Today, the fabric of every aspect of our lives – our values, our work, our health, whether we believe vaccines work, that Global Warming is happening or that it can be mitigated, even the bond market- is permeated with story-borne artefacts (Disinfolklore) of an attempt to support authoritarian cultures. What I call ‘Disinfolklore’ is being pumped constantly into our inner minds through the Make America Great Again (MAGA), Russian State and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus that includes X, Telegram, Fox News, TikTok and even, now, the White House press team. Once Disinfolklore has infected our minds with expertly designed and targeted emotionally resonant communicable trolls, we also act as perpetuators of Disinfolklore. We repeat these trolls to others. Often unknowingly, we become Servant Disinfolklorists of the Russian State, MAGA and CCP cultural revolutions. If we are to confront and solve the problems that Disinfolklore and its diabolical siblings - disinformation, misinformation and other forms of propaganda - are causing inside our communities, we must first acknowledge that we are part of the problem…

I work on the intersection of anthropology, archaeology, psychology, and various different other disciplines. All of them inform my work. I worked in Ukraine between 2015 and 2022. For three years of that time I worked on a bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska which divided Russia-occupied Luhansk from government-controlled Ukraine.

It was there I basically experienced what would become what I now understand as being a Disinfolklore Universe, a Disinfolklore Galaxy that Russia created inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. Now I fear, and I see the signs, the indications, that what Russia did there and inside Russia itself is now spreading across the entire world. It’s linking into the MAGA Disinfolklore Galaxy, and to a lesser extent for the time being, the Chinese Communist Party Disinfolklore Galaxy. So I see us being enmeshed in this entire system of basically trolling and trolls of untruth, of Disinfolklore, communicated through stories coming from the White House, coming from all of these voices we see. And that is what motivates my work: to try and help us see this Disinfolklore Universe, these Disinfolklore Galaxies that we are being enmeshed in. Ukraine is central, absolutely central to it, as everyone in this space understands.

Ukraine has been on the avant-garde of this war since 2015. And thankfully, now most people who have power understand this, and it’s a crucial battle space, the information space around Ukraine. And Volya Radio is doing a fantastic job every day, trying to bring to light the stories often containing Disinfolklore. So this afternoon, the UN Commission of Inquiry based in Vienna has issued a report on the human safaris in Kherson that all of us are aware of, which have been going on since July 2024, and it has established that these are crimes against humanity. And part of the indictment of Russia and those participating in the prosecution of these crimes against humanity — interesting to use the word prosecution there — is that the Russian state is sharing these videos of their human safaris, of the 140 people they’ve murdered using first-person-view drones. The Commission of Inquiry determines that because they are first-person-view drones, the operators of these drones are hunting individuals, chasing them and watching as they murder them, and then sharing these on what I call the Disinfolklore apparatus, which is Telegram, X, Facebook, Instagram. And now, sadly, the White House press room. And so these videos themselves are a perfect example of Disinfolklore.

They breach all ethical guidelines, which is the second — I have six criteria to determine whether or not a story constitutes Disinfolklore, the second of which is right or ethical discipline. Obviously, it’s morally wrong to engage in human safaris. There’s no law anywhere which allows this, moral or otherwise. But now we have a determination by a UN commission specifically established by 184 UN member states to inquire into Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, and it determines that these are crimes against humanity, and there’s no greater crime in the human family than crimes against humanity. And so therefore, the breach of the second element in the Code of Positive Trolls, which I use to determine what is Disinfolklore — how to distinguish between a unit of Disinfolklore and a unit of folklore, or any other kind of story or narrative form — but now we have this determination. So that’s a perfect example of Disinfolklore.

Much of what is on Telegram — and of course Telegram is, in Russian combat propaganda, in Russian military strategy, you have this concept of information confrontation in which the informational units and the environment are engaged in a confrontation — and here we have Telegram specifically established by the Russian state in order to communicate Disinfolklore into the inner minds of humanity. And very successfully doing it. It is acting in concert with its military apparatus in Kherson. So it’s not just killing these people. It is spreading the stories, spreading the images of these people being murdered, as part of its plan to dominate the inner minds of humanity and create terror, not just in the minds of the people of Kherson — and this is not me, this is the inquiry — but inside the minds of humanity as people gradually become aware that this is what’s going on. So that’s a good example of what Disinfolklore is in actuality.

Part of what helped me see this pattern — this is what I really do, I hunt for patterns in data, and I assimilate, as many of us do who participate in X — and X, as we now know from the third report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference by the European Union, which was released — I highly recommend anyone to read it along with the first two reports, which was published a couple of weeks ago — X is where, on a dataset, I think it was over 40,000 FIMI instances, instances of FIMI that were collected by the European Union, X was involved in 86% of them. So this is where we all are. And I know many of us have ethical dilemmas about should we be here, should we not. And most of us are also part of Bluesky and other places. But the fight is here and the examples are here.

Whether it’s — I saw Maid Marian Simonyan tweeting again in her folksy, her folksy Disinfolklore way where she does this a lot, where she tells these stories, as indeed does Donald — they tell these stories of frankly horrifying things. This is going to your question, James, really horrifying things. Like for instance, the way Donald communicated in, I think it was March 2024, that if the head of a major NATO country said to him, “We can’t pay for our NATO membership. Would you protect us?” And he said, “I’d say let them do whatever the hell they want with you.” And then this unit of information was then reported by CNN as a fact that Donald had told this head of state that America wouldn’t protect him. But we’re not clear whether this ever happened, but it was reported as a fact by CNN. And so you see these folksy stories get taken up.

Simonyan tonight, she’s talking about how people in the offices — and these terms really interest me, and they made me — I’ve seen them for years now. And it’s a pattern which is what, along with the horror of what they’re saying, it’s a pattern that made me suspicious something methodical was going on here, which is what I do: use folklore to explain and to interpret. She says, “Oh, people in the offices in Moscow are saying that if Germany gives their weapons to Ukraine, that Ukraine won’t be able to do anything with them without Germany’s help. Therefore, Germany is complicit. And so we’ll have to strike Berlin.” And so this is a classic piece of Disinfolklore. There’s a distancing in the narrative form. It’s presented as a folksy story. “People in the offices of Moscow” — as if she’s just heard this gossip.

And she’s said this before when she spoke at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June 2022. Many of us will remember this, where she said, “People in Moscow are saying that all our hope is in the famine.” And then she interprets what these folksy people are supposedly saying. And she’s sitting beside the head of state. She’s sitting beside Duncy Putin himself on the dais at St. Petersburg Economic Forum, dressed in green, which is why I call her Maid Marian Simonyan, like a reverse Robin Hood. And this is an aspect of the Disinfolklore analytical method: that we can use these folklore archetypes to interpret those who are themselves using these folksy archetypes, to combat them.

And she said, “The people in Moscow are saying all our hope is in the famine.” And what they mean by that is — this is her saying that she understands what the folk, what the ordinary folk in Moscow are saying — they are saying that there will be famine in Africa and the migrants will come to Europe. And then the European Union will release the sanctions because “it’s impossible for us not to be friends.” So this is the folksy banter, the schoolyard. This is your seven-year-old child speaking to their seven-year-old best friend and they’ve had an argument: “It’s impossible not to be friends.” But this isn’t a micro chat in a schoolyard. It’s a conversation sitting beside the head of state of a country at war, which is planning to famine millions of people in Africa in a madcap attempt which you’d really only see in literature, in Don Quixote or in some folktale. So the madcap plan to win in Ukraine is to starve millions of Africans. That will provoke the Europeans into lifting the sanctions. And then Russia will become friends with Europe and Ukraine will be abandoned. So the way she tells the story — it’s very solid Russian strategy, but it’s told in a folksy way. And it’s absolutely horrifying when you analyse what it’s saying, but it passes most people by.

It enters their inner minds, as indeed does this stuff, archetyping the former president of Russia as drunk. So many of us would have seen many sensible people tweeting today the content of the former president of Russia’s tweet, once again threatening World War Three if something happens. I think it’s related to the Germans. And so these are kind of folktale archetypes, folksy stories, which communicate really horrifying things when you parse the data. And it’s a pattern that they use. And it’s really effective because people like us share these because they provoke something in us, in our emotions. And even if we think we’re harming the former president by characterising them, by archetyping them as drunk, we’re still repeating the meme. And this horrifyingness is slyly communicated and the energy is continued and it’s pinging around the world.

Thankfully, now, today, as many of us will know because we’re tuned into this, we see great advances in our political leadership over what we have experienced since February 2022. But this method of communication has had an impact on President Biden’s policy. “Don’t poke the bear” is a Disinfolklore meme, probably the most successful one ever, that actually impacts on foreign policy. It stopped America properly helping Ukraine. And international relations itself, the entire discourse, is full of these metaphors and Disinfolklore — “don’t poke the bear” being one — but Disinfolklore memes that are represented as being a means of communicating foreign policy and strategy affecting the lives and deaths of millions of people. Whereas in fact, these strategies are only communicated by means of these memes and through these memes. And so what I have spotted, which as far as I’m aware no other writers have really noticed, is this continuity across multiple narrative forms, discourses. It’s obvious in anthropology or in folklore studies or in psychology, in Jungian psychology, when they’re referencing myths and archetypes and storytelling. But the same dynamic is at play inside international relations discourse, inside the speeches — up until recently — of many of our leading politicians. And obviously everything Donald says. He speaks in folklore fluently.

It’s these folksy stories, from the January 6th anthem of the January 6th insurrectionists, organised by the current head of the FBI, the songs which were used in his rallies, the folksy way of speaking about Alphonse Capone, the archetyping of Melania as Al Capone’s wife, using, wearing haute couture clothes made by Ukrainian fashion designers in LA — Dress X — who supply haute couture interpretations of comic book chic, comic book aesthetics for people like Elon Musk and Melania Trump who want to archetype themselves as characters in our info space by referencing through their clothes superheroes or characters from folklore, from folktale, from our contemporary folktale. So that’s kind of a sample of the scale of what I believe I’ve identified with Disinfolklore in this narrative form. But to answer your question, at basic, it’s a narrative form which, as far as I know, I’m the first person to spot.

So I took the idea of archetypes from — I’m a Buddhist — from Tibetan Buddhism, where the entire practice is about embedding archetypes in our minds, and very scary images of the Lord of Death, Yama. And what I noticed in Jung’s work — he says he took the idea of archetypes from St. Augustine. So again, it’s the similar idea of trying to embed these tropes. I use the term — so for me, the fundamental metaphor and archetype is the fundamental unit of information. That’s another term I use: units of information, or meme. So those three for me are synonymous. And I use them interchangeably. So I’m very happy to use the word meme — visual, audible. It’s an informational unit of any size. It could be a whole book or it could be just a flash of a colour in my conception.

And archetypal identities can be attached, in my mind. I suppose, philosophical anthropology for want of a grand term — but we’re among anthropologists here. In my philosophical anthropology, the archetypes can be identified with these memes. And so for Jung, he didn’t have access to the same, for instance, archaeology or linguistics and ancient DNA that we have. So when Jung was writing about Tibetan Buddhism, he wrote the introduction to the second edition of *The Tibetan Book of the Dead*, which was found by Evans-Wentz, who wrote his PhD thesis at Oxford on fairy tales in W.B. Yeats’s work, and who was a follower of Madame Blavatsky, who’s from Dnipro in eastern Ukraine. And Madame Blavatsky created the religion of Theosophy, which fused ancient Egypt and ancient Tibet and made up a lot of stuff. But she would have picked up a lot of the stuff there from Ukraine.

But what we know, but that Carl Jung couldn’t know, is that what he considered to be universal and part of the collective unconscious of humanity — in this way which has received a lot of criticism — actually, all the examples he gives are from Indo-European languages and religions. He did not know this then. He didn’t really understand, and many people still don’t understand, Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, because it was transmitted from the Vedic into the Sanskrit, into the Tibetan, and now it’s coming back preserved in Tibetan, a non-Indo-European language. But basically its content is an Indo-European religion.

So in all of my work, I am only ever talking about archetypes that work on Indo-European-structured minds: the minds of those whose native tongue is an Indo-European language. So that’s the only claim I’m making. I’m not talking about collective unconsciousness of humanity. But what I can say from my own experience of watching and observing and experiencing propaganda from the first moments on that archetypal bridge in eastern Ukraine, where I spent three years in a forest, is that I perceive the world through archetypes. And that when I read information that contains what I call archetypal identities — characters — so Ukraine can be archetyped as a weak woman. Putin does this. He did this when he spoke four days before the full-scale invasion. He said, “Like it or not, take it, my beauty.”

So what he was saying to Ukraine — as international lawyers, I’m also a lawyer by training — they interpreted this. They didn’t use the word archetyping, but they intuitively understood it as archetyping. They said what Putin was doing was representing Ukraine as a corpse. And Putin got this particular phrase, which means a lot to Russians, because it features as song lyrics. So songs are very much part of the beginning of folklore, which led to the foundation of nation states — the first unified German state, the first modern Irish state, the first modern Greek state. These are all the products of purposeful campaigns based around mythology and folklore to establish a unified identity that helped create community that resisted occupation.

When Herder in 1777 launched the German folksong movement and inspired Goethe and the Brothers Grimm — who all of us will remember as children — to collect folktales, and inspired Wagner, and led to the first unified German state ninety years later, they set out purposefully to collect common culture in the form of stories. The same in Ireland. The Irish Cultural Revival — the first president of Ireland was a folklore collector. And he, among others, created this sense, which was true, empirically true, but Irish people didn’t understand it until this thirty-year campaign revived Celtic culture as a distinct culture from the Germanic-English occupier. So Germany under occupation in 1777 by the French — French generals actually living in Goethe’s house in Frankfurt, which I visited — a very different kind of occupation to the one we’re all aware of. Same thing in Greece against the Ottoman Empire.

And what they did was they collected these stories to create a sense of community. And this is what I realised the Russians were doing and what MAGA is doing. So it’s creating these archetypal in-jokes. If you’ve listened — and I’m sure you have, James and Wendy — you’ve listened to any of Donald’s campaign speeches where he’s talking about Hannibal Lecter, again, a fictional character, using an archetypal character in our modern culture that people of a certain age will understand. So people who are today between probably the ages of 50 and 70 will remember Hannibal Lecter as a film character.

And so what Donald is doing is he’s not linking into any archetypes that are embedded in all of humanity, in my humble opinion. He is ripping off the archetypes of which the cognition of a certain subset of Indo-Europeans at a certain moment in a certain culture are aware of — Hannibal Lecter in that case, Alphonse Capone for obvious reasons. The man who was found guilty of 34 felony counts, and of acts tantamount to — well, I won’t mention a horrible word — on E. Jean Carroll.

So Donald is counter-archetyping, which is what I try to do as well when I call him Duncy Putin or Druidy Don. But what I believe they’re trying to do, and successfully doing, and this ties in to my understanding of deep Indo-European religion — the Lord of Death is one of the primordial archetypes inside Indo-European cognition, whether it’s represented as Jesus Christ, or Yama in Hindu religion and Vedic before it and in Buddhism. Odin — Wednesday, Woden’s Day — Odin, Lord of Death. And these are all self-sacrificing first monarchs.

And basically, I think what they’re doing effectively is saying — and this resurrection of Stalin is saying — “I control your death.” This is what Donald is doing with whether it’s vaccines or anti-vaccines, all of these terrible policies that lead to people’s deaths. And the same thing with Putin and Stalin. They’re saying, “We control the time of your death.” And this is a very old, ancient, tried and tested formula for exerting psychological control over people. And I guess this is partly connected also to the drone safaris. Obviously, we see this as a harbinger of what is to come. And they can do this through various means. There’s almost infinite stories that can be used to communicate these fears into people’s inner minds. And that’s what I believe they’re at.

My favourite subject. And it all begins in Kherson and Mykhailivka village in Zaporizhzhis - that zone, whether it’s the UN Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes in Ukraine or the Yamnaya community, who — a relatively small number of individuals — created the language, the linguistic structures, the words we use almost in every sentence, the religions, the solar immanence in many Indo-European religions. I would characterise Christianity as an Indo-European religion, and Buddhism. Created by this community, which just in itself is amazing, absolutely amazing, because most of us grow up with a mental model of Greece, Rome, maybe ancient Egypt before Greece, and then our cultures. And it turns out this is not true.

Greek — well, Italic culture — Italic and Celtic languages, as far as we know, formed inside a mixture of the Yamnaya community from this area in Kherson, Mykolaiv Oblast, right around the river where Russia and Ukraine — this has been an intersection point, an interaction point for millennia. Out of an interaction between migrating Yamnaya from there after 2500 BCE westwards, near Odesa, just east of Odesa, and the community of people there. Linguists and archaeologists have suspected, many of them have suspected this for decades.

And Jung refers — the reason why Jung explains why he believes that these archetypes are part of the collective unconscious of humanity is he just can’t understand how else they could have come from, where else they could have come from. And Jung talks about “the wildest migration theories,” which now we know, since the 2015 ancient DNA revolution as it’s known in the literature, are scientific facts. So the scientific fact of the genetic content of people from India to Ireland, whose genetic ancestry comes from what they call “the steppe” — what I call ancient Ukrainian.

And so for me, a lot of my work is about re-archetyping Ukraine inside the mental models of humanity, because I realised, as many of us did, there was some problem that people had, whether it was the former German policy or the policy of many of our governments. They were all perceiving — and perhaps many of us did this as well before we became aware about Ukraine and its importance, not only in our current moment, but its importance over time — that Russia was managing, by controlling, by monopolising the myth of Russia’s superiority, archetyping Ukraine as “not a real country.” Every time Duncy Putin speaks, he’s re-archetyping Russia as this great power. And many of us and many of our friends perhaps still perceive Russia’s culture as somehow justifying its genocide in Ukraine — Dostoevsky or ballet. And I’m a great fan of those writers because I think they’re very insightful and very helpful to us.

So I realised that basically, from the very beginning of the full-scale invasion, without really understanding it as being archetyping at the time, I realised that my mission was to try and at least campaign for parity of esteem between Ukraine and other modern nation states which have won the monopoly, by fair means or foul. Certain communities of people after World War Two had managed to become UN members, including Ukraine, which was a founding member of the United Nations, signed the UN Charter in 1945.

But then as I dug into it more deeply and followed this path from when I was in eastern Ukraine, I accidentally discovered the Yamnaya when some property developers were destroying this extraordinary structure in a posh suburb of Dnipro. And it made the front page of the New York Times and all of the local people were protesting. And so I went, in my capacity as a monitor, to monitor the security situation — I went there to try and discover what was going on. And what I discovered was these property developers had destroyed a Yamnaya burial mound in which was buried the local monarch and various other people throughout the millennia, including the last person to be buried in there was the head of the collective farm, believe it or not, in like 1932. So, delusions of grandeur there, and continuity.

And underneath this mound, when they destroyed it, was found a stone circle which was created by one of the major ingredient cultures in the Yamnaya. And through that, I began to — from a position of extreme scepticism — accept that we could trace the linguistic journey of certain people carrying not just a language, not just the words, the vocabulary, the sounds and meanings which we use today. There’s about a thousand sounds and meanings in what we call Proto-Indo-European, or what I call ancient Ukrainian, which is the language spoken by the Yamnaya between 4100 BCE and 2500 BCE. And I recognise I’m throwing out these dates. For me, it’s really charted territory; for most people, our history kind of begins maybe around 1000 BCE with the first King David in the Bible or whatever.

