Battling Archetypes

Decoding Trolls
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Battling Archetypes applies the Twelve Tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method to the folkloric structures hiding inside modern propaganda, memes, and geopolitics. Each episode decodes how Russia, MAGA, and other Disinfolklorists archetype reality — and how Counter Disinfolklore can unmask the wolf in sheep’s clothing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ www.disinfolklore.net

  1. 5d ago

    Podcast | The Three Moves of the Apparatus Campaign Elevation Doctrine

    Today I’m going to talk a bit about the Starobilsk incident, using the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, and I’m also going to talk about some examples from what I call the Luhansk Corpus, which I’ve been talking about for the last few weeks. We’re in the midst — not even one hundredth of a way through — what I have to talk about. This corpus is 10,000 propaganda items that I collected while I worked in Russia-occupied Ukraine, and between Russia-occupied Ukraine and government-controlled Ukraine, between 2015 and 2018 in Luhansk, and then afterwards in Dnipro. Today’s Topic: The Starobilsk Incident The first thing I’m going to talk about is the Starobilsk incident. Some of you probably didn’t hear about it, but it was a really interesting example for me to apply the Disinfolklore Analytical Method to. The moment I heard the President of the Rushist Federation mention a school in Starobilsk — which is a town I know very well, I used to go through it a lot when I lived in Severodonetsk, so it has that personal connection to me as well — and the moment I heard President Putin talk about it and talk about this, what I call the manufactured wound archetype, basically, it reeked of this, and I recognised the pattern. I thought, as the English might say, there was something rum about this. I tuned in. Russia’s defence ministry announces in Putin’s name that international journalists are invited to come and see for themselves that Ukrainian forces are surrounded in Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, and Kupyansk. The apparatus — which is how I refer to the entire collection of actors operating the Russian Federation — offers a five-to-six-hour ceasefire to enable the tour. 12th of December 2025: Putin claims at a press conference, based on a briefing from Gerasimov, that 15 Ukrainian Armed Forces battalions are blocked inside Kupyansk. Fifteen battalions. He invites journalists again to come and verify. On the same day, Volodymyr Zelensky turns up in Kupyansk himself, records a video address on his iPhone at the entrance stele, 1.15 kilometres from Russian positions, 500 metres from the grey zone. DeepState map confirms the coordinates. 22nd of May 2026: the apparatus elevates a strike on occupied Starobilsk to a campaign. Putin calls it a terrorist strike. Peskov calls it a monstrous crime. Six Russian official spokespersons issue coordinated naming within 12 hours. Russia requests a UN Security Council emergency session. Within 36 hours, 90 missiles and 600 drones land on Kyiv and Bila Tserkva, as all of us will know — where the Oreshnik fell, and some garages. The Chernobyl Museum was hit. We had an interesting discussion about this on Ming and Joanna’s show earlier in the week. I think Lexicon and I were convinced — and indeed I think Ming as well — that this was a hit on purpose. The Oreshnik, the nut tree or the walnut tree, the nuclear-capable hypersonic missile, is fired for the third time in this war. What we’re looking at is not three discrete events — which many people will see them as, but not us, and not me through the Disinfolklore Analytical Method. We’re looking at one eight-month campaign elevation doctrine that has been running in continuous deployment since at least last October. The Starobilsk strike of last Thursday is the latest instance. It’s not the first, and it will not be the last. This is Disinfolklore in real time. The Apparatus Does Not Improvise Its Archetypes The thing about the apparatus is that it does not improvise its archetypes. It deploys them again and again on the same template. What looks like news in your morning headlines, or on my evening television, or in our social media feeds, is on closer inspection the apparatus running the same play it ran last quarter, and the quarter before that, and the quarter before that. The play I want to walk you through tonight is what I’m going to call, for the rest of this episode, the Apparatus Campaign Elevation Doctrine. It is one specific kind of Disinfolklore deployment — the kind that begins with an apparatus invitation to international journalists and ends with a hypersonic missile in Kyiv. The doctrine has a name and a shape and a budget line. When I talk about Disinfolklore being a narrative form, what I’m talking about is the actor who is the acting president of the Rushist Federation. He’s an actor. He’s deployed on certain stages at certain times, and he speaks fluent Disinfolklore. His Disinfolklore is then ventriloquised, puppeted through the voices of other members of the apparatus until it becomes like a cacophony, like a chorus, like a vibration in our brain, until it meets the ears of a child in Kyiv who’s suddenly very frightened. That’s why I call it Disinfolklore, and the whole operation is a Disinfolklore operation. The Budget Line: $458 Million for Information Warfare The budget line is documented. In November of last year, the Jamestown Foundation — a serious-grade Western think tank that most of us will be aware of and respect, not a partisan source — published a piece by Yuri Lapayev showing Russia’s draft 2026 budget cuts military spending by $2.4 billion compared to 2025, while raising the state-funded media budget by 54 percent, $458 million additional. The apparatus is, in plain print, defunding its army to fund its information warfare. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha put the same funding on the public record. This is not a hidden doctrinal shift. This is the apparatus that has openly chosen to substitute information warfare for kinetic capability. The campaign elevation doctrine I’m about to walk through is what those $458 million are for. The Three Moves of the Doctrine The shape of the doctrine is three moves. Move one: the apparatus invites international journalists to verify an apparatus claim about a Ukrainian territory the apparatus does not actually hold — Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, Kupyansk, Krasnoarmiysk, Starobilsk. The invitation is the deployment. The apparatus does not need the journalists actually to arrive. The apparatus needs the invitation to circulate in Western media as evidence that Russia has nothing to hide. Move two: the apparatus produces its own evidence substrate. Telegram-distributed photographs from occupier-installed regional leaders; casualty figures from the apparatus’ human rights commissioners; all-actors framing statements from the apparatus’ foreign ministers; official namings from the Kremlin press secretary; and, at the apex, a head-of-state — an acting head of state, an actor, a stage actor, an acting head of state — personal statement from Putler himself. The evidence substrate is the apparatus’ product. Western media absorbs the substrate as if it were independent reporting. Move three: with moral cover now installed, the apparatus executes the actual operation — the strike, the barrage, the mass attack on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. The Western press’s headlines treat the execution as retaliation for whatever the stage-one invitation and evidence substrate had named. The cycle closes. This is the doctrine. Eight months of it now in public view. Let me walk you through how it ran in dates before we get to last Thursday. October 2025: Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, and the Encirclement Archetype 13th of October 2025: Russia’s Defence Ministry announces that Putler has ordered international journalists, including from Ukraine, to be allowed into Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, and Kupyansk. Note the counter-move when President Zelensky, who has the right to do this, ordered his army not to attack a small square kilometre inside Moscow for over a period of two hours. Russia, the announcement says, will halt hostilities for five to six hours so journalists can confirm the encirclement of Ukrainian forces. Notice this archetype of encirclement: of Ukrainian forces, cauldron, kettle. For Ukrainians these are sacred terms, because anyone who was in Ukraine in September 2014, just after the first Minsk agreement was signed, will remember the Ilovaisk kotyol, where Ukrainians had surrendered and then they were slaughtered and taken prisoner. The same troll happened again in Debaltseve, just after I arrived in Ukraine — after Minsk 2 was signed — Debaltseve, which is or was an important railway junction, was inside Ukrainian-controlled territory. After signing this agreement, the Russians went on the advance, and once again they killed a lot of Ukrainian soldiers in a cauldron or a kettle. Even the use of these terms — to people who don’t pay attention to these things — they won’t understand their archetypal content and their historical content. Ukraine’s Response: Tykhyi, Syrskyi, and the Centre for Countering Disinformation Ukraine’s response is immediate and on the record. Heorhii Tykhyi — please forgive my pronunciation, I’m in the same category as Mockers, although I know she’s better than me at this point — spokesperson for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, warns journalists not to participate. Russia broke the same promise during the battles for Ilovaisk in 2014, a ceasefire offered to allow Ukrainian troops to retreat, which Russia then violated, killing several hundred Ukrainian soldiers in what would become known as the Ilovaisk Massacre. One of my friends lost his lovely restaurateur chef brother, Andrei, in that. The Foreign Ministry is reminding journalists that this is what Russia’s humanitarian offers look like. Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, states publicly that there is no blockade of Ukrainian forces in Pokrovsk or Kupyansk. The encirclement claim is false. The invitation is propaganda. Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation publishes the structural analysis. The Centre surfaces a detail worth dwelling on: the invitations to German journalists come from a man named Vladimir Sergienko, former assistant to Jürgen Schmidt, an AFD member of the Germa

