Decoding Trolls

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Updated 6d ago
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6d ago

Revolutions in Paris, DC, Berlin: Turning, Then Righting

I’m going to talk about turning, then righting. When I use the word righting I mean R-I-G-H-T-I-N-G, not rioting as in France. But I am going to be talking about the rioting in France too. Turning, then righting. This is a fundamental movement in our mental models, in our lives and in our world. Movement is usually the beginning of philosophy and of religions. And there is a very simple dual movement embedded in our languages. Turning, then righting. Would you invent one, or surf one? Imagine you wanted to hack minds today. Would you invent what I call a sound-meaning bundle? Would you then try to hardwire it into humanity? Get an advertising agency, or lots of bots, to communicate it right into the inner minds of everyone? Or would you notice one that already existed? One that had been embedded in our language, in our concepts and in our minds for six thousand years. Even if you did not really understand what it was, you might just riff off it. You might surf on its surface. So what I am talking about today is turning. When you see a revolution on the streets of Paris, whether in 1789 or today, that is turning. And then comes the righting of the turning. Think of a wheel. The wheel is turning, with a Tr- in it, the consonantal pair. When it stops turning, it is righted. You have a wheelwright who fixes it. The wheel was turning, then it was broken. There is a riot, perhaps, or an insurrection. Then someone rights it. The wheelwright rights the wheel. So you create the chaos, which is the turning. Then you purport to save it, to solve it, which is the righting. The riot is the turning. The strong man who says I will lock every rioter up, or indeed the strong woman leader who says it, I will lock the far left up, that is the righting. And because the hand that offers the righting was behind the turning, the righting is his to offer. Think of a wheelwright who plants stones or nails on the road. Think of running a business that fixes tyres. You guarantee yourself plenty of custom by putting nails on the street. The hand that offers the righting was behind the turning, and he is ready for it, because he planned it. The damsel in distress The oldest shape of the trick is the damsel in distress. France is in distress. Europe is in distress. russian Disinfolklorists love the motif, and I have written about it often. The hero needs a damsel. If there is no damsel in distress, well, no bother. You distress one. Then you ride in. America was great. You say it is not great. You convince people it is not great. In fact you make it ungreat. You degrade America. You distress America, and then you say you are going to save it. There is an abhorrent cultural meme I have spoken about before, the men who call themselves pick-up artists. They nag their victims. Your nose is a bit too big. Wow, I am surprised you ever had a girlfriend, because you are pretty ugly. Then they use that vulnerability to hook the person. That is the micro level. On the macro level we are not used to this. We are not used to it in geopolitics. We are not used to it in politics. We are not used to people arranging riots like the January 6th insurrection and then riding in to supposedly fix it. We are not used to countries carpet bombing, let us say, Syria. Imagine a country like russia, which was having problems in Ukraine in the summer of 2015. It decides to carpet bomb Syria, which it starts doing in September 2015. That provokes millions of migrants, because nobody wants to die. The migrants come into Europe. They cause political chaos. And the people who ride to the rescue are PiS in Poland and Orbán in Hungary. Germany had a lot of problems. Merkel invited them in, legalised a million migrants and more or less absorbed them. Now we have the AfD, supported by russia, riding high in the polls. You cause the distress, then you purport to solve it. You cause the distress, then you sponsor political movements like the National Rally, you offer them massive loans, and then you purport to solve it. The same trick in Reform. It is a routine. A mantra for the moment The movement I want to bring into our minds is turning, then the straightening. I am going to keep saying it. Turning, then righting. I want to embed it, so that when our minds are being turned by someone, in real time, we recall this little mantra. Turning, righting. I am also going to show you how, in the letters themselves, there is both a sound and a meaning. That is what I mean by a sound-meaning bundle. It can help us understand precisely what is going on when someone in our private life, on the micro scale, is turning us. Or when a thought inside our own minds is turning us. And then we can carry it all the way from the micro to the macro, to the streets of Paris, to US politics, to what is going on between the United States and Iran and Israel and the world. Everything seems to be turning upside down. So who is going to do the righting? And then you have these political right movements, far right movements, which say, oh, we will lock up all the rioters. We will fix it. Keep this in mind while I talk. Turning, then righting. The wheel is turning. That wheel has been the metaphor of Indo-European cultures for four to six thousand years. Then the righting. This is exactly what we see in our political right. I am not describing this because it is clever to have noticed it. I am describing it because it is a mnemonic. It helps us remember, in the moment when someone is turning us, that we need to be righted. We have to right ourselves. We have to think, how can I right myself in this moment of maybe they are right? Maybe I will just vote for MAGA and it will help. Maybe I will just vote for AfD. They seem to offer a simple solution. They are going to solve the migrant problem. They are negative about the government, and I have plenty to complain about in my own life. So maybe they are just right. Ah sure, I will give them a vote. That is the righting. And then they call themselves the Right. They self-declare. I am right wing. And you think, God, that sounds right. So what is going on with the sounds? In turning there is Tr-, the consonantal skeleton. Its reversal is in righting, right, Rt-. Tr- and then Rt-. Keep those two words in mind. Turning, right. Say them a few times in that order. The wheel turning, and then righted. By the end of this you will not be able to watch a riot on the evening news without hearing them. Think of the conservative voter You think to yourself, I am quite conservative. I am a traditionalist. I do not really like change. I am going to vote for the Right. I feel right wing and I am unashamedly right wing. These people come along and there is tumult. There is a lot of turning, a bit of a revolution, demonstrations. I do not like that. I just want to do my job and go home from work, and I want the righting of this. The MAGA people come along and say they are going to solve migration. I did not think much about migration before, but I read all these memes. Every time I turn on my computer, or turn on Fox News, I read terrible things. People from Haiti eating pets. My cat went missing. I want it to end. I want to be right. And here are people promising to make it right. This guy Trump turns my mind. He is turning around in my mind. But he promises to make it right. So I fall for it. I fall into it. I do not know what to think. My mind is turning. Notice the two sounds. Turning, Tr-. Its reversal, Rt-. Turning, right. What a sound-meaning bundle is The sound is Tr- and Rt-. But a meaning travels with those sounds. Underneath the words you and I speak there are families of sound that carry a meaning with them. Nobody teaches us these families. We never even notice them. They behave lawfully all the same. And they can now be measured. The first one I found is the M-N- sound. It is in Mana, mind, moon, month, man, name, which is the reversal, N-M-, and meaning. The same two consonants, in language after language, from Ireland to India, on the same cluster of ideas. In all of them is the idea of something shining through something else. The meaning of a word shines through the word. In a human there is something that marks it off from a stone. We call it the life force, or Mana, or energy, qi or ki. In the mind, the same idea. In the moon, the light shining through. The dictionaries file those words, mind, moon, month, man, name, under four separate ancestors, and call the shared sound shape of M-N- an accident. I had a hypothesis that maybe they emanate from one root. So I put it to a test. I used the NorthEuraLex database, a public one of 107 languages, organised by meaning and never by sound. That is what I mean by a sound-meaning bundle. On it the M-N- sound keeps company with the field of mind, moon, month, name and meaning at a rate of 20.8 per cent. You look at the 107 languages. You look at all the words for mind, moon, measure, month, man, name and meaning. In the Indo-European subset, 20.8 per cent of them carry the M-N- sound. The rate for the language as a whole is 3.46 per cent. Choose any two consonants and any six fields of meaning, and the average is 3.46 per cent. So a word on the field of mind and measure and moon and meaning is eight times more likely to carry the M-N- sound than a word taken at random. The chance of that being a coincidence is one in a number with sixty-six digits after it. The frame came first of 182 frames tested. That work is the project I call Reversion to the Moon. I use Mana, the idea of energy inside memes, to distinguish positive from negative trolling. So it feeds into this project, and it is where the method was built. The moon, mēnōt, the word the proto-Indo-Europeans used for it, and what I call the moon-based metaphor, light shining through the moon, is my hypothesis about why the first Indo-Europeans embedded the bundle. By chance at first, and thereafter by convention. By sound-meaning bundle, then, I mean not
Oct 15