But again, what I’m trying to do, and part of my mission, is to re-archetype our mental models — our idea of not just Ukraine and humanity, our human history and our European history and Ukrainians’ position in it — but to create these new structures and these frameworks. Because that’s what Disinfolklore and disinformation does. It creates frameworks, untruthful frameworks, in our minds. People inside MAGA, in the MAGA Disinfolklore Galaxy, they have all these in-jokes. They know all about these different things which you and I wouldn’t know about. And this is how it works, as I understand. This is how Russian disinformation is so successful. Because it’s not a question of people’s intelligence or their education or anything like that. It’s about how people’s minds are changed.

So I’m quite upfront about this when I outline these histories and all of this stuff. The ancient DNA studies are published in *Nature* and *Science*, the preeminent scientific journals that stay away from anything that’s in any way unkosher or not backed up. Feel free to follow up on anything to do with the Indo-European thing, because it’s key to my mission to re-archetype the idea of Ukraine in people’s minds, but also it’s the key to understanding how archetyping works, I believe, in our minds, in Indo-European minds.

Yes, the bat. We all remember those pictures of Druidy Don — I called him Druidy Don because he’s kind of truthy, Druidy, as in the class of intellectuals in ancient Celtic society. So I call — Don is the Lord of Death in ancient Celtic culture who, according to Irish mythology, which was first written down around 1100 AD in the Common Era, but through the language dates from earlier, is about the Indo-European invasions of the island of Ireland. And Ireland’s pre-Christian Lord of Death was Don. And obviously you have the Dnieper River, you have the Don River, the Dniester — I think it’s Lower Don from the perspective if you’re looking at them from Crimea — and then you’ve got the Danube. So you’ve got these DN sounds associated with rivers, which were the embodiments of deities.

And Druidy Donald — you’ve got Donald and Druidy Don. So you see Druidy Don and Batman and Robin basically archetyping themselves as Batman and Robin, Elon in the White House dressed in black. So using again comic book haute couture, darkness. These are very — like, once you get your eye into what they’re doing and how they are archetyping, it seems quite clumsy sometimes, but it works quite well at the subconscious level, as of course Jung knew. And they clearly know what they’re doing because it’s not an accident that Melania was dressed by Dress X, two Ukrainian fashion designers from LA who tapped into this market. It’s not an accident that Donald was talking about Alphonse Capone just the other day again. But he did it at every one of his campaigns. So they very much know what they’re doing. They know it works in the moment. And they’re tapping into these archetypes.

Yes, the owls. I’m always impressed with General — I can’t remember his exact title — but General Budanov’s owl behind him. And I link that to Sumerian imagery and archetyping, where the owl — Lilith, I think. And we have many images across pre-Indo-European civilisation of owls. So they’re extremely adept at generating archetypes and at working on that plane.

And long before I worked out my portmanteau, Disinfolklore, when I look back at my writing since the war and even before the war — but my public writing has only, like Ukraine, only been since the full-scale invasion, because I worked as a diplomat and I couldn’t write about Ukraine when I was working there.

But President Zelensky — obviously, as I wrote this piece at the end of March 2022, “Let’s Compare Trolls,” where I set — Duncy Putin, as I call him now, and he’s Duncy because he’s like a folklore idiot. He’s the idiot. He’s the town fool. He’s like Raskolnikov in *Crime and Punishment*, kills two women to see if he can get away with it. And then it’s just the stupidest thing ever. He’s been tortured by it.

And this is Duncy Putin, the master strategist, who just wakes up each day — we see this archetypal character. Istanbul Peace Talks. They’re really pushing this. They’ve been pushing this. I spotted its emergence in mid-March 2022 — Istanbul Peace Talks — in an article in the *Financial Times*. And for people who are really tuned in to what had been going on in Ukraine as I was since 2014, even what was reported then in mid-March 2022 in the *Financial Times* — that Ukraine would capitulate — it was just so, not only even apart from the fact that most of us, or some of us, could already see that Russia’s invasion was a disaster within the first week of it. I’m on record as saying on the 1st of March 2022, “Russia has done a reverse Napoleon,” because I saw the communication and logistics difficulties it was having with that massive convoy, and the Russian units were complaining that they couldn’t connect with each other. So I likened it to doing the opposite of what Napoleon had done. Napoleon obviously invaded Russia, and here was Russia invading Ukraine. But it’s a reverse Napoleon in the sense that it shared the problem of having the logistics.

And all Ukraine had to do, which is what it’s doing on the longue durée, all it just has to do is keep drawing them in and letting them waste their logistics, waste their resources, which is exactly what the mythology embedded in *War and Peace* tells us of Marshal Kutuzov, the famous Russian general who resisted all attempts to make battle against Napoleon, kept on withdrawing, and everyone — the Tsar and everyone — said, “Come on, you must face them.” And he basically tried his best to avoid battle, and then the winter came.

And so President Zelensky is a master archetyper. I actually found footage of him archetyping himself as Napoleon in one of his programmes long before the war, which is wonderful. He’s just got this massive hat on. And so I juxtapose that with that great meme some of us will remember, when President Macron finally came to his senses. It was President Macron’s idea of Ukraine as this little brother of Russia, Germany’s idea of Ukraine as — well, actually, our debt, we owe our debt to Russia, not to Ukraine, for killing, what was it, eight million Ukrainians. But when I saw President Macron make that speech — well, he first did it in an interview in mid-February 2024, where he basically went all in, and then he made that amazing speech — and then the Macronian memes came out with a Napoleon hat.

So you asked the question: what do I think about the owls and the Batman and the bats in the FSB? Yeah, Ukraine is working on that plane and it is blessed to have President Zelensky, who operates — it was his job. He didn’t just — it’s like second nature to him. He operates on this symbolic plane in such a successful way. He and his writer, his wife who’s a writer, and his friends from Kryvyi Rih, which is a city I know really well. I actually used to visit the apartment block he grew up in quite a lot because there was a CSO, a civil society organisation, I did a lot of work with in Kryvyi Rih. And so I really understand this in a deep sense, where he comes from.

And when you hear MAGA people talk about Zelensky, or if I’m in England and in the shires and people are saying to me, “What do you think about Zelensky?” — I know that they’re talking about a character they read about in the newspaper who has been relentlessly archetyped as somehow unconnected to the, what was it, 64% of the people who elected him directly. More — a bigger mandate than probably any democratically elected leader in a free and fair election in world history. It’s literally at that scale. And now, thankfully, we see him — he’s up to, what, 72% or whatever in those polls.

So there is this war, and this is actually where I’m operating on this level, and all of us are, unknowingly. But this is where the war will be won and lost. And General Budanov and President Zelensky get this and have from the very beginning. It is a war of symbols. If Ukraine can archetype itself as a winner, it will get the means it needs to succeed. If Russia manages to archetype Ukraine as part of Russia, as a loser, then no one will help Ukraine. And that is the level at which the war — so we have these two battlefronts. We have the kinetic battlespace where Ukraine is doing extremely well. And then we have this war of symbols.

And you ask, what can we do about it? So what Volya Radio does, what Mockers does, and Yeni and Joanna — I see you all there — what you do every day at Kurdistan, what Wills at Kurdistan does, and these stories that Mockers tells from Chris Owicki and these people — because the archetype of Russia is this great culture, which many of us were embedded in. And I know I’ve had this conversation a lot with Ming as well. He, like me, has read a lot of great Russian literature. And we’ve fallen for that trail. We’ve imbibed it. And we’ve been drunk on its beauty and the amazingness of it. But then when you pull the — when the stage, when you realise that actually it’s just a stage play — the Potemkin metaphor is just so beautiful, so wonderful.

Because what you’re doing is de-archetyping Russia as this great culture. And Natalia Ukrainka’s work does this really well. So that’s really important work and we need to continue doing this and getting it into people’s minds. I mean, whenever — I obviously can’t really talk about many of the things I hear from, say, Mockers or from Chris Owicki or whatever in normal, polite society, because people literally won’t believe it. And yet, all of us have this kind of understanding of the absurdism, the lack of toilets, just the mad stuff they come up with to get people to sign a contract, which doesn’t mean anything, because you can’t coerce someone into signing a contract. It’s like what you do. Again, it goes back to Duncy Putin. It’s one of the first things you learn in contract law: if there’s coercion. And yet every day we’re reading about these crazy folktale-like tricks of getting people to sign the contract, torturing them. And then suddenly they sign the contract and they can be magically sent back to the front line where they’re killed within 24 hours. And it’s absolutely insane stuff. It’s no way to run an empire covering one-sixth of the world’s surface. It’s comical. It’s absurd. It’s extraordinary stuff.

But they used to have this programme in England called *Eurotrash*, where they basically — it seemed to be based on bizarre things that happened in Japan in the 1980s. We need to continue doing that about Russia. Because — and this is the great work — say that we see people trying to explain to Donald that Russia’s economy is tiny. It’s the size of Chile’s. This is not — if you’re going to sacrifice America to something, don’t sacrifice it to Russia. This is just rubbish on every level. And obviously all of our countries can be archetyped as rubbish, but we’re not committing genocide and doing these horrific crimes.

So that’s what we can do. But the War of Symbols: General Budanov and President Zelensky and many of the people around them are operating on that level. And it’s beautiful to watch. And it’s part of the evidence that I parse to work out what’s going on. And I do have these twelve tools which I use and which I’m proselytising that we should be able to use in our ordinary conversations and ordinary daily lives to help us see through this and get the lenses of what I call the lenses of Disinfolklore.

For the full range of Volya Radio’s excellent work rearchetyping Ukraine and Russia, you can listen on Spotify to its daily shows:

I first noticed the Disinfolklore Universe now spreading through our neural networks, like triffids rewilding the garden of Eden, when it was in a more primitive form. In 2016, I was a diplomat posted to eastern Ukraine. Russia’s army, cosplaying as Little Green Men, Polite Folk and Odin-worshipping soldiers from the Nazi inspired “Wagner” corps, had occupied part of Ukraine in 2014. My job was to establish the facts in relation to security incidents related to Russia’s Disinfolklore-justified military occupation of part of Ukraine.

One Saturday, my manager phoned me from inside the Russia-occupied and Russia-designated “Luhansk Folk’s Republic” (LFR). According to him, a “doctor” in LFR had walked into the MGB (Russian occupiers’ “internal security service” – so-named to conjure up the folk memory of the Stalin-era forerunner of the KGB: MGB). The Walk-In said his “common law wife and her underage daughter,” located in the non-Russia-occupied part of Luhansk province (where I was that day), were about to be “cut into pieces” by a Ukrainian “Nazi.” He tasked me with checking on the two damsels in distress.

Something, intuitively, sounded artificial about the linguistic formula “common law wife and her underage daughter.” Working in that Steppe-land Locus Amœnus, I had already realised that I perceived part of reality through cognitive lenses (archetypes) that had entered my mind as a small child from folktale-inspired stories. Here, Russian Disinfolklorists were leaning into this aspect of Indo-Europeans’ cognition and riffing off what Karl Jung suggested are the primordial archetypal identities of the Mother and the Maiden. The perfectly pitched troll for a specific emotional reaction in protective males who would undergo any ordeal to rescue from an ogre such damsels in distress stirred my suspicion; triggering what I now call my “Incoming Troll Radar.” This book is to help you learn the tools I use as a professional Disinfolklore identifier and interpreter. So that you learn to counteract the Disinfolklore Universe descending upon humanity, like a curse. Honing our Incoming Troll Radars to identify trolls which have the potential to affect us in manipulative ways before we allow these trolls into our Inner Minds is the first tool in our Archetypal Disinfolklore arsenal.

Tool 1 - Incoming Troll Radar

So let’s call our Incoming Troll Radar “Tool 1”! Later we’ll learn of what our Incoming and Outgoing Troll Radars consist – their elements - and how they work (clue: it’s all about the Code of Positive Trolls - Tool 4 in any aspiring Counter Disinfolklorist’s tool box). By the end of this book, you’ll be a fluent Counter Disinfolklorist, like me. So expect a bit of repetition which is a feature in Disin/folklore, and any good teaching material.

The “cut into pieces” aspect of the threat facing the two damsels in distress also seemed off. Such primeval savagery outside Russia-occupied Ukraine only existed inside story-borne artefacts of Russia’s Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus (which it was, in the manner of a nineteenth century Antiquarian folk-tale collector, my job to gather together, analyse and parse into patterns that helped us understand the security threats facing us on the front-line). Later I discovered the primordial foundation myths in several Indo-European cultural traditions involved universes being created out of bodies cut into pieces. It is not clear if the Russian manufacturers of Disinfolklore items like this tale about the Mother and the Maiden are consciously reaching back into millennia of Indo-European tropes and trolls, or if, as is much more likely, they’re just following instructions in their Combat Propaganda - the name Russians give for what I call Disinfolklore – manuals.

Tool 2 – Our “Look for the Mana in the Meme!” mantra

In Archetypal Disinfolklore, we don’t care too much about the intention (mens rea) of the purveyors of Disinfolklore, we focus mainly on what’s immanent in the memes, informational units, or stories we hear, see or feel. Sometimes it’s a Russian Disinfolklorist designing a meme to hack our rational thought systems (to bypass our Incoming Troll Radar – Tool 1). Other times it can be our family member or trusted news source conveying the meme into our minds, unintentionally furthering the Disinfolklore Universe designers’ ends. Since the effect is the same – manipulating us into activities that accord with the Disinfolklore Universe’s malignant designs for us and our communities - it’s better that we learn to start looking for the Mana / energy inside memes and informational units - rather than worrying about the intention of the communicators of specific items of Disinfolklore, we “Look for the Mana in the Meme!” (in this context, “Mana” means power or energy or immanence– we’ll, also, come back to this). Our “Look for the Mana in the Meme!” mantra, then, is Tool 2 in our analytical arsenal for spotting and then countering potential Disinfolklore trolls.

Yet, in those details - the use of the archetypal bogeyman villain (having worked in eastern Ukraine at that point for over a year, I knew rationally that the “Ukrainian Nazi” was wholly the creation of Russian propagandists (Disinfolklorists)); the mythological sounding “cut into pieces;” and the folklore-borne archetypal characters of the Mother and the Maiden (manifesting in this Disinfolklore item as the strange-sounding “Common Law Wife and Her Underage Daughter”) - I intuitively detected part of what distinguishes the Disinfolklore genre of folktales from others: artificiality, strategic construction from archetypes, stock characters and tropes selected for their power to move Disinfolklore consumers’ emotions in predictable ways. Disinfolklorists sculpt and aim their trolls according to where their potential victims chart on, for example, the different dimensions on the Openness Conscientiousness Extrovertness Agreeableness Neurotic (OCEAN) or Myers-Brigg psychological personality inventory models’ scales. If you are lower than average on both the “Conscientiousness” and higher than average on the “Neurotic” scale, you’re a perfect potential recruit for Make America Great Again (MAGA) Disinfolklore about migrants coming to eat your pets. Disinfolklore is a mechanism that effected what Russian military theorists call “Reflexive Control.” Disinfolklore transports its carriers into promoting activities which unknown to we who are infected by it furthered the strategies of Disinfolklore Universe’s designers.

Tool 3 - Inner / Outer Real switching quality immanent in items of potential Disinfolklore

In such a Disinfolklore Universe as the LFR (as in the MAGA Disinfolklore Universe occupying the minds of millions of Americans today), the fabric of every dimension of our lives - work, personal relationships, life choices, fates - is infused with an Inner / Outer Realm division communicated through a polyphonic All Channel (media, mental, interpersonal) memetic onslaught. Once the Inner / Outer Realm division immanent in the item of Disinfolklore passes from that Informational Unit / meme into our minds, we begin to perceive the actual world through the threats to the sovereignty, security and / or prosperity / fertility of whichever Inner Realm this particular item of Disinfolklore has manipulated us into believing that we must defend. Our moods, motivations, intentions and attitudes are further formed by constantly iterating and repeating Disinfolklore so that the Inner / Outer Realm division passes from the items of Disinfolklore (and their component memes), through our minds, into the actions we take In Real Life. The power of Disinfolklore to create Facts On The Ground out of entirely made-up memes is then further mobilised by the Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus’s designers and operators (whether from MAGA, Russia or those behind Brexit Disinfolklore) to entrench further division between those in the Inner and Outer Realms and community among those inside the Inner Realm (who are expected to resist the threat by whichever witch or scapegoat is being featured in whichever item of Disinfolklore is being propagated or consumed at any particular moment). In our hyper-modern moment, Too Much, Never Enough characterises the Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus’s inexhaustible firehoses of falsehoods. Since this paragraph depicts the engine of the Disinfolklore analytical method for parsing Russian and other forms of Disinformation, Misinformation and propaganda, we shall label learning to see this Inner / Outer Real switching quality immanent in items of Disinfolklore as Tool 3.

Throughout this book we’ll learn to identify as potential Disinfolklore any story, unit of information or meme (whether visually, audibly or linguistically communicated through any medium – air, text, video) which contains threats to our Inner Realm community or personhood from outside invaders in whatever guise. Naturally, threats to our community or sense of selfhood may be genuine and if so we need to react accordingly. Disinfolklorists – particularly in the guise of populist politicians - however, use this evolutionarily necessary aspect of our cognition to hack our minds. As we’re focussed on the bogus threat that a migrant will consume our daily bread or our child, we allow the Disinfolklorist to smuggle trolls passed our Incoming Troll Radar. Before we’ve Looked for the Mana in the Meme our emotions are so engaged the Disinfolklorist the item of Disinfolklore’s true meaning - surrender your liberty to the Big Bad Wolf - has worked their contagious magic and become embedded inside our Inner Minds. The moment you feel your emotions being engaged by a story or meme, be extra aware. Be mindful. Mindfulness is the essence of our Incoming Troll Radar.

