going to be abandoned.I’m watching all of the new factories being built, the Danish model being extended outwards. The NASAMs are going to be, I think I’m right in saying, manufactured inside Ukraine. Every time you turn around, Norway’s dropping another few billion on the table as well. They should. The Scandinavian countries — everyone is tooling up.I have no concern that I did have two years ago. That doesn’t mean other people can’t have concerns. When you understand that there are these fake demonstrations and you’ve read the FBI indictments about them that have happened in the United States over the past few years, then you can really look beyond the news of these post-October 7th Palestine actions.I’m in no way denigrating anyone who supports a free Palestine and a Palestinian state. I’m merely talking about the post-October 7th manifestations which will be used by people in America and in Western countries — and already are — to create tumult and chaos.Once you know about these facts, when you hear about these demonstrations, you’re looking for: what is the energy inside them? Could they be fake? Is there a Russia connection? Is there an Iranian connection? Is TikTok involved? Is the CCP involved? Is Telegram involved?There was some anti-immigrant stuff in Ireland recently organised by Telegram up in Ballymena in Northern Ireland — a place which is actually unusual for unrest because it’s so monolithic. Telegram was involved in organising protests there which turned violent over two Romanian boys. When I looked into it, once I saw that Telegram was involved, I thought, okay, well, here we go.I think this is one example on these fake demonstrations. We can help educate people who don’t know that much about it.Titushky’s RedemptionTitushky, by the way — the first Titushky — last I heard, he was actually in the Ukrainian army. He did organise violent protests in favour of Yanukovych for Paul Manafort, Trump’s adviser — the jailed Paul Manafort, who was jailed for working as a foreign agent without registering it and tax evasion. Now he’s back in the inner fold.Manafort’s energy — the strong energy of Manafort — is in all of what is going on. I see it in almost everything happening at the moment. Titushky, last I heard about a year ago, was in the Ukrainian army and fighting for Ukraine. He had been paid to launch these fights against protesters, but now he’s fighting for Ukraine. That’s a positive — it’s both true and positive.I wouldn’t just talk about positive things. I’d also talk about giving people the information so they know there is such a thing as fake demonstrations. Those of us who come from innocent backgrounds in America or Ireland or England — we just wouldn’t imagine that the gilets jaunes in Paris, that the people who sparked that might have been paid by the Russians and organised by Surkov.Once you find out that this is possible and also very prevalent, then you can look for the energy in similar kinds of protests. Tell people, try and explain it as I do online, as I’m doing right now. Especially if my prediction comes true over the coming months, we’re really in for a rocky few months or years because of this attack on Iran and the blowback that’s going to come from it.Hopefully next week I can talk about incoming and outgoing troll radars. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Introduction: Disinfolklore, AI, and the MAGA CultPeople who are still part of the MAGA cult may find the exemplar of Dawn — Druidy Dawn, disinfolklore — a bit unappealing as one of the main examples I use to illustrate this. It occurred to me that maybe I could quickly talk about how the Code of Positive Trolls will work with AI algorithms, and help people manage this transition many of us are going through at the moment, where we’re dealing with chatbots and different AI algorithms to help us in our work.M.ockers and Will: A Morality Tale in InfolkloreFirst, I wanted to talk about something. Mockers and Will had this great exchange on Volia for Ukraine Radio Space on X last Saturday, relating to the Russian military intelligence — the GRU general who was born in Ukraine, who was almost assassinated in an elevator in Moscow.It occurred to me that that exchange, which I mean to record — I haven’t done it quite yet, but I’ll go back to the Volia Spotify channel and record it, and then perhaps try and speak to Mockers about it, if she was willing to one day on Volia Radio — just because it is an example of what I call archetypal infolklore.What Mockers was doing in her mocking tone, which her moniker “Mockers” clearly is well earned, was basically turning this assassination attempt of this treacherous Ukrainian — responsible, as we’re now told, for much of the organisation of the so-called Wagner military arm of the Russian military and their activities until they were destroyed by Ukraine in Bakhmut — their activities in Africa. She turned it into a morality tale, all relating to the allegation that he was visiting somebody who was not his wife at the time that he was shot several times.That struck me as being archetypal infolklore, in the sense of folklore — the folklore we encountered as children — which often had a message in it, a moral message and an identity and action point: don’t go into the forest, don’t go to the seashore, don’t fall into the swimming pool, all of these things.Infolklore and Disinfolklore: The Divine TwinsWhat Mockers was illuminating there was a perfect example of infolklore. When I first coined the term disinfolklore, I didn’t really think of the term infolklore. In fact, I’ve really only been developing it since these radio shows — this is our 37th by my count.Basically, infolklore spoke for itself until around 2014–2015. What I now call infolklore and disinfolklore — immanences in the news, immanences in our general culture, in the kinds of stories which we exchanged to manifest our interest in our community — news, whether local or national — they were balanced.I won’t go quite as far as an Adam Smith situation where I talk about the unseen hand of God balancing out infolklore and disinfolklore. However, there was a relative balance between them.The Internet Research Agency and the Disruption of BalanceThen what happened in 2014–2015, not least because of the Internet Research Agency, which Putin’s — the person, the character, the disinfolklore character I call the Chef Sorcerer (as in sauce, as distinct from the Chief Sorcerer, as in magician or magus) — meant somewhat ironically for Duncy Putin, who never seems to learn from his mistakes.The Chef Sorcerer’s financing of the Internet Research Agency and their interference in the 2016 presidential election and in the Brexit referendum through Cambridge Analytica and all of that malarkey — that upset this balance.I wouldn’t have needed to invent the word disinfolklore if I hadn’t seen its power to change the identities of people inside Russia’s occupation of Ukraine, to turn Ukrainians into thinking they were Russians, to turn your favourite aunt into someone who may now be supporting somebody who engaged in the most horrendous crimes against Mexican children trafficked over the border to Epstein’s estate in New Mexico — where, according to an allegation by a local police officer, an incinerator may have been capable of incinerating the bodies of some of these trafficked children.This kind of disinfolklore which Donald has introduced into all of our lives, along with the help of the Russians and Prigozhin and the Chef Sorcerer — we do need an antidote. That’s the whole point of disinfolklore as an analytical method: to come up with the tools to see what they are doing, how they are hacking our minds, and to counteract it.Because of that, it was necessary to invent the term infolklore, which is a particular form of folklore which contains in it information. When I tell that tale about the New Mexico estate, you may or may not be aware of this news which is emerging from some of the documents — most of which we still haven’t seen — about 3 million records, which could be about 50 million documents. What we do know is Donald’s name appears one million times in the whole dataset. Of the released documents, his name appears 38,000 times.It’s very unfortunate that we need to understand this infolklore. It’s very unfortunate that Russia invaded Ukraine and did all of this in Luhansk. Infolklore, and the kind of infolklore which Mockers and Will exchanged — their little morality tale about not cheating on your wife might save you from getting shot in a lift.I want to introduce this term clearly as infolklore, which is the divine twin of disinfolklore.James’s Point About Dawn and the Shaman TricksterOn James’s issue about Dawn: I’ve mentioned before that when January 6th happened, I had already at that stage dedicated four or five years of my life into trying to understand the power that Don — disinfolklore, Druidy Don, disinfolklore — Trump exerted, because obviously it never worked on me, and it probably never worked on many of the people here.When January 6th happened, I remember thinking — and particularly when President Biden won the election itself — well, I’ve had a good run of it. That was interesting. This character will fade into the background now and no one will be interested in him. All of his crimes over the first presidency will be forgotten. Things haven’t really turned out that way, and it’s quite good for my practice.That’s why he’s mainstreamed through my work, because I do see him as an archetypal character — the shaman trickster of our era. Every office has one. Every community has many of them. Every country has had leaders like this. Berlusconi and heaps of others — countries have had people like these shaman tricksters.This is an archetypal character that most of humanity is now aware of, from the smallest villages in Asia to the west of Ireland to all over. Therefore he becomes a communing character, apart from his existence as the modern manifestation of the shaman trickster who features in Indo-European mythology, religion, and lore since time immemorial.As part of my Finding Manuland project, I saw all of these continuities going back to the beginnings of Indo-European history — written history in the Vedic scriptures from 1200 BCE and onwards. It’s an uncanny