Decoding Trolls

My new Historical versus Real Russia lens has been tested before.

In October 1925, at Locarno, Weimar Germany guaranteed its borders with France and Belgium. But Weimar Germany left its border with Poland open. The Weimar state spent years campaigning about the past. The history it told claimed the land, claimed Poland. Fourteen years later, its army crossed the open border.

“…The limb is gone, but the feeling of the Historical Russia remains. AfD, MAGA, Brexit, Poland’s PiS, France’s National Front and a heap of other backward-looking, oligarch-run democracy-hacking projects engage in History Provocation tactics - nostalgia concealing a will-to-power whose goal is to destroy the post-WWII architecture…”

The Federal Republic, the same core after a far greater defeat, kept a legal claim on the lost east for two further decades. But the Federal Republic renounced force. It acknowledged its crimes from 1951. In 1970, it signed treaties with Moscow and with Warsaw, accepting the post-war borders. After signing the first, that August, Willy Brandt told West Germans on television: “There’s nothing lost with this treaty which has not been squandered away a long time ago.”

That is what the Real Germany sounds like in a core that has lost its empire. That is what we must hear in the Real Russia of the future.

If we want to hear the leaders of the future Real Russia, then we must hear it from them now. We must be looking for that meaning in what we hear around us today. So, by the time the Russian state collapses and becomes Moscow and St Petersburg and a couple of counties around those areas, we will be equipped to help steer it, and to ensure that it remains inside the boundaries of the Real Russia. Whenever it lapses into the Historical Russia discourse, we can help correct it.

The question to put to every voice in Future Russia is Locarno’s. Which borders do you call final? And do you call all of them final?

For their own good, and within the law

If Russia had the power to conquer Ukraine, it would. But it doesn’t. Ukraine will enforce its borders for the decades to come.

So unless Future Russia learns what the Real Russia is, and how to evacuate its brain, its consciousness and its national consciousness of this Historical Russia fallacy, the Ukrainians will enforce it. They will be fully within their rights under the law. They will enforce it using tens of thousands of drones every time Russia strays over its borders, in search of revenge, or some historical Russian troll.

What I’m prescribing today is a change in mind and understanding. It is metanoia, in Yakubova’s speech. It is for their own good. It is for the good of humanity, and the good of European peace and security. And it is all within the law.

Respect your borders. Don’t invade other countries. Don’t fill your population with nonsense about the past. Especially when that nonsense will, in due course, end up persuading them to participate in unlawful invasions of other countries, and the deaths of millions of people, since February 2022.

Why we need to start now

The reason to learn the difference now, before Future Russia arrives, is that many Westerners are already hypnotised by the Data-Resistant Archetypes.

The archetype of Russia as a great power is a phantom limb. It’s like when you lose a leg or an arm. For months afterwards, you try to move it. You try to pick something off the shelf, or you try to walk, and you can’t. It’s gone. That is the Historical Russia.

The Historical Russia is still in our information space. As the Syrian regime began to collapse in the winter of 2024, the same IR (International Relations) experts who had not seen the end of Syria coming were urging Ukraine to concede territory to an unbeatable Russia. They still are.

The limb is gone. The Historical Russia is dead. It’s in the grave. All that is left is an idea of the Historical Russia. That idea must be smited and replaced with the Real Russia idea. That is the purpose of this piece.

The limb is gone, but the feeling of the Historical Russia remains. AfD, MAGA, Brexit, Poland’s PiS, France’s National Front and a heap of other backward-looking, oligarch-run democracy-hacking projects engage in History Provocation tactics - nostalgia concealing a will-to-power whose goal is to destroy the post-WWII architecture.

The History Provocation

Historical Russia knows how to work on that feeling. It’s like an AI agent coming to infect your minds, our minds, the minds of our countries, and our feelings of security. Then it comes over the borders and kills people, and does horrific things, all as an instrument of history. Its instrument is history, brainwashing.

I call it the History Provocation. A state talks about the past, loudly and for years, until its target, and everyone watching, are arguing about the past too. Before you know it, we’re fighting over stuff which isn’t even true. Or if it is true, it doesn’t matter.

What matters today is our future, and building and developing our human communities, educating our children, and building safe communities and a knowledge economy.

It doesn’t matter if the history we’re arguing about is stolen, invented, or even perfectly true. What makes it a provocation is what it does to us and our minds. It sets the agenda. The History Provocation pulls attention away from the present. The History Provocation gives the state’s surrogates, the Historical Russia’s surrogates, a part to play.