Podcast | Real Ukraine, Future russia, and Tools Three and Four

This week brings a little more of Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut, and a bit of the principles of Infolklore. It also brings the end of Future russia, Real Ukraine. Or, as I now call it, Real Ukraine, future russia, with a small r. President Zelenskyy is playing a blinder My view is that President Zelenskyy is playing a blinder, as the English would say. He has been dealt quite a bad hand over the last few weeks. We are going through one of those cycles we have all been through many times before. He has flushed out Donald and Putler by offering this ceasefire. He knows, of course, it will never be taken up. So it is a safe offer. He also knows that no action he takes, or Ukraine takes, will help get aid from the United States and from Donald. So he models peacefulness and a wish to make a deal. It will not help with America. But it builds capital for after the midterms, and for the long term. I see him trolling America, Donald and russia along. He knows well what Donald and the people around him do not seem to understand, or do not care to, because of whatever compromise is going on. The more you offer peace to the russians, the more they think you are weak. That goes for Donald too. So they think Ukraine and America are very weak. Constitutionally, peace is almost impossible for them. Remember Lavrov’s and Peskov’s words this week: no, we will not take a break. So it is very easy to troll the russians. Reflexive control works very well on this front. I focus on the front. What may be happening east of the Donets River is a very important milestone in Ukraine’s battlefield success. The mid-range strikes go on. There are these Academy Award-winning strikes on the data centres, and now Sberbank’s, which is a beautiful hit. When I was a diplomat in Dnipro, I went to see the board of PrivatBank when the state took it over. We talked about the vulnerability of data centres. It never crossed my mind, as I sat in that room with the then CEO of PrivatBank, that Ukraine would one day destroy Sberbank’s new data centre. Let’s hope to see more of those. That is what I focus on, rather than all the Starlink noise. Real and future russia Real and future russia is my new analytical lens. I use it to look at any national or nationalist movement. Such a movement may define itself by looking backwards. But it must mainly define itself by looking forwards. In Ukraine’s case that means building a modern European state without corruption, along the lines the European Union models. It means a state brilliant at nurturing its children’s destinies, educating them properly, and turning out critically minded humans. It means looking away from the Soviet legacy. That is a movement all countries must go through, in my humble opinion, in varying degrees and at various times. Future russia, real russia, will be the russia around St Petersburg and Moscow, with a few forests around them and a population of perhaps 20 million. It has a good chance to be a good state. It has good universities, museums and human capital. It will have to pay its debts, as will all the other former Ruschist Federation countries. But whenever we hear any russian, with a small r, speak about the past, mining grievance, Peter the Great, any of that nonsense, past glories in any disguise, we know it is old russia speaking. Historical russia. That person must be given no power and no entitlement to control of the information space or of economic resources. That should be a condition of any economic aid from the European Union, China or any other great power. Talking about history and the past is a luxury. A country and a national culture can afford it when they are not murdering people by the million in pursuit of a historical goal that was untrue and never existed, instead of building a modern nation state. An apparent contradiction This is where I ended a couple of weeks ago. There may seem to be a contradiction here. My main intellectual project, as many of you know, is to re-centre Ukraine in the story of humanity over the past 6,000 years: of Indo-European linguistic, cultural, religious and human development. Yet I also hold an absolute ban on entertaining any historical russia. The Bolshoi, the ballet, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, all of that imperialist nonsense, however wonderful some of the art is, and however derivative of Western European art in many cases. Future russia is asked to leave its history alone and live on the map, within the borders it ends up with after its withdrawal from 100% of Ukraine. So why should Ukraine not do the same? Because re-centring Ukraine is not a claim on anyone’s land. It is a claim on our attention. The difference between the two is the difference between the historical lens and the real lens. Identity is wholly a function of stories The narrow version of the project affords Ukraine what every sovereign culture already has. Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 1 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 2 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 3 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 4 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 5 Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 6 In 1777 Johann Gottfried Herder asked where Germany’s Shakespeare was. As I have written, “The modern nation state was created after Herder’s 1777 plea to unite the 10 German tribes behind a set of stories (folklore or more accurately folksongs) typifying Germanness. The Brothers Grimm, Goethe and later Wagner answered that call. And 90 years later the first unified German state was created.” Identity is wholly a function of stories. Some of you will remember that I came to this realisation in eastern Ukraine. russia understands it too. That is why it is so brilliant at Disinfolklore, and why Donald is. Disinfolklore also creates identity, by telling mean stories and injecting meanness into our minds. It creates just as strong a sense of identity as the positive stories do. Think of Greece. We think of Athens and ancient Athens. But the first capital of modern Greece was not Athens. Choosing Athens was a way to attach some of that ancientness to the modern state of Greece, a wholly new, invented country, like Germany, like Switzerland, like Belgium. And this week we saw Rubio, the complete ingénue, in front of the Acropolis, talking about Western civilisation, or values he learned as an undergraduate, probably when Huntington was all the rage. It was such an embarrassment. Huntington took a whole set of Indo-European cultures and chose Islam as his main dividing line. Given what I have looked into of ancient Iran, and since it was ancient Iranian scholars who largely systematised Islam, I see Islam as an Indo-European religion, as I see Christianity. By making their war in Iran, they are doing what Huntington asked of them. But for him to stand before the Acropolis banging on about this is just so embarrassing. If you saw any of his speech, he is probably the worst orator ever. He has absolutely no sense of pace, for such a portentous speech meant to lead into his presidential ambitions. That is, if he is not in The Hague, or in prison, guilty of war crimes. My point is this. We know all about ancient Greek. But the modern Greek state is related to it only through stories, and by having its capital at Athens. It is the same with Germany, and with Italy, also a fairly recent state, from around 1870. The collectors and the states they made The same work made most of the states we now take for granted. “You see most European states alive today are a function of the national consciousness wrought from the folklore collectors’ work, inspired by Ossian, Herder and Brothers Grimm,” I wrote in November 2024. The Ossian tales turned out, in the end, to be faked. “States which had never existed before - Greece, Finland, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Belgium,.. were all created out of this work.” All of us who take part in the national cultures of the states we belong to have won the lottery in many ways. Others have not. The Assyrians, the Kurds, the Palestinians. Tens of thousands of amazing cultures and peoples never made it. Then there are the Manchu, who ruled China for centuries. Around 1911 they lost power in a revolution. Today you would be lucky to find more than a handful of people who identify as Manchu. Great cultures disappear all the time. They lose control of the states they ran. I believe this is what will happen to russia. It will be well deserved. They should not regret it or be afraid of it, because it has happened countless times before. It does not involve mass death. It involves new memories. Take Vilnius. Polish schoolchildren still learn Pan Tadeusz, Mickiewicz’s poem that opens with Lithuania, and Vilnius was long thought of as a Polish city. But Vilnius is in Lithuania. Short of the Law and Justice party going in to take it back, nobody talks of this as a problem. It is a perfectly normal development in human relations. So russians should not be afraid of their country disappearing in that way. Ukraine is one of those states. Its songs and its poets, Taras Shevchenko first among them, made a nation of a people the empire called a province. As Timothy Snyder has written, “The earliest articulation of Ukrainian patriotism by russian subjects came from the left bank, from the new university at Kharkiv, in the 1820s and 1830s.” russia is relentlessly trying to destroy that city today. In August 2022, as russia shelled Kharkiv, I wrote that by destroying the buildings of the university where the idea of modern Ukraine was born, Muscovy could not turn back time. It was too late. From the first days of the full-scale invasion, my mission was, in the words I used later, “to campaign for parity of esteem between Ukraine and other modern nation states which have won the monopoly, by fair means or foul.” There are only around 190 of us with a protected nation state. Ukraine was a founding member of the United Nations. It signed the C
Oct 1

Podcast | Disinfolklore Detector - Live Demo

A listener asked: “I’m definitely interested to hear more in detail about how you use AI.” This week’s work was precipitated by a new model, which Anthropic dropped last week. Opus 5.5 has, for reasons that will become clear, become a bit of a revolutionary model. By model I mean a neural network algorithm. I am describing the architecture and the algorithm behind what many of us see as a chatbot. But there is a different way to use the model behind the chatbot. You reach it through a part of the computer that those of us old enough will remember from the 1980s and MS-DOS. It involves all of these little instructions. On a Mac it’s called Terminal. It is a part of our computer which is there, and which most of us never go to. It lets us reach these models in a way you cannot easily reach them through a chatbot. Some of you will also remember that I have been going through the principles of Infolklore. I use many words from the transcripts of Volya, and I am trying to derive the principles of Infolklore from the way many of us present on Volya. Last week’s episode carried the latest of them. The Meta Main Game The aim of all of my work is what I call the Meta Main Game. Within about ten years, the assisted cognition we already experience is likely to be mainstreamed directly inside our minds. We experience it now by interfacing with the internet, through chatbots, through web browsers, through this very app. Whether that is done through connectors implanted in us or through light, I don’t know. Obviously Facebook and Elmo are working on implants. I am agnostic about whatever technology is used. I hope it isn’t done through implants, because I think that’s pretty gross. My goal is to prepare for that moment. I want to prepare a module that an interpreter of sensory data will use, through assisted cognition, to determine quickly whether the data she is encountering is Disinfolklore, Infolklore or Neutral. It should work for humans or for computers. So it is an intermediary through which data streams. It lets us make decisions very quickly in the face of what I expect to be ever-accelerating vectors of information and sensory data. By sensory data I mean not just text, and not just music. I mean everything we encounter in our reality, including conversations, what people are telling us, and what we are feeling. Disinfolklore, as we know, is folklore-like story weaponised to inject lies, exploitative mental models and coercive control into minds. Infolklore is its positive twin. Its divine twin, if you like. The same archetypal forms, used to protect communities and rebuild shared understanding. Neutral is neither. It is a menu. It is an account of something that has no archetypal content. There is nothing good about it and nothing bad about it. It is just sensory data. So the detector I am working towards must be able to tell these three types apart. The Disinfolklore Detector is the Meta Main Game’s first working form, and I am building it now. This case records one week of that building. In this week a cheaper, much more efficient model let me run many different operations at once, as simultaneous conversations with the machine. Each of these operations has its own window on one state-of-the-art Mac. One window, the operator, keeps the others and the long-running jobs in order. Visualise a big screen, or several screens. Each has one of these MS-DOS-like windows open in it. The one in the top left-hand corner is the operator, which helps organise all the others. Two latent dreams Two latent dreams lie behind all of my work, and behind my work this week. One is a question I asked in the London law firms where I worked in the early 2000s. The other is what I conceived at a conference on artificial neural networks in Long Beach, California, in December 2017. That is where the Meta Main Game began. Both needed people and resources, compute and money, ideas and technical capacities which I did not have. The first needed a firm’s worth of them. The second needed someone who could help build and train a neural network. Now the machine I have available to me can be directed in plain spoken and written English. All it takes from me is a clear mind, one that can keep hold of all of these different vectors, all of these different aspects of the project. So this week’s lesson is really about that mind. Multiplying the conversations drew me back into the loop, the place of the person who checks and steers what an automated system does. There the work was plain. I was keeping thirteen windows in step, 24/7. Fifty-eight of my messages to those windows that week were the same instruction: just carry on. The operator window took that work over, a step at a time, as I taught it to report in terms I can see. Window titles, and a list of what to type where. What stayed mine were the rulings on meaning, the permissions and the signatures. The case closes where the Meta Main Game began, in Luhansk and Long Beach in December 2017. It closes on the open question of whether I can, in fact, build this. What I am building The Meta Main Game is a means of assisted cognition. On 14 July I put it like this: “In the vision I have for the Meta Main Game, in, say, ten years, humans will have the capacity to add on cognitive modules, which will immediately enable them to see” in different ways. They will filter data in ways not available to us today. Those ways may not even be necessary for us today, but may well be necessary in ten years’ time. Seeing through these modules is not just about reading. The module is meant to work on all sensory data: what we read, hear and see. At this point it is a hypothesis. It is an idea to work towards. Three kinds of work feed it. The main one is Automating Disinfolklore. The second is what I call Cryptotypic Engineering. The third I deal with mainly in my Power of Mana work, at PowerofMana.net: the Reversion to the M-N- sound. That is the linguistics and the meaning work. I draw on it whenever I talk about Mana. The engine of Automating Disinfolklore is a large language model that runs on a state-of-the-art Mac. The model I am running at the moment is a Meta model, Glimmer, released a few weeks ago. The work I do will be adaptable to whichever locally hosted large language models come along. Glimmer reads a text under one codebook, the written rules for every verdict, and one brief, the instructions it is given for each reading. It judges what it reads with the Code of Positive Trolls: Generosity, Ethical Discipline, Patience, Perseverance, Focus and Insight. Those are the criteria. If a text conforms to those six, it is Infolklore. If it violates any of them, it is Disinfolklore. If it triggers none of them, there is no archetypal content. It is just talking about the weather. Not the weather in a Jane Austen novel. Just the weather. There might be symbolic content there, but generally speaking there isn’t. My rulings on real texts are the standard Glimmer is measured against. So I am teaching it to perceive reality like me. Mine is the only ruling. Two bodies of Infolklore The engine learns first on two bodies of Infolklore, about 47 million words in all. One is a spoken reservoir, which we know about. It is an archive of broadcasts in natural spoken English by native English speakers. This show is among them. The other is an archive of two Ukrainian newsrooms writing in russian, in the form of the structured article. Later it will meet Disinfolklore at scale, in an archive of about 290 million texts from state influence operations around the globe, from war bloggers and from fringe platforms. Dravidian, Hindi, Chinese, russian, MAGA. The engine reaches people first through the Disinfolklore Detector. It is planned in five stages, from a page on my Mac, for me alone, to a tool that other people’s AI agents and AI assistants can consult. The Muse in your postbox Some of you might have seen that Meta made a big play in the last week by releasing Muse. Basically, you allow Muse to run free in your computer. Say you mention to your husband or your daughter, “Oh, it’s Peter’s birthday next week. God, I must order that ice cream cake.” The next morning an ice cream cake arrives through your postbox. Muse has done that, because you gave it the right to all of your credit cards and access to all of your devices. It is making your life less complicated. In return, Meta gets access not just to your posts on Facebook but to every single aspect of your life. That is the reality we are already embroiled in. This case is one week of preparing for the moment when billions of people have these agents running around their lives and their computers, to one degree or another. What was happening that week In this week the engine’s verdict rule was about to be tested against my judgement. The verdict rule is the way it weighs the six elements of the Code into one verdict. A library of very old texts, which the project reads for archetypes, recurring patterns of story and figure, was being read again. The codebook was being revised. So were the principles of Infolklore, which describe how the two bodies honour the Code and which I draw on in my writing. The detector’s first stage was built during the week. Much of it was running at once for the first time. The law firm and Long Beach In the early 2000s I worked in various law firms in central London. I sometimes wondered what would happen if all of these resources were dedicated to pushing the bounds of human knowledge rather than protecting the legal order. Hundreds of lawyers. Over a thousand employees. In December 2017 I travelled to the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, NIPS, in Long Beach, California. I was working then as a diplomat in russia-occupied Luhansk. At the same time I was trying to build an automatic means of interpreting satellite data into actionable intelligence. It was my entrepreneurship pr
Aug 13