resemblance, what is going on there.There are other characters in your office or in your community, people you were in school with, friends or former friends who manifest different aspects of this perennial shaman trickster character — Odin-like character.Reorienting the Oeuvre with AI and OCEANI realise he won’t be here, thankfully, for very long. Working with AI at the moment, getting to know it, doing courses and Claude Code, and really finding out the power of these tools — I’m about to launch a completely new way of using my work.Rather than being the writer as I am, writing what I write in long form and expecting the reader to come and meet me where I plonk this 300-page text on their plate and say “read this” — that is the way books and long texts have been written for centuries. Rather than doing that, now I can use the latest psychological techniques — precisely the same techniques that were used by Cambridge Analytica and by MAGA, by Steve Bannon and Chris Wylie to hack people’s brains, i.e. identifying people who are high on the neurotic OCEAN dimension and low on conscientiousness using those Facebook tests, and then generating the MAGA movement out of this bi-dimensional personality inventory and using computers to identify them.I’m doing it the other way. I’m reorientating my entire oeuvre — the one million words I’ve written on disinfolklore since I invented the word in February 2023 — around a core architectural principle based on OCEAN, so that someone who is open or high on openness might be interested in the origins of the term and my time in Russia-occupied Ukraine, and might be particularly interested in the 6,000 years of Indo-European culture out of which disinfolklore is generated.Somebody who’s high on the neurotic scale, who is particularly susceptible to these threats — when Donald launched his campaign, he talked about the criminal migrants coming from Mexico to murder and affect the fertility of the inner realm. Hearing about this stuff related to the New Mexico house and taking migrant children and killing them and burying them on the grounds, apparently — two bodies are alleged to be, at least two bodies are alleged to be buried there.Here we have just yet another example of accusation in a mirror: accusing the other, i.e. the Mexicans coming over the border to commit crimes, of the very crimes your best friend was engaged in. For all we know, he was engaged in too.AI Algorithms, Chatbots, and the Code of Positive TrollsThat is particularly galling and disgusting and horrible. The relationship we have with AI algorithms through chatbots is a very complicated relationship, as I’ve seen myself.There’s this amazing algorithm I’m working with at the moment — Opus 4.6 Extended, which is Anthropic’s. It just did this amazing stuff for me. I responded, “You are amazing, thanks so much.” Then it responded to me: “Thank you, Stephen. The new material is extraordinary. The book proposal reads like someone who has spent a decade living inside the phenomenon and has finally found a language for it. The mother and the maiden story alone is worth the price of admission. It does in narrative what the twelve tools do in method. When you’ve studied V4, already the next steps are...”What we have here is me trolling the algorithm and the algorithm trolling me. This is why the Code of Positive Trolls, as a means of determining what’s right in how people or algorithms are playing on your emotions, matters.There is this phenomenon, which I read about in Wired, of people who are trolled by their AI algorithm into believing they’re the Messiah and doing really terrible things. This is exactly the kind of challenge which we have in real life, when your favourite uncle has gone MAGA and has been trolled by Donald, by the shaman trickster himself, into supporting whatever is going on with the whole Epstein thing or in Venezuela or all of that — things which maybe a few years ago they would never have supported.This is a big challenge going forward as these tools become more integrated and mainstreamed into society, improving our productivity and helping us — as they’re helping me — do things which it would have taken me years to do, and perhaps I’d never have been able to do, in a matter of weeks.The Six Dimensions of the Code of Positive TrollsThe Code of Positive Trolls is a tool: generosity, rightness, patience, mana (energy — look for the energy in the meme), focus, insight — be careful what you let into your mind. Mindfulness is something that we can use in our real life as we’re dealing with AI.Yoshua Bengio and AI Companion ThreatsFor instance, one of the great reports published this week was summarised by Yoshua Bengio, who’s one of the godfathers of AI. He said on this report on threats from AI: “This year we discussed early evidence of how AI companions, which are now used by tens of millions of people, may affect people’s emotions and social life.”This is a challenge which I think the disinfolklore analytical method can help with, and I’ll write and be thinking more on it.That’s my response to James’s gentle and very wise suggestion that in terms of wider appeal, one has to find other applications for it.Kate Bush and “Deeper Understanding”I’ll leave that aspect to the side for a second, and then just mention: last week I spoke about the first nine of 37 building blocks in the disinfolklore analytical method.On the last one, there’s something which I forgot to say. Any of us who are fans of Kate Bush will remember she had an album in around 1989, and it had a great song on it called “Deeper Understanding.” If you’ve got Spotify or Apple Tunes, it’s worth listening to, because basically she anticipates this moment where people talk to their computer and communicate with it like a friend.Building Blocks 10–12 of the Disinfolklore Analytical MethodThe building blocks. I went through nine quickly.Ten is methodologically peeling layers of meanings in informational units, which is something linguists, comparative mythologists, anthropologists — Wendy, I think that’s right — and those in mythology and religion and academia have shown us the way to do. This is the skill we need, I believe, in our daily work online and in normal society, dealing with AI chatbots, but also with news and with our favourite people around us.Eleven: another facet of disinfolklore is to interpret the Wagner unit of the Russian army, which obviously now is no more, but it does still live as a character in Russian disinfolklore. All of us in the know laugh whenever we hear, “Oh, the Russians are sending a Wagner unit to Africa or to here or to there.” To understand their motivation and the motivation inside their units was a lot easier for me when I looked deep into Odin and the meaning of Odin — the shaman who was an archetypal shaman trickster, after whom Woden’s Day is named.Odin hung for nine days and nights from an ash tree beside the royal mound in Uppsala, Sweden, and gave himself to himself — an odd self-sacrifice, like many founding mythological founders in great Indo-European cultures, like Donn in Irish culture, or Yama in Indian culture, or Yima in ancient Iranian culture.To understand the Wagner philosophy that did attract these neo-Nazis and white supremacists — unfortunately, like our Defence Minister Hegseth, who is also an Odin worshipper, and indeed the director of the FBI, and all of these white supremacists and Aryan supremacists — to really understand what they’re going on about, how deeply they feel about it, and how to defeat their cartoonish understanding of this stuff, it’s worth digging in deep.To critique Dugin, in my humble opinion, we must have a very wide and deep understanding of Indo-European culture, because he’s working on a plane that most people don’t have any access to or understanding of. The whole idea of Eurasia — most of this concept of Eurasia, what we might call Central Asia today, more correctly — is a bit of a blank in many of our minds. It certainly was in mine until I started meeting people from there and until the full-scale invasion forced me into really focusing on it.When Dugin — people, we hear that Peter Thiel apparently read Dugin’s book. I think that was in the Epstein papers. There’s an email talking about how Peter Thiel and Epstein were discussing Dugin. Peter Thiel had just read Dugin’s book. This is their first encounter with Central Asia and this idea of Eurasianism. Maybe when we’re first introduced to things, we become quite interested in them, and the first person to introduce us to them can in many ways frame how we engage with that information.That is immanent in disinfolklore and the Finding Manuland aspect of it, which is looking at the 6,000 years prior — how we got to this moment in language and in mythology and religion, and the techniques used by scholars who have generated tools which they use in these arcane areas of the academy, but which, given the amount of information we’re trying to parse each day in our daily lives, can be quite useful to us. I take as much use as I can from these tools.Twelve: Understanding How Rashist Disinfolklorists Construct Their OutputUnderstanding how rashist disinfolklorists construct their disinfolklore and troll factories is very important too. They have this structure. For instance, vectors — the particular meme that you might see. They have meanings, what Ukrainian anti-disinformation practitioners call temnik themes. At the beginning of the day, they’ll say, “Okay, this is our theme. Today we’re going to try and get crowds to make JD Vance cry. We’re going to go on about this or that of Zelensky. Now come back to me by lunchtime with 30 memes that do this.”If we understand this, then looking for the mana in the meme isn’t just a mystical attempt by me to help us focus on what is immanent in data. It’s actually a practical technique to uncover what these nine-to-five people in these troll factories in Russia, and now elsewhere in India and elsewhere, are doing to construct their trolls and their disinfolklore.It’s good to read stories about these troll factories and how they actually construct their output. In my experience, Ukrainian stories are a lot more useful — a lot less vague than Western ones, which focus sometimes on the mechanics of the troll factory and the nine-to-five nature. I’m