    58 min

  2. May 21

    Podcast | The Don’t Poke the Bear Meme: AFD and Russian Information Projection

    What I’m trying to do is also communicate a form of literacy. I learned to see archetypes in data and in stories in 2016, in Russia-occupied eastern Ukraine, in a story I’ve told before. I’ve spent the last 10 years unpacking that insight into what I call the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, whose main exposition is on the disinfolklore.eu website, where we have the 12-tool way. For people who want a bit more detail, they’ll look in there, they’ll see all the origins — it’s about a million and a half words, divided into about two and a half thousand short passages, purposefully like that so that it’s very accessible. I also publish on disinfolklore.net, decodingtrolls.net, and powerofmana.net. Those three projects’ Substacks you can subscribe to, and they all meld into one. I’m currently building — well, I’ve completed this week — the building of the architecture of a training set to fine-tune an open-weights LLM, large language model, locally. That’s very exciting. The architecture is based on the 12-tool way, and based on the contents of disinfolklore.eu. The Don’t Poke the Bear Meme: AFD and Russian Information Projection The first thing I wanted to talk about today was really because it’s kind of in the news. Many of you have heard me talk about the most successful Disinfolklore meme ever, which is “don’t poke the bear.” It’s probably obvious to people, when I get your eye in, that this is Disinfolklore, because it’s about the bear, it’s from fairy tales, it’s from folk tales. This week we saw Russia projecting that meme, that piece of Disinfolklore, into our information space, through the mainstream of the German information space, through a political party which has been funded by the Russians. The AFD may have been founded in a virtuous way, although it was founded to deal with migrants — and the entire Syrian migrant crisis was on purpose provoked by Russia accelerating its carpet bombing in Syria in September 2015, when it wanted a bit more leverage at the so-called mythical negotiation table. That had a lot of concatenating effects, including Law and Justice being elected on an anti-migrant Polish nationalist agenda in Poland, Orbán consolidating his position, Brexit being done, and Merkel famously allowing in one million Syrian migrants to give them a path to citizenship. I’m sure they’re contributing greatly to German society and the German economy now, so it’s not all bad, and amazing lives have been changed by it. However, AFD consolidated its power out of this, out of this othering, and we see it projecting this “don’t poke the bear” troll. On its surface, it’s a piece of folk wisdom. It sounds reasonable. It sounds cautious. It sounds like the kind of thing a thoughtful person might say to counsel restraint: don’t provoke Russia, don’t escalate. The Mana in the Meme: Russia as Bear Don’t poke the bear — attend to the mana. In my understanding, the mana is the energy, the charge in the meme. What is the energy imminent in this meme? First, the mantra: look for the mana in the meme, which is one of the 12 tools. First, the bear. Russia is a bear — not a government, not a collection of decision-makers, not a bureaucracy with budgets, logistics and internal politics. A bear: a force of nature, unchallengeable, primordial, amoral in the way that nature is amoral. You do not blame the bear for mauling you. You blame yourself for getting too close. The archetype is the wild, the untameable, the power that cannot be reasoned with but only accommodated. This is not analysis — it’s mythology. Its function is to strip Russia of agency and responsibility simultaneously. The bear does not choose to attack; it is provoked. The causality is reversed. The victim is the author of their own destruction. The Poke: Infinitely Elastic Provocation Second, the poke. What constitutes poking? In practice, everything Ukraine does to assert its sovereignty is poking. Joining NATO? Poking. Joining the EU? Poking. Speaking Ukrainian? Poking. Existing? Poking. The concept is infinitely elastic. It expands to encompass any action by any party that Russia finds inconvenient. Because the bear is a force of nature, the pokee has no legitimate grievance. You do not file a complaint against a thunderstorm. You take shelter. The implicit instruction of “don’t poke the bear” is: submit. The Don’t: A Command Third, the “don’t.” This is a command. Not a suggestion. Not an analysis. Not an invitation to consider multiple perspectives. A command addressed to a potential victim, instructing them to modify their behaviour to avoid provoking their own destruction. The entire moral weight of the meme rests on the victim. The aggressor, the bear, has no moral weight at all. It simply is. The Charge: Pure Mana This is pure mana. The factual content of the phrase is zero. There’s no claim to fact-check. There’s no argument to rebut. There’s only a charge. Notice the RG in “charge,” the same RG in “energy.” It’s the same RG in “reign” and in “right” — this is the second most important cryptotype, which I write about. There’s only a charge. A dense package of archetypal energy — again, the RGE in “energy,” “right,” “reign,” “regency,” “regiment” — that, once received, restructures the recipient’s perception of the conflict. Russia becomes nature. Ukraine becomes the provocateur. The West becomes the foolish hiker who ignored the warning signs. All of this happens below the threshold of conscious evaluation, in the half-second between hearing the phrase and feeling its truth in your gut. Naming as Disarmament The mana tool — look for the mana in the meme — asks you to notice this, to slow down, to feel the charge, and then to name it. Naming is the beginning of disarmament, real disarmament. Once you can say “this meme encodes the archetype of the untameable wild, and deploys it to invert the moral relationship between aggressor and victim,” the mana loses its grip. Not entirely, not permanently — mana is resilient. Naming it creates a gap, a space between the charge and your response. In that gap, adjudication becomes possible. You can decide whether or not to share the meme. You can decide whether or not to support AFD. You can make a decision to step back and stop yourself becoming emotionally moved by this, or scared. 847 Instances in the Luhansk Archive I found 847 instances of bear-related metaphors in the 10,000-item foundational corpus of the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, which is what I call the Luhansk Archive — this collection of propaganda items that I collected while in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, and hand-labelled according to the archetypal imminences within it. Not all of these 847 instances were “don’t poke the bear” specifically, but they all drew on the same archetypal reservoir: Russia as elemental force, Ukraine as irritant, the West as naive interloper in a drama it does not understand. The consistency was remarkable. It was not the consistency of a coordinated campaign — though coordination was certainly part of it — but the consistency of a deep cultural archetype being activated and amplified across thousands of individual acts of communication, which reached over a million ears almost every day. This is what makes Disinfolklore so difficult to counter, or even to perceive if you’re caught up in fact-checking. It’s not imposed from the outside. It resonates with something already present in the cultural substratum. The mana was already there. The propagandist merely increases the volume. The mana has been collecting its energy and its charge for 6,000 years, from the first Indo-Europeans who stood on the edge of forests on the steppe in ancient Ukraine, to those who returned to tell stories of the elemental bear. That is the mana charge. That’s when the mana charge in this particular meme began collecting. This week we saw AFD activating it inside the minds of all of us, unbeknownst to us. Perhaps they don’t even know what they’re doing, but they received their orders and they followed them. Unpacking the AFD Statement: The Twelve Signatures Let’s look at what it means when AFD said that, by helping Ukraine with its attack on Russia, Germany was provoking Russia and making an attack on Germany more likely. That was communicated through this meme of “don’t poke the bear.” 1. Inner / Outer Realm Sleight of Hand The first aspect of it is inner/outer realm sleight of hand. As many of you will know, inner/outer realm switching, othering — what Donald does when he others migrants, or women, or Iranians, or trans, or whatever. This is in-realm and out-realm switching. I call it the witch switch — switching scapegoats. It had this geographical positioning for me on the bridge in eastern Ukraine, on Stanytsia Luhanska, where, depending on where you stood, the inner realm of Russia-occupied Luhansk was being protected from people like me and outsiders and Ukrainians by the Russians, by the merciful sovereign. Inner realm equals the Germans — that’s her constituency, even though she lives in Switzerland. Outer realm: the bear, Russia, framed as predator. Ukraine, the actor actually defending itself, has disappeared from the analytical frame entirely. This deletion of the victim from the analytical space is itself a recurring signature. Some of you will remember I wrote a piece a few weeks ago on Palantir and Maven — all of this hand-wringing by certain people in the American chain of command about the advent of automated targeting — and Ukraine was completely absent from this. It turned out the only AI involved in this was a decision about which targets to take; humans were involved in pressing the button. Whereas Ukraine is dealing with this issue on a technical level hundreds, if not over a thousand, times a da