In October 2025, I put it bluntly: Putler’s “history stuff is just a way of establishing character for his surrogates and to hypnotise”.

The record of the last History Provocation

The record of the last History Provocation is in the European Union’s own database of Russian disinformation. “Ukraine is an artificial state created by the Russians”, 9 June 2016. “Ukraine has never existed as an independent country”, the next day. “Ukraine is not a real state because it has no real territory, no single language, single economy and single population”, September 2018. “Ukrainians and Russians are one people”, on the day Putler’s essay on the subject appeared, in July 2021.

On 28 February 2022, four days into the invasion, “Russians and Ukrainians are one people” was offered as a reason to murder hundreds of thousands of native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians. Supposedly, in order to protect them.

Of course, the Historical Russia is nonsense, from start to finish, as a casus belli.

Some in the West read the warning

Some in the West read the warning. I was one of them. At the beginning of January 2022, Germany’s chancellor’s advisers were some others. They met four leading experts from Germany on Russia. Die Zeit reconstructed the meeting that June.

One expert found the questions very strange. Chancellor Scholz and his people were “not particularly interested in the current troop build-up. Instead, they asked about Russian colonialism, Putler’s politics of history and Russian fascism.”

In mid-February, Chancellor Scholz was flying between Kyiv and Moscow to try and stop the war. In front of journalists, he kept returning to what Die Zeit called “Putler’s historical treatise”. He kept wondering whether Putler was concerned not with the Donbas or NATO at all, “but rather with an imperial project”.

He was right to read the history. But he was very slow in understanding what Historical Russia means. He read it far too late. Years too late. Hundreds of thousands and millions will die because of that failure of cognition.

That is the cognitive failure I am trying to address, by inserting into our minds today this distinction between Historical Russia and Real Russia.

Two ways to meet a History Provocation

There are two ways to meet a History Provocation. One is to read it as a statement of intent. The other is to argue with it.

Every group of people that answers “one people” by debating the baptism of Rus’ in 988 has taken the road of Historical Russia and historical provocation. The argument can be won on the facts. It can be lost on the agenda.

In Future Russia, Historical Russia will come to Western capitals with maps, anniversaries, grievances, marches and complaints. It will ask to be understood. The empathetic amongst us will surrender our empathy to them. We will try to understand: “Oh, so 988. Oh, 1433.”

But the useful question will not be whether this history is true. The useful question will be: which Russia is speaking? If it is Historical, revanchist Russia speaking, then we must not entertain this nonsense for a second.

After Real Russia has reasserted itself, or indeed asserted itself for the first time in world history. After, for example, it has done what Germany and Japan did after their crimes during the Second World War. Then we can have nice chats about history.

But it will be several centuries before the Real Russian will be able to talk about history without catching themselves in the sentence itself. Without acknowledging publicly that they are speaking from a Real Russia perspective, and that they are not lapsing back into the Historical Russia doctrine.

An empire falls, and Ukraine rise

Ukraine knows how this story usually runs. We should listen to Ukraine, who were occupied by Russia for over a century.

So if we want to understand Russia, we should not be speaking to Western experts who fall for the Historical Russia troll. They are fully able to explain what happened in 988 and 1233, but they actually have no idea of the true and contemporary Ukraine.

An empire falls, and Ukraine rises. The empire recovers, and Ukraine is swallowed again. This is the cycle.

The Ukrainian People’s Republic rose in 1917 out of the wreck of the tsars’ Historical Russia empire. It fell to the new reboot of Historical Russia that the Bolsheviks rebuilt.

As we know now from historical sources, the Bolsheviks used the idea of a world revolution, and the idea of moving towards socialism and communism, as a mask. They knew they needed to mask the continuity of the ancien régime, and of the security and securocrats that persisted into the Bolsheviks. So they came up with this communist ideology to troll Ukrainians, and the rest of us, into thinking this was a plucky metanoia, a sincere attempt to build a workers’ paradise. In fact, all it was was a cynical continuity of what had come before.

Independence for Ukraine came again in 1991, out of the Soviet collapse. In 2014, and in 2022, the rebuilders came back. Those rebooters, the Historical Russians, came back again and again. They keep coming back. They will keep coming back until we can understand this distinction between Historical Russia and Real Russia, and the poison that Historical Russia actually is.

Historical Russia disguises itself as immanences in memes, and ideas, and people, and in our own minds, in fact all the time. It does this so that it can recreate and reboot itself, rather than engage in the kind of metanoia that Japan and Germany engaged in after the Second World War.