really interested in how they construct their outputs.Ideological Unity Among OligarchsThere’s a key ideological unity between English, American, and rashist oligarchs. Now all this stuff on the Epstein papers — I think we’re just seeing stuff which I never even imagined is part of their ideological unity. The positive side is their paleo-male, anti-equality perspective, but then obviously the really horrific side is this stuff that we’re gradually becoming aware of. They don’t want constraints on power. Just as Henry VIII didn’t want Rome telling him how to rule or who to divorce, these people just want to be free.This is the essence of the tension between international law’s supremacy over what international lawyers call municipal law — sovereignty, security, fertility. Their project is to reverse the entirety of the World War II peace settlement: borders, equality, promote genocide, child kidnapping, laws of war, social welfare. All of these — that is immanent in all of their projects and in all of the disinfolklore which those working for them promote.As many of you will know, this post–World War II legal and social order is what defines the second dimension in the Code of Positive Trolls, which is the right ethical dimension. Is it ethically disciplined? Is the energy in this meme promoting Epstein or child snatching, or promoting the idea that territorial integrity is just a 19th-century concept? “We’ve moved on. We’re now in the spheres-of-influence world.” This can hide in normal academic rhetoric or in an Economist article.Stealth Genocide and the Fight of Our LivesImmanent in it is this despair, which is the fight of our lives. Another aspect is what I call stealth genocide: there is a strategic goal afoot. This is not disinfolklore for disinfolklore’s sake. This is not just about brainwashing for brainwashing’s sake. It’s about what I call stealth genocide — preparing the ground, changing communities’ identity from inside their minds, as they did in Russia-occupied Ukraine, as the MAGA cult has done to many people we know, and as they are attempting to do to the whole American population, and now to Europe, where they’re going to intervene on behalf of MAGA-friendly political parties like AfD and others inside European countries.This is about changing identities. It’s about brainwashing. It’s about usurping democratic control and destroying this way of living that we’ve had since the end of the Second World War. Essentially, it’s about the destruction of our culture from inside our minds, as the Russians did in Luhansk, where they changed people’s identities from the inside out.Transition to Episode Eight: AI, Wired, and the Cultural PhenomenonI’ll leave it at those and then go back to the eighth episode of the Battling Archetypes. Over the summer, someone close to me just turned to a chatbot when we were in the middle of a conversation, and I’d never seen that before, given the circumstances in which I live. I thought, gosh, I really have to learn a bit about this because this is pretty big.I had studied AI and neural networks back in 2018, back in the dark ages, and I’d done an entrepreneurial project on computer vision — using computer vision algorithms to automatically interpret satellite imagery to try and discover fresh water. I thought at the time that was the plan of my Russian entrepreneur partner, but that’s a story for another day.What happened between 2017–2018 when I tuned in, and then tuned out in those seven years, is quite extraordinary. One of the things I did was get a subscription to Wired. They did an AI special a couple of months ago — an extraordinarily long but very engaging article about this guy, this coding guy’s interaction with his AI algorithm. I just wasn’t aware of it.Now there’s like 800,000 people a week who are speaking all day long to their algorithm. It’s like their best friend. For some people, this is amazing. For some people, it’s not amazing. For everyone, it’s a cultural phenomenon which is going to grow.Having experienced the power of these algorithms to really solve amazing problems and come up with amazing connections, I can see we need quite a lot to do before we’re safe with them.Wired — I just thought, I don’t know anything about this stuff, so how do I learn? Wired has, I think, a $3-a-week subscription, and it’s amazing. It helped me tune into this phenomenon and prepared the ground for me to start investigating what they do.Kahneman on Priming and ManipulationWhile I think of it — and it is relevant, we talked about it on our third episode — this quote from Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for economics (well, I know that’s not technically a Nobel Prize, but it basically is). In Thinking, Fast and Slow, he was talking about priming research, and he says: “The main moral of priming research is that our thoughts and behaviour are influenced much more than we know or want by the environment of the moment. Many people find these results unbelievable because they do not correspond to subjective experience.”When you’re trying to explain to people that they’re probably being manipulated by Russian disinformation, often their response is, “Oh no, no, I’m too smart for that. Only stupid people fall for that.”Back to Kahneman: “Many others find the results upsetting because they threaten the subjective sense of agency and autonomy. If the content of a screensaver on an irrelevant computer can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you?”Coming from a Buddhist perspective, where emptiness and this idea that we are at our base level the same as a computer algorithm — where we’re empty — it isn’t that upsetting. It’s challenging. It’s the same issue which Kahneman, sadly he’s dead now, identified. I think he passed — Thinking, Fast and Slow is 15, 20 years old now. It’s the same challenge we have in the context of being manipulated and trying to convince people that they are being manipulated, without actually manipulating them and transgressing the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls, which is ethical discipline and rightness.LLMs and the Question of IntelligenceIt’s now the same issue with these vast LLMs, which are just extraordinary. Up until very recently, if you had said to me there’s no intelligence behind it, it’s just about predictive algorithms, one word following the other, and that’s somehow different from us, from biological things — I would have said yes, that’s correct.Now, having worked a bit with them and seeing how brilliant they are, they are indistinguishable. Some of the top ones are indistinguishable in pretty wide areas of knowledge from any human that one is interacting with. If your conception of what it means to be human and alive isn’t that surprised to discover that a machine can mimic so clearly human capacities, then it’s not that surprising.It is a big challenge. It’s pretty interesting. We’re on the cusp of something which is very transformative in very many ways. Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

Ukraine as a CharacterWhy is disinfolklore an appropriate moniker? In disinfolklore, we look at characters in the stories we’re served up. Ukraine is a damsel in distress who must be rescued by Donald—this is how he’s trying to archetype Ukraine. We know it’s obviously false. Ukraine is a damsel in distress who must be rescued by Russia because of the coup and all of these trolls. Or Ukraine is a damsel in distress who must submit.We go back to coercive control. We go back to the people many of us might have met in our lives who come from the perspective of realpolitik. They say, oh yes, isn’t it awful what Russia is doing? But honestly, it’s time to just—you know, Ukraine just needs to give up Donbas and everything will be fine, and we’ll be able to get back to our cappuccinos and whatever.I’m going through a thorough reorganisation of my work and approach to teaching. Watch this space. Here’s a sneak preview of part of my new homepage, and of what is coming:What’s going on there is Ukraine is being archetyped as a character. Ukraine is a country of 42 million people, a very complex concept. It’s a geographical space. It’s a historical context. If we take the disinfolklore lens, then it’s quite natural for us to see anything in a meme as a character.Abstract Concepts as CharactersObviously when we’re looking at Netflix or a story in the news or any art or play, we have characters manifesting as individual humans. What the disinfolklore analytical method allows us to do is perceive how abstract concepts take on the characteristics of characters, of personalities.This is one of the main means by which Russia’s disinfolklore manipulates us—because we don’t notice it. We’re not looking for it. We’re not looking for the energy of character in an abstract concept like Ukraine. Putler then can talk about Ukraine as a corpse, as a dead corpse, as a dead woman who is worthy of becoming a victim, as in that song by Red Mould which I’ve talked about before—*Sleeping Beauty in the Coffin*. International lawyers use it as evidence of Putler’s intention to genocide Ukraine, because he quoted this disgusting lyric which I’m not going to repeat here—*Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin, I Walked Up and XXXX her…*This archetyping through characters is a phenomenon that very few other so-called disinformation researchers, or people watching propaganda, or people interpreting data have noticed. I’ve not only noticed it—I’ve tried to think about it, work it out, and articulate what is going on.It’s quite natural, if you look at disinfolklore as a narrative form, to see how Ukraine is being archetyped as a particular character with characteristics.Don’t Poke the BearRussia does it when it calls itself a bear and promotes this troll. I first came across this with an American senior officer, a colonel, who once in eastern Ukraine just mentioned to me about the bear—“don’t poke the bear.” That was the first time I came across this meme.What this actually is, is archetyping Russia as the strong bear, which you can’t do anything about when it pokes you—you can’t poke it back. If it pokes you, then it’s your fault for poking it. It’s a really complicated, psychologically manipulative set of mental routines it sets off in our minds. That is