I derived Tool 3 - these three defining archetypal identities immanent (in whole or in part) in items of Disinfolklore - from a fusion of Dumézil’s three socio-religious archetypes that underpin Indo-European language speakers’ cognitive structures (sovereignty, security and/or prosperity/fertility) read in conjunction with Tangerlini’s three archetypal structures in the contemporary Danish legend-telling tradition:

“Interaction with the Other falls into three broad categories in the contemporary legend tradition… [1] Sexual contact with the Other (e.g. Outer Realm-based common law wife of Inner Realm LFR “Doctor”)… including kidnapping and threats to the fertility of the Inner Realm (e.g. cutting her underage daughter and the “Doctor’s” step daughter into pieces harms the sustainability and fertility of the Inner Realm community); [2] The Other’s attempts to disrupt the food of the Inner Realm (e.g. in the archetypal troll tale, Three Billy-Goats Gruff, the three migrant Billy-Goat Gruff brothers attempt to migrate from their Outer to the bridge troll’s Inner Realm in order to consume the Inner Realm’s food); and [3] Narratives in which the Other attempts to maim, hurt, or kill an immediate threat to the individual (e.g. the function of the Ukrainian “Nazi” Disinfolklore archetype threatening to cut the two damsels into pieces is to entrench the idea in the minds of the LFR population that across the Donets river in non-Russia-occupied Ukraine, they will face mortal danger; best to stay inside the LFR Inner Realm inside the protective embrace of their Russian prison guards) and the social order (e.g. Russian Disinfolklore featuring bogeymen threatening to invade LFR had the effect of creating community and a sense of communal identity in LFR, an entirely bogus political entity wrought of Disinfolklore that created an illusion that it was real and that Outer Realm Ukrainians who were supposedly trying to kill, maim, hurt LFR’s population were monsters). In each category, communal integrity and survival is threatened from the Outside…”

Gradually, on the basis of my ongoing analysis of thousands of items of Disinfolklore collected from the media in Russia-occupied Luhansk and from hundreds of interviews with those living inside the occupation (and who were living in that evolving Russian Disinfolklore Universe) I began to see that I could use this synthesis of these two complementary analytical schemes of archetypal structures immanent in Indo-European culture – Tool 3 - to identify and interpret any item of Disinfolklore, whether emanating from the Russian, MAGA, Brexit or perhaps any Indo-European Disinfolklore Generation and Propagation Apparatus.

I recounted the contents of the phone call with my manager to my colleagues. I noticed the immediate change in intention and motivation that came over all of us. My aim was to avoid going to check on the damsels – it was a trap, I thought. A retired English Police officer colleague, with whom I usually never saw eye-to-eye, scoffed:

“What does he expect us to do if we find them being cut into pieces?”

with characteristic scorn for our office-based manager. Another colleague - a Bulgarian army general - was motivated to rush out to rescue the damsels in distress from the ogre’s jaws.

I was surprised that my manager had treated as truthful the testimony conveyed to us by the MGB, famous as it was for its falsifications of history, manipulations and terror. But that’s how Disinfolklore operates. It changes our moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations in ways which are foreseen by the originator of the Disinfolklore but which are unforeseen by us before we allow the item of Disinfolklore’s constituent elements into our Inner Minds, where they work to alter our moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations.

As we approached the cottage in the woods where the Mother and the Maiden supposedly were, I texted the Mission’s head of security in Kyiv:

“Confirm manager’s order to approach house where Mother and Underage Daughter are reportedly being cut into pieces.”

That linguistic formula, replete with its primordial archetypal identities triggered the normally reticent head of security to call me immediately. This was the first time I had consciously created Counter Disinfolklore using precisely the same archytypes Disinfolklorists use to further their nefarious schemes, and it worked.

Tool 4 - The Code of Positive Trolls

Archetypal Disinfolklore is a powerful method for destroying our civilisation. Using those same means and memes to preserve our post-World War Two communities governed by the Rule of Law and human rights protected as a matter of law is also a powerful tool. So we must use it ethically and properly. The Code of Positive Trolls (Tool 4) which we’ll learn more about later is our means of ensuring we do not ourselves become Disinfolklorists. Thankfully, the head of security wasn’t hypnotised in the manner of that Bulgarian general or my boss into falling for the troll. He immediately saw how unwise it would be for us, unarmed, to go to the cottage in the woods. I imagine he, like me, also understood it was so ridiculous that it must be a set-up. You see, we all have Incoming Troll Radars. The point is to surface them, fine-tune their sensitivity and learn, over time, to integrate them into the way we process any information. The head of security, mercifully, aborted the operation before we reached the cottage in the woods.

We never heard of anyone there being cut into pieces. The MGB’s agents would have seen that we almost made it to the cottage where who knows what fate awaited us. Meanwhile, the MGB’s archetyping of itself as protector of the folk it was imprisoning manifested in many iterations of the story of its attempt to troll us into going to the cottage in the woods.

Although I have never self-identified as being on the political right, it falls to me to try to re-orientate the Right away from continuing its terrible identification with MAGA and Russian right-wing Disinfolklore. Let’s, then, use my concept of Archetyping-Through-Disinfolklore to understand how the (political) Right was hacked by usurpers who managed to identify “Right” with “Conservative” and policy positions, like Trumps, which are anything but Conservative or Right (see my “Battling Disinfolklore Archetypes” speech delivered during the Munich Security Conference in 2025 where I first explained how Druidey Don and Duncey Putin are using Archetyping to wrap us up inside a Disinfolklore Universe:

Let’s model the relative hierarchy of terms “Right,” “Conservative,” and “Make America Great Again (MAGA) / Reagan/Thatcher Right manifestations thus:

Right

<—->

Conservative

<—->

MAGA or Reagan/Thatcher model.

Here, for reasons which will become clearer later in this piece “Right” is, of the three, the primary Archetypal identity. Conservative comes next. While specific temporal and epochal manifestations of these Archetypal identities, like MAGA or Reagan/Thatcher archetypal models of Right-wing Conservatism come last.

There is a reciprocal flow between these three hierarchical components of our own dimensions of political and self/social-identity. Sometimes a professed adherence to the MAGA or Reagan/Thatcher model of policies will define what is “Conservative” and what is “Right.”

In such cases the upstream manifestation of “Rightness” (in this example the MAGA or Reagan/Thatcher models of Conservatism) determines the content of the downstream and primary meaning of the primal concept of “Rightness.” Nefarious manipulators like Russian combat propaganda practitioners or the originators of MAGA use this bottom-up method/trick to transform the archetypal identity of what is Right, using disorientating and reorienting Disinfolklore.

Re-Archetyping what is “Right” or “Conservative” by manipulating adherents to, say, the Reagan/Thatcher or MAGA archetypal models works within communities.

The American Breitbart.com website set out “the Breitbart Doctrine” (note the two coincidental(?) “Reit” sounds in the moniker of the right-wing aggregating news service established by the late Andrew Breitbart in 2005).

According to this “doctrine,” “Politics flows from culture, and if conservatives wanted to successfully dam up progressive ideas in America, they would have to first challenge the culture. And so Breitbart was founded to be not only a media platform but also a tool for reversing the flow of American culture.” (Excerpt from “Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America” by Christopher Wylie).

Similar to the insight that politics is upstream from culture and if you can transform the culture you can manipulate the politics arising from that culture, what is “Right” or “Conservative” is also fluid. “Rightness” can be carefully and sensitively manipulated in an analogous manner to how Breitbart set out to “dam” so-called “progressive ideas” by reversing the flow of American Culture. This work, as well as Steve Bannon and Chris Wylie’s work on Cambridge Analytica led to the founding of the MAGA manifestation of the American Right. MAGA has now led to America halting support for Ukraine becoming part of Right-wing American orthodoxy, a few short years after Druidey Don was impeached for halting arms exports to Ukraine during his first presidency. This MAGA manifestation of “Right-wing” Conservatism now has colonised almost the whole meaning of what it means today to be on the political “Right” or “Conservative” in America today. Italy’s prime minister Meloni and Merz, Germany’s likely incoming Chancellor, self-identify as being on the political “Right” yet both are resolutely anti-MAGA. So far, both politicians have supported Ukraine’s right to defend its sovereignty, security, territorial integrity, prosperity and fertility (note the “Rt” sound in six of the seven words preceding this note). They are therefore acting like a dam for those on the political right who have become susceptible to MAGA Sirens’ songs. Merz and Meloni (so far!) refuse to allow MAGA to monopolise, dominate, hack pervert or wholly define what is or is not “Right,” in our world today. This is why I characterise both Meloni and Merz, whether one sympathises with right-wing policies or not, as the potential saviours of what is right in the global right today.

Given the near ubiquity and stability of the sound “Right” and associated meanings in important Indo-European vocabularies across time and space since at least 4,000 BCE, it is clear that despite the flow between these three levels in the hierarchy, “Right” is, among the three ideas of “Right,” “Conservatism” and different eras’ manifestations of Right-wing movements (e.g. MAGA or Reagan/Thatcher archetypal identities of such manifestations) indeed the primal and primary node in the interrelationship between Right/Conservative/MAGA.

A whole plethora of sounds/words and associated meanings - including Writ, Sovereignty, Security, Prosperity/Fertility, Rex, Rix, droit, Roi, Rg, Rí, merit, right, correct, etc. all contain the “Right” sound and have powerful associated Archetypal identities.

Here, as an example is some considerations by renowned Austrian Celticist Wolfgang Meid on the instances and meanings of “Right” in Celtic and Germanic languages and governance cultures. Similar commentary could be provided for the “Rt” sound and meaning in other Indo-European cultures:

“The corresponding Gaulish word for "king" was rix… As Irish tradition shows, the monarch who ritually [note how “ritually also includes the Rt sound] united with the goddess of the land was conceived of as the intermediary between their people and the superhuman powers. Their reign should ensure prosperity; failing this they could be deposed [impeached]. Gaulish personal names such as Biturix, Dumnorix, Albiorix, all meaning “king of the world,” may point to such a metaphysical connection… the Germanic people took over the word-concept 'rich', Germanic *rikja- (from Celtic *rigios "regal") and also (from *rigiom "regnum") the related substantive *rikja- in German Reich, English -ric (as in bishop-ric), and imitated numerous Celtic personal names such as Gaulish Catu-rix "Battle-King" whose Germanic equivalent appears as Old High German Hadu-rih.” (Meid, Wolfgang. The Celts. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen der Universität Innsbruck, Bereich Sprachwissenschaft, 2010. Print).

In the language of Ancient Iranian emperor Darius's inscriptions, drauga, the "lie," is essentially the attitude of rebels, of usurpers or potential usurpers who, like the Jan 6 insurrectionists and DOGE, deceive the people by pretending to be "monarch" in place of Darius himself. Darius I (522–486 BCE) founded the Iranian Achmenaid Empire that ruled Judea, Greece, Türkiye, Armenia and other lands and since it lasted for longer than American democracy -300 years- it’s worth listening to his idea of Right.

That struggle to define what's "Right" (rta in Sanskrit (i.e. truth/what is), art, tru (th), reich, -rch (in monarch), reign (in sovereignty, foreigner)) in Indo-European cultures is THE struggle.

One of the earliest texts in Irish Fir Flathainn/Audach Morainn/Truth of the Prince (700 CE) warns that when a Sovereign tells untruths, great plagues, pestilence, invasions, coalesce to ruin that Monarch’s land, and turn it into a Waste Land.

In “Sovereignty” is the element *Reg, which is a term that appears in every Indo-European language and culture - in English the Mana of *Reg is these sounds: “Right,” “Reign,” “Writ,” “Authority,” “Regime,” “Foreigner,” “Realm,” “Reich,” the “Rch” of “Monarchy,” “Security,” and “Regulation." This means that these sounds are cognate with the *reign element in the English word “Sovereignty. “Dieu et mon droit” is the French-language motto on the English monarch’s Coat of Arms - the “droit” in French signifies both “Law” and “Right.” If you say “Roi” (“King” in French), “Right,” and the “roit” in “Droit” you might notice that despite the different spellings they all sound similar. *Reg means “Rod” in the earliest Indo-European language that we know. Because of this, we know that monarchy was symbolised as the monarch stretching out a straight rod that signified the right of the king (Rex in Latin, Rí in old Irish, and Raja in the ancient Indian language Sanskrit are cognates meaning they come from the same Common Source among the Ancient Ukrainian Yamna community who created the ancestor of all living Indo-European languages) to rule. In the most recent coronation of a monarch in England, its sovereign is photographed holding, in his right hand, a straight rod symbolising sovereignty. Likewise, contemporary Ukraine’s rightful ruler/head of state Volodymyr Zelenskyy also held a sceptre in his right-hand upon his inauguration as president of Ukraine. "Rtá" is opposed to "drúh" in the ancient Indian Vedic language. “Arta” is opposed to “druj” in the ancient Iranian Avestan language. King Arthur in English lore embodies this idea of rightful ruler according to what is truthful and not illusory in the “Art” component of his moniker. The idea and form of the signifier "Art" as that which is created which reveals truth stems from this.

I have written elsewhere about the meaning of the mantic mantra-like hypnotic effects of the sound and associated meanings of Rg / Rt / Reg / Rch / Rit / Rd across Indo-European cultures: see ‘What Meaning Means’

https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/what-meaning-means. Suffice it to say for our purposes here, those who possess control of who gets to be branded with the moniker “Right” in any political community in any Indo-European society between 4,000 BCE and today has a comparative advantage over every other group competing for control of that community’s people, resources, and territory. This advantage operates at a sub-conscious level which is why in “What Meaning Means” I reveal that Rg / Rt / Reg / Rch / Rit / Rd is one of the two main cryptotypic signalling systems in Indo-European communities.

Since these Rg / Rt / Reg / Rch / Rit / Rd words/sounds are present in almost every Indo-European language we know that this association of sound/meaning is extremely ancient and probably goes back as far as the time and place when the first Indo-European languages were spoken by the Yamna community in the river valleys of Ancient Ukraine between 4,000 and 2,500 BCE (see https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08372-2 published in Nature on 5 February 2025).

It’s clear, therefore, that the Archetypal signifier and meaning of “Right” is very powerful and is indeed the primary Archetypal Identity by comparison to the “Conservative” or “MAGA” / Reagan/Thatcher” manifestations of Conservatism or Rightism in our era.

Not long ago, those who identified with the political right supported the political ideologies of rule of law, personal and fiscal responsibility. Let’s call this the “Reagan/Thatcher” archetypal model of political conservatism and the political right.

The content of what was (morally) right for those who identified with the political right had, according to the Reagan/Thatcher archetypal model, become synonymous with political conservatism. Those who self-identified with conservatism as conservatives felt comfortable with and conventional by voting for this agenda.

In many cases, political candidates and newspaper opinion writers who dressed their policy prescriptions defending the Rule of Law, of fiscal and personal responsibility within the archetypal clothes of the political right and political conservatism would be frictionlessly followed by the community of those who self-identified as politically conservative and politically right.

In fact, political parties like England’s Conservatives or the US’s Republican Party were able to change radically the content of their policy prescriptions – to abandon observance of the Rule of Law (see UK Supreme Court’s judgments in the two Miller cases related to Brexit), fiscal and personal responsibility - without their most fervent adherents among the general public even noticing. The archetypal frame of political conservatism and political right was being so strongly signaled by repetition mainly of their identity with one or more of the aforementioned hierarchical levels that those voting for its policy prescriptions weren’t attentively watching while the content of the policy prescriptions being presented by these alleged political conservatives and political rightists was transformed.

Within a relatively short period of time (since 2015?), the essential tenets of this Reagan/Thatcher archetypal model of political conservatism and the political right were completely swopped out – MAGA, which was created as a result of work initiated by Andrew Breitbart, Steve Bannon and Chris Wylie, is a manifestation of this transformation. Personal and fiscal responsibility were still used for Archetypal Signalling purposes to situate those who were utilising the Right’s monikers. But vast campaigns of tax credits for the very wealthy, the printing of vast amounts of money, undermining the rule of law by allowing Druidey Don and his accomplices to get away with election and other crimes, as well as an epidemic of scapegoating others as a means of creating the Right’s in-groups were not consistent with the Reagan/Thatcher model of personal and fiscal responsibility. The Cultural War political strategy that was invented by Pat Buchanan for Nixon (see his “Dividing the Democrats” memo for Nixon) became the Right’s main means of dividing its political opponents and winning power through promoting social and mental divisions across our community.

The monikers “right” and “conservative” were and are conserved, frequently by rhetorically attacking the “sinister” left (the “left” has been identified with being “sinister” and not Right at least since Roman times). Such attacks continued to Archetype the Left as “Bad,” or “Sinister,” a troll that is at least two-thousand-years old – we note that “ad sinistram” in Latin means “on the left.” Their true purpose though is to embed and archetype the identities of its Disinfolklore propagations as “Right” (within the long Indo-European tradition mentioned above), since it’s easy to portray yourself as Right-wing if you’re always banging on about “the left.”

Instead of the Reagan/Thatcher archetypal model of political conservatism and political right, the MAGA or indeed Putinist ideology of grievance-mining, scapegoating (migrants, Trans, Nazis, NATO, Europeans, liberals, Democrats, woke,…), unlawfulness (justifying doing nothing to defend Ukraine by referring to “corruption” is a favourite trope of the Russian and Trumpist self-declared Right) became mainstreamed across the political conservative and political right globally. People who had paid their taxes for decades in the expectation that the welfare state (Medicaid, social security) could no longer rely on the contractual duty of the State/government to help them during different stages of their lives being honoured – their “Rights” were transgressed whether or not they voted for the MAGA Archetypal identity of Right-wing policy prescriptions.

Today, Druidey Don Disinfolklore promotes his identity as a “Conservative,” while destroying what was “Conservative,” according to the Reagan/Thatcher Consensus. U.S. MAGA Conservatives, in the main, follow his lead and Archetype through constant Disinfolklore the content of Conservatism as the opposite of what they said they believed under the Reagan/Thatcher Conservative consensus.

Druidey Don and Duncey Putin (let’s illustrate the power of Archetyping through showing, not just telling!) are masters of the art of re-Archetyping fundamental concepts in our culture as a means of transforming cultures without us even noticing. While we’re being dismayed by their Disinfolklore, by altering our moods, we’re being brainwashed into surrendering our civilisation to the anti-Right. We must get better at identifying in real time and In Real Life how such manipulations work and countering them, through executing our own Archetyping campaigns.

Much of the democratic mandate for those who support this transformation of the modern political right and conservatives’ programme has been earned by this deception delivered directly into our Inner Minds through MAGA, Russian and other manifestations of Disinfolklore.

It’s important for us to understand how many who genuinely identify as politically conservative and politically right could, within a short period of few years, also genuinely support a political project that, for example, put an adjudicated rapist with 34 criminal convictions into the White House without their brains breaking under the weight of the contradiction between the Right’s adherence under the Reagan/Thatcher model to Rule of Law, and MAGA’s disdain for the law and what is right.

I believe this explanation reveals something very important about the power of Archetyping on our moods, attitudes, motivations and intentions. When Elmo Musk - Robin to Don Disinfolklore’s Batman - tells a CPAC Conservative conference “I am become meme,” he’s not joking; he’s revealing how conscious re-Archetyping is re-engineering our minds.

MAGA’s achievement also demonstrates that with the right tools (owning for example the means of Archetyping at scale) those who control Mass Media (Disinfolklore propagators like X/Twitter or frightening other oligarch-owned media outlets into enabling Druidey Don to capture news cycle after news cycle) can Archetype our cognitive frameworks in ways that, for me, are eerily reminiscent of what I witnessed as a diplomat working in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018.

In Russia-occupied Luhansk, a new entirely controlled media environment encompassing television, online, radio combined with Russian state imposed violence at population scale wrought significant changes quite quickly within the minds of Ukrainians living inside the occupation.

At that time (between 2015 and 2018) I did not understand to what ends this Disinfolklore apparatus’s hacking of the minds of Ukrainians living inside the occupation’s Disinfolklore Universe was being mobilised to produce. After Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, and the brutal attacks by the Ukrainians Russia had been brainwashing for eight years on their fellow Ukrainians, it was clear to me what Russia was up to (see my Stealth Genocide I (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/disinfolklore-2) and European Football Championships pieces (https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/european-football-championships-episode) at https://www.Disinfolklore.net).