Podcast | The Economist Gets Trolled

As in all my work, I’m both working through these contemporaneous examples of writing and Ruschist Disinfolklore in order to apply and fine-tune the method, but I’m also hoping to then communicate some of the power of the method, which is the twelve-tool way, available at disinfolklore.eu. Midnight Tea at the Kremlin So the clock on the Kremlin tower had already struck midnight on the 28th of May 2025 when Andrey Melnichenko was finally summoned. Vladimir Putin greeted his guest, invited him to sit beside him, and offered him tea. Move closer, Andrey, Putler said kindly. A red folder lay in front of the president. Melnichenko guessed it was his own security service dossier. Is someone bothering you? Putler asked, with care. Melnichenko told the president that the mistake of russia’s business elite had been to separate their fate from the fate of russia. He thanked the russian dictator for helping him see the light. Putler was pleased. For years he had warned the oligarchs that they were not truly welcome in the West. Now one of the foremost among them had admitted that Putler was right. The audience lasted over an hour. The scene is not mine. It is the opening scene of The Economist’s own profile of Melnichenko, published on the 9th of July 2026 in 1843, the paper’s long-read magazine, named for the year of its founding. The headline: a top russian oligarch breaks the silence. Why 1843 Matters in My Oeuvre Some of you who have been following my work since the beginning of the full-scale invasion might recognise the significance of 1843 in my oeuvre. One of my first posts on Twitter regarding russia was on the 4th of March 2022, when I was still employed as a diplomat for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. And I had, several years before, gone through all the documents I could find relating to the first Crimean War, to try to understand if it would give any insights into the current, the second Crimean War. And I found this amazing Economist article, which I then wrote about, in which it describes the perennial problems of the russian army. And you won’t be surprised to know they are exactly the same problems that we see today. Not only that, but even by the 4th of March 2022, it was clear, in the space of less than a week, that the perennial problems of the russian army were still the ones that had afflicted it in 1853 — sorry, I’m muddling my dates; it was 1853 — and that afflict it today. So much so that the Washington Post saw my post, and Max Boot did an editorial based on it, basically saying the russian army hasn’t changed at all since the first Crimean War. So, to see this puff piece for a Ruschist. So: a man takes tea with the Tsar at midnight. He recants his Western life to the Tsar’s face. He is shown the folder that owns him. Ten months later, he breaks the silence in the West’s most trusted liberal weekly, while living in Moscow, unarrested, his factories defended by the russian army. The silence was not broken. It was commissioned. One Package, Two Vessels The Economist didn’t publish one piece that week. It published two. The profile — 37 minutes of reading, built on 60 hours of granted conversation — tells us who the man is. And beside it, under the paper’s By Invitation rubric, the man’s own manifesto: why a broken russia is bad for the world. The paper’s standfirst, the line under the headline that tells you what to think before you read, asserts his conclusion as if it were the weather: when the war in Ukraine ends, Moscow will need to be part of the new security architecture. The two vessels carry one payload. The profile manufactures the character — the physicist, the outsider, the chaos theorist, the man who avoids ideological and moral judgments. The manifesto then delivers the policy: stop pressuring russia, accept its sovereignty over everyone, and let its elites design what comes next. Character first, payload second. This is how you serve a troll to readers who think themselves too clever to be trolled. I spent years inside russia-occupied Ukraine from February 2015, watching how this machinery works on ordinary minds. I called what I found Disinfolklore: the narrative form in which meanness is communicated directly into people’s minds, working on their intentions, their attitudes and their moods, without their even knowing. The Melnichenko package is Disinfolklore of the highest grade. It is also 200 years old. That’s the point of this mission: the same families of Chekists and KGB men have been in charge of russia for 200 years. Same genes, same memes — communism, empire, Russkiy Mir. Old wine, new bottles. The Manifesto: A War With No Actors The payload sits in the manifesto, so the manifesto comes first. It runs to some two and a half thousand words about the war in Ukraine. The word invasion appears nowhere in it. The name Putler appears nowhere in it. Bucha, nowhere. Mariupol, nowhere. The tens of thousands of Ukrainian children russia has abducted appear nowhere. A russian industrialist writes two and a half thousand words about this war for a Western audience, and the man who ordered it, and the people it is murdering, never come up. Instead, the war has weather for causes. Great wars do not begin when the first shots are fired, the essay opens portentously. The front line is merely the point where accumulated pressure breaks through to the surface. Pressure accumulates. Bonds break. Politics does not direct events; it is led by them. Nobody decided anything. Nobody loaded the missile that hit the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv. Physics did it. When the essay finally gives the war a verb, the verb has been chosen with jeweller’s care. In 2014, after what it calls the political upheaval in Ukraine — meaning the revolution in which Ukrainians died for the European future their president had stolen from them — russia concluded that democracy had run its course, and then acted: first in Crimea, then, eight years later, across four eastern and southern Ukrainian regions. Acted. The largest invasion of a European country since 1945, the flattened cities, the eviscerated humans, the torture basements of Kherson and Izium, the filtration camps. Acted. Then the single most revealing word in the whole document. The West’s support for Ukraine, the essay complains, is really a war on russia in which, geographically, the fighting stays on Ukrainian soil. Formally, Ukrainians do the fighting. Formally? Twelve letters that erase a nation. Ukrainians are not, in this man’s account, defending their children from a neighbour who has come to murder them. They are a formality through which the West conducts its pressure. And when the essay concedes in one sentence that Ukrainian sovereignty is real, the next sentence takes it back: Ukraine’s security, built on the permanent negation of russia’s sovereign agency, is equally unstable. In this grammar, Ukraine defending itself is an act of aggression against Ukraine. The Menu of Four Futures The essay’s core is a menu for genocide. It’s a menu of four futures for russia, and the menu is the message. Future one: a russia brought in from the cold but treated as a defeated power. That, we are told, breeds aggressive revanchism. And here comes the century-old chestnut, produced on schedule: Versailles was not the creation of order, but the accumulation of deferred energy. Mana, you might say. Punish us and you manufacture the next Hitler. Future two: russia as China’s vassal. Future three: russia fragments, and a fragmented country with a nuclear arsenal is America’s worst nightmare. Future four: russia as a fortress — North Korea. The Economist’s profile adds a detail the manifesto omits: this fourth scenario is promoted by the security services and subject to serious discussion in the Kremlin. That admission tells us the author knows the security services’ internal menu. The paper does not ask how he knows it. Then the punchline. The forms are different; the systemic result is the same. Every path except one leads to catastrophe for us. The one safe path is his: lift the pressure, accept sovereign rights, let its elites — its oligarchy, in the classical sense of the word — design the future, and ask no questions from outside. Because how russia conducts its own political process can be resolved only inside russia itself. No tribunal, no reparations, no returned children. This must be accepted. There is a name for an argument whose every branch ends in your ruin unless you pay. It’s a protection racket. Nice civilisation you have there, mate. Shame if something happened to it. The Nuclear Wrapper, and Moscow’s Three Demands The nuclear payload is delivered in the same style, dressed as concern: pushed too hard, and nuclear weapons become the background radiation of constant risk. The profile carries the same threat in the same wrapper: he does not rule out the use of nuclear weapons; that is an outcome he is desperate to avoid. The mafia lawyer is always desperate to avoid the outcome he’s just described to you in detail. And in the middle of the racket, printed by The Economist itself without a word of challenge, sit Moscow’s actual demands, presented as moderation because they have narrowed to three: recognition of the territories russia now claims under its constitution; legal protections of russian-speaking populations; and a formal commitment to Ukrainian neutrality. The first demand means the legal surrender of Crimea and four Ukrainian regions, including land russia has never actually managed to occupy. The second re-arms the exact pretext on which the invasion was launched. The third disarms the victim. These are the maximal war aims of February 2022, relabelled as a compromise in the West’s most respected weekly. The Factory: From the Third Section to Operation Trust Nothing above is new. russia’s opposition is a state
Aug 1