    51 min

  3. May 15

    Podcast | Minsking Coyote Lawyer

    Zelensky’s Red Square Coordinates: Sovereign Trolling I was happy to see this week when President Zelensky posted the executive order, for want of a better term, talking about how the coordinates — the very accurate, I think it was eight-digit grid coordinates, or maybe even ten — of Red Square in Moscow would be safe from Ukrainian missiles. I noted with great pleasure how everyone recognised that as trolling, and that interested me. There was no argument that this was what this was about. It was about trolling using the threat of force, or the non-threat of force, but in the sense of weapons. Here is a sovereign with the capacity to direct an army, missiles to kill people, using Twitter. I noted the Prime Minister of Ukraine and many ministers tweeted out the executive order, as did President Zelensky himself. That’s the online aspect of it. It was a very specific message within a complicated concatenation of negotiations that most of us are following on a day-by-day basis, but which most normal people wouldn’t follow. The venue was online in some senses, but everyone recognised it as trolling, not only because it was online. It had real-world aspects to it, and that pleased me enormously, because that was what I noticed about trolling in eastern Ukraine: it is a multi-arena activity that we have a sense of understanding what it is. It’s mainly encountered online, but when something happens like President Zelensky signing that executive order as part of a strategy to get 1,000 Ukrainian hostages back from Russia, we recognise that as trolling. That is in the context of the trolling series, which we’ll go into. Archetypal Literacy and the Luhansk Corpus The second element is this archetypal literacy. On disinfolklore.eu, the website, the main expression of my work, there’s what I archetype: the Disinfolklore Analytical Method as the 12-tool way. The first tool is archetypal literacy. As part of my learning — I’m still learning — to be archetypally literate, to see archetypes immanent in data, I hand-labelled this massive corpus of over 10,000 propaganda items that I collected while working in eastern Ukraine from inside the Russia-occupying media space inside Luhansk. I refer to this as the Luhansk Corpus. These are hand-labelled as the archetypal imminences inside these stories. What I started here about five weeks ago was talking you through these stories and the different archetypes within them. Some of you might remember I was talking about the merciful sovereign. Inside the entire structure of the situation, Putler plays the merciful sovereign by saying that he is rescuing Ukrainians from the drug-addicted leaders and all of that nonsense, and the Nazis and all of that nonsense. When Putler is talking like that, he is archetyping himself as a merciful sovereign. The Mother and the Maiden Some of you might remember from a long time ago — it is a year, over a year now, that we’ve been doing these weekly, and I’ve only missed, I think, one or two weeks — that one of the very first ones I talked about was The Mother and the Maiden. This was an incident in eastern Ukraine where, in a blinding flash, I realised that there was something artificial about the use of this term: underage mother and her underage daughter who were about to be cut into tiny pieces by a Ukrainian Nazi. Again, this is a form of trolling, and it’s a very typical situation in some respects, but it also has real-world effects. It begins in the information space. It passed into my chain of command and down to me as a patrol group leader of a team of international diplomats on the border with Russia-occupied Ukraine. We were dispatched to go into a forest to look for this mother and her underage daughter who were about to be chopped into tiny pieces. As I recounted, what that was doing was trying to archetype, was trying to trigger us — me and my team, and those in my chain of command who ordered us on this ridiculous task — which, even before I even had the word archetype, only me and one other colleague who were sent on this task realised: this is ridiculous, this is not true, this is an artificial situation that we’re being sent on. I subsequently found out that the mother and the maiden are what Carl Jung calls primordial archetypes. As spoken about before, I disagree with Carl Jung on the universality of archetypes. My other work in Power of Mana establishes that all of the different traditions from which Jung was gathering evidence of the universality of archetypes were Indo-European traditions. The Kramatorsk Video: The Switch from Merciful to Merciless This last week we saw this picture, this video — some of us will have seen this — of a mother sheltering her daughter, her young daughter, by a tree in a park that I’ve been to in Kramatorsk, while drones hunted them in the sky. The video lasts for about two and a half minutes. What we have there, for me, was a very significant video, quite apart from the human aspect of it and the barbarity of it. I did my best to share it because it hopefully will bring home to people one of the reasons why the mother and the maiden is a primordial archetype: it moves us. It should move us. It should move people in our lives who don’t really know about the drone safaris. The person filming that in the park may well have had no awareness of Carl Jung or why this particular scene — while that film was being filmed, while the person was standing there (I don’t know if it was a man or a woman who came across this scene while the drone was going overhead) — they themselves had to shelter from it, as we saw in the rest of the video. They themselves, while their life was in danger, were so drawn to the picture of this mother and the maiden, and because they had their phone they were able to film them. There’s a great beauty about these two and a half minutes. It’s kind of like an intermission in reality, where it goes into archetypal Disinfolklore in the sense of that video was capturing the horror of what the Russians are doing. The merciful sovereign Putler is — I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that mother and her daughter, certainly the mother, was probably a native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainian. That is the person like the mother and the daughter that I wrote about in one of my first Disinfolklore pieces, who brought their child to shelter in the drama theatre in Mariupol and then was annihilated. In the moment of their annihilation, they were turned from the person the merciful sovereign was going to rescue — because they were being ruled by a crowd of drug-addicted Nazis from Kiev, according to the Disinfolklore — and in the moment of their annihilation, of being turned into biological dust, they were transformed into Nazis. Now, thankfully, I’ve made the link that in that very moment, the merciful sovereign turns into the merciless sovereign, and that switch is a reciprocal process. Immanent in that video we saw of the mother and the maiden in Kramatorsk last Friday was the transformation in the eyes of people viewing it of the merciful sovereign Putler as he was playing himself into the merciless sovereign, and the further entrenchment of President Zelensky as the merciful sovereign, who, as all of us know, is doing everything in his power to ensure the protection of his people. These are very, very old categories. Apart from that, this is a method to analyse particular situations that I find personally quite useful, and also very rich. Training the Neural Network on the Disinfolklore Analytical Method The point of me hand-labelling these and speaking and doing podcasts is — what I’m also doing is training an artificial neural network algorithm to think like I think. This week I finished creating the architecture and the inputs, the dataset which I input into the neural net, into the large language model to train it. The architecture itself of the neural network which I designed is based on the 12-tool way. The process of doing this is absolutely fascinating. As I’ve mentioned before, I think this is the future for all of us. We will have our own little neural nets running all the time. Some people will never have the ability to train their particular personal neural net. My vision for the Disinfolklore Analytical Method is a module that we can add on to our cognitive system, our cognitive structures. At the moment it’s available on the website. It’s available listening to me and gaining some sense of archetypal literacy, so that we can parse the data and the data streams coming through us into structural elements that help us understand what’s going on when Russia, for instance, is playing the merciful sovereign by saying it’s trying to rescue Ukrainians from something. We know the only harm in Ukraine is being caused by Russia. Equally, in the American example, this method translates perfectly to Donald and what Donald is doing. I talked before about the archetyping of himself as a sovereign through the use of the ballroom from Cinderella, from Louis XIV’s, and also this triumphal arch — again, the RCH, the right — archetyping himself as an emperor. The method should translate into all those things. In order to train the neural network algorithm, and in order to get the architecture, it is necessary to label, hand-label algorithms. This is what I’m going to talk to you right now about, which is the walk-in. Stephanie Baker’s Bloomberg Article on the Walk-In There was a great article in Bloomberg published this week — very, very detailed article — and it was featured on the Daily Telegraph podcast, which I listen to every now and again these days, reluctantly. I do see this story of them kind of becoming more human and more European. Hearing the Daily Telegraph kind of eulogise Kaja Kallas and other people in Europe is a great joy to me, having gone through the whole Brexit malarkey. Th