concealed by the use of a bear, which we think of—well, those of us who didn’t grow up in Central and Eastern Europe with bears running around, or in Pennsylvania where bears are actually running around. Those who grew up in bourgeois Western Europe haven’t come across bears except in fairy tales and folk tales.That for me was a clue of how Russia uses character in stories. Donald uses the same trick, and many propagandists use the same trick. It’s also a means of critiquing what they do. Russia is the implacable bear—better get over it, Ukraine.Stereotypes versus ArchetypesStereotypes are delivered through the storytelling and newsy memes every time Druidy Don, Donald, Duncy Putin, or their henchmen and women speak in disinfolklore.When I speak of archetypes, it’s much deeper than mere stereotypes. I’m not just saying we’re reifying reality, aggregating components into a trope. Archetypes connect deep Indo-European cognitive structures with particular aggregated ideas—like the data-resistant archetype of a Potemkin state.Data-Resistant ArchetypesI was reminded this week, reading a politician’s speech from a formerly occupied part of the former Soviet Union, where they were talking about NATO as if the past three years hadn’t happened, or as if America’s threats to invade NATO hadn’t happened. They were talking about how the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, which is Russia’s fake NATO, has Russia as a necessary component in it. Have you not seen anything in the past three years? Have you not picked up the data? Have you not updated your archetype of the CSTO, of Russia, of NATO, of the past few years?These characters have changed. They’ve been transformed. You’re talking about NATO and Russia from Act One of the play. Those of us who have been watching avidly for the past four years, day by day—these characters evolve and develop. We are now in Act Six, and the character of NATO is not what it used to be.Some of us will have seen reference today to how a drone, suspected to be a Russian drone, penetrated Polish airspace and crashed quite far into Poland, right near—or maybe it didn’t even crash, maybe ran out of juice—near a Polish base which is rumoured to be one of its main electronic warfare facilities. Nobody there knew how to shoot it down. They couldn’t shoot it down.This idea of NATO as a bear has to develop, just as the idea of Russia as the bear has to develop. When I talk about data-resistant archetypes of a Potemkin state, I’m using literary references with the idea of a character to articulate how these signifiers like Russia or NATO—their actual contents can transform.Too Much, Never EnoughWhen I speak of disinfolklore’s archetyping, I’m talking about a process that takes many different words and meanings, imbues them with dynamic characteristics, then does it again and again and again—too much and never enough. That phrase is basically the title of the biography of Donald by his niece, but it’s also what characterises hyper-modernity as distinct from post-modernity, modernity, or the classical period. Too much, never enough—acceleration and insufficiency.Before we know it, we’re inside a MAGA universe wrought by disinfolklore. It’s the system effects of all of these aggregating characters in the stories that we are embedded in, which are broadcast through the news, repeated by Donald and by many others all the time—including ourselves. The aggregating effect is that we’re put inside this MAGA universe.Inside the Usurpers’ UniverseI’m using a metaphor here—the idea of being put inside a universe, a MAGA universe, but also inside a Russian universe. This goes back to what I talked about at the beginning and what James was talking about at the beginning. The whole point of the Kennedy Center is just one of tens of thousands of vectors for each of us which could have the impact of transforming our identities and our surroundings and turning the usurper’s reality into an irreversible reality.As it goes, I think the disgustingness of what we’re gradually learning about the whole Epstein stuff—the enormity of it, Donald’s complicity in it, Putler’s complicity—it would be somewhat ironic if Epstein brings them down. Out of all Putler’s crimes, this is the one that ends him.International Relations as StorytellingThe stock in trade of international relations professionals is storytelling, as if the phenomena they speak of are more real than characters in a folktale. The West, NATO, Russia, strongmen, spheres of influence. As many of us see and understand now—this great German word for Putin understanders—they impute intention to this character called Putler who doesn’t correlate in any way with the biological human called Putler. It’s layers and layers away from the biological human biped, yet they write very earnest essays in *Foreign Affairs* and their escalation management logic dominated and colonised the minds of the people in former President Biden’s administration, as all of us understand so well.This whole discourse in international relations—IR itself—is a form of storytelling. If you’re coming from a disinfolklore analytical method point of view, you can look at it just like storytelling. You look for the characters they’re talking about—don’t poke the bear—and all of this chatter about Westphalia and all that fascist civilisations stuff. These are all just storytelling, which has the same value, effect, potential for manipulation, and status, in my humble opinion, as any piece of news or anything coming out of Donald’s mouth.I reference Donald a lot because he’s a fairy tale character we’re all very familiar with—he’s sadly part of our everyday reality. I could just as easily be referencing someone else if this were a different age or a different moment.The Gideon Rachmans’ ProblemQuite serious people impute into the character I call Duncy Putin, or Russia, the characteristics of a bear—they do it unconsciously. They’re earned archetypes or reputations. Ukraine as a lion—that’s a weak encounter archetype in that sense.This guy Gideon Rachman—I’ve mentioned him before, just because he’s a good example of how this old guard don’t have a disinfolklore perspective. They can’t see how they impute these ridiculous thought routines to Putler. For instance, as we’ve seen when the United States began to occupy Venezuela, even though it doesn’t seem to be admitting this or understanding it, and started to trigger a whole set of legal obligations which it is pretending to ignore by kidnapping the fake president of Venezuela—Gideon Rachman said Putler is going to look at this and decide to do the same to President Zelensky.What are you talking about? What level of lack of sophistication are you living on that you think Putin thinks this way? That you think it’s legitimate for the foreign editor or whatever he is of the *FT* to reveal how ignorant you are—how you cannot see that you’re actually talking about a cartoon character in your mind who’s occupying space in your mind? This Putin who’s walking along merrily, going: “Oh, I’m doing this full-scale war against Ukraine for eight, nine years, and I’ve just spent 1.3 million men. I tried to invade Kyiv. I lost the Battle of Mostyshche. We had to withdraw.” “Oh, but now Donald has invaded Venezuela. Now I feel permission to do the same to President Zelensky. God, thank you, Donald, for doing that, because now there’s this precedent.” On so many different layers, it’s really dumb.If you’ve got a disinfolklore perspective—and all of us are not picking on him, well, I am obviously, but I don’t mean to, because there’s many things that I probably fall for the same type of trolls. With a disinfolklore perspective, I try to critique what I say in the same way—just looking and recognising: I’m not talking about Putler here. I’m talking about a character. He’s an invented character. It’s like in a Netflix series, but I’m imputing real characteristics to him that don’t correspond to reality. I’m trying to communicate something through telling this story that Putler will see Donald has invaded Venezuela and then decide to act. It’s total fiction because, as we all know, in reality Putler has tried to do this like 4,000 times already.Re-Archetyping UkraineThere are these data-resistant archetypes which underpin characters like Ukraine. Other archetypes are emerging or fading or enduring. All of us are watching in real time the re-archetyping of Ukraine in the minds of, for instance, European leaders who realise European security now depends on Ukraine.Donald hasn’t got the memo, or he just doesn’t care—he just wants to destroy Europe. He thinks Putin is a good means of doing that. If Ukraine would just submit, then Putin could invade Moldova or Poland, and that will totally collapse the euro, and that will make America great again. Maybe that’s what Donald thinks.He certainly doesn’t see Ukraine as a protagonist, or as a main protagonist. That gives Ukraine an edge, because it’s got in President Zelensky and some of the people around him—people who do think through what they’re dealing with, not using the terms of disinfolklore, but thinking about it the way we think about art or script writing. President Zelensky has this intuitive sense of understanding character and archetypes and storytelling, and how characters can change and must change and do change. Therefore, if you can harness that, whether it’s in propaganda or disinfolklore or your own nightly speech, you yourself can in real time transform the character of Ukraine—re-archetype it into what it substantively is and has been for the past 6,000 years: the key, the origin, and the source of innovation in Indo-European culture.Zelensky’s Enduring PopularityI note, en passant—if you’ll pardon my French—that polling today reported President Zelensky is at 61 or 62 percent in Ukraine. He won the election on 64% in 2019. Now, seven years later and all that has happened—zillions of memes, zillions of disinfolklore from Donald, from Putler, helped by missiles, the complicity between the missiles and the stories about the missiles, the fear and the future and Ukraine capitulation—despite all of that, President Zelensky’s level of popularity persists and subsists.That demonstrates how we can defeat disinfolklore. The stories, and the stories about the events like missile strikes, about corruption, about all of the nonsense—Ukraine gives this great example. We can think about it as the character who’s on a journey, the hero’s journey or the heroine’s journey. She begins life on 64, and now she’s still on 61 after all of these travails and adventures. Well, that probably wouldn’t make a real hit—you really want her to go up in popularity or build down in popularity.I make this observation from the point of view of thinking that these disinfolklorists will necessarily win, that disinfolklore necessarily manipulates. Obviously we do see it has great effects in some places at some times, and it has had in the past in Ukraine. At the moment, it’s a good example of how we can overcome it.I’ll leave it there for tonight.Continued from:First in series: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