MAGA Disinfolklore operates by identical means as Russian Disinfolklore operated in Russia-occupied Ukraine inside closed loop media spaces for MAGA cult followers. We may think that MAGA Disinfolklore is undirected, somewhat quaint or something that will only happen to the American Right, while we look on cooly, as superior-feeling and resilient-minded Europeans.

Such complacency in the face of cutting edge communications techniques like Archetyping through mass amplification of trolls is not consistent with the data. The data suggests population scale brainwashing is as easily achieved as has been the hacking of the right’s minds by MAGA Disinfolklore since 2015. I observed in Russia-occupied Ukraine (as we have all observed in MAGA-occupied American Conservatism) a complete identity-hacking of MAGA and Conservative adherents’ minds over the course of a few years. MAGA, Russia and Don Disinfolklore’s ambition is to do the same trick across our entire civilisation and lead our world into a similar place as Russia is in today.

Inside Russia the mind-hacking Disinfolklore brought ordinary Russians from a place where they condescended to Ukrainians in 2009 to a situation in which they cheer on the mass murder, rape and forcible transfer of millions of Ukrainians. While I was monitoring closely the emergence and peculiarities of the identity-hacking Disinfolklore apparatus in Russia-occupied Ukraine, every single Russian news bulletin was re-Archetyping the idea of “Ukraineness,” inside the brains of virtually every Russian.

Russian news (Disinfolklore) carried reports of entirely fictitious attacks by entirely mythical characters called “Ukrainian Nazis” on native Russian-language speaking Ukrainians. These reports of mythological events (in places at times I was physically located where these mythological attacks had supposedly occurred. So I knew they never happened in Russia-occupied Ukraine) had an aggregated impact of transforming the Archetypal identity of Ukraine inside the minds of the ordinary Russians who today support genocidal activities against Ukraine.

Today, too, the United States President and his MAGA Disinfolklore apparatus uses a wholly manufactured Archetypal character of Ukraine as deserving the coercive control punishment being meted out to it in Russian Disinfolklore and the physical battle space as a means of recruiting more MAGA supporters into his own death cult. Disinfolklore Don is using his bogus efforts to bring peace to Ukraine to coerce Ukraine into surrendering to the Big Bad Wolf Russia. Don is copying the Soviet and Putinist Archetyping trick of using the moniker “Peace” to troll us into thinking he’s against war. Russki Mir for example is an imperialist ideology whose purpose is to occupy territories which are not part of Russia militarily under the pretext of bringing “Peace.” “Mir” in the Russian language means “peace,” yet Russki Mir is about implementing an endless genocidal war against our civilisation. The stakes could not be higher as Druidey Don is using all the warlike tropes that history’s mass murderers have used to troll nation states into wars which cost millions of lives.

This is why understanding how we got from a political idea of the “Right” that could be argued at least aspired to identify itself with what was morally right has become completely divorced from reality. MAGA and the Russian state both use Disinfolklore to create illusory realities that change mental archetypal identities in the minds of many (most?) who are exposed to it. Rightness as previously defined according to the Reagan/Thatcher model of the Right is re-Archeyped according to MAGA Disinfolklore’s idea of what is “Right.” It is never moral to be an adjudicated rapist or to usurp power in the manner which the Federal indictment of Druidey Don’s Jan 6 conspiracy to defraud the United States of its rightful government set out.

We began with an archetypal identity of conservatives. This evolved into the Reagan/Thatcher Model of fiscal and personal responsibility Conservatism. It’s important to note that the fiscal and personal responsibility archetype of Conservatism was itself a corruption of what was rightful Conservatism – and Rightism meaning: identity of secular law with what is right and opposition of rightful sovereign with usurper (see how Darius defined what is Right in his inscriptions mentioned above).

Nevertheless, despite its corruption from the ideal Archetype of what is Right, this Reagan/Thatcher model reinforced, reproduced and enacted through a billion different means as it was, often through pre-Disinfolklore memes in our communities’ information and policy spaces, was for all its faults less harmful than today’s corruption of what is Right by the Far Right regimes of MAGA America, or the Axis of Misogyny (China, Iran and Russia) acting in concert to bring about a Handmaid’s Tale society. A Unified Reich as Don Disinfolklore’s election manifesto promises to transform America into.

Many people who identified with that Reagan/Thatcher archetype of conservatism were politicians who promised to implement policies consistent with this archetypal identity of conservatism. Many people without even looking at the content of the policies or indeed assessing the track record of the conservatives voted and continue to vote along with those political entities characterised by the archetypal identity of conservatives.

The identity of conservatism itself with the right is another archetypal relationship that is part of this explanation. The idea of right is inherent in our Indo-European minds (as evidenced by the recurrence of the sound and associated meaning outlined above). The Right has a certain manifestation in the political sphere and indeed it is manifested also in the legal order (droit).

In a healthy community, the identity of right with law and rule of law with conservatism (and indeed with any political party) in a democracy is perfect or at least aspiring, in good faith, to be perfect.

What has been happening of late to an extent that even the laziest person on the right must at least in some moments suspect is a tribe of people who understand that if you can hack the archetypal identity of the right attach it to their own lawless/amoral political vehicles then you can win elections and implement policies which are the exact opposite of what is right, what is lawful, what is truthful and what is morally correct.

So, going forward, let’s look a bit more deeply when Druidey Don, Elmo Musk or Russia’s attempt, through Disinfolklore, to detach ordinary meanings from archetype-bearing words/sounds imprinted in our minds. Disinfolklorists like Duncey Putin, Druidey Don and MAGA achieve their diabolical success through endless repetition of Disinfolklore. This Disinfolklore is used to negatively impact our moods, motivations, intentions and attitudes in ways which make such imprinting less detectable.

It is a fundamental feature of our cognition that we aggregate through our perception lots of different phenomena into what I call archetypal identities. This saves a lot of time. It saves a lot of computing time. This short-cut helps us make Good Enough assessments that prevent us falling over or making errors of perception.

If we were to base all our decisions on the actual characteristics of matter (which is at a quantum level empty and full of air and water), we would never have the courage to sit down on aggregated quantum particles in the form of chairs - Matter, after all, is merely air and water. This view from the standpoint of ultimate reality, while philosophically or religiously correct, is not much cop when you just want to find a seat to sit upon. If the actual material content of the seat or of what is Right, Conservative or MAGA at a quantum level is no different from the material of the air beside the chair then distinguishing between the illusory and the real becomes extremely tedious and not very practical.

Therefore, we see “chairs” (what is Right) and we see “tables” (Conservatism) which are collections of matter (analogous to what, say, Druidey Don is trying to archetype as Right in our minds) aggregated into an entity that we have archetype as a table (Conservative/Not Left) or a chair (say, MAGA) and we sit down (vote for MAGA). We sit down to eat our dinner (get entertained by the Disinfolklore) all the while unbeknownst to us, Druidey Don, Duncey Putin and MAGA Disinfolklore is taking advantage of our mental shortcut taking. Their Disinfolklore re-engineers our brains and imprints new Archetypal identities inside our minds.

Everything I saw in Russia-occupied Ukraine’s information space is present today in MAGA and Disinfolklore Don’s architected information warfare operations. The Archetyping as “Right” what is, in reality, wrong and illusory is precisely what Druidey Don is doing when he hypnotises us with lies masquerading as truthiness about crowd sizes and whether or not The Comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a dictator.

The Archetyping of “brutal Russian occupation” as “Peace” is just the latest in a long line of clues that Disinfolklore Don’s following a Russian playbook. This brainwashing at population scale so that, for example, democratically elected leaders like President Zelenskyy are being re-Archetyped as Dictators while Ukraine which is winning the war against Russia is being re-Archetyped as “weak” and in need of a Minsk-like peace is recurring.

Russia specialises in offering the executioners of its Disinfolklore-dependent strategies like Disinfolklore Don offers they can’t refuse. They’re compelling and designed for the psychological vulnerabilities Donald wears on his sleeve. He wants to be world king and the political technology of re-Archetyping at population-scale is a potent means offered to Druidey Don by Russia to achieve his goal.

In return for sharing its methods of hacking archetypes like “Right,” “Conservative,” and lawfulness with Don Disinfolklore, Russia hopes to win Ukraine. We must not allow this to happen. Our communities and our minds’ health depends on us harnessing the power of Archetyping to bring “Right” and the political right back into sync. Ruschist ideologue admitting Trenin recently wrote in RT (note the Rt sound in the moniker of the Russian State’s main Disinfolklire distribution apparatus - they’re not subtle, if you know what to look for, and my job is to help you know what to look for) of the “Invisible Revolution” which is taking place inside Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. According to Trenin Russia is the first right-wing state that has “re-established the supremacy of national legislation over international treaties…” What unites self-declared “Conservatives Traditionalists” like American MAGA, English Brexiteers, Oligarchs, Anti-Woke, and Ruschists?

They all want to destroy the post-WWII legal architecture, including explicit commitments in domestic/municipal law to honour the supremacy of international law over municipal/national law. Human Rights protected, universally, as a matter of law is one form this post-WWII supremacy of International Law over domestic/municipal law takes.

States’ rights to territorial integrity is another form of international law’s supremacy over, for example, Russia’s attempt to use domestic law to usurp Ukraine’s sovereignty over Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts.

We are extremely fortunate that Russia’s attempt to use law to usurp Ukraine’s right and Ukrainians human rights is a function of its failure on the battlefield. Its current attempt to coerce, through Druidey Don’s intervention, Ukraine to surrender its legal right to areas Russia has failed to capture according to the age-old law of Might is Right/Reich is almost comical. Yet the deadly serious Comedian, himself educated (like me) in international law, President Zelenskyy, Italy’s current leader Meloni and Germany’s incoming Chancellor Merz understand exactly what is at stake.

On multiple occasions these three rightful leaders have spoken about the consequence of allowing Russia any victory in Ukraine being the collapse of the international legal order established after World War II. So President Zelenskyy, Prime Minister Meloni and likely incoming chancellor Merz are therefore the Right’s (and indeed humanity’s) main chance to achieve the collective goal of preserving the post-World War Two conception of what is right. If they don’t retrieve right from Druidey Don, Duncey Putin and MAGA, then we’re done for as a species.

1 Introduction: Declaration of ‘Our Disinfolklore Universe’

2 Was Ist Disinfolklore —-> Mana in meme

3 Examples of mental models/archetypes in memes.

4 Archetypes:

Archetypal Archetypes: the Shaman-trickster is personified by All Father Germanic God of Runes Odin

Druidey Don

Duncey Putin

The Comedian

5 Consciously Disrupting Archytypal identities

1 Introduction: Declaration of ‘Our Disinfolklore Universe’

It’s appropriate to be speaking about our Disinfolklore Universe at a Pirate Party Munich Security conference event.

Those who founded the Pirate Party get what I am about to speak to you about.

There’s a flow between on the one hand culture, art, films, literature about pirates and geopolitical security. Those whom we entrust with securing our conditions of civilised life don’t seem to understand this. This is partly why they’re such easy marks for Russian and MAGA Disinfolklore. They get wrapped up so easily in Russian or MAGA trolls, like flies in a spider's web, it’s very hard for them even to understand they’re trapped inside Old Thinking.

Today I’m going to offer a perspective on what I call our Disinfolklore Universe. And I’m also going to offer a means to escape the troll memes wrap us up inside when we fall for MAGA or Russian Disinfolklore.

None of this is easy. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have all the answers. Whenever you hear anyone talk about Disinformation or Disinfolklore as if it happens to other people. As if only stupid people fall for trolls. Whenever you hear chatter like that, be certain those people are easy marks for trolls. For MAGA and Russian Disinfolklore.

Today we live in a true Disinfolklore Universe.

The fabric of every dimension of our lives - work, personal relationships, life choices, fates - is infused with aspects of Druidey Don and Duncey Putin’s memetic onslaught.

Our Moods/Motivations/Intentions/Attitudes are being formed by what I call ‘Disinfolklore.’

Directly – through whichever media memes we consume.

Or indirectly, through our own minds and those of others, influencing us from archetypes created and evolving from Disinfolklore.

Batman and Robin are running America – you saw Elmo, Druidey Don, and the kid in the White House the other day?

The totality of our info-space is occupied by memes like the brand Department of Government Efficiency- DOGE (the class of oligarchs who ran Venice into the ground and baseless meme coins).

The totality of our conception of America now is occupied by actors playing leaders in superhero costumes.

Elmo Robin and Druidey Don Batman dressed up in Marvel Universe costumes (through AI and In Real Life).

Memeing a Disinfolklore Universe using marvellous Marvel Universe-inspired memes is a means of creating a Disinfolklore Universe in our minds and In Real Life.

Using their own controlled Disinfolklore propagation network X and America buying TikTok from China…

Compelling other oligarchs to do likewise of theirs.

We’re being embedded just as Russia embeds Ukrainians inside the occupation in Disinfolklore - stories that purposefully affect our Moods/Intentions/Attitudes/ Motivations in ways that repurpose us to serve the Disinfolklorists memes/means to transform our world.

Did you see what Druidey Don’s wife Melania was wearing for his inauguration? A meme chic costume designed by Ukrainian fashion label DressX.

Two Ukrainian fashion designers founded DressX in Los Angeles. They like the Pirate Party and me with Disinfolklore noticed the porousness between In Real Life and memes in our cultural space. DressX identified a market for real world clothes that mimic and riff off a Marvel or Disney World aesthetic.

Now DressX clothes Druidey Don Disinfolklore’s wife, actual American Memester-in-Chief’s First Lady.

Good luck to them, for they’ve seen what I see and what the Pirate Party sees: we’re living in a Disinfolklore universe made of memes.

The First Lady chose DressX to model Druidey Don’s vision of a Disinfolklore Universe in which we are battered daily by a million hitherto unsayable and hitherto undoable things.

So the abnormal becomes the normal.

We have no anchor, except the Mememaster-in-Chief’s next whim to latch on to.

The power to Archetype at will belongs to all of us.

BUT if you own the memes of cultural production, exchange and distribution of memes (the main means through which Archetyping outside our minds occurs) then you can archetype at scale.

By Archetyping in this context I’m speaking about an aspect of cognition. We model the world, our context. Our mental ideals help us navigate. We create stereotypes. Aggregates of phenomena become archetyped as ‘this’ or ‘that.’ Then new data is bounced off these archetypes which in no cases are fluid and dynamic. Sometimes though we form what I call ‘data resistant archetypes.’ By declaring our ‘Disinfolklore Universe’ I am Archetyping the current moment in human civilisation. Values, reputations, modelling, mental architectures, characters, personalities, interpretations algorithms, stereotyping: these are al forms. All dimensions of Archetyping as I’m using the term today. Anyway. Enough of definitions. Defining something is also a form f Archetyping as I am using the terms.

If you own the memes – and ‘Memeing’ is also a form of Archetyping in the sense I’m using the word- of production, the cultural means of production then you can re-engineer humanity’s minds. The surveillance capitalists behind Druidey Don as represented by Vance want to reengineer humanity using behaviourist practices of herding, tuning and conditions with all the added value accruing to the organisers. The oligarchs whose puppet is Druidey Don.

US Presidents could always archetype at scale.

Now, they have the capacity to re-encode our minds into their Disinfolklore Universe.

If the media repeats your trolls then people truly believe migrants are eating your pet dawg.

If you own X and Facebook then you can convince at scale that we are NOT living in a Disinfolklore universe now.

We are though. The signs are everywhere, once you get your eye in. And that is my job: to get your eye in, so you can see what is being done. By understanding the Disinfolklore Universe we can engage in conscious memetic warfare. Conscious Counter Disinfolklore.

The Disinfolklore Universe is a place in which ‘up’ is being archetyped as ‘down.’

Today, our Disinfolklore Universe reminds me rather of Russia-occupied eastern Ukraine, where I worked as a diplomat 2015-2018.

It took Russian Disinfolklore seven years to change the identities through brainwashing of the population of Russia-occupied Ukraine using Disinfolklore.

Now the process which began around the same time in America - turning normal right-wing Americans into MAGA cult members - is being unleashed on all of us.

After seven years in Russia-occupied Ukraine, Ukrainians were not only convinced their fellow Ukrainians across the Donets River were Outer Realm dehumanised bogeymen.

Russian Disinfolklore also had brainwashed Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Ukraine to such an extent that they believed they MUSK participate in Meat Assaults against their fellow Ukrainians.

Today, Ruschia uses Telegram to create communities characterised by division and anti-immigrant far right and far left militancy that spill out onto our streets and politics to wreak havoc.

You see, what Ruschia noticed was that community identity is wholly formed through story-telling.

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. Know this, and you will begin to understand how Ruschist Disinfolklore works to undermine and recreate identity.

In Ireland, the Celtic literary revival of the late 1900s led to our liberation from England’s yoke.

MAGA, likewise, creates community out of grievance, fear and memes.

What I saw in Russia-occupied Ukraine is where Druidey Don’s Disinfolklore Universe Spectacle is leading us to.

We are no longer mere spectators looking on with polite revulsion and mystification at MAGA America.

Today, Druidey Don’s Disinfolklore encompasses all of us. We’re participants picking up and repeating Disinfolklore. We read the newsey or hear a friend speak of the attest abomination emanating from Moscow or Washington or Berlin. And our moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations are affected. We’re Disinfolklored into depression or sadness. sovereignty, our security and our prosperity.

The Disinfolklore Universe is not a metaphor.

It’s where we’re living right now. It’s the Matrix. The Matrix is a metaphor. You’ll be glad to know. But as far as I can see Druidey Don and Duncey Putin’s vision for us is to become slaves. Project 2025 is about replacing migrants with all the children we’ll have when there’s no legal means of birth control.

Positive Trolling and Counter Archetyping our means of escaping our civilisation’s fate. I’ll come back to this later.

First, we must understand what’s going on.

My job for the past several years now has been focussed on forging the tools we need to counter MAGA, Russian, Brexit and other forms of masculinist Disinfolklore.

A few years ago… In the Autumn of 2019, I decided to dedicate my life to creating tools to help interpret and counter MAGA Trump and Russian Disinformation. Even then it was clear to me that something strange was going on which could lead our civilisation over the precipice.

What is the nature of Druidey Donald Trump’s power? Druidey Don Trump is not a Druid – the Magico-Religious caste in Celtic society. He’s Druidey in the same way he speaks Truthiness to weave us inside his Disinfolklore Universe.

Of what is Duncey Putin’s Mana composed? His energy. What is it? A Dunce is a Village Fool. An archetypal identity in Germanic culture going back millennia. I remember studying the transmission of ideas in the early German reformation as an undergraduate – and the Ship of Fools image was a common one in 1520s Wittenberg. The Ship of Fools representing the papacy in images propagating ideas into the minds of the so-called Simple Folk.

Putin like the ingenue village idiot in any folktale never learns. Like Raskalnikov in Crime and Punishment Duncey Putin is a St Petersburg Law student who didn’t study very hard. Like Raskalnikov Duncey Putin thinks he can murder women, and get away with it. Like Raskalnikov Duncey Putin keeps trying the same tactic day after day meat assault after meat assault in the hope that one day he’ll get lucky.