    43 min
  4. Podcast | The Creature of Moral Ambivalence and The Grandmother at the Checkpoint

    May 6

    Podcast | The Creature of Moral Ambivalence and The Grandmother at the Checkpoint

    Some of you may remember that two weeks ago I started a new series, looking at trolling and trolls. I am interspersing each week: one week on archetypal analysis of what I call the Luhansk archive, and then I move into the trolling. Trolling as Emotion-Moving Activity Just to remind everyone how I conceive of trolling: it is an emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind. I arrived at that definition through the story I am telling you tonight, and that I told you last time — that trolling is about movement, and what binds the use of artillery in eastern Ukraine, which I witnessed a lot, with Donald’s trolling about Iran, or anything else on the internet, with indeed President Zelenskyy’s trolling about his ceasefire offer this week and Ukraine’s great response to that. What binds all of these uses of the term trolling — which do describe the phenomena I have described — is movement, and the movement of emotions. What unites an artillery barrage with a tweet, or with the kind of way you might communicate with your pet cat, or the way someone you love communicates with you when they are trying to persuade you to do something that initially you did not want to do, but it is in your interests — this is all about a movement of emotions, and there is an activity which moves the emotions. I just wanted to fix you on that as we go through this. The Journey from Factiva to Eastern Ukraine What I am doing is bringing you on the journey I went on, which is: how do you link that aspect with the use of trolling as a term — trolls and trolling — for a phenomenon that most of us did not have any awareness of before, say, 2010? I did not have any awareness of trolling before about 2018 as a signifier. I remember the moment I received an email from a friend who just mentioned, oh, they were on YouTube trolling some people. I did not know what he was talking about at the time. I do remember that. What that signifier describes has been around forever, and I can say that with certainty because I have looked into what it means. The meaning which I deduce from the Dow Jones Factiva database of the uses of the term trolling and trolls — 65,000 uses of those terms in the world’s largest database of media, 33,000 media sources — that was my starting point. My friend used this term, it intrigued me, and I did not know what he was talking about, but I was seeing it a lot around. I wanted to see how this term has been used over time. That led me on this journey. It was my insight in eastern Ukraine that actually the meaning of this phenomenon — that has a meaning in early computer culture from California, and also with the advent particularly of Facebook and Twitter around 2008, this explosion of the use of trolls and trolling in the media around the world — what united those uses with what I was seeing in eastern Ukraine was the fact that there was a troll: as a person, as a metaphor to describe a person, or as a metaphor to describe a tweet, or what I now understand as any emotion-moving activity. The activity could be a flick of your eyebrow. It could be a tweet by the President of the United States. It could be a piece of legislation. All of these phenomena are united by the fact that they are emotion-moving activity, and they do move others’ emotions. Two Springs: Fishing and Folklore Last time I spoke about this, I was talking about looking at the term, how it arose in the Oxford English Dictionary, and how it went from fishing — from the discourse of fishing. It was used as a metaphor to talk about how you troll for souls. That was some of the earliest uses. Then in 2006, the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive account of the English language, used the term from computer culture for the first time — trolling for bait, in the sense that my friend used it. That was a proposed amendment in 2006. There are these two springs from which this idea of trolling and trolls comes. One is fishing, and that goes back to the 13th century. The other is folklore. Today I am going to talk about folklore, and the connection there obviously with what I was doing in Ukraine: I was on a bridge with bridge trolls. The troll’s tale described the structural situation that I was in in eastern Ukraine. There were all these colliding meanings and associations which I have spent years trying to work out and work through. First spring, fishing. Second spring, folklore — the creature under the bridge. On the older of the two streams that fed the word troll, the Scandinavian folk creature: the bridge, the billy goats, the Moomins, and the long moral ambivalence of the figure in the folk imagination, before it met the English verb at the bottom of the hill. I took you on the first of the two streams that fed the word troll. I took you on the angler on the river in 1606, the clergyman who wrote that God trolls for souls. Tonight I will take you on the second stream. This one is older, it is colder, and considerably stranger. The Creature of Moral Ambivalence The creature is not unambiguously malign. The creature is not unambiguously benign. The creature has a long, murky career as a figure of moral ambivalence. To understand what happened to the word in the last 30 years — because this is really what I am doing, telling you about the development of this word in most of our lifetimes, and the development of the practice of trolling from early computer culture in California, to the use of trolling as a weapon of war by Iran, by Russia, indeed by Ukraine, and by the United States of America — you have to see what happened to the figure across the last thousand years. When I say that the troll is ambiguous: we do associate trolls with negative connotations, but the literary history we have also has them as positive creatures. Why is this significant to the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska, where on one side you had the Russian bridge trolls protecting their inner realm, Russia-occupied Ukraine? From the perspective of the inner realm, they were using their Disinfolklore to convince the people inside Russia-occupied Ukraine that those imprisoning them were actually protecting them from Ukrainian bogeymen, from Ukrainian Nazis. From that side, from the inner realm of Russia-occupied Luhansk, you look at the bridge troll and you are being brainwashed into thinking that is a positive creature. If you are MAGA, you look at Donald as someone who is going to protect America. He is standing on the bridge. He is protecting the inner realm of white-dominated America from the marauding migrants who are coming in over the bridge. From the perspective of MAGA adherents, or those who fall for the Donald troll, he is a positive creature. Obviously, from all of our perspectives — I am making assumptions here, but I think it is a good assumption to make — from our perspectives, he is a troll in a negative sense, and he is destroying the inner realm of America. That ambiguity depends on where you stand. Understanding that helps us understand the complexity of the act of trolling, where you can very gently troll someone into doing something that is in their best interests, and vice versa. Yet it is the same activity you are really doing. It is persuasion, it is courting, it is expressing love. It is like if your child or your pet is trying to get you to do something. Old Norse: A Category, Not a Creature The Old Norse word trolls — spelt troll, without the S, in the sagas — does not, in the oldest attestations, name a single specific creature. It names a category. In Indo-European culture, we have this category with different monikers everywhere. The category is something like: a supernatural being, larger and stronger than a human, not clearly divine, usually hostile, sometimes intermarriageable with humans, often associated with remote places — mountains, forests, caves, the underside of bridges, the far side of rivers. Every one of those elements can be found in the Prose Edda, which is one of the earliest texts in a Germanic language, and in the Heimskringla, and in the Icelandic family sagas of the 13th century. The creature is pre-Christian in origin, and most of the surviving texts were written down after the Christianisation of Iceland in 1000 AD, and the Christian scribes have already imposed a layer of demonisation. You find trolls who are pitiable or even noble. One of the oldest story types in the corpus that I collected is the story of a human hero who is trapped in the wilderness — on a mountain pass, in a cave during a storm at night, on a lonely road — and is rescued from the wilderness by a troll woman, who turns out, under hideous exterior, to be a supernatural figure of rescue. Here we have, in the other series I am doing, where we talk a lot about the merciful sovereign — when Donald or Putler create the crisis and then act as the merciful sovereign to get the Hormuz Strait open. This is an essential aspect of the early use of the troll. The troll woman gives the hero food, shelter, a magical object, crucial knowledge. The hero goes on to do his great deed because of the troll woman’s gift. This is not the story the Grimm brothers would later tell about ogres. It is a story that acknowledges that the creature outside the human community has gifts the community cannot provide, and that the hero who needs those gifts must be willing to accept them from the figure the community fears. Three Billy Goats Gruff: Moral Simplification Three Billy Goats Gruff — which is the foundational story for me on the bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska, because I realised that not only was it a structural description of what I was going through there, but it is a structural description of all encounters with the other world and all encounters in interaction zones — in airports, on the Hormuz Straits, wherever you have one community defining itself against an outer realm community. The Three Billy Goats Gruff is reall