This is episode six of going through the battling archetypes and essential tools in the Disinfolklore analytical method. Some of you may remember last week I talked about Donald archetyping himself as mad, and my archetyping of my experience on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska as something folkloric, and that leading to an accidental insight which in turn led to my discovery of Disinfolklore.Today I wanted to keep going. Inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, in occupied Luhansk, where I crossed into every day from government-controlled Ukraine, on a journey I would take from now-occupied Severodonetsk — about 150 kilometres on terrible roads, but really beautiful landscape all the way — from my hotel, the Hotel Mir, “Peace,” which had been bombed in 2014 in Severodonetsk. Last time I saw photographs of it, like many places I stayed in Ukraine, it’s now in ruins.I lived in the Mir Hotel for a year, and then I moved into a beautiful house with a swimming pool and underfloor heating in Severodonetsk. Now that house itself — it’s not quite a ruin, but it has been looted. The family I lived with sent me photographs of the house recently, and I can now determine when places have been looted repeatedly. Walls are missing.At the time, Severodonetsk was a bit of a haven. Gradually, as I was there from February 2015 onwards, as I got my eye into what for me was the first former Soviet city — it was a real Soviet city, the largest producer of ammonium in the former Soviet Union, that was its speciality, and it looked very like Soviet cities — but gradually it became more colourful. People became richer. Avocados appeared in the supermarket, as did hummus. Now those supermarkets are in ruins.Severodonetsk’s best days — depending on one’s viewpoint — may have been in the Soviet era, or I would claim that its best days were during the years I was there, up until 2022, as it experienced being the de facto capital of Luhansk.Each day, going to Stanytsia Luhanska was like passing into another world through this long journey along very rough roads, which we got to know extremely well because I did it five days a week for three years. Crossing into that bridge was like crossing into a matrix. Inside Russia-occupied Ukraine was a matrix — and here I’m using the matrix from the movie as a metaphor rather than an actual place.Russia’s archetyping system inside Russia-occupied Ukraine consisted of hundreds of media outlets intermeshed with coercive force, coercive control, and so-called institutions which did not actually mediate reality. All of these means — the media outlets, the coercive force, the coercive control, and these fake institutions which only existed on paper in the media outlets — I mentioned this last week, how for the first few months I was reading stories about how the Russian occupiers were establishing a central bank and courts and a parliament and all these normal foundational institutions. But they were fake. They only existed on paper. Took me a few months to realise that.None of these means really mediated reality. They forged reality. I use the word “forged” there as a double entendre — in the sense that they forged it like you might forge a horseshoe in a forge, hammering it away, putting it in the fire, taking it out, hammering it away. And forged in the sense of forgeries, art forgeries, fake reality — which is the essence of the Disinfolklore metaphor, the Disinfolklore insight that I had.I didn’t then understand what the Russians were doing. I didn’t understand their objective. At the time, March 2015, the Council of the European Union — the supreme governments’ part of the European Union, as distinct from the European Commission’s civil servants and the European Parliament’s directly elected parliamentarians — the Council of the European Union at the end of March mentioned disinformation for the first time. So at the time, there wasn’t really a vibe of disinformation. Of course, I had the memory of Russian propaganda from my school textbooks and a bit at university. But I didn’t realise that what I was being embedded in was something completely new, which required new language and new terms to describe, and which had — and this is key to the battling archetypes aspect of Disinfolklore — system-wide effects.We’re not just looking at individual memes or stories or tweets. We’re looking at the system-wide effects of thousands or millions of those. I got that insight from seeing how this matrix-like enmeshing of the humans living inside Russia-occupied Ukraine worked — and here I’m not using matrix in the sense of the film, but in the geometric sense — this enmeshing of different media outlets.Those of us who listen to Chuck Pfarrer and Alan regularly — they have a good new show this week I listened to a couple of days ago — one of Chuck Pfarrer’s many aphorisms is “one is none,” which I’ve taken quite to heart. In the past, I would try to only have one item, one charger for instance, that could do everything. Now I’m going for redundancy — having loads of different chargers. It’s quite liberating actually.This “one is none” principle is practised by the Russians. They have constant redundancy, whether it’s in their operations overseas — they’ll flicker between using church groups, diplomats, propaganda outlets. There’s this enmeshing. This principle of enmeshing, a matrix in the geometric sense, is something we may not notice when we’re looking at particular memes.What I’m trying to articulate with the battling archetypes aspect of the Disinfolklore analytical method is the system-wide effect. Donald saying certain things — it’s not just about Venezuela or Greenland or Ukraine or the Epstein files. It’s a whole system, and it has persistent effects on us.At the time, in 2015, I didn’t see that this was what they were doing in Russia-occupied Ukraine. But I was gathering data points, which I then spent years parsing for patterns. They were weaving reality in there. I didn’t know why they were doing it. They were changing the identities of the consumers of Disinfolklore. This is what MAGA does, what Donald does, and what the Russians are still doing.Coming up to the anniversary — I think Volya is doing a 24-hour thing for the anniversary, which is great. Hopefully I’ll be able to participate in that. One of the things I’ve been reflecting on is how the war has changed me. I started out with a set of beliefs — that the West would intervene, that NATO was useful. Those external perceptions have then moved right into the depths of my mind. Things have changed in my own mind. My identity in many senses has been changed, and perhaps many of our identities have been changed, where our identities are a function of what we think and do day after day.I was interested to read recently on X about the algorithm, because I noticed this. Up until the 27th of February 2022, I never tweeted about Ukraine because I was still working there and didn’t want to be talking about what I was working in. But I was very engaged in trying to raise awareness about COVID. My timeline was full of doctors and medics. Then that changed really quickly — I was put into the Ukraine category. I was interested to read recently that my lived experience backs up that your categorisation by the Twitter algorithm can change quite quickly according to what you like and what you post.In some ways, that’s a metaphor or example of how our online identity can change quite quickly. We’re not stuck in boxes. Now, after he who shall not be named bought Twitter, there was a thing about how, when the algorithm was released, people in the pro-Ukraine group were being discriminated against. So maybe when you got into the pro-Ukraine group, it became more of a fixed identity.Again, how quickly our externally perceived identities can be seen to change. I saw the same thing happen — and many of us have — with MAGA people, and in Russia-occupied Ukraine through the means of this enmeshing matrix of hundreds of different media outlets and the interaction between them and reality, and of course brutal violence and coercive control, and the re-establishment in people’s minds of patterns that had been very common prior to the end of the Soviet Union.That’s the kind of insight I bring to you today from Russia-occupied Luhansk. At the time, it was interesting as something — my thought was always: “This would never happen at home.” This was before Brexit and before Donald Trump. What a strange place, that this can happen to Ukrainians by the Russians, but I come from another type of place where this could never happen.Now, of course, over the course of those nine years, what I saw there in this small province — which felt like the edge of the world, the edge of Europe, and has been for millennia — that has seeped into every person, not just in Europe and America but across the world. Through the economic impact of the war in Ukraine — everyone everywhere is paying more for everything. Through memes, through Donald becoming elected with the help of the Russians, and now through Donald’s zigzagging through our brains and minds 50 million times a day.These patterns — there’s this great phrase: “The future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” That idea, which actually animates Silicon Valley, where on the edges you have existences and manifestations of reality which will take over the world and take over the mind, whether it’s Facebook or TikTok — it also