The third archetype I’m going to speak about in this talk is The Comedian – The Comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy. What is the nature of his inspiring performance since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine?

Well, one key aspect is related to the power of harnessing archetypes. I call this a form of War Magic.

Herodotus (c. 484–424 BCE) uses goēs to refer to nations with strange powers - Ukraine is such a nation. No other country on earth could unite the world against Ruschism. Magic was first a characteristic of countries. Of states. I am bringing back that meaning.

In Counter Disinfolklore, we consciously disrupt archetypal identities.

The stake in geopolitics today is:

We allow propagators of Disinfolklore to capture our minds and our countries. To implant their own archetypes and imprint their chosen identities populating these archetypes in our minds. We allow ourselves to be brainwashed, into the grave.

Or, we forge our own archetypes. We engage in conscious memetic warfare according to certain rules of engagement, which Counter Disinfolklorists like us need to master and mistress.

By memetic in this context I use the term meme to signify any informational unit – it may be a thought, an image, a sound, or text. Memetic warfare is just a means of describing the state of our information space.

Here I am not using ‘warfare’ as a metaphor. I am not likening the war for our attention in the information space to a war. To me, it is the Main Battlespace in a war whose dividing lines are:

On one side, those of us who will fight to the death to preserve the post-WWII legacy: the European Union. European Convention on Human Rights. Human Rights protected as a matter of law. Equal rights.

On the other side, an anti-woke, pro-oligarch, traditionalist conservative attempt to recreate the social conditions of 1920s and 1930s Germany.

Kinetic battles in Kursk or Kherson today serve as fodder for the true battle that’s going on for our minds. Across the information space of our civilisation. Bloody kinetic battles are wars to dominate humans and space in order to feed the mythos that affects our moods/intentions/attitudes/ and motivations in ways that benefit Disinfolklorists like Druidey Don and Duncey Putin: Russia’s goals are clear. Russia wants to destroy the European Union. Our security umbrella. Russia wants to establish the primacy of Municipal Law over International Law. Russia wants its own corrupt elite to be empowered, on a whim, to legislate new laws into existence. This is Druidey Don’s project too.

The key battleground for Ukraine is our Disinfolklore Universe is to transform successfully its Archetypal identity of Ukraine as ‘weaker than Russia’ as a ‘damsel in distress’ inside the minds of those today who are captivated by Data Resistant Archetypes of a Potemkin State. The Potemkin State is both Russia and the Mental States created in our minds by Russia’s Coercive and Reflexive Control campaigns that use Disinfolklore).

This battle over Archetypes populating our minds is THE fundamental meta battle that is served by the Ukraine-Russia military campaigns in two domains:

Information space (Disinfolklore vs Counter Disinfolklore) AND on the 1,200km long front line.

Let’s look at three of the most data resistant archetypes of the Potemkin State that is Duncey Putin’s Russia today:

“Russia is invincible.

Russia is indispensable.

Russia has the right to determine its neighbouring countries’ destinies.”

Remember these three archetypal identities, please:

“Russia is invincible. Russia is indispensable. Russia has the right to determine its neighbouring countries’ destinies.”

You will see these archetypes in zillions of memes. When the US defence secretary or Druidey Don himself says Ukraine must sacrifice Crimea, it’s clear they’re animated by this troll: these three Archetypal Identities. Presidents, prime ministers, Russia-hawks the world over are animated by these archetypes whenever they say something like ‘of course Ukraine will have to give u Crimea for peace’ you know they’re occupied by these Russian archetypes.

The problem: Data resistant archetypes of a Potemkin State.

Disinfo debunking is challenging due to various factors, including emotional biases, confirmation biases, motivated reasoning, and differences in intellectual and emotional backgrounds. Propagandists use falsehoods, gaslighting, and emotional manipulation to control people’s thoughts.

Okay that’s the introduction done. Now let’s talk about how I came to invent Disinfolklore.

2 Was Ist Disinfolklore —-> Mana in meme

I forged the word Disinfolklore out of ‘Disinformation’ and ‘folklore’ in February 2023.

Instead of including the word ‘folklore,’ I could have chosen ‘song’, ‘folksong’, ‘propaganda’, stories, narratives, or a heap of other words to describe the new phenomenon that I have identified.

Folklore however captures best the way of seeing which is as valid today to see described as Disinfolkore as Folklore was in Jacob Grimm and Herder’s times.

For 3 years, I’d been researching Indo-European mythology/folklore as a means of seeing how Ruschia/MAGA used stories to create community.

Was looking for a moniker: Disinfolklore suddenly came to me!

The bridge. Intuition.

Mythological

Odin-worshipping "Wagner" army unit soldiers guarding bridge

Structure

Bridge dividing Other Worlds

Boundary Zone for millennia:

Europe vs. Asia

Events

Luxury Sausage Troll Saga, that almost leads to war

Everyday heroism of ordinary people managing in extraordinary situation: mothers bringing children across a Hellscape with good humour and trolleys

Trolling

Artillery barrages

Mythical happenings that only existed in Russian Disinfolklore

Locus Amœnus

“…'pleasant spot’, a phrase used by modern scholars to refer to the set description of an idyllic landscape, typically containing trees and shade, a grassy meadow, running water, song‐birds, and cool breezes. The tradition goes back to Homer's descriptions of the grotto of Calypso and the garden of Alcinous"

People

Archetypes

Forester

Soldiers

Knights

Nurses

Villagers

Knaves

Damsels in Distress

Invaders

Trolls

Villains

Mercenaries

Defenders

Animals of all kinds being led across the bridge

Færy story-like switches

Interzone Tripping

Russian occupiers described as "defenders"

Ukrainians represented as usurpers/occupiers

Occupiers described as mere Ukrainian Separatists

Peace Mir

Environment

Donets River

Bridge

Shores

Mist rising over the river

Passage to Otherworlds / afterlife across bridges / rivers

Styx River

Acheron

In early Iranian religion, Daena controls passage across Cinvat Bridge: to the saved Daena appears as a beautiful woman, and they pass into the House of Song. To the damned, Daena appears as a witch, and they pass into the House of Lies

Arcadian setting for Chretienne de Troyes's Graal Tales, Hohol's folktales, Tolstoy's Village Stories, or Dostoyevsky's struggles to reconcile the European with the Asian in Ruschia.

So what I was doing was Archetyping the scene as Something Folkloric. Something Folkloric helped me make sense of it. I delved into memories of archetypes learned from folktales.

Now the elements of that bridge situation which were blatantly folklore struck me. But what was truly Disinfolklore about the scene was then invisible.

As with many discoveries the accidentally followed trail leads to an unexpected insight:

I was collecting media studies inside Russia-occupied Luhansk. Institutions being founded. A central bank. Stories about events I knew hadn’t happened. What Russia was doing was Archetyping a reality using references and tropes which meant little to me then – I hadn’t grown up in Soviet Union. Tropes from Gret Ateitic War were invisible to me. Polish mercenaries. Like, the Brithers Grimm I was collecting these stories. And then years afterwards I understand what Russia was doing.

Inner / Outer Realm Archetyping.

There was an intelligence behind what was happening inside the minds of those consuming what was masquerading as news. Whereas it had been me Archetyping the scene as something folkloric. What was going on inside the information space of Russia-occupied Ukraine was a purposeful Archetyping of Ukraine as Puter Relm, threatening and Russia as saviours.

To be clear thus is exactly what MAGA Druidey Don does whenever he speaks. Now this process has gone national. International.

Inside Russia-occupied Ukraine was a matrix. Here I’m using the Matrix as a metaphor.

Russia’s Archetyping system consisted of hundreds of media outlets, intermeshed with coercive force, coercive control and ‘institutions’ which did not mediate reality.

They forged it of stories – what I now call Disinfolklore. I didn’t then understand what the Russians were doing. I didn’t understand what their objective was.

They were weaving reality. I didn’t know why they were doing it. Their were changing the identities of the consumers of Disinfolklore. And it’s that insight which I bring to you today.

Preparing Ukrainians to be part of a genocide. Is 1942: would you know you’re witnessing a genocide?

Now, let’s zoom out from the particular to the universal:

The Family Resemblance between the Disinfolklore Universe Russia created in the minds of Ukrainians living in Russia-occupied Ukraine and what is today happening on a global scale across America.

Now, let’s zoom out from the particular to the universal:

Let’s define “Disinfolklore” as follows:

“Disinfolklore” is a specific form of disinformation. Disinfolklore is a medium for affecting our moods / intentions / motivations and attitudes in ways which help the Disinfolklorist.

“For example, we intend to donate to help Ukraine develop its drone-based warfare capability.

“But the New Orc Times tells us a fable whose message / Mana is: “Ruschia will win.”

“Instead, we donate our money to another cause. Disinfolklore is disinformation which can be usefully parsed into some folkloric elements.”

Disinfolklore inhabits you like a ghost.

Disinfolklore is a way of seeing.

Disinfolklore is a mood.

Disinfolklore is an empirical observation that immanent in many forms of what we already considered to be disinformation are discernible tropes from folklore.

By learning to see Disinfolklore, by learning to archetype reality through the lenses of Disinfolklore, we can teach ourselves how to identify negatively manipulative messaging in even the most innocuous informational units.

Disinfolklore is a tool kit.

Disinfolklore is a form of War Magic, which is why the book length version of “Counter Disinfolklore” is subtitled “controlling war magic.”

Why Disinfolklore is an appropriate moniker: in Disinfolklore we look at the characters in the stories we’re served up. Ukraine as the damsel in distress who must submit. Russia as the implacable bear. Better get it over with Ukraine. Stereotypes are delivered through story telling in newsey memes every time Druidey Don, Duncey Putin or their bench men and hence women speak in Disinfolklore.

When I speak of archetypes it’s much deeper, than mere stereotypes. I’m not just saying we’re reifying reality. Aggregating components into a trope. Archetypes connect deep Indo-European cognitive structures with particular aggregated ideas like Data Resistant Archetypes of a Potemkin State.

In script writing film actors. But that’s just a province. Joseph Campbell took a set of given archetypes from one Indo-European culture – Ancient Greece – and reverse-engineered a useful system for artists of them. Doesn’t make much sense to those of us outside that Greek tradition.

When I speak of Disinfolklore Archetyping I’m talking about a process that takes many different words and meanings, imbues them with dynamic characteristics. Then does it again and again. Too much and never enough. And before we know it we’re inside a MAGA universe weight by Don Disinfolklore.

The stock in trade of International Relations professionals is story-telling as if the phenomena they speak of are more real than characters in a folktale: the West, NATO, Russia, strongmen,...

Quite serious people impute into the character I call Duncey Putin or Russia the characteristics of the bear. They do it unconsciously.

There are earned archetypes or reputations– Ukraine as a lion.

Then there are the data resistant ones: Ukraine as a damsel in distress who must submit.

Other Archetypes emerging or fading or enduring. At a certain point quantity changes quality.

“Narrative” like stereotypes just gets to the surface. It’s a delivery mechanism. A connector to the archetypal level, which is well below and multi-layered embedded deeply in our consciousness. In a certain sense speaking of archetypes is a form of magic.

Magic

Magic itself is an archetype hocus pocus.

Herodotus (c. 484–424 BCE) used the word, sound, meaning “goēs” to refer to powerful nations, like Ukraine. No other country can unite against Russia.

Playwright Aeschylus (~500 BCE), employs through his speeches “songs that call upon the souls of the [Soviet] dead to appear to the living.”

Euripides’s character Hippolytus is called a “goēs” when he attempts to control his father through clever speech.

So Magic, MAGA and goēs are connected to geopolitical concepts and manipulation through sounds, words and meanings from the very beginning of the uses of those terms.

We have forgotten this. In our era, we use “magic” as a metaphor. We think of illusionists, of mere entertainment as the meaning of magic. MAGA magic the same sound as indeed in image and Druidey Don draws images in our minds brilliantly we can virtually taste the dawg.

Elsewhere, I have written about the algorithm at the heart of Disinfolklore as an analytical method to parse Disinformation. Here I just want us to grasp the primary mantra in Disinfolklore as an analytical method is:

“Look for the Mana in the Meme!”

The Mana in the meme means “the energy communicated between humans”, affects our own Mana (manes in Latin, amhain in Irish, Manu in Vedic, Mannus in early Germanic).

Each meme has its own Mana, characterised by archetypes.

By explicitly acknowledging the archetypes in memes, we gain a better understanding of what affects our moods, intentions, attitudes, and motivations. We begin to look at memes and question: what is the energy immanent inside this meme? What is its meaning? Is it “Ukraine is a damsel in distress who must surrender quickly get it over with so we can get back to eating our lunch?”

Is the Mana in the meme: Russia is indispensable? Russia is inexhaustible? Is it Russia has the right to veto Ukraine’s NATO or EU membership?

In summary: Our own Mana, the source of our moods, motivations, attitudes, and intentions (Mens Rea), is manipulated by Disinfolklorists by implanting archetypal logics in our minds.

That is what at stake here. Our souls.

3 Examples of mental models/archetypes in memes:

I first got interested in this when I encountered friends whose mental models of Russia seemed immune to data. Many of us have been on a journey since Russia purportedly annexed Crimea in March 2014. Eastern Europeans of course knew what Westerners have only recently discovered for ever.

Since 2005 Putler reactivated the Soviet-era troll that the ONLY moment that mattered was victory over Nazi invaders.

May 9 parades and worship of the ancestors was reactivated with gusto.

Duncey Putin was hijacking six decades of Soviet Disinfolklore about Victory over the invaders. Why was it Disinfolklore? We distinguish between Dustin folklore and Counter Disinfolklore using six criteria. Six measures, which I call the Code of Positive Trolls. I’ll come back to this later. The second criterion is ‘Ethical Discipline.’ Is there truth in the meme? In the case of “Who started WWII?” Well I now understand that it was a joint endeavour: Soviet Russia and Germany. Then secondly:

During WWII, USA provided the following to Ruschia:

800 boats

400000 jeeps & trucks.

14000 airplanes,

8000 tractors, 3000 tanks

5 million blankets

5 million army boots,

70000 tons of cotton

Million tons of petrol.

5 million tons of food…

So yet again another archetype of the poor betrayed bear alone holding back the Nazis, while the rest of the world relied on Soviet Russia’s military might does not correspond to reality. They invaded Poland, they relied on American materiel, then after the war created a Cult of the Dead based on falsified history.

After 2008, Duncey Outin resurrected this troll, expanded the Worship of the Ancestors parades on May 9th, and used it to entrench his own archetypal identity as the wise protective sovereign. This was injected into the minds of every Russian and potential Ruschist. This even features in every phone call with a Western leader. Even with Druidey Don the other day who commented on the Soviet Union’s sacrifice after his call with Duncey Putin. I’ve long believed subjecting yourself to such phone calls is a colossal error, because it gives Duncey Putin a chance to Top-Up his hypnotic, War Magical entrenchment of Ruschia’s priority archetypal identities like “we sacrificed 30m in a war the Nazis started.”

Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk is one of the most perfect trolls I’ve ever witnessed. It pierces Duncey Putin’s troll that only he can protect Russia, that Russia is invincible and that anyone who attacks Russia is done for. Only mass distracting Disinfolklore manages to keep the fact that Ukraine holds around 700 sq.km of Russia. And experts I listen to reckon there’s no end in sight for Russia’s misery. Were have many datapoints that suggest Russians themselves are bewildered by (as Duncey Putin describes it passively) ‘the Situation that has arisen in Kursk.” But if many of us are possessed, like ghosts, by Data Resistant Archetypes of a Potemkin State, think how brainwashed poor Russians must be. As I wrote at the first moment of the Kursk offensive: “Russians’ brains are about to burst.” What I meant was: having been brainwashed into thinking Russia is invincible and no-one can attack Russia, now Ukraine is occupying actual Russia, how even in their Disinfolklore-addled brains will they hold both the data resistant archetype and the fact of the invasion. Of course he blames it on NATO forces and Polish mercenaries. Now that Druidey Don is echoing Kremlin trolls, and serving Europe on a plate to Duncey Putin, how will Duncey Putin manage to explain to his people why they should celebrate Druidey Don yet NATO won’t retreat from Kursk? Herein lies the danger of a Disinfolklore Universe as with Druidey Don getting back into office using his MAGA Disinfolklore Universe shows, data resistant archetypes are, well, impervious to truth.

Now Ukraine has shown wise and protective Nordic Russian troll Putler is an easy mark.

Such MAGA or ‘Russia is invincible’ Mental Archetype digests and processes ALL data about Ruschia.

The Output is always the same: Ukraine can’t win. Ukraine must surrender…

Yet, Ukraine routed Ruschia in Kyiv, Kherson, Kharkhiv and Kup’yansk (twice in Kup’yansk- in late November Ukraine destroyed Ruschia in Kup’yansk again).

These Experts’ Mental Archetype of Ruschia (which even with Ukraine as part of USSR was beaten by the Pashtuns in Afghanistan) still can’t compute that Ruschia (and its Mental Imprint in these experts’ minds) is a Potemkin State.

Yet, still these Sirens whose minds are infected by a Mental Archetype of all powerful Ruschia will still be telling us Ukraine must surrender.

Peace is also an archetype. A magic formula. Enspells us. A mantra. Myr. Mir. Repeated ad nauseum in Soviet and now Russian culture until you understand: in Russian lore “Peace” is a pretext. Its surface is good. Its meaning. Its archetypal meaning is “slavery,” “aggression,” and “submission.” Yet still many of us fall for the troll: we think of peace when the Russia says if you do X, there will be peace.

Bogeymen, values, leaders, are also archetypal forms. As are Deities and gods.

There’s a flow between personified archetypes, like Duncey Putin and Druidey Don and the nature of the archetypes they personify.

Archetype Legislators like Druidey Don and Duncey Putin exploit this phenomenon.

West vs. East rivalry is an archetypal identity. Russia is of course a white European-led empire. China too: Buddhism and ‘communism’ in the title are respectively Indo-European-European religion ad an Indo-European/ German political ideology. Anti-western Iran itself is fundamentally Indo-European. Yet the Othering / bogey man any-Western rhetoric creates false divisions and false archetypal identities.

With Duncey Putin’s Russia we always come back to the three fundamental archetypes occupying billions of minds and memes which are particularly far resistant:

Russia is invincible, indispensable, and Ruschia has the right to decide on neighbours’ destinies.

4 Archetypes:

Let’s talk about archetypes through archetypes. Sovereignty is an archetype. But it’s too abstract.

Let’s go a bit deeper.

Archetypal Archetypes: the Shaman-trickster is personified by All Father Germanic God of Runes Odin

The Shaman-Trickster is one of the most fundamental archetypes in our culture. The Joker in Batman. Charles Chaplin’s ‘Great Dictator’ character. Sasha Baron Cohen playing ‘The Dictator.’

That archetype is more deeply grounded and widespread than than we find in our popular cultural outputs.

First, it is widespread in almost every community in which we participate, from a very young age: The Class Fool. The friend who, metaphorically speaking, always Gets Away With Murder. The uncle at our Christmas parties who makes lewd jokes. The tears of the clown – such pathos: all they wanted to do was make people laugh, and then for whatever reason, their life was a failure. Grievance-mining, as I term it, was an art form belongs to this archetype. The prideful speech of the falling or fallen deity. Both Druidey Don and Duncey Putin moan about betrayal all the time. This is not just a reflex. It’s a strategy to situate them as a Shaman-Trickster like Odin.