    51 min
  5. Podcast | Mobile Armies of Archetypes

    Apr 30

    Podcast | Mobile Armies of Archetypes

    A couple of weeks ago, I started a new series, and this is going to be the third episode of it, where I am going through what I call the Luhansk archive, the Luhansk corpus, which was the data set from which I generated the Disinfolklore analysis. I am going through the different archetypal identities in each of these stories. This is a core part of the analytical method: this idea I have of mobile armies of archetypes — really, archetypal identities. You have the signifier, you have the surface, the phenomenon. You have the gold in Donald’s office in the White House — that is surface. That is an archetypal identifier. Then you have the identity associated with it, which is what it is supposed to signify on the surface level, but also subconsciously. I talk in all my work about archetypes and archetypal identities and archetyping, but this mode of analysis was generated from this corpus, which I gathered, collected, and analysed, and tried to understand what on earth was going on when I first encountered it in eastern Ukraine. Why This Is Relevant to Ukraine: A War of Symbols Why is this relevant to Ukraine? We are all here for Ukraine. We obviously have the connection between Donald and America and Ukraine, which has just been spoken about. We also have, on the level of the war itself, that it is a war of symbols. It is a war of archetypes. When we see Russia sending a thousand humans to their doom each day, they are trying to affect and project archetypal identities into the minds of the decision-makers and the non-decision-makers like normal people like us. They are trying to impact the minds of humanity and to persuade us that they are strong. That sacrifice is being made — despite us knowing in this space that they are not strong — to try to convince people that they are strong. Strength and strongman is an archetype, and the archetypal identity is between Putler and a strongman, or between Donald and a strongman. Of course, we understand the true archetypal identity there is between, say, President Zelenskyy with the Ukrainian people and strength. That is also why it is relevant. The Ballroom: Folkloric Motif Before Architecture This week, we saw the obsession with the so-called ballroom. This is the relevance of the Disinfolklore analytical method. As far as I am aware, nobody else has noticed this phenomenon yet, despite it being so obvious. You can get your eye in because you have been reading me or listening to me. The ballroom. The repetition of the ballroom — that phrase, that archetype, which we all remember from children’s stories, from Cinderella: you will not go to the ball, you will go to the ball, the slipper, Disney. That is the payload. It is everywhere in our information space, whether you want the ballroom built or whether you do not want the ballroom built. People this afternoon are sharing photographs of the gold in the Oval Office. By sharing a photograph of this gold in the Oval Office, we are actually participating in the embedding of an archetypal identity that we may or may not agree with. From the standpoint of the intelligence and the people who are trying to affect our moods, our intentions, and our motivations by using these archetypes, this idea of the ballroom — they do not care, because the energy is being continued, and the picture is being continued. What I try to do in all my work is just give us a bit of a guide, because I see it. I see the same energy, the same tactics that were used in eastern Ukraine, and it can help us understand what is going on in today’s world. I wrote a piece this week — I have been meaning to write it for a very long time — because of this obsession and this repetition, this mantra, like Hunter Biden. This is the point of it: whether you are for or against it — ballroom, ballroom. Yes, I could fall into that trap, but I am claiming a special exemption. I can use the archetype ballroom, ballroom, ballroom here, because I am trying to explain a perspective on what it means and its impact, and why suddenly this is in everyone’s minds — everyone who is tuned into the American infospace. The ballroom is a folkloric motif before it is an architectural one. We have to understand that. A lot of the debate is showing pictures of the destruction of the East Wing, which is one archetype: destroy the heart of American identity. Yes, if you want to destroy that, then you physically destroy the building. That is one element, one archetype. I am not focusing on that. I am focusing on this idea that a Republican Party — whose moniker, whose archetype is as a Republican — will be banging on about a ballroom. Three Inflections of the Ballroom: King’s Hall, Mead Hall, Cinderella It is a folkloric motif. Three of its inflections are doing the work here. The first is the King’s Hall. Some of you know my Finding Manuland project, the exchange of mana. Part of my motivation to look for that was reading in Irish mythological tales. So many of them are set in the King’s Hall. It is a table replete with food, and it is about the exchange of what I call mana. Homer — the composite individual, Homer who toured, and the different other people who toured the coast, the western coast of Anatolia, of today’s Turkey — and spoke at certain festivals where food was exchanged. The king, the monarch, would pay for these huge feasts, and these tales — a bit like I am regaling you with a tale now — would be told. Those eventually were written down, and that is the Iliad and the Odyssey. We see it also in Indian culture. It was just a curiosity to me, because it is quite alien from most of our lives. I think it is important to sit down in a room — but for some people who went to older universities, or old boys, or Rotary Club, there is all this thing about food and the exchange of energy in those rooms, so there is part of that. The gilded Oval Office, his gold card, his own face engraved on it, his Mar-a-Lago, Rococo mirrors, and now his East Wing ballroom — they are all operating in the same gift economy of sovereign favour, in the same idiom of polished gold. I went once to the mansion that Yanukovych — who was president of Ukraine until he ran away in February 2014 — owned. I was expecting this mythical place that had been built. I think it cost maybe 100, 150 million dollars. It had a Spanish galleon on it. I do not think it had any zebras, but they were not there when I went to visit it. I was expecting to hate it, but actually I had never been anywhere like it. It was just every detail: from the gold loo brushes to the underground corridors, to the perfectly sculpted rooms to resemble the Holy Grail and suits of armour, brand-new suits of armour, all done — and then you move into modernity and John Lennon, a Steinway piano, and just beauty, and birds fluttering around, singing songbirds. It was one of the most beautiful houses I have ever been in. On the face of it, it seemed gaudy. I draw that in because, while many people advertise this gold and this royal stuff, we think we are making a point by saying it is gauche. There is a semiotic and archetypal reason why this is being done, and why it has the effect it has. Whether he understands it on the level I am talking about now or not, he does understand the effect of it on people. This is why he is where he is today. The second inflection is the Mead Hall, the room in which the king becomes the king. Many of us have perhaps wondered about Mar-a-Lago. It is just so sad. It is such a weird thing. Many of us would just prefer to be at home or be with our family and our pets, yet he wants to reside in this public space, because that is where the king becomes the king. It is Versailles. He is quoting, he is representing, Louis XIV in 2026. That is the antithesis. It is the reversal of the Republic. It is the reversal of 300 years of history. It is completely consistent with the idea to destroy and eradicate every memory of the post-World War II legal order, and indeed even the constitutional order before it. The reference is not generic luxury. It is the particular memory of a court that danced while the country starved. That is the citation by an administration whose Project 2025 and DOGE and all of that is about producing disequilibrium, and disequilibrium-analysing the entire globe all the time, while supposedly running a fake blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, except letting through — and this is where the axis of misogyny operating on the level of oligarchy let through this big Russian yacht the other day. Iran, Oman, and the United States colluded to allow through this oligarch’s yacht. That is the props. The third inflection is the Cinderella ballroom, the room in which status is confirmed. The whole passport thing is also part of this — the room in which the door closes at midnight on those whose invitation has expired. The presidential ballroom is by its nature a guest list. A Republican space by its nature is not. The Law of Similarity and the Gilded Monarchy Set I have talked a bit before about the law of similarity: things that look alike are treated alike. This is why we fall for trolls, why we look at photographs of people and think we are looking at something real. It is very important in disinformation. The gold leaf, the crystal, the Rococo mirroring produce similarity by association. It is the archetype of monarchical sovereignty. I posted this yesterday morning. The eye reads the whole, and the unconscious reads the king, the monarch. Read alongside the long-link “to the King” Truth Social post, where he is archetyping himself as king; the AI-generated crown portraits; the Mar-a-Lago oval; the gold card; the military parade — the ballroom is not an ornament. It is the missing room in a coherent set. The set’s archetypal payload is gilded monarchy. Adjudicated against the Code of Positive Trolls, the ballroom fails generosity, because it is