After the next collapse

Future Russia will be another collapse. The danger after every collapse is in the rebooting or the metanoia. Ending the pattern is the historical task of Real Ukraine. Thank God Ukraine has the power to do it. But we must help it through understanding. Every state that will be born out of Russia’s collapse itself must rebuild itself as a result of metanoia. Not just a reboot.

Historical Russia will be ended in heads before it is ended on maps.

In February 2026, I put it this way: “The war of archetypes is permanent. It requires permanent counter-archetyping.”

The archetype of Historical Russia must be smited wherever we see it. Only the Real Russia should be allowed to live in our minds.

The war of archetypes is permanent. It requires permanent counter-archetyping.

I’m trying to equip us for this today.

An apparent contradiction

My own intellectual project is mainly focused on recentring Ukraine in the story of humanity, in accordance with what history and archaeogenetics and archaeolinguistics today help us understand. Those before 2015, for instance, could not possibly have understood it. In July 2024, I put it in one line: “My core project: re-centring Ancient Ukraine in humanity’s mental models.”

This can look like a contradiction. I’m banning Historical Russia, but I’m advocating in favour of ancient Ukraine. I’m saying Future Russia must leave its history alone and live on a map. But on the other hand, I’m allowing Ukraine, and I’m advocating for Ukraine, not to do the same.

Recentring Ukraine is not a claim on anyone’s land. It’s a claim on our attention. The difference between the two, between Historical Russia and recentring ancient Ukraine in our minds, is the difference between Historical and Real.

Songs, and a state

The narrow version of my intellectual project, Finding Manuland, affords Ukraine what every sovereign culture already has.

In 1777, Herder asked where Germany’s Shakespeare was. As I have written: “The modern state was created after Herder’s 1777 plea to unite the German tribes behind a set of stories (folklore, and more accurately folk songs) 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.”

Herder was talking about songs which contained the stories.

The same work made most of the states that we today take for granted. “You see, most European states alive today are a function of the national consciousness, wrought from the folklore collectors’ work, inspired by Ossian, Herder, the Brothers Grimm,” I wrote in November 2024. “States which had never existed before (Greece, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Belgium) were all created out of this work.”

Ukraine is one of them. Its songs and its poets, Taras Shevchenko first among them.

I stayed on Shevchenko Boulevard on my first night in Kyiv. I wondered about him. Because I saw the name, I then researched him. He is for Ukrainian nationalism what W. B. Yeats is for Ireland. What Shakespeare is for England. What Herder and Goethe are for Germany. Every country has their Shevchenko.

Taras Shevchenko, of course, was born a slave. He was only freed when he managed to convince a group of rich Muscovites that he, a Ukrainian, was so special that they should pay to emancipate him.

Taras Shevchenko, first among them, made a nation of a people the empire called a province. As Timothy Snyder has written: “The earliest articulation of Ukrainian patriotism by Russian subjects came from the left bank of the Dnipro River, from the new university at Kharkiv in the 1820s and the 1830s.”

In August 2022, Russia shelled Kharkiv in order to liberate the native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians living there. I wrote that by destroying the buildings of the university where the idea of a modern Ukraine, which contains Russian identity, was born, Muscovy could not turn back time. It was too late.

They cannot return to the Historical Russia. And we must not let them return to the Historical Russia. That’s why we must learn to see the Real Russia.

Parity of esteem

From the first days of the full-scale invasion, my mission was, in the words I used later, “to campaign for parity of esteem between Ukraine and other modern nation states which have won the monopoly game of nation statehood by fair means or foul.”

Ukraine was a founding member of the United Nations. It signed the UN Charter in its own right as a sovereign state in 1945.

On the eightieth anniversary of D-Day, in June 2024, I wrote of Ukraine taking its rightful place “on the basis of equality and parity of esteem” among the great European peoples who, in the post-World War II legal order, became “sovereign, secure and prosperous nation states”.

Positive nationalism

That is positive nationalism. The collectors of the nineteenth century were recording a culture that existed. As I put it in 2024, “the collection of folktale songs during the 18th and 19th centuries was a good faith attempt to record actual existing culture.” It gave peoples a voice. And in the end, a state.

Its counterfeit, Disinfolklore, came later. Disinfolklore takes the collectors’ tools and uses them to plant a negative identity. An enemy, a grievance, a lost land.

Disinfolklore is the narrative mode that Historical Russia uses. Real Russia will use Infolklore.

Positive nationalism at work

Ukraine today is positive nationalism at work. A whole society is mobilised against an unlawful invasion. Soldiers and medics, drone makers in garages, volunteers weaving camouflage nets, teachers holding lessons underground in Kharkiv’s metro, farmers clearing mines from their own fields.