Second, the many aspects of the Shaman-Trickster archetype is personified in the folklore, literature, media, art, movies, television and news which we consume. Our Disinfolklore Universe is always connected to our Marvel Cinematic Universe. Until I began researching this issue, we were blind to this fluidity between the idea of archetypes and the different personifications of these archetypes flowing through our lives and minds through means of stories (what I call Disinfolklore or Counter Disinfolklore ), people we actually know, art we consume, mental models we iterate, different personas we adopt. All reflect, embed, entrench and hypnotise us into seeing certain characters as archetypal identities.

Third, the archetype of the shaman-trickster is so embedded in our Indo-European cognitive structures that even a day of our week is named for the fundamental shaman-trickster in Germanic cultures: Odin, Wodin, Woden, Whodanaz Dyeus.

We are not looking here as primary causes or the first archetype. We are looking at the reification of certain collections of archetypal qualities: Druidey Don, Duncey Putin and Odin are of one kind.

There is this flow between our recognition in their many aspects as being akin to the Class Comic, the person in our office world who deceived us when they tell us a joke. We don’t blame them for it. Because they make us laugh. We allow ourselves to be deceived. There’s something of the shaman trickster archetype in most office environments even in politics: those who lie and cheat and trick their way to the top while we obey the rules and sink.

Fourth, shaman tricksters often transfer the personification of the shaman-trickster archetype to others both human and non-human. Shaman Tricksters imbue concepts like states, like countries, like collective identities, ethnicities, whole categories of humans with monikers like migrants, politicians, Others, Ukrainians, Russians, Westerners, Christians as themselves shaman-tricksters.

In fact, we can even imbue concepts like “Government,” “Westerners,” “development aid,” “pensioners,” or anything with personal characteristics. This is a favourite trick of those who wish to manipulate us.

This is why the exploration of archetypes which Disinfolkore – the analytical method for parsing Disinformation that I invented - concerns us here at a security conference.

So while Karl Jung’s work was operationalised by Joseph Campbell to teach aspirant writers and artists about the hero and their arc is interesting of course when we create art. It has seldom been mainstreamed into our parsing of geopolitics. This is what I am doing too.

Odin is such an archetypal eminence even the supposedly anti-Western Russian army “Wagner" units worship him. See this slide. Wagner’s unit mythology (culled from Wagner's operas) which taps into the common core of Indo-European religion forged in eastern 🇺🇦 by 2,500BCE. Along with language, this is part of ALL of our cognitive frameworks today. Getting Ruschism requires getting this.

The war and a heap of other manifestations of deeply embedded cognitive structures in our Indo-European minds.

Let’s consider how Donald and Germanic death deity Odin are alike.

Odin, for whom our Wednesday is named, was the shaman-trickster and lord of death of the Germanic Saxon people.

Odin is a complex character, a magician and a God of runes, like Druidey Don who’s cryptic posts would make the Oracle at Delphi confused. Looking at entrails to divine what Druidey Don will do next might be more profitable than parsing his Delphic, oracular, completely contradictory utterances and writings. a

When the Russian army’s “Wagner” unit’s soldiers are killed in Ukraine their propagandists “say they have gone to Odin.” This is a reference to the 19th century German composer who popularised Odin around the time Donald’s ancestors left Germany.

A sacrifice to Odin was as good as death on the battlefield, which every well-born German used to wish for. fate of a human victim offered to Odin is not lamentable; it will honourably increase, in the Otherworld, in the mead-halls of Valhalla where Odin will host them.

Most recently a Druidey Don fan incinerated himself in a strange sacrificial ritual involving a Tesla car. It’s fair to agree with Michael Cohen that there isn’t much evidence these strange self-sacrifices by Donald’s supporters bother him any more than sacrifices to Odin bother him.

Odin was the high God and All Father in pre-Christian Norse Religion.

Donald is MAGA deity and All Father in MAGA religion.

The German Odin is the ancestor of all the Saxons.

Donald’s father had three sons who fought bitter battles over their inheritance. Donald, like Odin, eventually trumped his other siblings, as written about by Mary Trump Donald’s niece. Donald himself recognises three sons who also fight bitter battles for their father’s approval.

Every time we say “Wednesday,” unconsciously we are invoking Odin’s protection. For Whodenaz (for whom Wednesday is named) is just another name for Odin. Donald’s insistence on attaching his name Trump to buildings, cheques giving tax funds to all Americans is an attempt to get us to invoke him.

Druidey Don

‘Trump… like something in a Bad Faery Tale’

“Trump launched his campaign rally with January 6 insurrectionists singing from prison on cell phone while images of the January 6 riotors played on the big screen behind him at his rally. Can you believe that? This is like something out of a fairy tale bad fairy tale…

“Trump is now promising a ‘full scale campaign of revenge and retribution’ - his words - for some years to come. They were his words not mine. He went on to say that he’ll be a ‘dictator on day one.’ If I write in a book of fiction and I said: ‘American president said that and not in jest…’ He called for, and I quote, ‘the termination of all the rules, regulation, articles, even those found in US constitution should be terminated…’ It's really kind of hard to believe Trump is saying this, but it’s true…”

Trump is consciously and deliberately a cartoon, pantomime villain. This is how he normalises authoritarian mental routines, and injects them into the minds of unsuspecting Americans.

Soon we take on the ideas embedded in these memes, we allow into our unguarded minds, as our own thoughts: we think of a Trump victory against 91 criminal indictments as inevitable. Then we vote for him anyway as in the Garry take Druidey Don or Duncey Putin always win. Why resist then? They have a magic about them. They have attached themselves to these archetypal identities as invincible.

Druidey Don works by hacking and negatively mutating the multitude of mentally present archetypes we use to orientate our relationship with external reality.

“In America, the impossible is what we do best.”

This is how the Disinfolklore character played by Donald Trump (“Druidey Don”) characterised America. And himself.

Make no mistake, when Druidey Don speaks thus, he speaks not of America, but of himself. “The impossible is what I do best.” In his mind, l’etat c’est moi.

Suddenly, we understand why Druidey Don spends so much time spewing grievance-mining nonsense.

Druidey Don mines grievances, Grievance-mining is the main mode of communication for the paleo-male populist strongman leader.

By constantly harping on about the obstacles they face in realising their vision, those who live without the challenges we mortals face – Druidey Don inherited the equivalent of $400m - forge an idea in our minds. They create the idea that when they achieve the possible, they are actually achieving the impossible. They leverage this reputation into further achievements of the impossible. And so on.

Druidey Don has a genius for attaching his character to the archetype of “Achieves the Impossible” inside our minds.

We all have such an archetype, from a very young age. Many of us lucky enough to know our parents, think that they can achieve the impossible. Gradually we learn the truth.

That Druidey Don grievance-mines so cynically, like Duncey Putin, should not blind us to what is going on. They’re manipulating us. It’s an illusion. A conjuring trick, like we pay for when we visit a magic show.

Duncey Putin

Duncey Putin like all Disinfolklorists archetypes through speech. Legislated into existence archetypes whose Mana is coercive control and misogyny.

For example, in February 2022, as international lawyers looking for evidence of the

intention to genocide Ukraine have noted Putin likened Ukraine to a Dead Woman:

“‘Like it or not, take it, my beauty,’ a reference to a vulgar Russian rhyme about

necrophiliac rape, implying an intention to inflict similar destruction on Ukraine and a view of Ukraine as a corpse.

The “vulgar Russian rhyme” Putin was referencing has obvious Disinfolklore

connotations. It comes from a Soviet-era Russian band called “Red Mold.” The exact song

lyric is:

“Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I crept up and f**ked her. Like it, or dislike it, sleep my beauty.”

One of the reasons why I use the moniker Duncey Putin is that that the Master Strategist (as he’s ironically called) reminds me of Pangloss. Putin is a Village Fool. An idiot. He’s like a dunce in a fairy tale. A caricature. Duncey Putin never learns from his mistakes. He portrays no self-knowledge. Those of us watching the granular battles along the 1,200km long frontline in Ukraine marvel at the stupidity of Russian tactics. Duncey Putin is the personification of an army that attacks day after day in the same places in broad daylight to the same effect: annihilation. Duncey Putin, through Disinfolklore, just rebrands his failures as successes. Many of us, sadly, buy the troll that he’s a Master Strategist. And that Russia is something bigger than an economy the size of Chile’s. Counter Disinfolklore must consciously upset these archetypes. This is our task. And this what I am talking to you about today.

The character of Duncey Putin in Russian Disinfolklore does not evolve, as in, say, a bildungsroman - a tale in which the dunce goes forth on heaps of episodic adventures before coming into a state of at least a modicum of wisdom.

Instead of this kind of character development, in Russian Disinfolklore, we have a stubborn commitment to trying the same failed strategy again and again.

Starvation, genocide, freezing, madcap plans, and at the end of each episode Russia has lost. It's more miserable than it was at the beginning.

Yet, Duncey Putin stubbornly invests all its hope in the next episode in the same failed strategies. Like a folkloric dunce or Parzival in the first Graal tale, Pancloss in Candide, Sancho Panza in Don Quixote Dunsey Putin sets off each morning with no lessons learned from the previous day's failures..."

Let’s look at how Duncey Putin grievance-mines himself into an archetype of someone who gets the impossible done.

In a speech to pro-war bloggers in June 2023 Funcey Putin ran through all the times he was betrayed in negotiations by the West:

· 2003 (Putin signs border treaty with Ukraine)

· 2004

· 2006

· 2008 (blames West on protests against Putin's faked election)

· 2012

· 2014 (Minsk, which Putin signed because Azov, Dnipro 1 & Dnipro 2 (funded by Dnipro's Jewish community) volunteer battalions fought Ruschist army to a stalemate)

· 2015 (Minsk - I was in eastern Ukraine on the front line 2015-2018 - Ruschia breached its Minsk duties every day)

· 2019 (Macron lures Putin to Paris by promising Putin President Zelenskyy was going to Marshall Petain Ukraine, and allow Ruschists to hold elections in occupied Ukraine. President Zelenskyy laughed at the press conference when Putin claimed he'd been tricked).

· 2020

· 2021

· 2022 (Ruschia was defeated militarily in Kyiv: see my "A - Z of Ruschist failures in Ukraine:

· 2023

The betrayed hero who just keeps resisting. A bit like Russia. Unless you see through the trick. And Disinfolklore is a trick.

As The Comedian Zelenskyy expressed it recently, of Duncey Putin:

“Putin can force the whole world to feel they have lost. And this will be a reality. Because it is possible not to defeat Ukraine, but you may win over the entire world. And show that he was right in some way i.e. without punishment.”

This brings me to the third personification of the shaman trickster that I want to speak about.

The Comedian

And so to the third of our trilogy of archetypes. The Comedian is of course Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Now that The Comedian is bombing Duncey Putin’s Mother Russia (another complex of archetypes in the term “Mother Russia”) every night… Now that The Comedian’s army is occupying 500 sq.km of sovereign territory of Duncey Putin’s land, in Kursk, and we see that ‘The Bear’ and indeed Duncey Putin, is powerless to stop this, we can see the emptiness and vacuity of surrendering to ‘The Bear’ before a shot is fired.

Well if you fail to see the comedy in this, then I’m not sure what will make you laugh.

We’re left with an understanding that The Comedian is getting more powerful with every one-hundred-drone strike on one of Duncey Putin’s oil refineries 1,000 km from its frontier with Ukraine. The ‘Don’t Poke the Bear’ troll is losing its Mana or power too, along with every North Korean soldier The Comedian captures in Kursk.

This is a perfect example of the shifting power dynamics as archetypes create reality, are impacted by new realities, facts on the ground, and of new understandings.

As Frederic Engels wrote in the context of the transformation from one mode of production- feudalism into capitalism, and capitalism into communism: ‘at a certain point quantity changes quality.’

"How does President Zelenskyy resist being hypnotised by Putin?

President Zelenskyy's TV production company produced ex-USSR's most entertaining TV formulas.

President Zelenskyy's fluent in 21st century emotion-moving activities (trolling)..."

The Zelenskyy effect for the archetype of The Comedian: a closer match between archetypes at various levels, the artists, the actor, and ordinary people, makes their campaign more resilient and successful.

Drudey Don Trump – Don Disinfolklore - is brilliant at forging a mythos that convinces people he has a superhuman ability to make the unexpected happen. Druidey Don – as I shall refer to him - may seem to have magical powers, yet what he does and what those around him amplify is in fact as I shall show a mechanical process that uses archetypes deeply embedded in our culture and in our minds in ways that are quite familiar to those of us who study Indo-European culture within the timeframe of the last 6,000 years.

5 Consciously Disrupting Archytypal identities

What is to be done?

So MAGA is disrupting the archetypal identities that are the foundation of our community.

Archetypes change. Our own. We were fat. Now we’re thin. Ireland was poor. Now it’s not. America was reliable. Now it’s not. We felt secure now we don’t. Russia is a menace. Soon it will collapse. Embrace these changes.

Consciously disrupt the archetypal identities our enemies attempt to inflict on our minds.

Defend the post WWII legal and social order. Don’t get accidentally mobilised into the wrong war..

First know that this is what is going on.

Second create your own archetypes and counter theirs with yours. In your mind and inside your sphere of influence.

I created the moniker Disinfolklore as an archetypal lifestory. An aggregate. To describe reality today’s reality as I see it. And I try to communicate it into others’ minds. That’s what I can do.

This is no time to despair.

Or to keep trolls alive.

Positive troll.

In the Russo-Ukraine war domain know:

The battle in Ukraine is about more than Ukraine. It’s a fight between Druidey Don, Duncey Putin and The Comedian for the mantle of preeminent power in our world today.

Some of us may have noticed how perceptions of Duncey Putin’s immunity to the power of sanctions not just to slow its war but to destroy the solidity of Duncey Putin’s Russian state itself are changing.

We now notice multiple articles on Russia’s collapsing economy in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and even in Russian newspapers. Here we may be seeing a shifting in the archetype of an all-powerful bear. And in the perception of Duncey Putin, who’s own archetypal identity as a ‘Strongman’ depends on the strength of his wisdom as a leader and the strength of the state he leads.

Of course, the power to make the unexpected happen belongs to wizards. So if the bear or Duncey Putin’s archetypal identity changes. If they seem suddenly weak – like Duncey Putin seemed when his Chef – the Chef of Disinfolklore Prigozhin launched his coup. And then pulls off a miraculous save, Duncey Putin’s archetypal identity as ‘strong’ will become intensified.

However, if The Comedian and the state he embodies ‘Ukraine’ continues, then, its archetypal identity will continue to evolve in our minds and in the minds of our civilisation and, in the present moment most importantly, in the mind of Druidey Don then we will see a reversal in fortune between The Comedian and Duncey Putin that I believe has been in train since December 2019 completed. That, in a nutshell, is the way of seeing that I want to elucidate and surface through this paper.

So the power to make the unexpected happen connects such wizards, magi and superhuman celestial beings to the cultural and mental archetypes lurking unacknowledged and unseen inside many of the linguistic, audible and visual memes wizzing between us in every situation we find ourselves in, all day long.

On our micro level, what is to be done?

Our moods. Be mindful. The essence of Disinfolklore is to affect our Moods/Attitudes/Intentions/Motivations – stay mindful of that. The fifth element in the Code of Positive Trolls. I use the term ‘Focus’ in the Code of Positive Trills. Because Mindfulness has a meaning in New Age Spirituality that I wanted to avoid in the Code. Mindfulness as an archetypal identify in New Age stuff is different from its source meaning in Tibetan Buddhism: ‘be careful what you allow into your mind. Remember this. Be mindful.”

I carefully curate what I share and the overall character of what I inject from my consciousness into the world. I try to model a comms method I invented called Positive Trollimg.

Since Counter Disinfolklore is a manual, let us summarise this method:

A. Discern the Mana in the meme or the troll - it will be there. It might be manifesting positive, neutral, or negative energy. We use the Code of Positive Trolls six criteria to proof any informational unit against:

1 Generosity: does the meaning in the visual, linguistic or audible meme qualify as being generous?

2 Ethical Discipline: Does the meaning of the informational unit promote untruths? The means do NOT justify the ends, when assaying informational units in this context.

3 Patience.

4 Mana: what the underlying archetype? Crimea is a great litmus test. Many have a lot of empathy for Ukraine. When it comes to Crimea though they imagine there will be peace if Ukraine loses Crimea. They’ve fallen for the complex of archetypes embedded in our minds: Russian speakers. Khrushchev. Russia is undefeatable.

5 Mindfulness..

6 Insight/Wisdom.

If any informational unit being assayed conforms to all six of these criteria, it is Positive (Counter Disinfolklore). Usually, Disinfolklore (Negative Trolling) violates the second criterion - it is NOT ethically disciplined. It’s a lie.

B. Assess the quality of the subtle energy the Mana represents, encapsulates, and promotes.

C. Make a call: After proofing the informational unit against the six criteria - Make A Call.

Don’t just stand there assaying.

Russian Disinfolklore, counter Disinfolklore, or indeterminable (literally meaning "unidentifiable, unassessable Mana (“Mina” as another M-N- word is simply another form of the same thing))?

The means by which we exchange emotions and intentions through almost all forms of communication (literally, a “comingling of our Mana” (muni)) can seem magical. It is enchanting.

With the help of the Dalai Lama / Ekman “timeline of emotions” cognitive model which I will introduce in the next chapter, though, we can perceive this passing between us of intentions / Mana / emotions / energy as being quite mechanical.

It just happens so fast that we are not aware of all the stages we go through while our minds are transformed from one state to another by Disinfolklore.

Also, because until I coined this word “Mana” to describe this process, you did not have a means to isolate this aspect of what it means to be human.

Now with Mana we can, at last, meditate on and control the exchanges of Mana that Disinfolklore uses to undermine all our communications.

Who will win the war for biases? Biases depend on archetypes, which determine their default.

What we can do:

· Ukrainian world boxing champion Usyk battles Ruschia’s attempt to archetype Ukraine as ‘weak’.

· Kursk offensive.

· These memes communicate data resistant archetypes of a ‘strong’ Potemkin Ruschist state into the minds of all those who bang on about Ukraine could never defeat ‘strong (🙄)’ Ruschia (a state that is led by cowards who rather die in Ukrainian trenches than stand up for their rights).

Druidey Don, Duncey Putin and their puppeteers and enablers have one goal: destroy the post WWII legacy of our civilisation. Their main means of pursuing this diabolical goal is through mind-altering Disinfolklore. Stories that change the attitudes/motivations/moods and intentions of its consumers in ways that benefit Duncey Putin and Druidey Don’s aim of restoring the social and economic conditions that gave rise to German Naziism.

Ukrainian Cossack Usyk by communicating an image of extreme strength to match President Zelenskyy and other Ukrainians’ extreme guile (magical attributes to provoke Ruschia into destroying itself a little more each day) combats these data resistant archetypes of a Potemkin state.