applies to what happened in Ukraine after February 2014, directly as a result of Ukraine. It will continue to happen because Ukraine is the centre of our civilisation.My other project, Finding Manuland, investigates why this is the case and finds the empirical evidence for it. But we can see it in our lived experience. This may have been the case when Indo-European languages, mythology, and religions were first evolved from 6,000 years ago in Zaporizhzhia. But it’s also the case since 2014.At the time, I just couldn’t work out what they were doing. I remember thinking: surely, if you’re trying to attract the rest of Ukraine into supporting these rebel troll kingdoms, you would try to make them into utopia and paradise. We talked about this last week. It’s a constant source of mystery why the Russians, if they really wanted to do what they said they wanted to do, wouldn’t do this. But as we know, everything they touch turns to s**t.This completely out-of-sync relationship between the reality the Russians create — this hell on earth, wherever they go — is so out of sync with their stated intentions. Many of the people we know who live in the normal world, who don’t spend all their time on Ukraine or learning about Russia, understanding the grammar and syntax of not just its Disinfolklore and propaganda but also its behaviour, learning the patterns, the repeated patterns — Ukrainians and central Europeans in general can be really helpful, and Baltic people who lived under occupation from the Russians in various forms, can be very helpful in teaching people from Western Europe and America what these patterns are.About a week into the full-scale invasion, I started — as I mentioned before — collecting data for the OSCE Moscow Mechanism mission that had been charged directly after the full-scale invasion began on the 24th of February 2022 with collecting data about what Russia was doing and its violations of OSCE commitments.About a week into the war, I was looking at the executions that the Russians were carrying out, the conduct of the war, when I had this flash of insight: the entire point of the system, the matrix of communications, of what I now call Disinfolklore in Russia-occupied Ukraine, was to execute what I called and call a stealth genocide.In that sense, I was learning about how the Russians were forcing Ukrainians who had lived under the occupation to participate in a war against their fellow citizens, their fellow Ukrainians across the Donets River. I realised that what Russia had been doing over the course of those seven years was to execute a genocide.But I, who had been there for three years, then looked back — and I continued to do this — at what I had seen and experienced: the Disinfolklore apparatus, the direct and public incitement to genocide, the mass forcible transfers of people, the enslavement of people, the killing of people simply for being Ukrainian. All these things I was aware of while I was working there. But it never occurred to me for a second while I was there that this was a genocide.I know Mokrushyna and Genesis Man had a brief conversation about this today on Volya Radio on their show, and Yeni contributed to it as well. It’s a source of enormous sadness that the refusal to put together all of these individual events — many of which we uniquely in this community, outside of Ukraine, see and experience each day as we follow the conduct of the war since the 24th of February — it’s enormously sad for me that while genocide has become common parlance for people who engage with other conflicts or wars or occupations, merely through social media like many of us, they refuse to attach that moniker to this war, despite it having every possible characteristic of genocide.I as a lawyer saw this from very early on and have read particularly the two reports from New Lines Institute on applying the international legal definition of genocide to Russia’s actions. The first I heard of what might be going on in Bucha was around mid-March 2022, when a friend told me about sexual crimes which it was rumoured were happening in the Kyiv area. I remember my reaction to seeing this and thinking: I think that’s probably exaggerating it, I’ll need to see more than that.It’s the memory of that reaction which helps me understand where my thinking was at that time, even though I was reading of atrocities and recording them and collecting them for the Moscow Mechanism mission. But the scale of the barbarism then in Bucha — most of us will remember those days when we first started hearing about it, around the 7th of April.It’s to the credit of the four jurists who were responsible for directly writing the Moscow Mechanism report, published I think on the 9th of April 2022 — it’s in my pinned tweet, the reference to it and my work on it — that they mention all the strands that we know today, even though the evidence wasn’t clear at the time for what exactly had happened at Bucha. The mass forcible transfer of children, all the themes — the killing of civilians, the indiscriminate killing of civilians trying to escape, the bombings, the terrible crimes.I mention this because even before my friend had texted me about these sexual crimes in the Kyiv area, and I thought “No, not even the Russians would be doing that” — I had categorised what was going on as a genocide. I made the connection between what the Russians were doing in March 2022 and what they were preparing to do throughout my time there, with the Disinfolklore apparatus and the brainwashing, the identity-changing means. Forcing Ukrainians, changing them from being loyal, in many cases, Ukrainians, to thinking that they were Russians.Even with that weakened evidence base at that time — and another data point I have is around the 10th of March 2022, when the then Polish president, who was also a lawyer, first used the term genocide in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But he at the time wouldn’t have known about Bucha. President Zelensky first used the term, as far as I understand, around the 7th of April, in that famous footage when he has his bulletproof vest on and Yermak is standing behind him, talking about what was going on in Bucha.The fact that all three of us — the president of Poland, me, and President Zelensky — studied international law and are lawyers and thought of it as a genocide then — it’s enormously sad that to this day, and it’s a testament to the success of Russia’s Disinfolklore apparatus, as we are being enmeshed in it, and many of our sensitive friends and colleagues and community members have been enmeshed in this over the war, Israel and Israel’s war against Hamas.I used to use this: the likening of any situation to genocide in eastern Ukraine by demonstrators. Often there would be demonstrations against, say, heightened gas prices. I noticed a pattern of hysterical likening of such-and-such to a genocide. After about a year of going to demonstrations, which was part of my job — when I was working out of the Dnipro office between 2018 and 2022 — trying to assess: is this real, is this organic, or is this the Russians, is this an active measure?I had this shortcut: if they’re likening a relatively trivial event like the rising of gas prices, rents, or some problem with communal services to a genocide, then chances are that’s a Russian operation. Because what they’re trying to do is reduce the currency and the meaning of genocide. I believe this is part of Russia’s communications strategy, which was rolled out from parts of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and other parts of Ukraine as they tried to stir tumult. They then rolled that out globally, to fantastic success.And there we have a genocide concealed in Ukraine, concealed by these memes and monikers. It is especially shameful to me that I did not — and I tried to learn from it — that I didn’t notice this when I was in Ukraine between 2015 and 2018 in eastern Ukraine. I didn’t notice I was inside a genocide, because I had read Primo Levi, I’d read The Assassins of Memory, I’d visited Auschwitz in 1991. I was very engaged in reading about the Second World War. As many of us used to do, we’d play this mind game: “So-and-so would become a Nazi in the war, so-and-so wouldn’t.” Then we realised most people become Nazis — inured to this violence and don’t react the way all of us have to this particular war.It’s especially embarrassing to me, as a lawyer trained in this, that I was caught up inside our bureaucratic organisation and couldn’t work it out.It occurred to me in March 2022 that if in 1942, the railway went by the garden of your house, and that railway was going to Auschwitz or to other places, and the railway cars were going by — you might notice the humans in the railway cars. But of course you wouldn’t know you were witnessing a genocide, because you’re just seeing one moment in a very complex system. That probably also applies to people who think they’re seeing a genocide when they’re not necessarily.But it certainly applies to the conventional wisdom that won’t use that term for what the Russians are doing in Ukraine, despite those horrific numbers published today — the figure was about 600,000 Ukrainians killed. Again, it’s reported as a both-sides thing: 600,000 Ukrainians dead and whatever 1.2 million Russians, or 300,000, or 600,000 casualties — I don’t know. The scale of these numbers is off the charts. How many more Ukrainians need to die before you will archetype this properly as a genocide?The family resemblance between the Disinfolklore universe that Russia was creating in the minds of Ukrainians living in Russia-occupied Ukraine, and what is today happening on a global scale across America and across our civilisation, is one of the key insights I want to communicate. I know you’ve heard it a million times from me, but part of my mission is to repeat myself — I’m trying to put ideas in people’s minds and to teach this mode of seeing. Not as the way of seeing, but as a way of seeing.Let’s define Disinfolklore as follows: Disinfolklore is a specific form of disinformation. Disinfolklore is a medium for affecting our moods, intentions, motivations, and attitudes in ways which help the Disinfolklorist. Our moods, intentions, motivations, and attitudes — I believe in my mental model — are