Ukraine is exercising the right of self-defence that Article 51 of the UN Charter recognises. Ukraine’s aim is not a lost province. It is not Historical Ukraine.

As I said in March 2026: “Ukraine has one strategic goal in this war: to destroy Russia’s capability to invade Ukraine again, permanently.” Part of Russia’s capability is its promotion of Russkiy Mir, or the Historical Russia fallacy. That fallacy is always used, and has been used for centuries, to justify going into other people’s lands and murdering them.

Ukraine’s soldiers are dying for a free and sovereign Ukraine, not for a map of lost provinces and Historical Russia, or an Historical Ukraine.

A sovereign country does not wait to be rescued. Allies can help. Allies should help far more than they have. But allies cannot be Ukraine’s state for it. Ukraine is doing it for itself, with its own drones, its own long-range strikes, its own defence industry.

True history, and human rights

When positive nationalism reaches for history, it reaches for true history. But even true history does not decide how we see today.

True history, what I call real history, does not override the post-war legal order, or the protection of human rights and dignity which each of us is afforded as a function of being human. They are, after all, universal.

The idea of universality of human rights was theorised by the Ukrainian international lawyer Hersch Lauterpacht. He later taught at my university, Cambridge University, after graduating from Lviv University. It was Hersch Lauterpacht, Sir Hersch Lauterpacht in the end, who wrote The Rights of Man in 1945. He argued that human rights should be afforded universally.

Sovereign democracy cannot stand

This goes back to when Surkov talks about sovereign democracy. He asserts, for Historical Russia, the right to curtail those living subject to Historical Russia’s laws: their right to participate in decision-making.

But this cannot stand. This cannot be. It’s conceptually impossible to justify this, because the vision of Hersch Lauterpacht, the Ukrainian international lawyer, was accepted by the international community after World War II. His vision was for human rights protected by law, which applied universally to all humans. It was even accepted by Russia, and signed into treaty by Russia.

And yet, the Historical Russia troll enables Russia to try and assert that its municipal law can trump international law. But this cannot stand. That is another clue for those arguing for Historical Russia.

The Real Russia of the future must adhere to international law, strictly, or they will be punished for it by Ukrainian drones. It is so much easier to do what Japan and Germany did after World War II. To withdraw from the lands they purported to occupy. To try and make good on their crimes. To try and build up communities and societies within their lawful borders that the rest of the world envies.

That is the challenge for the Real Russia, the future. That would be, and is, the essence of positive nationalism. I said it plainly at the end of 2024: “What matters is the international rules-based order as established” in the wake of the Holocaust.

Six thousand years

That was the narrow version. This is the wide version of my project, Finding Manuland.

Manuland is what I call “an imaginary community radiating around the hub of the modern state of Ukraine, stretching from India to Ireland”. I gave it that name in the autumn of 2021, as I passed a warehouse in northern France with the word Manuland written on it. I was on my way back to Ukraine from the last leave I would take before the full-scale invasion.

The story Europe told itself

For three centuries, Europe told itself a different story than the story I tell in Finding Manuland. The origins of Indo-European languages and its gods were placed in India, or in the German forests, or in Greece and Rome.

You can listen to my Finding Manuland podcast on PowerofMana.net, on the Atlas series, which I began recently. There are five introduction episodes, or the series on which came first, Manu or Mannus.

The mental models of our culture, our Indo-European culture, placed it in Greece, or in the German forests, or in Rome, or India. These mental models were built long before archaeogenetics. And they were built in good faith.

“The idea that Western culture was founded in ancient Greece or ancient Rome has been relentlessly promoted, and in good faith.” I wrote that in March 2026. “Ancient Greece is just one daughter of Indo-European culture, privileged because we have amazing written records.”

Soviet archaeology added a layer of its own. As I wrote in 2025, Soviet archaeology “managed to troll many linguists, archaeologists, archaeogeneticists, historians and Comparative Mythologists/theologians into using formulae like ‘Steppe Ancestry’, ‘Southern Russia’, or ‘Pontic Caspian Steppe’” for the Ukrainian homeland of all living Indo-European languages.

Halle and the Nebra moon disc

In early February 2022, days before the full-scale invasion, I was on my way back from Ukraine. I visited the museum at Halle, home of the Nebra moon disc.