Podcast | Crossing at Ceuta

This week, the bridge troll went to Africa. I want to talk about Ceuta, and I want to use what happened there to show how a migration crisis hacks our minds. Everything I learned on a wooden bridge in eastern Ukraine between 2015 and 2018 played out this week on a breakwater at the edge of Africa, on a scale I’ve not seen in all my years watching such crossings. 50,000 at the Fence Ceuta is a Spanish city on the African shore of the Strait of Gibraltar. It has been Spanish for centuries — longer than the United States has existed. About 83,000 people live there. On the land side it is bordered by Morocco, an ally of russia, and the border is a double fence that runs down into the sea at a breakwater called the Tarajal. On Thursday the 30th of July, the border effectively stopped existing. Spain’s government counted roughly 50,000 people entering in about a day. The president of the city said 60,000. Take the lower number: it is seven in ten of the city’s population arriving in 24 hours. At least 57 human beings died doing it — most drowned, some crushed in a stampede at the breakwater. They were mostly young Moroccan men, with Algerians among them, and a great many unaccompanied children. Footage from the Tarajal shows young men wading ashore chanting Viva España. Another chant was simpler: Bye Bye Morocco, Hello Spain. Ten days earlier there was a trickle. Between 1,500 and 2,000 people had come across since early July, after Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that people who arrive by sea cannot be summarily pushed back. The ruling itself is a humane one — a court applying the post-World War II Refugee Convention, under which the right to seek asylum is sacrosanct. What was done with it was not humane. The Prime Minister says a self-serving interpretation of the ruling spread like wildfire through the smuggling networks. The gangs sold desperate people a rumour about an open door and marched them to the water. And 57 of them died in it. Whatever else turns out to be true about this week, that part alone convicts the people who organised the march. But it’s not the whole story. A rumour does not cross a militarised border by itself. Someone has to hold the gate open. The Goats Are the Original Migrants Longtime listeners know where I learned to read a crossing. Between 2015 and 2018 I was a peacekeeping diplomat on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska, then the only legal crossing point between russia-occupied Luhansk and the rest of Ukraine. In the counter-Disinfolklore manuscript, I called the armed men on the occupied bank what they were: armed Ruschist bridge trolls. My job was negotiating with them. The oldest troll story in our culture is Three Billy Goats Gruff. Three goats cross a bridge to reach new pasture, and under the bridge lives a troll who demands a toll. When I finally read that tale as an adult, standing where I stood, I saw what had been hiding in it all along. The goats are the original migrants — economic migrants. They just want a bit of extra food on the other side of the water. And the troll is the figure our stories have taught us to accept at every crossing since. He does not build the bridge. He does not own the river. He controls the one narrow place where you have to cross. And from that one place he controls the story of who you are when you cross it. Refugee or invader, returnee or criminal — you do not get to say; the one at the crossing says it. In the manuscript I put the whole engine of Disinfolklore in one sentence, and I’ll read it to you as I wrote it: stories that embed an inner- and outer-realm division in our minds, with invaders from the outer realm said to be threatening the sovereignty, security, and the prosperity — fertility — of our inner realm. That is the machine. Stories. That is the whole machine. Every migration panic you have ever been fed is that machine running. And I wrote one more sentence you should keep in your pocket this week: it is a story structure that becomes a cognitive structure. The border on the map gets built in your head, and then someone else decides who stands on which side of it. So when 50,000 people appear at a fence in a single day, the Disinfolklore analyst does not start by asking what the crossers wanted — 50,000 individual wants as old as our species: food, safety, a future. The analyst asks the bridge-troll questions. Who controls the crossing? Who opened it? And who profits from the queue? The Receipts from the Gate Start with who opened it, because there the record is rich. Spanish officers who stood at the fence say the Moroccan gendarmes opposite them stayed passive while tens of thousands walked past. The Spanish police unions went further — and I quote them as unions, rather than as the government, because the government says the opposite. JUPOL called it a window of opportunity inside a strategy of hybrid war. JUCIL called it an orchestrated invasion. Crossers told reporters they had been encouraged to go. Morocco’s ambassador to Spain says the whole thing unfolded against Morocco’s wishes — Morocco, which I remind you is an ally of russia. And Madrid publicly praises Rabat’s loyal cooperation, while quietly returning people across the border at a reported 150 people a minute. By Friday evening, more than 48,000 of the 50,000 were back in Morocco. So the official story on both shores is that nobody opened anything. The Precedent: May 2021 Now the precedent. In May 2021, the same fence fell open the same way. Around 8,000 people crossed into Ceuta in 48 hours — over 1,000 of them children (the mother and the maiden archetype: children) — after Spain quietly gave hospital treatment to the leader of the Polisario Front, the movement that contests Morocco’s hold on Western Sahara. The Moroccan police — and I remind you, Morocco is an ally of russia — showed what Spanish officers then called unusual passivity. Morocco, an ally of russia, explained that its border guards were exhausted after Ramadan. Wow. A month earlier, Morocco’s ambassador had said in public that there are acts that have consequences, and they have to be assumed. The European Parliament called that episode what it was: the use of migration, including children — the mother and the maiden archetype — as political pressure on a European state. Spain’s own defence minister used a plainer word: blackmail. And here is why the precedent matters more than any denial: the lever worked. Within a year of those 8,000 crossings, Spain reversed half a century of policy on Western Sahara and backed Morocco’s plan. Algeria broke off relations with Madrid over it. Every state on that shore learned the lesson the same week we did: the queue moves Spanish policy. One more dated fact, and then you can weigh it for yourself. On the 20th of July this year, Sánchez went to Algiers to repair relations with Algeria, which is Morocco’s adversary. Ten days later, on Throne Day, Morocco’s national holiday, the fence fell open. The same ambassador who said acts have consequences in 2021 was the one issuing the denial this week. The Spanish foreign ministry formally rejects any talk of retaliation. The denials are on the record. So is the calendar. The Angriest Man in the World Has a Friend at the Gate Now widen the lens, because the question this week is not about Morocco alone. Two great powers stood to gain from a broken fence at Ceuta, and I want to walk you through what each of them actually did — dated and quoted — before I tell you what I contend. Let’s start with Donald. His war on Spain has run for over a year, and it’s all on camera. June 2025, at the NATO summit, after Spain alone refused the new five-percent military spending target — a troll which Donald uses to try and coerce Europe into acceding to his blackmail on all policy issues: “Spain wants a little bit of a free ride. We’re going to make them pay twice as much, and I’m actually serious about it.” October 2025: “Maybe you should throw them out of NATO, frankly.” Then came a second war on Iran, launched in February of this year — the war Spain’s defence minister, Margarita Robles, called profoundly illegal and profoundly unjust. Spain refused him everything. No assistance of any kind, she said. Absolutely none. And Madrid meant it: every flight plan connected to the Iran operation was rejected — Spanish airspace, American aircraft turned back. Donald’s answers came in real time. Spain is terrible. And let’s remember: Spain is adhering to the post-World War II legal order in this matter. The UN Charter, which the United States is a party to, determines that the only lawful use of force is either Article 51, in response to an invasion — which is why Ukraine can do anything it needs to do to defend itself under Article 51, within the constraints of European and international law and the laws of war — or where the Security Council so determines. And there is no such mandate from the UN Security Council for Donald’s unlawful war against Iran. So Spain is enforcing international law in this matter. Now the other side of the same ledger: Morocco is washing in gifts. Donald recognised Morocco’s claim over Western Sahara back in 2020, as the price of Morocco joining the Abraham Accords. Last October, his administration sponsored a Security Council resolution that made Morocco’s plan the basis of everything. There are $8.5 billion of active American arms sales to Rabat — good luck with that, Morocco — and a 10-year defence roadmap signed this spring, and a military build-up that the Spanish press writes worries Spain. And in the very week of the crossings, Donald announced on his own network that Morocco is naming a 1,000-kilometre highway through Western Sahara after him. The angriest man in the world spent a year promising to punish Spain, and the man who holds the gate to Spain’s African city spent the same year being pai
Aug 20

Podcast | What is Infolklore?