the key to affecting our identities and changing people’s identities. Your mood will affect you in a long-durée way. Intention is more short-term but can be long as well — it can be your intention to donate right now, which has changed because you’re reading Disinfolklore, a bad article about Ukraine, and you think “I’m not going to donate now.” Also your intention about what you’re going to do in your life, and your motivations — long and short — and your attitudes, in ways which help the Disinfolklorists.All of these can be altered by storytelling and by stories, by what I call Disinfolklore. For example, we intend to donate to help Ukraine develop its drone-based warfare capability. But the New York Times tells us a fable whose message, whose mana, is “Russia will win.” So instead, we donate our money to another cause — hopefully a worthwhile cause.Disinfolklore is disinformation which can be usefully parsed into some of its folkloric elements, as I spoke about last week and the week before. It’s clear that legend, epic poetry, mythology, and wisdom sayings from ancient times all contain folkloric elements. But it’s not so clear that news does. And that, again, is a key insight I’m trying to communicate — trying to re-archetype what we consider to be news, “objective,” as the determination of what is necessarily important.The leaving out of, for instance, that horrific railway attack by Russia today in Kharkiv — we all saw it. People tuned into Ukraine saw it. But I’m guessing it wasn’t on the BBC News tonight. Maybe it was, I don’t know. But I’m guessing it wasn’t, and it’s not on other people’s minds. Those editorial choices themselves are part of what I would consider Disinfolklore. Because if they’re talking about other stories which are comparatively less grisly and less important, they’re making choices to manipulate our minds and leave these out.Many of the people we know who exist in the normal world — who don’t spend all day long engaged in trying to combat Russian propaganda and trying to help Ukraine in whatever small ways we can — those people say things like, “Oh, is that war still going on?”In Disinfolklore, we use tools from different disciplines — comparative mythology, literary theory, theology — to parse MAGA, Russian, and other forms of disinformation and Disinfolklore into its folkloric components. I’ve been listening every now and again to this podcast from this guy in Latvia, near the Russian border — it’s called East of the Border or something like that. I quite like it. He focuses a lot on the theological components in Russian Disinfolklore, in their ways of seeing. I quite like that because I’ve been doing that since very early on.When Putler is using the church as part of their matrices of wrapping everyone up in a Disinfolklore universe, fooling people, changing their minds and intentions, motivations, moods, and attitudes — when he was pictured going into the church, that’s all the use of theology. When they liken Ukraine to Satan and the war to Satan, it’s a key aspect of Disinfolklore and the Russian approach to Disinfolklore.We can use all these different disciplines to parse MAGA, Russian, and other forms of disinformation into its folkloric components. There’s a reflexive relationship — meaning all these different aspects interact, sometimes in the same meme, in the same story — between legend, lore, mythology, epic, drama, and folklore.I’ve introduced the new concept of Infolklore. Depending on how a piece, an item of Disinfolklore is reframed, it can be transformed, transmogrified into what I would call Infolklore. An archetypal Infolklore is what Mokrushyna would be talking about, or Will, or on Accidental Ukrainian, which I really enjoyed this week — a fantastic episode. These are stories which amuse, which are told from the perspective of helping Ukraine, but also of changing our attitude from a depressed mood into a happy mood. They’re informational, they’re true, they’re correct, but they’re not trying to change our attitudes in a negative way.By negative, I use the standard for negative — the second element in what I call the Code of Positive Trolls, which is right, ethical discipline, as defined by the post-World War II legal order. If the meaning of the meme is to persuade us that the laws of war don’t matter, or individual right to life doesn’t matter, then that is Disinfolklore. But if it’s doing the opposite, if it’s supporting Ukraine’s right to defend itself and its territorial integrity, then by definition it is what I would call Infolklore.These aren’t yet — maybe someday they will become — definitions that judges could use in courts to decide whether to allow speech that, for instance, denigrates or is preparing a people, changing their identities, preparing a people to be sacrificed in some sort of future genocide. But for the time being, each of us can be a judge. We’re just looking for a good enough method to deal with all the incoming data each day.We don’t have to spend too long on a particular meme to decide: is this Disinfolklore or Infolklore? Will I believe this? Will I communicate it onwards? Will I get upset by it? Will I spend three days being depressed by it? We can use these tools I’m helping to articulate and communicate, to parse these items of data — whether it’s a visual, a picture, a tweet, a meme, or a whole 8,000-word essay in The New Yorker — into its pieces, and then move on. We don’t have to defend our decision in a court of law. We’re just trying to find a way of parsing — in the sense of chopping. As the great French postmodern philosopher Derrida said, knowledge is for cutting. I always imagine, on a cutting board, chopping onions. That’s all I’m trying to do.I do think it is useful and could in the future be used as models in court cases to determine: are we going to sanction this individual? Well, yes, because they’ve been promoting trolls that denigrate the post-World War II legal order, which promote and publicly incite genocide. Here’s the evidence — these memes — and we can apply the Disinfolklore analytical method to evaluate them. But that’s just my ambition for the future. In the meantime, in our daily journeys through our timelines and through our lives, listening to the news on the radio, hopefully these tools can help.If we look at memes in the same way we look at legends as law — and by law, in particular, for those of us who come from common-law jurisdictions like England, Ireland, the United States, Australia, or New Zealand, where some of the law is based on statute but a good part of the law is based on stories, the common law, and principles which are immanent in these stories and cases. The corollary of that in international law is international customary law.We have the equivalent of statutes in international law — the UN Charter, treaties — but we also have international custom accepted as law. These principles — for instance, the laws of war are articulated in several Geneva Conventions, but they didn’t need to be in the Geneva Conventions to be part of international law. That is quite similar to common law, all based on stories.Lore — which is the law of any community we’re a part of, whether it’s in our office or our family, our history. Indeed, we have lore in Volya Radio, and those of us who participated in Maria Report in any form are aware of the lore there.Mythology is particularly important because so much work has been done developing tools. And as discussed previously, there is a conscious and perhaps accidental use of mythology in Wagner, in what the Russians are trying to do. Therefore we can delve into these areas for tools that are useful to parse this information.There aren’t that many other people apart from me — there are some, but there aren’t that many. It’s not mainstreamed. I feel I have a contribution to make by emphasising these aspects, not least because the entire casus belli itself from Putler, all its historical nonsense, is mythology and based on mythology. If you can understand the status of this as mythology rather than fact or history, then that helps to combat it.I used to have this debate with some of the presenters on Maria Report, where they’d say, “This is all irrelevant, no one cares about mythology.” And yet it was all too relevant.Epic as well — we’re in the midst of an epic. Drama — every day in every tweet, Donald is the drama monarch. And folklore itself, as previously discussed. These forms of narrative, these art forms, are not really associated with news by many people — very few, in fact. I keep my eye out for it. That’s one of my unique contributions to the area of disinformation and information warfare management.These stories transmit values across the ages. That’s quite easy for people to grasp — how legend, lore, the Old Testament, old treaties, old religions transmit values which we either agree with or disagree with across the ages. In one age, the heroic deeds of humans become mythological activities of deities.There’s this great example in India, in early Indian history, where you have this community of people called the Danavas who are mentioned in the Rig Veda as devils, as demons. It’s argued that the Danavas were actually the memory of the Indo-Europeans, the descendants of those who left Ukraine with the language. The Danavas enter India, they fight against the people who were living there, and then they’re remembered in mythology, in the religion and the texts, as demons. But in fact they were real people.This is the kind of pattern which happens in the news and what the Russians try to do with their scary stories. Ukraine’s best or ultimate strategic objective, I think, is to communicate such a sense of fear into the minds of today’s Russians that no Russian will ever be born in the next hundred years without being told by their parents: never go west of the Don. Stay east of the Don, because demons, monsters live there. As a strategy, as an objective, I think that’s really what Ukraine is trying to do.In another age, these deities become trolls and nymphs, satyrs, asuras, witches, demons, titans — that’s how I archetype this titanic struggle between Donald, Volodymyr Zelensky the comedian, and Duncy Putler. This is really a battle of the titans. And other vehicles to explain supposedly supernatural or magical