Scan for archetypes immanent in memes

1. To defeat archetypes, understand their existence in our minds and how they persist through information. Look for them, analyse data, and refresh our archetype-infused opinions. Examples include Ukraine helping with wildfires and accurate economic analysis of Russia.

Mental model of Ukraine as a precursor to our civilisation: that’s my target.

Victory on the battlefield will not mean the end of this war.

After Ukraine wins the war, we need to continue fighting to re-centre contemporary and Ancient Ukraine in the mental models of humanity.

Ancient Ukraine is the location of the Common Source for ALL Indo-European languages, and religions.

Ancient Ukraine birthed modes of social organisation like the Indo-European model of monarchy horse-powered pastoral farming, and wheel-powered migration went global.

From 4,200 BCE when the cultural ancestors of the first Indo-Europeans to conquer all of Anatolia (today’s Türkiye), to 2,500 when migrants left Ancient Ukraine to found Greek (the first olive branches for the Olympics came from Ancient Ukraine and Zeus Pater and his son Apollo were Ancient Ukrainian innovations), Celtic , Italic (yes, Ancient Rome is Ancient Ukraine’s daughter culture),…

Ancient and contemporary Ukraine has been at the centre of our world:

Centuries of ignorance and Russian Disinfolklore, however, has masked this:

This is what my Finding Manuland project is about.

From the 17c onwards the idea that “western” culture was somehow founded in Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome has been relentlessly promoted: decodingtrolls.net/p/ancient-ukra….

Today, due to new sciences like Isotope analysis of Ancient humans (powerofmana.net/p/the-economis…), linguistics, comparative mythology and Archaeogenetics we know for certain that Ancient Ukraine birthed Indo-European culture. Let’s re-centre Ukraine, and transform our mental models accordingly.

The Indo-Iranist can hardly think of anything else here than the fact that the Vedic Danu's or Danava's were evil demons, the Danu's of the Avesta, a half-demonic tribe hostile to the Iranians, so the name Danus must have had an ominous ring to the Aryans. One sees that ancient information betrays a remarkably precise knowledge of the Scythian language and the Aryan views, which the Greeks presumably acquired from their planting cities in the Scythian country north of the Pontus. This source is probably also the indication of the non-Grecianized ones.

Ukraine has one strategic goal in this war: Destroy Ruschia’s capability to invade Ukraine again. Permanently.

Indicator of Ukraine's victory: in 100 years grown-ups in Muscovy freeze at the thought of Ukraine.

Small children in Muscovy are warned at birth:

Never go there. Don't go west of the Don. Dragons live there.

Our goal then as conscious Counter Disinfolklorists is to, intentionally, attack the Archetypal Identities being imprinted by Russian, MAGA and other forms of Disinfolklore. Every post, every conversation in whichever small arena we operate plays a role in achieving this goal. We can perform our own metaphorical virtual meat assaults knowingly disrupting the subtle implanting of archetypes through Disinfolklore. This is our task and our means of escaping from the Disinfolklore Universe.

Welcome to the Disinfolklore podcast!

Hi there, my moniker is Decoding Trolls. This is the Disinfolklore podcast. This is the first Disinfolklore podcast, so thank you very much for being here. Today I want to look at the newest addition to the arsenal of the Disinfolklore analytical method for parsing Russian, MAGA,and in fact any form of disinformation which is communicated through stories.

So I invented disinfolklore and have elaborated upon disinfolklore since February, 2023. I marked its invention with a tweet.

I was trying to find a moniker to communicate all of the work which I had done since first being posted on a bridge in eastern Ukraine in early 2015. as a diplomat, as a monitor, as what I now understand myself to be a Counter Disinfolklorist. So I'd had an intuition that on this bridge... surrounded by a biosphere zone of forestry and a bridge guarded on one end by Russian occupying bridge trolls and on the other end by Ukrainian armed forces defending their their land from the Russian occupiers.

I had had an intimation that there was something folklore about the whole situation. And after seven years, eight years almost after that, after I had begun in earnest in early 2022, after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, to communicate publicly everything that I was seeing and interpreting through the Disinfolklore lens.

After in February 2020, around the time COVID struck, I began in earnest to try and interrogate what was it of this scene on this bridge with little green men on one end of the bridge, a folkloric dimension which is used in russian propaganda to disarm us into for instance tolerating as we did as a civilization the march 2014 occupation of ukraine's Crimea Crimean peninsula and so from March 2020, I began in earnest to try and explore what was folklore about it.

And the unit of analysis I settled upon primarily was trolling and trolls and this idea of energy, this idea of a character in a story protecting the bridge. From three goats wanting to cross the bridge.

In this case, they were Russian occupiers, armed Russian occupiers. And every day, as an OSCE diplomat in charge of a patrol group of 25, senior police, army and human rights professionals, we would cross this bridge. We would test what we call our freedom of movement to move between this other land, this other world, this folklore kingdom where the monarch, the troll king monarch, Prigozhin, the chef of disinfolklore, disinfolklore apparatus, this massive multi-channel communications infrastructure, which at the time I was very curious about and I wrote a lot about.

And communicated a lot about it, but I didn't know what it was or what it was doing, and it was only after the full-scale invasion I realised that this dis-folklore apparatus, this multi-channel, so multiple TV channels, TV channels for every personality type, TV channels with the production values of CNN or major American stations, Newspapers which resembled the kind of really low production values and on the other end of the scale very high production values. Websites, hundreds of different websites in this little troll kingdom which I call the house of lies which I take from Iranian, early Iranian, early Indo-European mythology. where at the time of death, we cross a bridge. And this is conceptualized as meeting.

We meet Daena, who is guarding the entrance to this bridge. And if Daena appears to us as a witch, then we will fall over the steep, long the side of the bridge into an eternal ravine, and we will cross into the house of lies. However, if Daena appears as a beautiful woman, then we know we will pass across the bridge into the house of songs.

Crossing this bridge into the rebel troll kingdom, the Russian-occupied Luhansk, I always knew I was going into a house of lies, But I didn't have a moniker for it and I didn't really understand totally what was folklore about the whole situation. I knew the Brothers Grimm, I had read Tolstoy's village tales as a child, my mother loved the book, she read them to me a lot. I was an expert in Dostoevsky. I had studied the brothers Karamazov as a postgraduate at Georgetown University in Washington, where I studied geopolitics through the eyes of what I now call Disinfolklore, but through the eyes of intellectual history. And this idea in, for instance, Crime and Punishment, which I studied as a law student at Cambridge University, I knew that Roshkalnikov was a dunce. So he was supposedly this deep people, the deep folk, which the Russians call themselves. But in fact, he was a folkloric dunce. He murders two women just to see if he can get away with it and then panics the whole time as gradually this police, this detective, who's actually based on the detective in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, So this idea that we perceive reality through folklore, through folklore laundered, through literature, through this massive apparatus, which I now understand since the first, since the full-scale invasion, this massive dis-folklore apparatus. in the House of Lies, in Russia-occupied Ukraine, its purpose was to brainwash us.

Its purpose was to persuade and brainwash Ukrainians into thinking they're not Ukrainians, to brainwash them into being prepared to kill their fellow Ukrainians. And it did through this, through the medium of stories. So all the time I was working on this bridge for three years between 2015 and 2018, there was a constant drumbeat, a repetition of stories which embedded the idea that Ukrainians were trying to kill their fellow Ukrainians and Russia occupied Ukraine. And in Russia-occupied Luhansk, in this house of lies, through this disenfolklore apparatus, was embedded in the minds of the Ukrainians living there, the idea that they were other than Ukraine, that they were Russian, that the Ukrainians, helped by 10,000 Polish mercenaries, were crossing this bridge to try and kill them. And only the Russians were rescuing them. So Russia was endangering the damsel. It was putting the damsel into distress, and then it was purporting to solve the pain of the damsel in distress.

And this trope, this immanence inside every aspect of Russian Disinfolklore at the time, I didn't know, understand what it was doing, but actually what it was doing was preparing Ukrainians in Russia occupied Ukraine to go and try and kill in what, what the Russians themselves call meat assaults, which are, is this idea of absorbing all of Ukraine's artillery and bullets with wave after wave of human beings. And once Ukraine is exhausted of its artillery and its ammo, its ammunition, then they send in their special, their Spetsnaz forces to take the land. And this is the Russian method of operating Russia.

Of operating war and of trying to conquer Ukraine. And so all of these earnest NATO manuals, I now understand, which describe Russian doctrine, they are a distant folklore. All of these Russian manuals themselves publicized and public about their particular military doctrine and that they do this and they do that.

It is in fact also an example of Disinfolklore because the practice, what happens on the ground is not what they do. And so I was sitting there trying to work for a moniker to describe all of the work I'd done, all of the understanding, the millions of texts of people who had read my work online, particularly through since the full scale invasion. when I made a decision to use the knowledge I had of having worked in Ukraine, having monitored the Minsk peace process for three years on this bridge, and then afterwards, for four years, having gone to speak to hundreds of elected officials in eastern Ukraine, in parts of Ukraine,which are now under a brutal genocidal occupation, I made this decision to use this knowledge to try and interpret and promote the importance of Ukraine maintaining its sovereignty, its security and prosperity. By using my knowledge combined with the stories, the Disinfolklore that we were reading on Telegram, the propaganda, the stories that were persuading many of our friends who up until that point we thought were probably quite solid people.

And yet suddenly all they needed to hear was this folkloric dunce, Putin, who just like Rashkalnikov in Crime and Punishment was, in fact, a St. Petersburg law student and a dunce who, like the archetypal dunce in every Bildungsroman, who, unlike, rather, the archetypal dunce in every Bildungsroman, every day they go to bed at night and wake up the next morning having forgotten everything they learned the day before. And this is Roshkalnikov. This is Putin himself. He today, as we'll discuss, has no clue about how badly placed his entire army and country is going that those of us who understand Ukraine and understand Ukrainians understand that Ukraine will not stop until it ejects Russia from all of its territory. And unfortunately for Russia, this means that it will destroy Russia.

So a wise and non-folkloric dunce who didn't fall into their own distant folklore universe, who didn't believe their own or who didn't drink their own Kool-Aid such that they think that they're very strong. They fell in love with an archetype of a strong Russia. And this is what really what we're going to be talking about today.

So I was looking for a moniker to describe all of this work. And I had this folder in my computer, which I had created in around June. in around June 2020. And the folder was called Folklore. And because I had started off looking at trolls and trolling and the origins of the moniker and the idea and what they meant. And so I had this folder Folklore, which by the time I was in February 2023, having just met a publisher who said to me, you need to get practiced at bringing your ideas into people's minds and presenting folklore. uh, your ideas. And so I established the publications on, um, on substack, uh, decoding trolls and then power of mana. And then I was looking for this moniker for what then became, uh, Disinfolklore. And I had this folder folklore on my computer. And then I started writing, okay, distant fate, dis. And I, I got to the N, uh, for writing disinformation.

I was like, Oh my gosh, Disinfolklore this describes everything so Disinfolklore is a diamond it's got so many sides that I've gradually unpacked and unraveled and the Disinfolklore podcast will help me bring these ideas into a new order audio audience which I've been writing about millions of words and have had tens of millions of readers since I first introduced the idea with a tweet and in February 2023. So today we're going to look at what for me is one of the newest pieces of ammunition in the arsenal of Disinfolklore, which is this, in this sense, I mean this distant folklore as the analytical method to parse disinformation.

So we're looking, we're perceiving through the lenses of Disinfolklore any memes, any linguistic, audible and visual memes. And what do I mean by archetype? Well, when we come across somebody who thinks of Russia as having an inexhaustible supply of humans and of being the strong, unbeatable force that. And yet the data tells us it's lost oodles of wars, including in Afghanistan. It's had its, you know what, handed to it in Ukraine constantly. It had to retreat from Kyiv, from Kherson, from Kup’yansk. It's constantly on the run now. Ukraine is occupying, at the time of recording this, around 500 square kilometers of Russian territory itself.

Ukraine has destroyed its... Russia's Black Sea fleet. It has obliterated its naval headquarters. On the other hand, there's inside this thought about Ukraine for people who don't understand Ukraine and haven't had the benefit that I had of spending seven years in eastern Ukraine encountering it. And then since the full-scale invasion following the minutiae of the day-by-day battlefield both on the ground but also in the information space, that haven't had the benefit of that, what we call perhaps low-information consumers of information about Ukraine.

They don't understand that Ukraine has, on almost every dimension of natural resources, from farmland to uranium, to precious metals, to oil, to gas, on all of these dimensions, the largest country entirely in Europe is in the top five and in many cases the first or second most prosperous country in Europe and one of the most important countries in the world. And yet they portray and they've swallowed and they propagate this idea of Ukraine almost as a weak woman.

So this idea of archetypes is what's going on here. So we're looking at Russia as the bear. So the bear, don't poke the bear, is the most important distant folklore meme there is. It influences national security advisors. You're not stupid if you fall for Disinfolklore. I fall for it all the time.

And what I'm trying to do with countering Disinfolklore and learning the method and elaborating on the method is And introducing these new weapons of Counter Disinfolklore weapons. I'm trying to teach myself as much as anyone else how in real time to detect, counter and combat weapons.

This Disinfolklore which affects our moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations. So we begin to read an article and in our mind is the intention to send some money to Ukraine to help the Ukraine resist the Russian onslaught.

But we start reading this article, this example of disin folklore. So we start reading it with that motivation,with that intention, with the attitude of, yes, we're going to help Ukraine. And by the end of the article, we're thinking, oh, there's no point. And so we decide to donate to another charity and nothing to do with Ukraine. We're deflated where we think Ukraine will lose. So why bother?

There's just no point in donating money or spending any time on it. So what's happened in that? Well, we all go on oodles of emotional journeys almost every second of our life. And every conscious moment we're going on emotional journey after emotional journey after emotional journey. And what dissent folklorists have understood is by, for instance, invoking fear or sadness or disgust or joy, schadenfreude, as the Germans might call it, joy at the enemy dying, that they can manipulate our emotions and sneak trolls directly into our inner minds. They can sneak ideas. And what I now understand is At a certain point, many, many different ideas aggregate into becoming archetypes.

And Russia occupies an archetype of the strong, unbeatable force. And this archetype is communicated into our mind through memes. And by meme, I mean any informational unit, whether visual, audible, sensory of any description. So I don't just mean what we understand as memes on computer memes. I mean informational units which communicate ideas and certain kinds of memes, which deliver a certain kind of energy, which has a certain kind of quality into our mind. And some of these are either deliberately or accidentally have the effect of creating in our minds immovable archetypes.

So let's look at Russia's performance in Ukraine since February 24th, 2022. on the one hand, and then the other hand, this archetype of Russia as this unbeatable force that no power can possibly defeat, and especially not little old Ukraine, which in our minds, it occupies the archetype of basket case, corrupt, full of far-right Nazis.

These are all archetypes communicated into our minds by Russian distant folklore on purpose. and accidentally perhaps in the history books in school.

So let's look at... Why, if we look at Russia's performance in Ukraine since February 24th, 2022, how can we still maintain the view that Russia is inevitably going to win? On the 1st of March 2022, I was able to call this war because I'd read War and Peace, Tolstoy's War and Peace, one of the great pieces of literature of our time. all 12 books of it, based on decades of research by Tolstoy himself. And one of the most memorable aspects of War and Peace is how the Russian general Kutuzov is trying to defend against Napoleon, who has entered Russia, Russia proper.

And Kutuzov is being pressured by the Tsar and everyone. And Tolstoy really lays this on. Everyone wants Kutuzov to attack, attack, attack in this huge set piece battle. And Tolstoy shows again and again how Kutuzov resisted this pressure and knowingly replied whenever he was being pressured, whether it was by the Tsar or any of the other protagonists,

“Just wait, just wait. I know what we're doing. I know what I'm doing.” And over the course of two or three of 12 of the books, which constitute war and peace, Kutuzov is shown resisting this. And what he's in fact doing, as we then see, he's drawing the Russians in. He's refusing to directly engage them.

And so on the 1st of March 2022, when I started reading the data that was coming in about the Russian forces, which had, some of us might remember this long convoy of infantry fighting vehicles and tanks, which had come in from Belarus and was all stuck in this massive 30 kilometer long convoy.

And very quickly, Ukraine spontaneously started destroying the convoy. and provoking the occupants of the convoy into running away. And this threat which was looming over in many of our minds, like the archetypal pantomimic, uh devil like the the joker in batman or any of these other characters in our popular culture and in our literature and our film in the stories we we see where we have good versus evil and we have this uh bogeyman or bogey person uh that uh These archetypes arise in our mind. And then when, for instance, a 30 kilometer long convoy of infantry fighting vehicles and tanks starts pouring towards Kyiv, we just have this fear. And every day we go to bed with fear about what's going to happen. And all of us know how this ended about 10 days after it ended. It started looming in the back of our mind. It was no more. It was destroyed.

It was just so many metal hulks, scrap metal, and lots of dead Russian soldiers. It would be a couple of weeks later. Until the Battle of Mostyn on the 27th of March 2022, when Ukraine decisively defeated Russia. And Russia started retreating from the Kyiv region the next day.

And it retreated so fast that it left the dead bodies of all the civilians. Russia's entire model had been to come into the Kyiv region... President Zelensky would run away, as would his people, and it would occupy the buildings in central Kyiv and take over. When this became impossible, it decided it continued to do through military means.

So it started killing of normal villagers, people in these very posh suburbs of Kyiv, like Irpin and Bucha, where people, just ordinary people gathered together to resist the Russians. but the Russians themselves just tried to massacre everyone. And the idea, and this is where Russian model in Russia occupied Ukraine since 2014, it's to do the most despicable acts, torture, murder, genocide, forced deportation, enslaving captured soldiers, and then to hide the evidence because it still possesses the land. But it had to run away so quickly from the Kiev region. as it would later from Kherson, from Kup’yansk, from Kharkiv, that it ran away so fast that it never got to cover the evidence.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, the plucky Ukrainians who spontaneously, children, men, women, whole communities, people who didn't know each other, spontaneously came together to defend and defeat the mighty Russian army, which at the time people thought was the second army, army of the world on the 1st of March 2022. So all that was ahead.

But I was seeing what was going on, what was being reported in the Russian disinfolklore apparatus through Telegram and on Twitter and through other modes of communication, that the Russian soldiers, for instance, were all coming into Ukraine as if… They were going on a parade. They themselves were not mentally prepared for war. They had their parade uniforms. In some cases, there was instructions to arrive in Kyiv by 1455 on the 24th of February 2022. They were complaining then that they couldn't communicate with each other. They didn't have enough food after a couple of days.

These were all the same mistakes Napoleon had made when he invaded Russia. And as I knew from my war and peace, Kutuzov, Russia's general at the time, he decided, OK, the best means of defeating this enemy is to draw them further in and And let them, let the winter, let their lack of logistics, just eat them around the edges. Don't face them down in these big set-piece battles which they wanted. And so I coined the term on the 1st of March 2022, a reverse Napoleon. And this is very important in counter-Disinfolklore, because Disinfolklorists use stories and mean stories.