    52 min
  6. Podcast | Trolling as Geostrategic Doom Magnetism

    Apr 23

    Podcast | Trolling as Geostrategic Doom Magnetism

    New Second Series and the Starting Point I have been thinking about some of the archetypes and seeing their application. Frankly, I have been hearing more people say the method is useful for figuring out what is going on in the world. I am glad this is something that is catching on with some important people, the people I work with. It matters. It really is helpful to understand how Russia thinks and how we can use this against them. My vision is that we will have two series going on together at the same time, one week on, one week off. The other series, which I started a few weeks ago, is looking at this well of data that I collected between 2015 and 2018 in Luhansk from the Russian occupier media, broken down into the various archetypes. I have been going through that. This series I wanted to start was to look at trolling and the emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind. I have spoken about this before. I did a lot of work on this from the autumn, from the fall of 2019 onwards, and particularly from March 2020 onwards. I went through 60,000 or 70,000 entries under the terms trolling and trolls in the Dow Jones Factiva database of 33,000 sources. That is the largest media source database on planet Earth. What I wanted to look at was how the terms trolling and trolls are used in the modern era, as evidenced by these 60,000 or 70,000 entries in the database. Recently, I have been able to analyse the results in a way that I had not had the space and the time to do before. In some ways, you have seen the results of it, which is Decoding Trolls and all of my work, the Code of Positive Trolls, and things I have talked about in Disinfolklore. The Insight from Eastern Ukraine: Artillery and Emotions I am going to start with the insight which I had in eastern Ukraine, which was the continuity between, for example, artillery strikes on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska — the continuity between that and the emotions you feel when you see them or feel them or hear them — and the emotions you feel when you read articles written about them. I had this insight, this vision, that actually there is no real difference in terms of quality, the content of trolling through artillery strikes, for example, and using Twitter to troll. The same effect on people’s emotions comes from these two different examples. I had started off on this journey because I wanted to understand how Donald Trump was able to use Twitter to provoke people’s emotions. That is essentially why trolling seemed to me important as a concept. It is my luck — I use that in a very classic sense — it is my luck that Donald was re-elected and we have seen his self-realisation move towards this apex. The White House Meme Apparatus in the Iran War My starting point really is the White House meme apparatus in the Iran war. Between the 28th of February 2026 and the launch of Operation so-called Epic Fury and the two-week Hormuz Strait ceasefire — or if it was a ceasefire, which has supposedly been extended today — the Trump White House ran the most aggressive presidential office social media war propaganda campaign in American history. What had been in the first Trump term a hobbyist’s Twitter feed has been fully institutionalised. The White House X, TikTok, and Untruth Social accounts, together with the Rapid Response 47 feed, have posted over 100 short-form videos mashing up real Iran strike footage with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Mortal Kombat, Halo 2, Call of Duty, Wii Sports, Top Gun: Maverick, Gladiator, John Wick, Transformers, Deadpool, Star Wars, Iron Man, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Yu-Gi-Oh, and SpongeBob SquarePants. This is clearly within my jurisdiction. This is all Disinfolklore. This is the use of contemporary folkloric tropes and memes to communicate national policy. Six Archetypal Moves Inside the Iran Theatre There are six archetypal moves I have managed to trace inside this, all running simultaneously. The first is drama as war. Real killings are edited into video games. Ludic frames — wasted, flawless victory — close the Epic Fury montage after Iranian trucks and ships are blown up. This is Surkov-style dramaturgy imported into the world’s largest military. For those of us who are Americans, it is a moment of epic shame. The second archetype is accusation in a mirror, Minab edition. The Shajira Tayeba school was destroyed by a US Tomahawk on the first day of the war. Bellingcat, BBC Verify, the New York Times, and preliminary Pentagon findings all attributed responsibility to the United States. Donald, on the 7th of March, said the strike was done by Iran because Iranians are very inaccurate with their munitions. Leavitt, at the 4th of March podium, said “not that we know of” when asked if the US had killed the girls, and called the reporting propaganda. The third archetype is war magic by repetition and opposites. The White House reframed a war of choice, unsupported by a UN Security Council mandate and unsupported by any armed attack on the United States, as “peace through strength” — another archetype, the exact phrase that Reagan coined and that Leavitt in November 2025 attributed to Donald. The words crushes, decisive, overwhelming strength, lethal precision recur verbatim across the White House Epic Fury page, the CENTCOM press release, the DOD fact sheets, and the Rapid Response 47 feed. Just to remind people: in the past, wars were fought — sure, we had CNN in the first Gulf War, and Baudrillard famously wrote about how the Gulf War only happened on TV. At that time, there were also diplomatic channels, the UN Security Council, meetings between allies. The war itself was separate in some sense that it is no longer separate from this meme war. The fourth archetype is the provocation logic cycle, which I did that series of five on — reflexive control. Donald’s Truth Social cycle — open the Strait, you crazy b******s, or you will be living in hell — his Easter week threats to bomb every bridge, every power plant, every desalination plant, all AI-generated — exactly the escalation ladder that let him claim victory by ceasefire hours before his own deadline expired. Iran’s forced reopening of the strait under threat was branded a diplomatic win. The test was invented to produce the outcome. The fifth archetype is the foreign scapegoat switch. Iran was slotted into the same scapegoat rotation machine that has cycled through trans service members, Haitian immigrants, Venezuelan gang members, universities, law firms, trans athletes — Donald is on about athletes again today, university athletes — and the press corps. The Iran theatre gives the administration what domestic scapegoats cannot: kinetic footage. That footage feeds the meme engine, which feeds the ratings, which feed the podium. The sixth archetype is stealth via AI targeting. The Maven — again, a Disinfolklore moniker — the Maven so-called smart system from Palantir — again, a Disinfolklore moniker, the magic stones from Lord of the Rings. Palantir is a $1.3 billion Pentagon programme of record, with Anthropic’s Claude embedded to rank targets and draft legal justifications. Palantir has been around for about ten or twelve years. Many people have said it is basically just a shell; they have nothing, there are no magic stones underneath it. Here we find out that basically — because it was Palantir’s magic stones which were involved in the targeting of this school — Palantir is using Claude. It is using Anthropic’s systems. Anthropic was a company begun four years ago. From my experience, it does have the most powerful available AI engine ever created. Here we have Palantir. They are just basically trying to scapegoat Claude. By scapegoating Anthropic’s Claude for the mis-targeting, they are admitting that they have nothing. It is just like a holding company. Even though they have had access to so many governments’ records — the National Health Service in the UK handed over the entire database to Palantir under the last government, continued by this government — yet, despite having all this massive amount of data, Palantir never seemed to build any AI engine capable of properly processing these data into actionable predictions. We know what Ukraine has done with the Delta battlefield system. One of Palantir’s great products was to sell NATO their real-time battlefield intelligence system. Ukraine has just built its Delta system from the ground up, which is, as far as we were aware, better than anything NATO or Palantir could come up with. Palantir used Anthropic’s Claude to rank targets and draft legal justifications. This compressed what had been days of human analysis into minutes. The Minab school was hit because DIA-supplied coordinates were outdated. As we now know, you could have looked on Google Maps and seen it was a school, but six years ago it was not a school. The system did not catch that the school had been fenced off from the IRGC compound. Between 2013 and 2016, the kill chain accelerated faster than the error-correction loop. When the atrocity surfaced, the administration’s first move was denial through social media. Second was propagandising the denial. Third was the meme. In my Disinfolklore framework, this is what I call a negative chain: coercive control, war magic, stealth, and drama, all running on full throttle in the Iran theatre. The meme apparatus is the drama. The archetypal insurance the administration is taking out — through Leavitt’s podium denials, Trump’s Old Testament Hormuz thunder, Hegseth’s no-quarter pledge, and the White House’s cartoons — is the war magic that legitimises the stealth and re-archetypes a war of choice as an existential one. The Code of Positive Trolls — the six-element code which I came up with in February 2020 — has never been more clearly needed and more clearly absent. A Confession About the Word Trolling I want to be