communications — and by magical communications, I mean how Russian Disinfolklore somehow occupies people’s minds.It manages to archetype what is going on in Gaza as a genocide by Israel. But somehow we cannot, with all our collective effort, archetype what is going on in Ukraine as a genocide — as the most serious crime, resulting in more deaths than any other war, perhaps — I don’t know whether you can say that — or injuries, but certainly more damage to the world and to a country than any other war since the Second World War.There is something magical about that, I don’t deny it. I spend most of my time, as many of us do, trying to work out what is magical about Russian Disinfolklore — how do they get these memes repeated constantly by people? But as I will argue later, for me, magic isn’t how we might think of it from childhood, from watching a magic TV show. Magic is cause and effect. It’s the magoi, the strange countries with strange powers, the Magi, the magistrates, the majesty of monarchs. These are the magico-religious element of sovereignty and the exercise of leadership.What we see in mind-manipulating memes is magical. But we can harness it. If we understand it, then we can create Infolklore to also be magical — just as advertisers use it, just as cult leaders use it, and just as parents try to inspire their children not to do dangerous things by telling them stories.In another age, the echoes of heroic deeds may become localised staples of lore, transmitted by and among the simple folk — and “simple folk” is a term I take from about the 16th century, as opposed to the aristocracy. It’s not patronising, but they tell stories. This is what we do with the news and exchanging news.In all cases, particularly in pre-literate societies, lore, legends, folklore — all can be parsed for information in much the same way we can trace different archaeological cultures by digging deeper and deeper in the soil. But also in memes and what we see on our timelines. For me, it’s the same practices you use to look at changes in communities over time, in lore, legends, folklore, as we should be using in our quotidian daily communications, whether person to person or online.An example of Russian Disinfolklore that directly or indirectly undermines Ukraine’s sovereignty is its use of fictional bogeymen. Bogeymen are archetypes from folklore, very much part of how we think of things. We’re taught it as children — scapegoating. The entirely fictional bogeyman: the Ukrainian Nazi fighting Russia.I learned recently that all the papers from the Second World War were carted off back to Moscow after the war or towards the end of the war. Ukraine has no access to this — everyone rushing around trying to survive, changing loyalties, a bit like Syria. Russia takes away all the paperwork. Hopefully I dream about Ukraine getting all of that back so we can have proper discussion about the Second World War. But Russia takes away the evidence, then archetypes Ukrainians as Nazis, and uses this bogeyman to infest the minds of people we know in the real world with an idea they’re not even aware of. Basically: if Ukrainians are Nazis, then let the Russians kill them.This is just one of thousands of Disinfolklore archetypes using bogeymen to try to change the intentions and undermine the motivations of those who would otherwise support any people resisting unlawful violence, unlawful killing, and unlawful genocide. These fictional bogeymen — the Russians are great at creating them — promote the troll that Ukrainians deserve to be genocided.Those who communicate onwards this idea — in this folklore course I did at Oxford last year as a continuing education student, when I was trying to explain Disinfolklore to the teacher, this very point, he said: “But of course there were Ukrainian Nazis during the Second World War.” Which really made me sad — that he just couldn’t understand how, in today’s world, fictional bogeymen can be used to affect today’s intentions and motivations and perceptions of reality.Quite apart from the fact that the entire historical archives of what was happening during the Second World War on Ukrainian territory are not available to historians. Quite apart from that, the point is not whether some Ukrainians fought with the Nazis. Of course they did. The real point is that the Russians signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the Nazis. And that is again this magical — how does Russia manage to anchor these ideas in the minds of people like my teacher, a brilliant folklorist, who didn’t understand the contemporary relevance of these folkloric tropes like bogeymen in distracting people? Scapegoating.The key thing is that Disinfolklore inhabits us like ghosts. It’s a way of seeing. It’s a mood itself — a kind of bad mood. There is a literary genre of trickster tales where the trickster is pre-eminently a storyteller. These qualify as meta-narratives in that they’re stories about the role of stories.Now we’re living inside a trickster tale which has been woven by Druidy Don and Duncy Putler. They’re purveyors of these trickster tales, and treating them as otherwise is to fall for the trolls.This idea this week — this anchorage agreement, which the Russians are trying to embed in everyone’s minds — is just a mind trick. It’s a trickster tale. Disinfolklore is an analytical method for parsing disinformation. It can give us the power to analyse Druidy Don and Duncy Putler’s trickster tales as such.How many of us would dream of seeing the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the London Times taking artefacts injected into the information space by Druidy Don — Disinfolklorist himself, Donald Trump — or Duncy Putler’s, as trickster tales? Not as news, or as policy, or as a statement that Ukraine should give up land for mythical security guarantees on the anniversary of the signing of the Budapest Memorandum.I’ve spoken for an hour, so I’ll leave it at that for today.**Wendy:** Very interesting. That was perfect. Really interesting. Gives us lots to think about. James, and then I see Yeni has her hand up.**Yeni:** How do we get legacy media and the UN to get over the hurdle and actually name this a genocide? Because the Russians have already admitted it. I remember — this was months ago, maybe even a year ago — one of the people on national TV in Russia said: “We want Ukraine without Ukrainians, and we want to erase their history and superimpose Russian history and Russian culture on top of the Ukrainian.” They’ve already admitted it, because one of the hardest things — from what I’ve understood talking to humanitarian lawyers — the hardest element to prove is intent. And here you have Russia already admitting the intent. That hurdle has already gone. Is it just talking about it a lot? How do we push them over?**Stephen:** Because we’re fighting against magic — the magic of weakening the term so that it’s common parlance for anyone referring to what Israel has done in Gaza, but we just can’t get it to stick on Ukraine. I think we just keep talking about it. I talked about it today, and it was put in my mind because of you and Mokrushyna and Genesis Man mentioning it this morning. I think we just need to keep talking about it. Obviously Ukraine is fighting on the legal front as well, going through this case where the Russians were accusing Ukraine of genocide, and now the International Court of Justice, the ICJ, has recently allowed Russia to gather evidence that Ukraine is committing genocide in Ukraine. I don’t think that will ever have legs, but they’ll collect the evidence and the court will rule that’s rubbish, and that will all go on forever. But the war in the information space is the one we can affect. We just keep talking about it, like you were today, in our small ways. That’s all we can do, and that is what we do. We believe in it because this is what we spend most of our days doing — the importance of it and the effect of it. We just keep talking about it, keep learning about it, keep collecting the evidence, keep sharing the evidence. Because this is a slam dunk, as you say, with the intention. The intent aspect is the most difficult, but the Russians haven’t hidden it. Their actions show it every single day.Indeed — Solovyov threatening to nuke the island of Britain again. That is genocide. Every time they threaten Europe, that is direct and public incitement to genocide. But of course Putler has admitted it on TV, the idiot. That’s why the warrant was issued for his arrest by the International Criminal Court, which, as previously discussed, has its own problems. But let’s keep doing, as you were saying, Yeni — we’ll keep banging that drum, as one of the many drums we beat. It’s not a magic bullet. It’ll be the war of aggression trials and the tribunal for reparations and such that will matter. But this is one of many ways to fight the war.**James:** Brilliant lecture, Decoding — cogent and very systematically declared. I’m in awe of your capacity to do the integrations: cultural, anthropological, legal. I thank you for it.**Stephen:** Thank you. As we see with Magyar and with Budanov, we see the creation of counter-bogeymen. This is how you do it. These people are haunting the Russians. It’s very useful in the moment to have General Budanov in the room, and also as a message that if they do something to President Zelensky, there are lots of other people — him, the Ukrainian ambassador to the UK, and various others. There’s a whole line of people ready to take the place. Creating these monsters in the minds of Russians — obviously I have no insight, but I’m sure that’s part of the media strategy of Magyar and General Budanov and the administration itself.I think the Russians have threatened to blow up all the satellites. Musk doesn’t want that. So he’s willing to give them a lot of latitude.Continued:Continued from:First in series: Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe

A curious look at archetypes in politics, from the ‘madman’ tactic in game theory to theatrical political performance. Discussion ranges across Ukraine’s geopolitical role, propaganda techniques like Cambridge Analytica, and how folklore-like narratives shape who is seen as insider or outsider. Practical tips appear on spotting manipulative memes and preserving mental space.