Germany’s president, Steinmeier, had spent years trolling Ukraine into surrendering occupied Luhansk and occupied Donetsk to Russia. He did it under the guise of allowing Russia to hold elections in these occupied territories, in exchange for peace. Steinmeier had spent years on the Ukraine issue. In 2022 he was still writing, in the introduction to an exhibition guide on the Nebra Sky Disc, that all Indo-European languages, including the Germanic, had emanated from “southern Russia”, instead of Ukraine.

That is the Historical Russia occupying the minds of our leaders. I think President Steinmeier today would have a different answer to that. But people like him did not see through the Historical Russia troll. The cost is the graves of hundreds of thousands of innocent Ukrainians, and indeed of over a million Russians, in Ukraine.

Where the story begins

The ancient DNA studies of the last two decades now say where the Indo-European story begins. Every living Indo-European language goes back to the Yamna. The land that nourished the Yamna is south-eastern Ukraine, on the lower Dnipro, at Mykhailivka village, on the right bank. It is just across from Enerhodar, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which the Ruschists are brutally occupying as I speak to you today.

“More than half of humanity today speaks languages which were first spoken in south-eastern Ukraine, around where the Ruschists blew Nova Kakhovka dam.”

Many great Indo-Europeanists, and their colleagues before the archaeogenetic evidence, had been willing to count today’s Russia as part of the Indo-European homeland. But I’m with one of the greatest researchers into the origins of the Germanic language, including English: Don Ringe, at Penn. Penn is where my grandfather went to university. “Only Ukraine makes sense,” as Don Ringe said, long before the archaeogenetics demonstrated the truth of this.

I have taught myself to “dance in my mind between 6,000 years”, from the time the Yamna grew up inside ancient Ukraine to the present day, from Ireland to India. But the mental models we have been taught to imbibe go back through Rome, to Greece, and maybe to Egypt. Or maybe, if we know a bit about India, we’ll go back to India’s Indo-European history, which begins around 1200 or 1300 BCE.

However, we can change our mental models and give it a time span of 6,000 years. That is the 2,000 years into the common era, and back to the 4,000 years when the Yamna first spoke the predecessor language of all of today’s living Indo-European languages, and cultures, and religions. That is a much bigger time span than we’re used to. And it’s a time span that begins and ends on the steppe of Ukraine.

A daughter of that steppe

Rome is a daughter of that steppe. “Ancient Rome is Ancient Ukraine’s daughter culture.” So is Greece, one of the amazing daughter cultures. So is Celtic Ireland, the Germanic north, England, Vedic India.

When I began this work, I put it this way: “All roads may well lead to Rome, but they continue eastwards on from Rome, through Athens to ancient Ukraine.”

Even the faith that Moscow’s church claims as its own arrived in Indo-European language. The New Testament was written in Greek. Greek is a daughter language of the language first spoken by the Yamna, in Mykhailivka village, in 4000 BCE. As I wrote in 2023, “Greek was the lingua franca in the Roman occupied land of Judea, where Christ lived and taught at the time of Christ.” Rome was another Indo-European culture. Ancient Ukraine is the beginning of our history.

Chornomorsk

Chornomorsk is just east of Odesa. The Russians are bombing it relentlessly. It is thought to be the meeting point of the Yamna and Usatovo communities. Out of that encounter is believed to come all of the Italic, Celtic and Germanic language families, cultures, religions, ideas, words and meanings.

It never fails to amaze me. I long to go back to these places now, with the knowledge of how all of our forebears began our time there.

So when I talk about re-centring Ukraine, I’m talking about the true history. We now know it through modern, scientific, methodologically kosher archaeogenetics, linguistics, archaeology, theology and the rest.

Rome is not a licence

Of course, none of this licenses modern Ukraine to anything, any more than Rome licenses modern Italy, or modern Greece, to anything.

In April 2022, while France hesitated over Crimea, I made the point as a joke: “Perhaps Italy could take Amiens? It’s basically Rome.”

Nobody in Rome thinks the Caesars gave Italy a claim on Amiens, or that Pericles gives Greece a claim on Sicily. The glory of the ancients belongs to all their descendants. The glory of the ancients belongs to the land that raised them. It confers nothing on today’s army.

Ukraine on its own terms

This wider lens, which I talk about in my Finding Manuland project, applies to Ukraine on its own terms. Not only as Russia’s mirror.

An Historical Ukraine is possible too. An Historical Ukraine would treat the 6,000 years as a title deed, like Russia treats its Historical Russia as a title deed and a casus belli.