Stories to affect our moods, our attitudes, our motivations and our intentions. They use stories to do this, to deflate our feeling of agency and to make us think resistance is futile. They coercively control our activities by affecting our manner, which is the well from which all our moods, intentions, attitudes and emotions motivations flows.

They use stories to deflate us and to affect our motivations, which we're not even aware of. We're just consuming a story about such and such thing, about Ukraine and something that might have happened. But at the end of the story, we decide not to donate money to Ukraine.

And the same works with MAGA and with other forms of distant folklore and particularly authoritarian stories. authoritarians who do their best to take away from us any sense of agency. So it's very important that counter-dis and folklorists, which I hope if you're listening to this, you want to learn to become a better counter-dis and folklorist.

It's very important that we also have catchy phrases. And so this idea of reverse Napoleon has been taken up by many thousands of people who have very kindly shared words. my work and shared my counter disin folklore avant la lettre. I say avant la lettre because it would be a year before I coined the moniker disin folklore,

which suddenly within a moment of seeing it, the folder, my folklore folder, my disinformation and realizing, oh my God, disin folklore describes everything, everything I have been working on for the past eight years. And it indeed describes perfectly everything everything the Russians are doing, both knowingly and unknowingly, their mode of doing what I now call stealth genocide.

So they persuade Ukrainians and Russia-occupied Ukraine that they're not Ukrainian. And if anyone has a problem with conceptualizing how this happened, if you know anyone who's gone MAGA or, for instance, who went Brexit, then you will have a really good idea of how quickly, really clever, bright people with whom you felt you had a real connection can be turned by distant folklore. Stories that embed this inner and outer realm. A million Syrian migrants coming to steal your children. to steal your jobs, to steal your prosperity, your sovereignty, the security of your state. In Maga disinfolklore, it's a similar idea.

These Mexicans, Donald, who himself always insists, loves the word Trump because he hated Donald Duck, which is a form of Counter Disinfolklore. to call him Donald, to insist on calling him Donald when he was plagued by this moniker as a child. And so he hates being called Donald. He hates it. But if we're going to be effective counter to some folklorists, we must take the tools in the arsenal of the counter distant folklorist arsenal and use them to battle, to save what I see is the essential battle of our age. And this is what Counter Disinfolklorists are most involved in. We're most involved in preserving that. the benefits, the post-World War II legal and social order.

Disinfolklorists, by contrast, want to return us to the social conditions of the 1930s, where there are no universal human rights protected by law. Territorial integrity doesn't matter. You, as a human, have no right to participate in the decisions that affect you. You will be lulled into sleep like the Russian population. Meanwhile, the oligarchs will control everything.

They use migrants and these outer realm migrants, or in the case of eastern Ukraine, these Polish mercenaries wanting to come across and kill you. These embed this inner outer realm within our minds. and allow the Disinfolklorists like the Russians to pose as the rescuer of the damsel that Russia itself has distressed. So from...

War and peace I determined on the 1st of March 2022. And I'm not special. Lots of other people worked this out quite quickly. So we started off on the 24th of February thinking Russia was the second army of the world. I knew and I know that Ukraine will fight to the death because I had spoken to so many of Ukraine's elected officials and I was often working with a Russian and these elected officials told us again and again and again that they would fight the Russians. So they would say exactly to the Russian diplomat that I sometimes had to work with, we will fight you.

If you come into our land, we will fight you to the deaths. And when you hear this once, twice, 100, 200 times from people who are so representative of their community that they are elected by them, At a certain moment, your archetype of Ukraine as a basket case, as a corrupt country where everyone is far right and which is post-Soviet and doesn't really exist, is not really...

At a certain moment, that archetype can change. And for me, listening to these stories and listening to the vehemence with which... these people took by telling me this in front of my Russian colleague, knowing my Russian colleague would probably become part of the occupying force when it would have been wise to say to him, to, as we say in Irish, to make him feel they were his friend. No, they wanted to tell him very clearly so that he would take this message back to his people, and say to them, do not go to Ukraine. Do not go there. Dragons live there. And this, I know, is Ukraine's message today. And this is why whenever you hear any distant folklore about peace processes, and there's going to be a Minsk 3, and Ukraine should lay down its arms and accept the battle lines as they are today.

Know this. Know this from me, from someone who spent seven years in Eastern Ukraine and who has been embedded in this, all the stories, the billions and millions of stories since the full-scale invasion, every day, these emotional journeys and understanding what is happening in the villages that I visited and got to know well, in the communities I visited, in the schools I visited, the children I met or was shown by teachers proudly demonstrating how European their pupils were, these children now forcibly disappeared by Russia, murdered, transported into Russia, their language taken away from them. These children, 20,000 of whom are named in the warrant for Putin's arrest by the International Criminal Court.

Have you any idea how difficult it is to get a warrant for the arrest of a sitting head of state? The amount of evidence you need to convince all the judges in the International Criminal Court to issue a warrant for the arrest of a sitting head of state is for the war crime of forcibly transferring children. Well, I knew those children. I met those children. I met those teachers. I was in those villages, which today are ashes, which were vaporized by the Russians. So know this when I tell you this.

Counter Disinfolklore, Ukraine will never lay down its arms. And you can use this as a method to determine the validity of anyone who is telling you otherwise. They don't know what they're talking about. They're not parsing the data. Their mind is animated by this archetype of Ukraine as a weak woman who can't do anything and can't defend itself and Russia as this monster which always wins wars.

So listening to the Disinfolklorist in chief, Putler, the other day, as he spent three hours spouting Disinfolklore, brainwashing Disinfolklore to his people on this call in this yearly call in which he does every few years. He talked about his S-400 systems, these anti-aircraft systems, which are so strong, they're actually several generations ahead of Ukraine's ATACMs and Patriot missile systems. And in his mind, he doesn't seem to be lying about this. He seems to really believe this because no one is bringing him the real stories.

Yet those of us who are engaged in the war have seen oodles of S-400 systems being destroyed by the very missiles. They were intended to neutralize. So think about that. They have these anti-aircraft systems which cannot defend against the exact missile systems, which in the case of ATACMS and Patriot missiles, these are systems that were designed in the 1980s. These were systems which were designed 40 years ago. And Russia, this disinfolklore idea, this meme which has been promoted by Putin, that Russia has such strong anti-aircraft systems that nothing can defeat them. This helps promote this archetype in the minds of people. And every time you hear these memes, it just adds, it's like, what would you call sand in an egg timer jumping in, which helps embed and create this archetype.

But we always need to measure these archetypes against the data of what actually is happening. So we see these video footages, and I could show you 10, 20, 30 of them.

We've seen tens of thousands of artillery systems, tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and humans being destroyed by Ukrainian armed forces, even without Western help. So for six months last year, Ukraine didn't get a thing from America, not a thing from America. And Russia only made tiny, tiny incremental gains in land. It set out to conquer a whole country.

And now it's losing, it lost 75,000 men to capture Bakhmut. It thought it would take Bakhmut by the end of July 2022. It didn't capture Bakhmut, this city which leads nowhere, until the spring, the late spring the next year. Then the next town along Chasiv Yar, it thought it would take that immediately.

Russia has lost another 75,000 men trying to take Chasiv Yar, and it seems no closer to doing so. And bear in mind... When Russia captures Chasivyar, then it leads nowhere. It's high, it's at heights, which is great, but it's vaporized. There's nothing there. There's no treasure there. There's nothing to gain there.

So we see the Russian economic catastrophe unfurling at 700,000 casualties, which is generations worth of future workers. Its interest rate is 22%, but reflecting a real inflation rate of about 50%. We see how most of, all of its huge companies, Kamaz, Gazprom, all of its major companies, the value of their bonds in the last week has crashed.

So this means that these bonds, which are denominated in Western countries, currencies, no one thinks that they will be able to meet repayment schedules. And so no one will buy them and everyone's trying to drop them. Its property companies and its property market is crashing. Its currency has crashed. And still, because their minds are full of what I call data-resistant archetypes of a Potemkin state, data-resistant archetypes of a Potemkin state, Useful idiots and well-meaning people that all of us know, and sometimes we may feel it after we've read one article, which, for instance, is talking about, oh, how Russia can keep going forever.

But those of us who look at the data, who parse it carefully... and who understand what is in operation are these archetypes in the back of our minds, bogeymen, great men, small men, weak women, weak children, that these archetypes, which we can use these kinds of expressions to describe, are immanent in the stories and the Disinfolklore and the Counter Disinfolklore that we read. And as the data comes in, as it did for me, from the full-scale invasion, we can begin to challenge these archetypes and understand that they are trying to communicate a sense of inevitability into our minds, which does not match the data.

We remember that Russia has not even conquered any major city in Ukraine. the only major city in Ukraine it conquered to Kherson, it retreated from in September, uh, 2023. And the only reason it, um, it captured Kherson was through the treachery of, uh, people, uh, that, uh, Russia, uh, agents that Russia had managed to implant in, um, the Ukrainian security services, security structures, obviously deceit and deception is a legitimate, um, is a legitimate strategy or tactic in a war. But that, if your argument is that Russia is this great power that was never defeated, obviously that's wrong. It's lost wars against China, Japan, the Nazis until the West bailed it out, Afghanistan. So Somehow, people think Ukraine, as an advanced European power with vast human resources, which powered 40% of the GDP in the USSR of the Soviet Union, somehow Ukraine is weaker than Afghanistan. And somehow Ukraine cannot defeat Russia when Afghanistan defeated Russia plus Ukraine as part of the USSR.

Ukraine contributed the human and financial capital and provided 40% of the GDP of the USSR. And yet the data-resistant archetypes in the minds of people tells us that somehow Ukraine can't win. So that's even in theory. We understand that in theory. But then we look at what has happened since February 24th, 2022, and we try to explain why there is this data-resistant archetype in the back of people's minds.

Now, obviously, some of them and many of them are paid. They're paid Disinfolklorists. We understand how Doppelganger, which is the folkloric moniker given to to this method of Russian Disinfolklorists using spoofed Western media to pretend that stories which it plants are in The Guardian or in the BBC. And so it uses doppelgangers of their websites to spread them out and spread these fakes. And when the European Union's anti-disinformation practitioners discovered this They called it the doppelganger network. They reached into German folklore to take a moniker, which then the Russians themselves took on and began in their internal documents, we now see, to describe their own bot network, which is spoofing Western media outlets as the doppelganger. So it's the doppelganger of the doppelganger. And again, this Russian trope of copying, of mirroring. whatever comes out of the West, out of the Grimm fairy tales or out of the European Union, anti-disinformation practitioners. So that, again, is a common theme we will see imminent in anything which goes on. So another archetype is, oh, Russia's population, 130 million people. And yet we know Russia lies about every single statistic. And yet suddenly Russia We're to believe this population statistic.

There's been no proper census in Russia for decades. But of course they promote the distant folklore, the idea it's 130 million people and the Ukrainians are only 42 million. Ukraine has proper censuses. We understand what the population of Ukraine is. We also understand that in many parts of the Kharkiv front, Russia is losing 10 humans for every one Ukrainian that it kills. So Ukraine may have a population of 42 million, but Russia does not have a population of 420 million. So Russia doesn't even have a population of 130 million. But the Disinfolklorists will promote these ideas of strength and of power.

Oh, Russia has a population of three times Ukraine, therefore it will inevitably win. When you do the data and when you look at the math, as Will Thiel has done... you will see that actually, at current rate of attrition, Russia will run out of men long before Ukraine will. So again, data-resistant archetypes of a Potemkin state. Potemkin, of course, the German Catherine, the so-called Great, who conquered southern Ukraine and then... wanted to show his lover how much he had developed. So they built this village, which was a fake village. It was only the fronts of the village. And when their train passed by it, she went, oh, that's really lovely.

And thereafter, it was called the Potemkin State. But that metaphor, that story that I've just told you, can serve as a means of communicating to you exactly why When we have this data-resistant archetype of a Potemkin state that says to us, Russia is unbeatable despite the data, that really what we're dealing with, which is its eternal soul.

And what I'm trying to plant in your mind is that the archetype of Russia is the Potemkin state. So when we see Russia withdrawing from Syria, and we hear Putin describing this as a great victory, and we watch the actual in Raqqa the other day, we could see the Russians pulling out of their base in Raqqa, which had been the capital of the Islamic State. And then within hours, the American military moving in to the same base.

So again, the data-resistant archetype of the Potemkin state is defeated and overcome when we are looking at the data, when we are seeing the stories in the distant folklore and counter Disinfolklore apparatus.

We're watching the actual retreat of Russia from Syria. Then we see Putin describing this as a great victory. we have to make a call on this and say no it's not a great victory so we look at the uh the the the the claims of all of these in all of this distant folklore and we think well

So let's compare it with the data. So let's take a test case, a case study as our final bit in this, the first Disinfolklore podcast. How does Russia implant these archetypes in the minds of us? And so one of the important tropes that Russia wanted to promote was that Ukraine was a far right state and that therefore it did not deserve, not only did it not deserve our help, And one of the main tropes it uses to do this was a chap called Stefan Bandera, who was Ukrainian, who spent most of the Second World War in a Nazi prison camp as a prisoner. You wouldn't think that from the Disinfolklore. So anytime you see any term stemming from this stock character in Russian Disinfolklore called Stepan Bandara, you know you're dealing with a Ruschist state-funded troll and or victims of brainwashing. So it's very easy when you see a tweet by the famous or the former Russian president and prime minister Medvedev where he refers to the Bandarite regime, because this troll that Russia uses is that actually they're not at war with the Ukrainian people, they're just at war with what they call the Bandarite regime. So there you know you're dealing with someone who's trying to brainwash people.

But what we need in the counter-disinfolklore method and the analytical method I call disinfolklore is to be able to distinguish the imminence, the manner, the energy inside memes when we don't really know, we don't really have that much, information about the source of the meme or the speaker.

So anytime you see any term, you can take this as a thesis, as an axiom. Anytime you see any term stemming from a stock character in Russian to sub folklore called Stepan Bandra, you know you're dealing with a Russist state-funded troll and or victims of brainwashing.

Never mistake an historical figure who also shares the name Stepan Bandara with this stock bogeyman actor in Russia's distant folklore. So Russian distant folklore has these stock characters. They're like... In any tale where you have the dunce or the wise man or the Cinderella character, they're all kind of archetypes. They're not real existence. They're not real people.

They're not complex characters. They're not like a character in a brilliant novel which manages to convince you within a few sentences that you're dealing with a real person here. These are bogeymen. These are meant to scare you. And to perform a function, their function is to embed archetypes in our mind and to connect with archetypes we already have, which are deeply implanted through religious and linguistic memes, which we will get to and which I talk about in Power of Mana today. my other podcast as well. And so one Stepan Bandura is a real person, but the other is a character in Russian distant folklore. They only appear in the tweets of Medvedev.

Their job is to provide a common language for those who have chosen to incite, justify and celebrate genocide. If someone accuses someone of being a Banderite, that immediately identifies the accuser as being a brainwashed Russist or a brainwashing Russist. And I use the term Russist to distinguish between Russians. I have no problem with Russia or Russians.

Russian is a legal nationality. But the Russist is someone who is addicted. This is actually defined by the Ukrainian parliament. in April 2023. But the Rushist is a term that describes a particular form of Russian who believes in an imperial ideology. They believe in the cult of the leader of Putin.

They believe in destroying countries in order to save them. They see themselves as a kind of supermen, as a super country, and their will to power must triumph at all possible costs. Every single Russian in Ukraine today who is there unlawfully, who is fighting there, every single one of the million Russians who has crossed the internationally recognised border into Ukraine, including Crimea, is a Ruschist.

They're there unlawfully and they are executing part or some or supporting some of the at least 150,000 documented war crimes since February 24th, 2022. But actually since March 2014, Russia and Rashists and Rashism has been executing war crimes. So Russia's far-right bogeyman went global in 2014.

Russia invented the idea of a far-right Ukrainian to deter support for Ukraine. Lazy, weak, ignorant and cowardly policymakers and journalists spread that meme. It was useful for politicians who didn't want to help Ukraine. Russia's disinfolk law was helping them out by giving them a stock bogeyman character, the Ukrainian nationalist. This was their vulnerability.

They wanted to do nothing to support Ukraine. And Russia saw that market, saw that vulnerability and provided them with a stock bogeyman, the Ukrainian nationalist. Stepan Bandera branded memes are wholly concocted, hyper-normalised, rashist memes. By contrast, they're just too narrow for any foreigner to get. You don't have to know anything about the real Stepan Bandera's life, the fact that he spent the Second World War in a Nazi prison camp. So the idea that someone who was imprisoned by the Nazis is a Nazi, and then somehow he is a model for contemporary Ukrainians resisting the Russian Nazi, the Russist Nazi invasion of Ukraine.

It's just preposterous. But when you read it in Medvedev's texts, as he's trying to incite genocide and incite in Russians and Westerners alike a feeling that Ukraine isn't maybe a damsel in distress, but is not worthy of helping, You don't need to know any of the facts of the case.

You just need to know that what Russia is doing with this Bandarite discourse istriggering archetypes in the backs of our minds. And that's the function of these distant folklore, these examples of distant folklore, these memes, which trigger these archetypes. Only Russist state-funded troll farms and beyond redemption victims of Russist Disinfolklore and perpetrators of genocide use terms like Bandarites. If Russist disin folklore inspires you to Google Bandara, or worse, to read some academic paper on the historical person, you're already well on your way to being trapped inside a Russist troll universe. Like Hunter Biden, such words work like a mantra on the level of incantation and war magic through repetition. Before you know it, you'll be entering into sincere debates that serve to entrench Russia's Disinfolklore memes in your mind as well as in your culture. So you'll start thinking, is Ukraine far right? Or reading articles about this when Russia That is precisely the purpose of the Disinfolklore that Russia is promoting, which is to distract us from the fact that invading Ukraine was unlawful. The method of invading was also unlawful.

The destruction, for instance, this morning or sorry, yesterday of Kherson Children's Cancer Hospital by Russia and Russian state media apparatus publishing the video of the destruction of a Ukrainian children's cancer hospital. So they're creating distant folklore out of their unlawful invasion, their breaches of the laws of war, to try and create these emotional impacts in our minds so that we just think, oh, there's no point in helping them.

They're so evil that we'll never win. no that's just Disinfolklore and thankfully we have the Disinfolklore podcast and I'll leave it at that for today to help us learn how to combat these memes in real time because this is really important we're all susceptible to this I'm susceptible I’m fall for trolls the whole time i'm just trying to um when I do fall for trolls I then try and work out what happened how did it happen How did it trigger my emotions? How did it overcome my capacity to what I call my incoming troll radar, to my defenses, my rational thought stream? How did it trigger my fear such that I didn't think it through?

And before I knew it, I was sharing that meme or something. broadcasting. My intention hadn't been to promote Russian Disinfolklore, MAGA Disinfolklore, but I ended up telling the story. It was so bizarre. I ended up telling my story to a friend who then told it to someone else. And we kept this troll in motion.

And when I become aware that I've done that, I try and work out what I've done and the outcome of this is really Disinfolklore and Counter Disinfolklore and all my work in Decoding Trolls and Power of Mana podcasts and in writings.

And so it's great to have you with you and thank you for being here for the first podcast. I'll leave it at that for today.