The Poison and the Antidote The poison was never hard to find. The poison finds you. Turn on anything russian and it arrives by the tanker load, free of charge, around the clock. What took months to find was the other thing: the antidote. Here is what I published on the 22nd of July this year, in a Substack piece called It’s Amazing What Regular People Can Do. One challenge sits under everything: we are swimming in Disinfolklore. Infolklore is scarce. Two coined words in that quote. Disinfolklore is my name for folklore-like information told with meanness — stories built to bend our moods and our intentions, our attitudes and emotions. Infolklore is the positive kind: true stories, told with generosity, told by someone with real stakes in a real problem. The first kind, Disinfolklore, is an ocean, and we all swim in it every day, and it’s what motivates all my work. Because we swim in this ocean, I decided to try and work out what this ocean consists of. The second kind turned out to be scarce, almost to vanishing. This episode and this mini-series is the story of the search for it — the search for Infolklore. Months and months and months of failure. The best-loved books in the English language going into a machine, one after another, and coming back stamped: no. Automating Disinfolklore And for those who haven’t been listening: what I’ve been working on since January is actualising my long-held plan, which is to automate Disinfolklore detection — and, in our detection, to create an automatic engine that will enable us, in times to come, to plug in a module the way today we may surf the web or look at ChatGPT. In the future we will have cognitive modules. And what I’m trying to build is for the… So that when we are confronted with the vast amounts of information, and information flows that continue to increase, we will have a means of interpreting it really quickly — as quickly as we really need to. And so I call that cryptotypic engineering, or Automating Disinfolklore. So, my attempts to build this machine. I started off with the 10,000 propaganda items that I collected and hand-coded in Luhansk, which I talk about a lot, back in 2015. And so for much of the year I’ve been teaching a machine to tell the two kinds apart. Where the search ended was really not in any library on earth. And I went through so many texts and types of narrative, from EUvsDisinfo to war college reports to all kinds of different narrative forms. And the search ended, really, in this room, with Volia Radio. And it ended with you. With us. And this whole mini-series is our own practice — but I’m just a bit part in this, with just this short time once a week. The whole series is Volia’s own practice, read back to us as principles. And this first episode is how I came to be reading the Volia Radio transcripts. Great thanks to all at Volya Radio for their great support of my work over the years! Teaching a Machine the Two Kinds So for much of this year I have been teaching a machine to tell the two kinds apart: Disinfolklore, Infolklore and neutral. A frontier model — one of the big AI systems, the kind that can read a whole archive before breakfast. And you teach it by feeding it specimens. What I’m doing is creating training pairs for a locally held large language model. Well — not, I mean, it’s locally held, but it’s held in a data centre somewhere; but it’s proprietary. And here is the real Disinfolklore, and you learn its smell — which I first scented when I was in russia-occupied Luhansk in 2015 — and real Infolklore, teaching the computer to learn the smell of it, the scent. And half of the job has been relatively easy, in the sense that I’ve managed to gather together a corpus of hundreds of millions of artefacts in Ukrainian, russian, Chinese: hundreds of millions in each of these languages, and in Hindi, in Dravidian languages, in MAGA language. So that gathering together, that corpus, was relatively easy — the easy half. The graph tells us something about the world we live in, which won’t be a surprise to any of us on Volia Radio, but it also tells us about my motivation in all of this work, which is to try and do something active about it. And I’ve been on this task in various forms since 2015, as I gradually worked out what was going on. And here is how I described the task to you last month. Finding real Disinfolklore to train on is easy — everything we hear from Strelkov will do. We’re going to kill you all. Basically. Finding clean Infolklore turned out to be the hard part. I’ve spent months feeding every kind of text to the frontier model I work with. Sherlock Holmes; even — maybe Ming will appreciate this — P.G. Wodehouse. None of it passes muster. The Reject Pile Wodehouse had company in the reject pile. Sherlock Holmes went in, failed. War college reports went in, failed. The Battle for Kyiv study — which I’ll get to in my Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut report — towards the end, the Battle for Kyiv study done by John Spencer, a friend of the channel, did go in. And that was really my only piece of archetypal Infolklore: a serious piece of military analysis, by serious people, about the defence of the capital. But what I’m trying to do is build a system that will recognise the archetypal content in any sized lexical unit. And so it needs to be really flexible, and needs to be able to be trained on lexical units which aren’t all in the same format. So that particular war college report gave me a lot of hope — but then I tried others, and it just didn’t work. The EUvsDisinfo stuff didn’t really work. And for the same reason that an academic from the information school in Melbourne found that fact-checking doesn’t work: because it’s a different narrative form. You have to counter magic with magic. So if Disinfolklore manages to meld itself into our minds and alter our intentions and our moods, our attitudes and our motivations, through a means that most of us don’t really understand or can’t detect in real time, then Infolklore — which is a creative practice rather than a countering practice — has to do the same thing. And fact-checking just doesn’t do it. So there’s a lot of value in EUvsDisinfo’s work; it’s the format it presents. And so my own witness writing went in. It failed too. And it failed in its own particular way. The person who named the framework — me — cannot be its neutral witness. And so, I built the instrument; I cannot also be the specimen that calibrates it. There I sat, month after month: a machine hungry for the positive kind, and a whole civilisation of shelves unable to feed it. Conan Doyle could not feed it. The finest comic novelist in the English language, P.G. Wodehouse, could not feed it. The war colleges of two continents could not feed it. And I could not feed it myself. The Wodehouse Failure The Wodehouse failure deserves its own telling. And for those who aren’t familiar with P.G. Wodehouse, he wrote about a hundred — 110 — about the relationship between Jeeves and Wooster: a slave owner, or rather a gentleman, and his servant. And it came closest of anything. And the way it fell short taught me, really, what Infolklore actually is, in some respects. On the 19th of May I proposed to the frontier model the Jeeves and Wooster series as a training corpus for the positive kind, for Infolklore. I was confident that if any books in the English language were going to pass, it would be these sunlit, kindly, perfect books. And the adjudication that came back was, on its face, glowing. Jeeves is archetypally saturated: he’s the trickster servant, the clever slave of Roman new comedy, a figure the stage has carried for more than 2,000 years, still quietly running his master’s life. Bertie Wooster is the holy fool, the indulged innocent, whom the plot punishes and protects in equal measure. When I say archetypally saturated, I mean the stories are full of the old shapes — characters folklore has kept alive for millennia because they do something for us. And on the Code of Positive Trolls, Wodehouse passes everything: generous on every page, patient, non-coercive. Nobody in those books is ever mean to anybody. Temperamentally, Wodehouse is the exact opposite of Disinfolklore. Yet still, it had to be turned away. And I felt this refusal personally. Those books have been friends of mine for decades. I turn to them in times of stress and difficulty because they’re so light, they’re so easy to read, they’re so pleasant, they’re so joyful. But the machine had a reason, and the reason was right. One leg was missing: real stakes. Nothing in Wodehouse refers to a real problem in the real world. Nobody in the Drones Club is under fire. Aunt Agatha, terror that she is, never shelled a city. The stories are true to human nature, and true to nothing that is actually happening to anyone in the real world. That near miss sharpened the definition. And here it is, the finding that the whole season, the whole search, paid for. Infolklore must be true. It must be soaked in the old story shapes. And it must be told by someone with real stakes in a real problem. All three legs, no exceptions — not even for Jeeves. Lexical Units, and the Twelve Tools Those of you who are interested in the Disinfolklore analytical method can look at disinfolklore.eu, my main site. The twelve tools, the twelve-tool way, goes into detail there on each of the different elements in the Disinfolklore analytical method. And that is essentially what I’m looking for in lexical units. When I say lexical unit, I mean a sentence, a word, of any size — and it could be a 20,000-page article, or a one-page article. What I’m building must work, must be sensitive enough to work on every kind of lexical unit, and indeed on images themselves. So that’s the goal I’ve set myself, and it may take me years. The Code of Positive T
Aug 27