An Historical Ukraine would look east to the Kuban, to the country around Kursk and Belgorod, perhaps even to India, to Ireland. These are places where Ukrainian, or ancient Ukrainian’s proto-Indo-European daughter languages, have long been spoken. It would call them lost provinces. It would turn Ukraine’s suffering into a doctrine. An Historical Ukraine would keep an enemy forever to explain its present.

In September 2022, I wrote: “Muscovy’s rather lucky that President Zelensky is strong enough to ensure Ukrainians settle for ejecting Ruschia from within Ukraine’s 1991 borders.” In the same post, I wrote: “Some voices call for the restoration of Ukraine’s historical lands.”

Ukraine’s government has held to the 1991 borders through the whole war. That is the Real Ukraine speaking.

On the record, Real Ukraine keeps its history true, the terrible parts with the glorious. That is because true history is the only kind of positive nationalism we can use.

Real Ukraine

So this is Real Ukraine. It holds 100 per cent of its sovereign territory, Crimea included. It has won a war against a country that once covered a sixth of the world’s surface.

Ukraine holds the stories it has earned by smiting Russia. On the anniversary of Russia’s retreat from Zmiinyi, Snake Island, I wrote: “Immanent in Ukraine is the Mana of the whole of your Indo-European civilisation.”

The oldest Indo-European story of all is the herdsman Trito winning back his stolen cattle, and “in every iteration of the story since 1,200 BCE Trito ALWAYS wins.”

In a hundred years, children in Muscovy will be told: “Don’t go west of the Don. Dragons live there.”

Real Ukraine holds its place as the land that nourished the Yamna. Their language, culture and religion now live in the minds of more than half of humanity, across the whole space between Ireland and India.

That place is territorial, not ethnic. It’s a ground shared by all of us who descend from it, whether we have ancient Ukrainian genes in us, as most of us do, or we simply speak the language.

If you can understand this, in the language I’m speaking, or writing, then you too are part of that inheritance. You own it no more or no less than any of today’s Ukrainians.

The test of the History Provocation

Put it to the test of the History Provocation. What makes history a provocation is what it does.

Historical Russia’s history claims its neighbours’ lands. It names an enemy. It drags every audience back into the past.

Real Ukraine’s 6,000 years claims no one’s land. Real Ukraine needs no enemy. They ask for parity of esteem. That is the whole difference.

The job of Real Ukraine is the job of every real country: to build its future. Its economy, its human capital, its universities, its engineers, the farms of its black earth, the young people who will come home when the war is won.

Real Ukraine rests on the people who get up every morning and build it: engineers, farmers, shopkeepers, programmers and teachers.

The deep past is there to be proud of, to be studied, to be visited. It’s not there to be fought over in a trench.

If Russia wants to argue on history’s ground

Suppose Future Russia still wants to argue on the ground of history. Future Russia will lose there, too.

“’Russia’ takes its name from the Kyivan Rus’, centred on the ‘Ancient City’ of Kyiv,” as I wrote in March 2022. Moscow’s claim to be the Third Rome is ironic “when we discover that in ancient Ukraine is the origins of the actual First Rome.”

An imported church

Even Moscow’s church turns out to be imported.

In 2021, the historian Ievgeniia Sakal completed a doctoral thesis at Yale, The Imported Church. It “shows that the key texts of the Russian Orthodox Church were rarely Russian in origin. The Russian Church coopted texts of late Byzantine origin, texts produced by Ukrainians and Belorusians”, like my ancestors, “and texts produced by Catholics and Protestants in the West.”

Having faced “a legitimate and sophisticated Ukrainian Church”, she writes, the Russian Church “was forced to adopt the scholastic culture of the Ukrainian Church”.

Byzantium, the Ukrainians, the Belarusians, the Catholic and Protestant West. Every source it borrowed from is Indo-European. So is the language of its scripture.

How the game ends

So if Future Russia still wants to play the game of Historical Russia, Future Russia should know how the game ends. Historical Russia is Ukraine.

Rus’ was Kyiv’s name long before it was Moscow’s. The Moscow that calls itself the Third Rome took its church learning from Kyiv. The history of the land of Ukraine runs far deeper than the Rus’.

Ancient Ukraine is the matrix of every living Indo-European language, religion and culture. It is the matrix of the Greek in which the Gospels reached the world, and of much that Christianity carried across Europe.

On history’s ground, Ukraine wins, and wins everything.

But that is not the ground we argue on. We argue on what is real today: sovereign territory, the law, the record, building our communities. How much can we develop, and teach our young to survive in a knowledge economy? That is the ground we argue on.

The longer view of history is not a title deed. It’s the story of all of us.

The bones of Potemkin

On the 1st of October 2022, I wrote that “the real Potemkin is buried in Kherson”.