    1 hr
  7. Podcast | Merciless Sovereign Goes Hungry

    Apr 16

    Podcast | Merciless Sovereign Goes Hungry

    The Archetype Series: Recap and Context Last week, we started a new series, which is on actual archetypes, because what I have been trying to do is go back to where all of this began for me, which was in eastern Ukraine, looking at the Russian occupiers’ media. I saved thousands — 10,000 articles from the Russian occupiers’ media from between 2014 and 2018. In them, I found some archetypes at the time, but I did not have the word for it. I have told you the mother and the maiden story, where we had that operation where I was sent to find a common-law wife and her underage daughter who were about to be chopped into tiny pieces by a Ukrainian Nazi. The moment I heard about that operation — I did not know anything about Jung or archetypes — I knew that the story sounded artificial to me. Then I saw the reaction of the people around me and above me in the chain of command. They did not react in the same way that I did. Only one other person did, who was a London Metropolitan Police officer. We were like: what are they doing? This is a ridiculous operation. There began my suspicion that Russian propaganda was, either knowingly or not, using archetypes to manipulate our ideas of right and what is right, beneath our conscious minds. Last week I started with the first three archetypes, and one of them was the merciful sovereign. A Year of Volya Radio Over the year, I have introduced you to the Disinfolklore analytical method. I have gone through several different series. I went through the four years of the war, and everything I did is posted on my website, disinfolklore.eu. That is my main website, and all of the Volya shows up until about two months ago, or a month and a half ago, are there on the Spotify. If you just press play, it starts with me, because it is all about me in this small slot. I have also been posting them a bit more systematically on my other website, which is disinfolklore.net. Disinfolklore.eu is the processed, sliced-and-diced, structured twelve-tool presentation: the origins of the Disinfolklore analytical method. It is over a million words, all in very short passages, over 1,700 short passages. It is a response to people who really liked and were interested in what I had to say and my ideas, but did not or do not have the capability to read the long Substack pieces where some of the material began. Then the 44,000 tweets — all of those have been sliced and diced and put in there as well. On disinfolklore.net, which is based on the Substack and which is part of my tripartite Substacks — Power of Mana, Finding Manuland, and Decoding Trolls — one of which I use to publish pensées, which are basically my tweets with a bit of processing to try and preserve those. Then mainly on disinfolklore.net is where I post, and where tomorrow, for instance, I will post this particular show. Trump’s Tweet on Hungary and Dumézil’s Trifunctional Hypothesis Donald Trump tweeted this week. Let me read what he has to say: “My administration stands ready to use the full economic might of Hungary’s economy, as we’ve done for our great allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán” — spelt correctly, believe it or not — “and the Hungarian people ever need it. We are excited to invest in the future prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s continued leadership. President Donald J. Trump.” As many of you know, I worked out, through trying to process this experience that I had in eastern Ukraine in 2016 with the mother and the maiden story, and ended up looking at Dumézil. Dumézil is one of those people in human culture who discovers something that nobody else has discovered, yet all the data was available to them. To cut a long story short, in the mid-1930s, by looking at various myths from different Indo-European traditions, Georges Dumézil suddenly had a moment of insight, which he then spent the rest of his life articulating and elucidating. The moment of insight was that Indo-European cultures — from Ireland to India, the eight main branches of living Indo-European languages — organised themselves according to three dimensions, three archetypes, three functions: sovereignty, security, and prosperity. All of my work is impacted by this. Donald J. Trump and those around him have probably never heard of Georges Dumézil. Yet here is Donald playing the merciful sovereign. Literally, I am ticking off every element: his message conforms to these archetypes. Obviously, at this point, no one has ever heard of any of my work. These people have not heard of Georges Dumézil any more than I had. Yet they are kind of going through a tick list. He is talking about “my administration stands ready to use the full economic might.” There we have administration — that is sovereignty. The full economic might — that is the third function, the fertility. These map onto the three castes in Indian culture. We have them in Ireland. We have them across the entire Indo-European world. There are some elements of Georges Dumézil’s work which are still discussed and still a bit controversial, but it is widely accepted now that not only are Indo-European myths organised in this way, but the tripartite structure of our governments and of our communities is as well. This stretches all the way back to the Yamnaya in Mykolaivka village on the right bank of the Dnieper River, about 40 kilometres south of Zaporizhzhia. We know that because, generally speaking, if you find an element in a living Indo-European language east of Ukraine — mainly Indian or Iranian — and you find that same element in an Indo-European language west of Ukraine, then you can, on the balance of probabilities absent any other evidence, deduce that that element was present before the split. Before one brother and sister of the Yamnaya community went west from Mykolaivka village or the area between the Don and the Dnieper, and one brother and sister went east, and they both carried with them this element. There are lots of exceptions to this general rule, but when you find an element in every Indo-European language family — all eight living Indo-European families — and then you also find it in the Anatolian family, then you know for certain it is part of the common source and was present. We have a few examples of this. I believe I have identified one, which is the M-N sound. I have written about that extensively. My main mantra is: look for the mana in the meme, look for the energy, look for the psychic energy, the synchronicity, the libido, the X factor — but I call it mana, M-N. In this tweet, he has administration — the sovereignty. Full economic might — the fertility, which maps onto the farmer economy, the female aspect of society, which is the third caste in India. Hungary’s economy, as we have done for our great allies in the past. If Orbán wins, if they ever need it, we are excited to invest in the future prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s continued leadership. This is archetypal merciful sovereign. We have Orbán himself playing a sovereign, but then we have the big daddy playing the merciful sovereign. He sends over his son, Vance, to go there, and then he decides to weigh in and uses Dumézilian language. What I am trying to teach, and what I now see with X-ray specs because I analysed this corpus — because it was so strange to me — is that I now literally see it everywhere. That is the perspective I am trying to help us see through, because when we see a tweet like this, if we can analyse exactly what he is doing — and it is very simple what he is doing, but he does not know it — these archetypal structures, they are not setting out to play the merciful sovereign, but he is acting in that way. That is just a practical use for what I am trying to teach and the perspective I have learned to see. The Changeling: Stealth Genocide and the Theft of Identity You will remember last week I went through the mother and the maiden; I began at the beginning, the bridge troll; the merciful sovereign — and of course the bridge troll, here we are in the Hormuz Strait, this whole structure is playing out there; and then we had the Ukrainian Nazi, the bogeyman. Now I am going to talk about the changeling: stealth genocide and the theft of identity. Stealth genocide is a phrase I forged — I think in August 2022. I started using the term genocide in respect of the full-scale invasion after about ten days. At the same time, the then president of Poland, who was also a lawyer, started using it. Then, of course, President Zelenskyy used the term genocide when he visited Bucha and when he saw the dead bodies. Lawyers were very cautious about using the term genocide. Russia has been doing everything it can for the past ten years to determine what the term means, because everything they do, as is the case with Donald, is really a confession. You can predict what they are going to do by looking at their language and the archetypal structures in their language and what they are doing. This is actually the hardest archetype to name, but it is one we must learn fastest because it is the engine of what I have come to call Russia’s stealth genocide. In folklore across Europe, the changeling is the child swapped in the cradle. In Ireland, the Stolen Child — W.B. Yeats wrote an amazing poem about the Stolen Child, which the Waterboys put to music, which is beautiful. If you go into Apple Music or Spotify, you will find it. It is a ridiculously beautiful poem and will transport you through these beautiful valleys in the west of Ireland, which I know very well. In folklore across Europe, the changeling is the child swapped in the cradle. The parents look down and see their baby, but it is not their baby. It is an imp, a revenant, wearing the baby’s face. The parents do not notice for years, but by the time they do, the true child is lost forever in the other world. The changeling tale