Podcast | Volya’s Nest and Counter Disinformation System Development in Ukraine

Principles of Infolklore, Ep 2: Volya’s Nest The Most Valuable Position in the Room Two hours and forty minutes into my own show, this past February. Decoding Disinfolklore on Volya Radio, the Wednesday slot this station gives me. Ioana, who co-hosts the news shows with Will, had been put to work. She had been asked for her articles, and she delivered: “I posted the links to, I believe, seven of my articles in the commentaries.” The commentaries. The comments. Not the nest. And then she said why: “Let’s keep the nest on Ukraine. So I’m quite okay if people look in the comments, they will see that.” For anyone new here, the nest is the pinned stack at the top of a live room on X, where the receipts go. A host reads a story out, finishes with it, and posts the source above the room, so anyone can retrace the segment, item by item. And what Ioana did that night is the nest’s constitution, spoken in one breath. Her seven articles went into the comments. The nest is kept for Ukraine’s evidence. The most valuable position in the Volya room is reserved, and not for the people who run the room. I have now counted the nest through every broadcast this station has ever made. It is spoken of 8,558 times, across 1,060 of the 1,121 episodes in the archive. That is nineteen broadcasts in every twenty. Not a feature. A constitution. The Name Came First This series flies under a banner, and you have seen it, because it rides at the foot of every post this series ships in. Let me define Infolklore for you. Infolklore is the active, conscious, Code-observant deployment of folklore-like archetypes. When I say Code-observant, I mean it observes the Code of Positive Trolls, which, as many of you know, I created in February 2020 and trademarked at the European Union Intellectual Property Office. The Code of Positive Trolls is six criteria: generosity, ethical discipline (or Right), patience, joyous perseverance (or Mana), focus and insight. Any meme, any lexical unit which I categorise as Infolklore, or which can be categorised as Infolklore by a large language model or automatically, must observe all or most of those elements in the Code. Infolklore is a first-order practice. I have now gone through the Volya Radio archive. Three thousand one hundred and ninety-five hours of it. Twenty-six million words. And in it I found the most amazing reservoir of Infolklore that exists on this earth. This series, which I began last week, is looking at how I parsed that data set for Infolklore. You will see that in my last podcast. So Infolklore creation is a first-order creative practice. It is not just counter-Disinfolklore. That is where I was three years ago, when I created the portmanteau Disinfolklore to describe what I had witnessed in russia-occupied Ukraine: stories which communicate a sense of meanness directly into our inner minds, using archetypes. That is Disinfolklore, and it is all around us. There is no shortage of it. I would not have bothered to create the creative practice of Infolklore if Disinfolklore were not affecting our world in so many different ways, whether it comes from russia or America or Brexit England. Disinfolklore is everywhere we look. It is pickling us in its nonsense and in its manipulations. So we not only need to learn how to identify it and understand how it works, which is part of my mission. We also need a means of countering it, in the sense of creating a world in which we are pickled in Infolklore instead. Infolklore is a first-order creative practice. Making the true stories, not just refuting the false ones. Those words were written before I had ever read a Volya transcript. And when they were written, the practice of creating Infolklore had exactly one validated specimen anywhere on earth: the Battle of Kyiv study I spoke about in the last episode. If you look back at my fourth-anniversary podcast for Volya, you will find it on Disinfolklore.net, where I post my podcasts every week. I also post weekly podcasts on PowerofMana.net, which is the Finding Manuland Atlas side of my work, the linguistics side. You cannot understand russian disinformation, or any form of disinformation, without looking into the linguistics that underpins it. russian disinfolklorists learn linguistics. In fact, linguistics graduates in russian universities study Disinfolklore. They study propaganda, what they call combat propaganda, as part of their course. And the reason they do it is the reason you must too, if you wish to understand, underpin and create a system that will help us interpret and create an Infolklore-saturated universe instead of a Disinfolklore-saturated one. That is why you must study it, and that is Finding Manuland at PowerofMana.net. You can subscribe to my work there, at Disinfolklore.net and at DecodingTrolls.net. My main site is Disinfolklore.eu. So here is this episode’s claim. While the name Infolklore sat waiting for specimens, this station built the practice’s operating system. The working rules everything else runs on. The evidence shelf, the source grading, the wish filing, the correction ceremony. You, on Volya Radio, built all of it without the name. Here is the evidence. First, an update on the reading. In episode one I gave you the scale. When I described you to yourselves in those first episodes, the close reading behind them had covered many of your shows. Now all of the shows are part of the analysis. What Are They Trying to Tell Me Now the toolkit proper. Where would you send a truth-seeking audience for evidence? These Volya shows send it straight into the aggressor’s own channels, and they teach the frame for reading what it finds there. Here is This Week in Absurdistan, one of the station’s long-running news marathons, on Rosstat, the russian state’s own statistics agency: “We never look at it from the perspective of this is the unvarnished truth from Russia. We look at it in the perspective of what are they publishing here and what are they trying to tell me? What kind of story are they trying to tell me?” What are they trying to tell me. I consider people like Mockers much more expert than people like Mark Galeotti, who is pulled in to talk about russia all the time but who knows nothing about Ukraine, or indeed russia, in the way that Mockers does. So on Volya we are asking what are they trying to tell us. That is source criticism, the discipline scholars take degrees in, taught as a morning reflex, and aimed at enemy numbers as well as enemy words. And when the enemy admits a terrible thing, the admission becomes a floor. Here is World at War, the strand where the war’s hardest numbers get read, on the abduction of Ukraine’s children: “These are the 100% provable cases with data, that the Russians themselves say 700,000 plus children and women have been abducted to Russia.” And in the same breath: “Even the UN, which has lowballed these numbers, admits that that is extremely low.” That was from a December 2024 episode. Seven hundred thousand, from the abductor’s own mouth. Many of us will remember the day that was publicised. I have the receipts. I have the screenshots, as probably do most of us who listen to Volya regularly. Our phones are full of screenshots of the evidence, of the receipts. The one number the Russists cannot dispute becomes the floor under the charge. The Russists’ confession is the minimum, and the truth sits above it. And it is almost unbelievable to people who have not been paying attention, as many of us who try to explain these matters to people in our real lives find continually. Nobody here pretends this reading is a grim duty. On the morning of Operation Spiderweb itself, the day Ukrainian drones smuggled deep inside russia burned the bombers on their own airfields, someone in the Volya room said “the biggest pleasure at the moment is also reading Russian Telegram channel.” That was June 2025. Verification on this station is not a defensive crouch. It is a craft, practised with visible enjoyment, on the enemy’s own material. Then the discount turns around and comes home, which is the part that would astonish any propaganda ministry on earth. Here is Ukraine News and russia’s Hybrid War, a show whose own title spells russia with a small r, on our side’s frontline news: “For the last 12 months, the OPSEC, the operational security, when it comes to the front lines in Ukraine, has improved so much that 90% of what we hear from the front lines, it’s only something that the Ukrainian military wants us to hear, or it’s a Russian narrative. So everything that comes from the front lines, we have to take it with a grain of salt.” This is especially relevant at the moment. We have recently had the final announcement, after six months of great, well-kept OPSEC, of Ukrainian advances, and there are now discussions about whether new advances are about to be announced. All of us repeat, again and again, that we would rather not know these things until they are properly confirmed. OPSEC is operational security, the discipline of telling the enemy nothing useful. Grain of salt, aimed at our own side’s good news, because good security means curated news. Everything gets graded here on Volya. Friendly sources included. And in the same segment, the tool I find most elegant: enemy silence used as the debunk. A panic was running that day about a russian breakthrough, and here is how it was closed: “On Russian telegram there was no party there was no elation if that was a legit breakthrough of the front lines you know the Russians are going to go crazy with it but and they did not which told me that you know it’s not as bad as people trying to pan it out to be” That is the 12th of August 2025. No party on the enemy’s channels, therefore no breakthrough. The absence of celebration, read as evidence. The mirror of the admission floor: what the enemy cannot help boasting about, and what he fails
Oct 3

Podcast | When History Becomes War: Transcending the History Provocation troll (Ep 2)

My new Historical versus Real russia lens has been tested before. In October 1925, at Locarno, Weimar Germany guaranteed its borders with France and Belgium. But Weimar Germany left its border with Poland open. The Weimar state spent years campaigning about the past. The history it told claimed the land, claimed Poland. Fourteen years later, its army crossed the open border. “…The limb is gone, but the feeling of the Historical Russia remains. AfD, MAGA, Brexit, Poland’s PiS, France’s National Front and a heap of other backward-looking, oligarch-run democracy-hacking projects engage in History Provocation tactics - nostalgia concealing a will-to-power whose goal is to destroy the post-WWII architecture…” The Federal Republic, the same core after a far greater defeat, kept a legal claim on the lost east for two further decades. But the Federal Republic renounced force. It acknowledged its crimes from 1951. In 1970, it signed treaties with Moscow and with Warsaw, accepting the post-war borders. After signing the first, that August, Willy Brandt told West Germans on television: “There’s nothing lost with this treaty which has not been squandered away a long time ago.” That is what the Real Germany sounds like in a core that has lost its empire. That is what we must hear in the Real russia of the future. If we want to hear the leaders of the future Real russia, then we must hear it from them now. We must be looking for that meaning in what we hear around us today. So, by the time the russian state collapses and becomes Moscow and St Petersburg and a couple of counties around those areas, we will be equipped to help steer it, and to ensure that it remains inside the boundaries of the Real russia. Whenever it lapses into the Historical russia discourse, we can help correct it. The question to put to every voice in Future russia is Locarno’s. Which borders do you call final? And do you call all of them final? For their own good, and within the law If russia had the power to conquer Ukraine, it would. But it doesn’t. Ukraine will enforce its borders for the decades to come. So unless Future russia learns what the Real russia is, and how to evacuate its brain, its consciousness and its national consciousness of this Historical russia fallacy, the Ukrainians will enforce it. They will be fully within their rights under the law. They will enforce it using tens of thousands of drones every time russia strays over its borders, in search of revenge, or some historical russian troll. What I’m prescribing today is a change in mind and understanding. It is metanoia, in Yakubova’s speech. It is for their own good. It is for the good of humanity, and the good of European peace and security. And it is all within the law. Respect your borders. Don’t invade other countries. Don’t fill your population with nonsense about the past. Especially when that nonsense will, in due course, end up persuading them to participate in unlawful invasions of other countries, and the deaths of millions of people, since February 2022. Why we need to start now The reason to learn the difference now, before Future russia arrives, is that many Westerners are already hypnotised by the Data-Resistant Archetypes. The archetype of russia as a great power is a phantom limb. It’s like when you lose a leg or an arm. For months afterwards, you try to move it. You try to pick something off the shelf, or you try to walk, and you can’t. It’s gone. That is the Historical russia. The Historical russia is still in our information space. As the Syrian regime began to collapse in the winter of 2024, the same IR (International Relations) experts who had not seen the end of Syria coming were urging Ukraine to concede territory to an unbeatable russia. They still are. The limb is gone. The Historical russia is dead. It’s in the grave. All that is left is an idea of the Historical russia. That idea must be smited and replaced with the Real russia idea. That is the purpose of this piece. The limb is gone, but the feeling of the Historical russia remains. AfD, MAGA, Brexit, Poland’s PiS, France’s National Front and a heap of other backward-looking, oligarch-run democracy-hacking projects engage in History Provocation tactics - nostalgia concealing a will-to-power whose goal is to destroy the post-WWII architecture. The History Provocation Historical russia knows how to work on that feeling. It’s like an AI agent coming to infect your minds, our minds, the minds of our countries, and our feelings of security. Then it comes over the borders and kills people, and does horrific things, all as an instrument of history. Its instrument is history, brainwashing. I call it the History Provocation. A state talks about the past, loudly and for years, until its target, and everyone watching, are arguing about the past too. Before you know it, we’re fighting over stuff which isn’t even true. Or if it is true, it doesn’t matter. What matters today is our future, and building and developing our human communities, educating our children, and building safe communities and a knowledge economy. It doesn’t matter if the history we’re arguing about is stolen, invented, or even perfectly true. What makes it a provocation is what it does to us and our minds. It sets the agenda. The History Provocation pulls attention away from the present. The History Provocation gives the state’s surrogates, the Historical russia’s surrogates, a part to play. In October 2025, I put it bluntly: Putler’s “history stuff is just a way of establishing character for his surrogates and to hypnotise”. The record of the last History Provocation The record of the last History Provocation is in the European Union’s own database of russian disinformation. “Ukraine is an artificial state created by the Russians”, 9 June 2016. “Ukraine has never existed as an independent country”, the next day. “Ukraine is not a real state because it has no real territory, no single language, single economy and single population”, September 2018. “Ukrainians and Russians are one people”, on the day Putler’s essay on the subject appeared, in July 2021. On 28 February 2022, four days into the invasion, “Russians and Ukrainians are one people” was offered as a reason to murder hundreds of thousands of native russian-language-speaking Ukrainians. Supposedly, in order to protect them. Of course, the Historical russia is nonsense, from start to finish, as a casus belli. Some in the West read the warning Some in the West read the warning. I was one of them. At the beginning of January 2022, Germany’s chancellor’s advisers were some others. They met four leading experts from Germany on russia. Die Zeit reconstructed the meeting that June. One expert found the questions very strange. Chancellor Scholz and his people were “not particularly interested in the current troop build-up. Instead, they asked about Russian colonialism, Putler’s politics of history and Russian fascism.” In mid-February, Chancellor Scholz was flying between Kyiv and Moscow to try and stop the war. In front of journalists, he kept returning to what Die Zeit called “Putler’s historical treatise”. He kept wondering whether Putler was concerned not with the Donbas or NATO at all, “but rather with an imperial project”. He was right to read the history. But he was very slow in understanding what Historical russia means. He read it far too late. Years too late. Hundreds of thousands and millions will die because of that failure of cognition. That is the cognitive failure I am trying to address, by inserting into our minds today this distinction between Historical russia and Real russia. Two ways to meet a History Provocation There are two ways to meet a History Provocation. One is to read it as a statement of intent. The other is to argue with it. Every group of people that answers “one people” by debating the baptism of Rus’ in 988 has taken the road of Historical russia and historical provocation. The argument can be won on the facts. It can be lost on the agenda. In Future russia, Historical russia will come to Western capitals with maps, anniversaries, grievances, marches and complaints. It will ask to be understood. The empathetic amongst us will surrender our empathy to them. We will try to understand: “Oh, so 988. Oh, 1433.” But the useful question will not be whether this history is true. The useful question will be: which russia is speaking? If it is Historical, revanchist russia speaking, then we must not entertain this nonsense for a second. After Real russia has reasserted itself, or indeed asserted itself for the first time in world history. After, for example, it has done what Germany and Japan did after their crimes during the Second World War. Then we can have nice chats about history. But it will be several centuries before the Real russian will be able to talk about history without catching themselves in the sentence itself. Without acknowledging publicly that they are speaking from a Real russia perspective, and that they are not lapsing back into the Historical russia doctrine. An empire falls, and Ukraine rise Ukraine knows how this story usually runs. We should listen to Ukraine, who were occupied by russia for over a century. So if we want to understand russia, we should not be speaking to Western experts who fall for the Historical russia troll. They are fully able to explain what happened in 988 and 1233, but they actually have no idea of the true and contemporary Ukraine. An empire falls, and Ukraine rises. The empire recovers, and Ukraine is swallowed again. This is the cycle. The Ukrainian People’s Republic rose in 1917 out of the wreck of the tsars’ Historical russia empire. It fell to the new reboot of Historical russia that the Bolsheviks rebuilt. As we know now from historical sources, the Bolsheviks used the idea of a world revolut
Aug 6