Today Kherson is under the most catastrophic drone safari. It is run by the very Russians who claim they arrive in Kherson to liberate its native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians, who mostly live there.

And yet, as documented by many journalists and by the United Nations, up to 3,000 people are hunted by drones and murdered. Babies, small children, women. Buses, bus drivers. Doctors, medics, hospitals, ambulances. The woman herding her goats at sundown, as she had done for decades. They are used for training by the Russians.

We’ve seen the videos. The videos exist. They’re undeniable. The Russians publish them themselves. The Ruschist state publishes them itself.

That is the city where the real Potemkin is buried. Or was buried.

In October 2022, I wondered whether he would still be there when the Russians left. They did leave, around that time. They retreated. He was not there.

On the 3rd of November, the New York Times reported from Kherson. The occupation administration had already gone. The New York Times said: “They even took the bones of Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin.”

Listen to those Historical Russian words, repeated by people like Putin to hypnotise people.

They took the bones of Potemkin, “the 18th-century commander who helped Catherine the Great conquer southern Ukraine.” Catherine was German, not even Russian.

Eight days later, Ukraine was back in Kherson.

Historical Russia left the city carrying its history in a box. A bunch of bones of Potemkin.

Ukraine kept, and will always keep, the city. The steppe around it that nourished the Yamna 6,000 years before. The long Dnipro River, the Don, the Donets, the Dniester and the Danube.

Future Russia will have to decide which it wants to be: the Russia that carries the bones, or the Russia that lets them go.

Continued from:

This is about Future Russia. Now is the time to think about Future Russia.

Current Russia has one choice left that does not end in losing everything. It can accept that the world will settle for nothing less than its withdrawal from all of Ukraine, every village of Ukraine, Crimea included. Russia has shown no sign of making this choice. I contend it will not make this choice in time.

“We need to understand the distinction between Historical Russia and Real Russia today. Historical Russia is often disguised. It comes through the words and the writings of journalists, or of Western so-called experts. It comes through Russians themselves, and propagandists, and Disinfolklorists.

So in the future, as soon as it raises its head, we must have the analytical capacity to see the Mana, to see the energy, of either Historical Russia or Real Russia.”

Ukraine’s war aims

Ukraine’s plan does not depend on Russia choosing well from its perspective.

In February 2024, Kyrylo Budanov, then head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, set out Ukraine’s conditions for ending the war. Ukraine should destroy Russia’s rear: its oil and fuel bases, the plants producing its weapons and ammunition, and its other strategic targets. Ukraine should take back all its territory before peace talks begin. In his words, Ukraine “will be able to feel secure only after all Russian war criminals are prosecuted, [Russia’s] nuclear weapons are destroyed, and [Russia’s] nuclear power plants are controlled by international organisations.”

I called those Ukraine’s war aims: destroy Russia’s capacity to wage war, permanently.

I wrote then that Budanov gets it. I wrote that this is a once-in-a-millennium chance for Ukraine, and for all of us. That includes Russians who understand what the Real Russia is, and how their future can be built only on the Real Russia, not the Historical Russia. Any chatter, I wrote then, about “peace” should be filtered through this prism.

General Budanov had already said in October 2022: “As soon as the Russian regime collapses, it will all fall apart.”

Future Russia

This is what I expect. Current Russia goes on losing until it has lost almost everything. Future Russia is the state of Moscow and St Petersburg.

The rest of today’s Ruschist Federation becomes a whole plethora of sovereign states. Their independence is watched over for a time by Europe, the United States, China, the powers of Asia. Each of these future states must adhere to a Real policy, not an Historical policy. That is a condition of receiving the aid they will need to sustain themselves as sovereign independent states.

The map already holds the outline. Within its internationally recognised borders, the Ruschist Federation counts 83 federal subjects. These are the regions, republics and cities that make it up. Twenty-one of them are republics. Most are named for people who are not Russian.

As I wrote in 2022, “Russia’s self-image as an eternal monolith masks its continuing colonial legacy.”

Muscovy was a village when Kyiv was already a city. Muscovy has never had a decolonisation moment. There was no Frantz Fanon in Moscow, and no Sartre. Future Russia is what the decolonisation looks like when it finally comes.

Two Russias inside Future Russia

The current Ruschist state dissolves and splinters. It leaves a remnant based around St Petersburg and Moscow. Even then, however, the Russia problem will not have been solved. A state of Moscow and St Petersburg can still be the old empire in a smaller coat.