    1h 5m
  8. Podcast | The Corpus and the Elephant in the Room

    Apr 9

    Podcast | The Corpus and the Elephant in the Room

    This data set of 10,000 propaganda items, which I collected in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, is the basis of Disinfolklore. It is the basis of my insight about archetypes. I had not really systematically gone through it to take out all of the main archetypes and sub-archetypes from this corpus, as it were. I have done this now, and I have quite a number of individual papers on it, which I thought I would go through. I suppose the first thing to address is the elephant in the room. I have three points to make on Donald at the moment. I cannot think of another orientating topic — or Iran, let us call it Iran then, to avoid Donald — and how it relates to Ukraine. First, I think on one level, this so-called peace agreement, this so-called ceasefire, if it is real, if it was real, would be an appropriate acceptance by the United States, by Donald, and by Vance of their position in this mess that they got involved in. They had one option of escalating and losing a million American soldiers and treasure beyond all comprehension in a war that was impossible to win, given the hundreds of thousands of drones — which we must assume, if not millions — we must assume that Iran has ready for this, and the plans. In a position like that, I would analyse this as an honourable retreat from a situation they obviously should never have gotten into. That is one point. I am quite happy about that because I did not want a war. I understand there are a lot of people now who did not want the war who are kind of quite rightfully trolling Donald with the humiliation of this deal. The humiliation, in my analysis, is not this deal. It is the situation our country found itself in. This retreat is the most honourable thing that could happen. What This Means for Ukraine The second thing is what this means for Ukraine. If — and obviously this is all in fantasy land and total fairy land — if this peace agreement came to fruition and there was peace in our time and Iran had the sanctions lifted, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, then the example for Russia would be: cut your losses and leave Ukraine. There is no dishonour in realising you have made a terrible error. Look at America. Look what it has done. It has the strength, the capacity to admit this was an absolute disaster. The entire Middle East was about to be depopulated and Iran was going to eviscerate millions of lives, perhaps. Therefore, unlike Russia in early March 2022, when the dogs on the street could have and did understand — and many of us did and many of us wrote about it at the time — we understood the true enormity of the error that Russia had made within a few days. The reverse Napoleon attack, as I archetyped it at the time on the 1st of March: invading Ukraine with too few resources to achieve its goals. Ukraine’s dominant strategy was as Field Marshal Kutuzov’s strategy is described so brilliantly, with such pathos, such mythos — and it is part of the creation of this archetype of Russia as unbeatable — that all he had to do was draw the French further and further and further in, and that would take care of them. It has gone the same way for Ukraine. Now we have an example of a superpower which realised that it overreached and has done what hopefully most of us manage to do in our personal lives. When we realise we have made a terrible mistake, we just get out of the situation. We understand the sunk cost fallacy, which the Russians clearly do not and just have no conception of: that at any single point in time, everything that you have invested into pursuing a particular strategy is lost anyway. It should not form any part of your decision about whether or not at this moment in time it is the right thing to continue. If this peace agreement held and if the situation stays as it is now for more than the next five minutes — which, frankly, I doubt it will — in an ideal world, this would be a fantastic example to everyone. This is what perhaps J.D. Vance would try and sell as he defenestrates Donald. Donald’s Pattern and the Ceasefire Troll The third thing I had to say was really, obviously, the pattern we all know in Donald: this will not stay because he will realise he has done something terrible, the whole thing is terrible, and he will regret it and then he will send off the tweets, and maybe this is the end of him. I do not think any of us would be complacent about making that prediction. I thought it was the end of him on January 6th. I thought it was the end of him after the January 6th inquiry. I thought it was the end of him when he was held liable for the 34 felony counts. I have learned from that experience. This certainly does not look too good for him because I recognise that my first point is a very — not that many people probably share it. From a strategic point of view, I do not mind that so much. I do not want the people who were opposed to the war in the first place now to troll Donald to such an extent that he is then trolled into resuming the war and bringing about this terrible catastrophe for the United States, and not least for the Middle Eastern countries and Iran. If there was a ground invasion, Iran would do to the United States what has been done to Russia today. That is really all I had to say about that. Maybe the last thing I wrote, which was basically influenced by a data set all of us are really tuned into — though most people in the real world are not, because we have been following Ukraine — to the extent that we can record what has been going on over the past two years with Istanbul peace talks, Riyadh peace talks, Qatar, and all of that malarkey, and then Donald archetyping that he wanted peace, though we all know clearly he does not. He is just surrendering Ukraine to the Russians for whatever reason. This whole re-archetyping of the content of the word peace, of peace talks, of ceasefire, and of threats: this is a big concern in a negative way to me at the moment. Watching everyone fall for this ceasefire troll saddened me — all of these experts — because you are just like: have you not been paying attention to what has been going on in Ukraine? The mirroring where Ukraine offers the ceasefire, then Donald and Putler say they want ceasefires, and it is just all this nightmare of the decoupling of meaning from particular sounds and from peace meaning war, which characterises the last hundred years of Russian history, which Orwell himself picked up well. It was strong enough an archetype and a decoupling from the true meaning even in — when was 1984 written? In 1948, I think it was. Then to hear Donald selling this pup in the public sphere and people, serious people, falling for it and promoting it and not seeing through it. I recognise that is slightly contradictory to what I was just saying about how, on one level, this capitulation to Iran — given where we are today, and given the lack of power to prosecute the war that the United States has, as has been shown over the past few weeks. Iran has not even shown its hand in terms of the drones and everything we have seen Ukraine batter the Russians with. I recognise there is a slight contradiction between saying that and also the fact that archetyping Donald as this Machiavellian who is tricking everyone with his ceasefire — I mean, all of us have an opinion on this, but surely those pictures of him, that film of him beside the bunny rabbit on the balcony of the White House, like the Queen of England, talking about killing millions of Iranians while a bunny kind of waves and Melania — I mean, it is absolutely insane, and he must be insane not to see all of that. If he was a Machiavellian, this whole ceasefire stuff — and maybe they are just holding back while they prepare and put special forces in line — I hope that is not what is going on. I do not get the feeling that is what is going on. We do see this same misuse of language from him, and many people we might have respected before we followed the Ukraine war — who write for the FT or the New York Times, the think tanks, Carnegie people — all suddenly going: ceasefire, it is going to be a ceasefire, that is great. I referenced the experience I have talked about before, where the Russian model of ceasefire is: you call it a ceasefire, you get everyone to agree to it, and then you just continually shoot off your artillery. It is only ever a ceasefire in the information space. I hate that that lesson has now travelled from eastern Ukraine, from Luhansk, from even the Ukraine war space, to now globally. Probably billions of people last night did not sleep very well because they were worried. They woke up this morning, checked their phones to see: has nuclear annihilation happened? Because he said he was going to end a civilisation. I just hate that that trolling has gone from page eight in the New York Post in the 1980s, through January 6th — which was just really only concerned Americans — through all of these other minor incidents, to this mega tweet on Sunday. The conduct of war and peace is not, as it used to be a mere 20 years ago, conducted by diplomats in parliaments, in hushed rooms at the UN Security Council. Now it is conducted basically solely by Twitter, by Untruth Social. The Decision I Made in the Autumn of 2019 On the other hand, I have mixed feelings about this, because I bet everything that I had — all my intellectual power, all my time, all my energy — that trolling and trolls was the most significant phenomenon in our civilisation. That was the decision I made in the autumn of 2019. That was the problem I was going to look into and try to come up with an understanding of what Donald was doing when he roiled humanity through Twitter. As I say, this was pre-COVID even. It was not such a life and death matter then. He had not killed that many. He did not kill a million Americans unnecessarily through COVID, or however many people have died

    46 min
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About

Battling Archetypes applies the Twelve Tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method to the folkloric structures hiding inside modern propaganda, memes, and geopolitics. Each episode decodes how Russia, MAGA, and other Disinfolklorists archetype reality — and how Counter Disinfolklore can unmask the wolf in sheep’s clothing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ www.disinfolklore.net

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