Podcast | The Plight of the Sorcerers: Putler and the Chef, Zelensky and Fedorov; and

Putin’s Chef Problem: The Plight of the Sorcerer So on the 26th of May 2023, I published a piece called Putin’s Chef Problem, the plight of the sorcerer. And I posed the question: 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 sorcerer’s apprentice to take over? This is the plight of the sorcerer, and it’s featured in Indo-European stories for millennia. And since early March 2022, Putler’s magical, manipulative powers have been noticeably on the wane. Nothing has gone right for him — even for those who dutifully surrendered to his bespelling needs. I first noted how President Zelensky’s magical powers to curse, outwit and humiliate the sorcerer Putin were growing, in proportion to Putler’s loss of power, by the end of March 2022. And as I wrote then, on the 23rd of May 2023: until recently I had ignored Putler’s apprentice, the Chef, who is now at the height of his powers. Every day since 2012, the Chef’s trolling Disinfolklore has featured across global media. His Disinfolklore even got Trump and Brexit voted in. Only now, instead of the Chef’s Disinfolklore being the concealed trolling output of his St Petersburg Disinfolklore war-magic production factories — the Internet Research Agency — the Chef today is the star of the show himself. Why, and how, has this happened? The answer is simple. So I wrote, on May 26th, or 23rd, 2023: Putin’s Rasputin, this turbulent priest of the St Petersburg underground, is ready to take over the chariot. These days the magician apprentice doesn’t even disguise himself, or his ambition. Just an iPhone and grainy footage, and his every muttered thought — and trolling grandfather glasses — is front-page news across the earth. The Chef Saucerer has sacrificed 100,000 Ukrainians’ lives since 2016. And like every Indo-European monarch for millennia, he boasts of the human sacrifices he’s made. From these sacrifices his power and authority emanates. The magician Chef has vaporised entire cities in central Europe — Popasna, Bakhmut, and the rest. Seventy-five thousand Ruschists have died at his command in six months of Bakhmut. And before this, his Nazi-worshipping soldiers, in his Nazi-branded Wagner Group, had murdered hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Yet the Chef’s power as the Apprentice Magus is such that the New York Times and the rest breathlessly quote, and report verbatim as truth, his every bespelling utterance — like they did before with the butcher Putin of Grozny. Then, now, they do with the Chef. Unknowingly, Western leaders and opinion formers promote the Chef, as before they promoted his sorcerer master, Putin. Every Western website reference eulogising the butcher of Bakhmut, with his trolling grandpa glasses, is echoed back into Ruschist information spaces as evidence that the West respects the Chef and will accept him as the new sorcerer monarch. The Chef’s Internet Research Agency bespelled America and England. That was his time as Putler’s apprentice. Now the sorcerer master, Putler, who created him, cannot destroy the Chef without destroying himself. Nor can Putler promote the Chef while being certain that, once promoted, the Chef won’t destroy Putler. That is the plight of the sorcerer. So: the Chef Saucerer against the Chief Sorcerer. Why I Bring This Up: Two Tellings of One Story So why do I bring this up? Two summers ago I wrote about Putler’s plight, and it’s the oldest story we have about power changing hands, and Putler was living out its darkest version. Now, in the past few weeks, Volodymyr Zelensky has stepped into the same story. He’s living out the bright one. The two tellings sit at opposite poles of a single tale that is 6,000 years old, and watching them side by side tells us almost everything about the difference between the two countries. Georges Dumézil. A master holds a power, and an apprentice grows into that power. One day the apprentice is ready to make his own way, and the master still needs him. How do the two part without one destroying the other? That is the whole plight, in one question. The young one always rises — that was never in doubt. The only question the story ever asks is whether the rising costs a life. The Mahabharata gives the good answer, and it’s worth holding in mind. The demons free the apprentice from the master’s belly, and they do it without killing the master. Both men honour the bargain. Nobody dies. The power moves, and the two who carried it are both still standing when it settles. That is the rare ending. The plight is dangerous precisely because that ending is rare. The Dark Telling: Putler and the Chef Look first at the dark telling, because you already know it. Putler was the chief sorcerer. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Chef, was his apprentice — the alchemist who turned mercenaries and African gold into power the master could use. By the summer of 2023 the apprentice was ready, and the master would not let him. Prigozhin forced the question the crude way, with a mutiny: the march on Rostov, a column pointed at Moscow, and for one evening the master submitted to the apprentice in front of the whole world. Then the plight resolved the way it resolves when there is no honour in the room. Two months later, Prigozhin’s plane fell out of the sky — allegedly. The master kept his power by destroying the apprentice. That is what the passing of power looks like when a society is sick at the top: paranoia in the palace, blood on the runway. It is the serpent’s answer to the question. This story offers a far better answer, too. The Bright Telling: Zelensky and Fedorov Now the Ukrainian side, and the same story turned to the light. Mykhailo Fedorov — whom I never forget — comes from Vasylivka, which is right on the contact line in Zaporizhzhia. He has stood at President Zelensky’s side for seven years. He built Diia, and the state that fits into a phone. He built the Army of Drones, and he’s the face of the modern, un-Soviet way of fighting this war. Six months ago President Zelensky moved him to defence, and he moved him there to do a hard thing, which was to break the paralysis with the old command. On the 15th of July, President Zelensky dismissed him. The official reason was a cabinet reshuffle. The real reason was a fight that had frozen the top of the war effort, between Fedorov and the commander-in-chief, the last powerful man of the Soviet military generation. And here the ancient story shows its shape, because the people did not accept the dismissal. Crowds filled the squares, three generations deep. Fedorov’s trust rating leapt from 35 to 65 per cent in a single week, and 72 per cent of Ukrainians said the dismissal was wrong. Within days, President Zelensky dismissed Syrskyi instead. Well — the crowds had their scalp. They stayed in the squares anyway, and they remain in the squares, although I look forward to hearing an update from Lexicon, still calling for the young man to be given his seat back. Magister and Minister: The M-N- Vocabulary of Rule Read that through the old frame, and every piece falls into place. Zelensky is the Magus I have been archetyping him as since the end of March 2022 — the magister, the master. In Dumézil’s map of our societies, the first function is the one who holds the magic and the law of rule. And the ministers — the magister, minister — the ministers serve directly under it. That’s hardwired into our language and into our governance for 6,000 years, since this idea of organising community was formed in Mykhailivka, which is the village about 20 kilometres south of where Mykhailo Fedorov grew up, and the place where Alexey Nikitin’s paper, published in Nature on the 5th of February 2025, put beyond all reasonable doubt the origins of the Yamna, from whom all living Indo-European languages emanate — in that community, on the Dnipro. The words themselves carry the story: magus, magister, minister, monarch, mandate. The whole vocabulary of who may rule carries the M-N- sound, because that is the sound our language family has carried its idea of sovereignty on since before writing. Fedorov is a minister under the magister. That is not a clever overlay on the news; it’s the story’s own word for where he stands. Fedorov is also the apprentice, and his seat is the warrior’s seat: defence is the strong right arm every sovereign needs and every sovereign fears. He is ready. He is trusted. He carries a power the master cannot make for himself. That is the apprentice of the plight, exactly. The Demons Whispering And the demons are whispering. On the Ruschist side I named them once as the men of the Ozero Cooperative, the grey figures around the throne. On the Ukrainian side they are the wily remnant of the Soviet-era power bloc — and every adviser who leans to the master’s ear to say the young man is too popular; that a minister the people love is not a minister but an heir; that the one who broke the old command will one day break you. And I remind you of Veronica, who runs under the callsign Luna, and whose father was an Opposition Bloc councillor and now, it is reported, serves the occupation administration. Veronica, whom Yermak consulted over the past few years on every major appointment in government, supposedly because he believes in her authority, her capacity as a medium — though some of us might be quite sceptical about a lawyer doing that, and perhaps might suggest, or suspect, there’s a certain amount of tradecraft about it. We’ve now seen the texts between Yermak and Veronica from after Yermak was defenestrated, metaphorically speaking, at the end of the year. She advised him to speak to our friend, President Zelensky, and suggest to President Zelensky that Fedorov, if he takes Yermak’s seat in the presidential administra
Sep 16

Podcast | I am become meme.

When Elon Musk told a conservative conference in 2025 “I am become meme”, he was not joking. He was telling you what he does for a living. The russian state’s own dramaturg has said the same thing in plainer words. Dramaturg carries the Tr-. Vladislav Surkov, once deputy prime minister of the Ruschist Federation, was picked in 1999 to design Vladimir Putin’s political system, like an architect, and directed it for years. He was the actor-director at the centre of managed democracy, that play-act of democracy. Part 1 of this two-parter is available here (though this is stand-alone and one of my best podcasts. In an essay in early 2025 he wrote that russia had gone onto an information counter-offensive against the West by transferring the psychological concepts of the mental matrix and the archetypes of national consciousness into politics. Perhaps by sending two Brighton Beach oligarchs, mafia-adjacent oligarchs, to Kyiv the other day, supposedly representing the greatest country that ever was. So when I talk about archetypes, I am not trying to be arch or impressive. I am not telling you that I have read Jung. I am helping you understand the enemy of everything that is good about our lives. Surkov serves a regime whose only goal is to evaporate, eviscerate and turn to ashes every city and village it can get within drone or artillery range of. Google him and you will find them all saying he is a great genius. When he says that russia has gone onto an information counter-offensive by transferring the archetypes of national consciousness into politics, we must listen. In every country where russia operates, it dons the mask of patriotism. The AfD, Reform, the National Rally, all the so-called patriotic parties the russians fund wear the costume of patriotism in the country they operate in. That is the mental matrix and the archetypes of national consciousness, in the reality of our lives. How un-American is MAGA? Yet it purports to define what is American. That is Surkov’s reveal. Continued from Part One: In March 2025 Surkov told the French magazine L’Express what the system he built was. He called it democracy with a monarchical archetype. We need a tsar, he said. Periods without a tsar always end in disaster for us. And he said that when Donald was first elected, a number of very serious American media had reported that Donald’s team used Surkov’s propaganda methods and some of his political ideas, and that Donald was ideologically closer to Putler than to Macron. The operator named the operation, in print, in the year the ballroom was begun, the folklore-like ballroom that installs an archetype where the East Wing stood. Democracy with a monarchical archetype. In Washington it is being architectured, by a ballroom bolted onto the White House. The phrase belongs on the roundabout at Arlington. The nursery Gold. There is no East Wing any longer. Imagine that. Imagine I had told you two years ago that he would demolish the East Wing, that he would take the architectural symbolism of destroying the First Republic by knocking it down and installing a folklore-like monarchical archetype in its place, a ballroom. The East Room has gold drapes. The Oval Office is gilded, with a cabinetmaker flown up from Florida to do the trimmings and the President adding bits himself with Krazy Glue, Krazy with a K. The two equestrian statues by the Lincoln Memorial have been coated in gold leaf. When I was a diplomat in Kosovo, everyone said that when you went to Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, you would see their gauche equestrian statues dedicated to Alexander the Great. Now the two by the Lincoln Memorial are gold. “Wear sunglasses if you’re passing by them,” a Washington theatre director told Hitchens. The West Wing has its name in gold lettering. The ballroom will carry gold seals on its outside before the courts have finished with it. The arch is to be topped by a gold Liberty, the liberty of the eparchy, the enslavement of the people and the liberty of the oligarchy, and by gold eagles. The President addresses his donors from a lectern shaped like a golden eagle. And a 22-billion-dollar gilded redesign of Dulles Airport was presented in the Oval Office one afternoon. The ballroom. Ninety thousand square feet, which doubles the footprint of the White House. Two hundred and fifty workers, twenty hours a day, seven days a week. Three thousand cubic yards of concrete. A million pounds of rebar. The lead architect parted ways with him over how big was big enough. To make room for it the East Wing was demolished in three days in October 2025, and the rubble dumped on a historic golf course in East Potomac Park. “Sorry, darling, that’s progress,” he says he told his wife. Pure Disinfolklore. Does he ever talk to her? The latest drawings, Hitchens reports, add decorative lion heads, more gold and an ornamental staircase. “Where the heck are these lions coming from?” a former commissioner asked her. I can tell them. I spend a good part of my life touring the Neo-Hittite and Syro-Hittite monuments of Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia, and you see a great many lions there, from millennia ago. “You could imagine a symbol of American democracy, like a bald eagle or a bison or something. The lion is associated with the British monarchy.” The garden. The Rose Garden was torn up and paved over for striped umbrellas and lawn chairs, so that it now resembles the patio at Mar-a-Lago. He wants Lafayette Park to have forty-seven maple trees, in homage to himself. Dozens of trees, including historic cherry-blossom trees, were ordered out of East Potomac Park to make way for his golf course. The pool. He had the Reflecting Pool, the mirror of the Republic, drained and repainted in what he called American-flag blue. The house. The South Lawn became a helipad, rebuilt flatter so that guests can, in his words, go there for cocktails and then walk to the ballroom. A court asked the Administration’s lawyer whether, if the government decided very quickly to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty, nothing could be done. “I think that’s right, yes,” the lawyer said. One enabler among thousands. They are cursed for what they are doing to our republic. Preservationists, he insists, are treasonists with bad taste. The usurper accuses those defending what is truly right under the law of treason. The chutzpah of it. And his own legal brief, which he edited personally, as if he had nothing more important to do, says the ballroom is a gift to our country from President Donald, and asks who could ever object to that. The arch. It began in April 2025 as an architecture critic’s proposal for a temporary 60-foot arch for the country’s 250th birthday. The President more than quadrupled the height, made it permanent, and put the gold Liberty on top. He considered topping it with a giant fist, Hitchens reports from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book, in homage to his own raised fist after the attempt on his life. His architect said the arch would frame the view of Arlington as Raphael framed the heavens. Talk about delusions of grandeur. Excavation has been announced without the planning commission’s approval. Small, medium and large, he told the donors, holding the three models. I happen to think the large looks by far the best. What a child reads A child reads that list differently. Gold. A ballroom. Lions on the palace. A rose garden destroyed. Trees cut down. A mirror-pool. The king’s own name on everything. An arch for a conqueror to ride through, who has conquered nothing but the inner minds of too many people. Every one of these is a story that every child in our civilisation carries before she can read. Disney put them there. The Grimms put them there before Disney. Our great-grandmothers put them there before the Grimms wrote them down. Gold is what the king’s hall is made of. The ballroom is where Cinderella goes and the stepsisters are turned away. The roses are the ones the Queen orders painted, and the briars round the sleeping castle. The mirror is the one on the wall that tells the queen who is fairest. The arch is the gate the returning conqueror passes through. The scaffolding of the Disinfolklore Universe has been built out of the nursery, in granite and gold leaf, and every commentator who says how vulgar it all is passes the story on. That is colonisation of political discourse by Disinfolklore. It does not need us to want a ballroom. It needs us to talk about the ballroom. I am sorry to have to talk about it myself, but the mechanism cannot be explained without it. That is the turn. Every mind that talks about the gold has been moved, and none of them chose the direction. New Yorker writer Hitchens’s sources feel this and cannot say it. They reach for kings. Nero fiddling while Rome burns. Ozymandias. Louis XIV. Robert Moses. “Have you ever heard a President talk about beauty so much?” a senior official asked her. Every comparison they make is to a king or an emperor or a master builder, and every one of them is an archetype. They treat the resemblance, the Law of Similarity, the law of sympathetic magic, as a fact about one man’s psychology. The Cabinet secretary who told her “It’s a diversion for him. If he’s doing stuff with gravity, like Iran, he loves to be able to turn to this” has the mechanism the wrong way round. We know about his diversions from the Epstein files. The gold is not the President’s diversion from the war. The gold is our diversion from what the war and the gold are both for. Three rooms The ballroom deserves its own reading. The press has filed thousands of column-inches on its cost, its heritage and its precedent. A ballroom is three rooms at once, and the unconscious reads all three. The first is the king’s hall. Heorot in Beowulf, the foundational text of the English language, ironically set in Sweden. The mead-hall of the Anglo-Saxons

Decoding Trolls decodes the meanings immanent in memes - visual, audible, linguistic,... any kind of sensory stimulus. Decoding Trolls conceives of any emotion-moving activity of body, speech, or mind as trolling. Trolling others' emotions is what sentient beings do! The point is to control it - through getting, seeing and harnessing trolling's Mana / Power to affect our moods / intentions / attitudes and motivations. This channel is about Positive Trolling, which we define as any troll that conforms to these six criteria: Generous, Right, Patient, Energetic, Focussed, and Insightful.

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