Inside Future Russia, two Russias will argue over the country. The rest of us need to know, from the first day, which one is speaking.

One is Historical Russia. The other is Real Russia.

The purpose of this is to explain to you the difference. Understanding this difference can help us cut through debates today, rhetoric today, and what I call, in other projects, Disinfolklore today.

One is Historical Russia. The other is Real Russia. They cannot share one country. For 30 years, plenty of Russians, plenty of Western experts thought the Russia of the doctrine of Russkiy Mir and the Russia of the map could get along. Indeed, they thought they could even help each other.

They cannot. Sooner or later, one devours the other. The Real Russia devours the Historical Russia. Or, as is occurring today, the Historical Russia is devouring itself.

The hardest place to separate the Real Russia from the Historical Russia is not on any map. It is inside the head of every Russian. And, indeed, it is inside the heads of those of us who have spent our working lives watching Russia. I’ve noticed in my own time that Russia experts themselves are just as susceptible to falling for Historical Russia trolls as complete neophytes.

The archetype, in the Kremlin’s own phrase

What I want to focus our minds on is the meaning of the Real Russia. Historical Russia, Russkiy Mir, whatever we want to call it, I’m calling it Historical Russia. That is the archetype. The archetype, Historical Russia, is Russia as its doctrine remembers it.

The phrase is the Kremlin’s own. So I afford it the privilege of calling it what they themselves call it. On 30 September 2025, it was three years since Russia had claimed four Ukrainian regions as part of its own constitution. That day, Putler described his programme for these regions, as Reuters reported at the time: “essentially a program of reviving our ancestral, historical Russian lands”.

The doctrine’s theorist

The doctrine has a theorist. Vladislav Surkov was for years the Kremlin’s chief technologist. He was the one who staged Russia’s politics. He was once Deputy Prime Minister of Russia. He was later the curator of its policy on Ukraine.

He got his first start from Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky is a man who always advocates for the Historical Russia. He does so despite his opposition credentials. He does so despite his undoubted sacrifice in spending a number of years in the gulag before being released.

Surkov was initially Khodorkovsky’s bodyguard. Then he managed to get himself into the role of PR, as an ideologue. In my book Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut, I maintain that Surkov is actually an actor. He is acting the role of controller of the Ruschist Federation.

Surkov is actually from Ichkeria. His real name is not Surkov. On 11 February 2019, as part of his role and on the instructions of the security service curators he serves, he published an essay he called “Vladimir Putler’s Long State”.

Surkov counted three historical Russias. Each of the historical Russias he counted was tied to a ruler who was great, in his mind: Ivan III, Peter the Great and Lenin. Surkov announced a fourth, the long state of Putler. I answered it the day that piece appeared.

The bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska

I had spent three years leading international monitoring patrols at one of Surkov’s finest creations. It was a scene he had drawn: the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska. On one side of the river, we had Ukrainian defenders. On the other side, Russian occupiers, masked as the so-called fake Luhansk People’s Republic. Between them, up to 10,000, mostly elderly females, played bit parts in this entire drama, set up by Surkov.

This was the only official crossing point on the line of contact in the Luhansk region. Russia occupied part of that region from April 2014.

The bridge I worked on was real. The state, the fake Luhansk People’s Republic, was created by Surkov and his curators. That state, which staged the scene around the bridge, was a performance. And so, I maintain, is the state that performed that performance, the Ruschist Federation. That is the Historical Russia, not the Real Russia.

A Russia with no border

Historical Russia cannot recognise a border, its own or anyone else’s, because its borders run wherever history reaches.

Borders like that are always being crossed. So there is always someone to fight. There is always a neighbour to be taken back into the house as “one people”, whether the neighbour wishes it or not.

Surkov’s scene at the bridge

That was the scene Surkov set up in eastern Ukraine. There, Russia’s Ruschists, on one side of the river, masqueraded as Ukrainians. They pretended to be involved in a civil war, defending their little fake statelet from Ukrainians. They archetype those Ukrainians, falsely, as Nazis.

They used this geography, and they used the bit-part actors. The bit-part actors actually are real humans. The Ruschists interrupted their lives. Since they first entered Ukraine, they have remorselessly disrupted those lives, and destroyed them, and corrupted them. Russia has been famous for this pattern for centuries.

What I witnessed at Stanytsia Luhanska, the bridge over the Donets River, was an archetypal scene. The Ruschist bridge trolls were at one end of the bridge. The Ukrainian defenders were at the other, attempting to defend the rest of Europe from their incursions.

The Russians specialise in scenes like that. Surkov created this one. It was there just to play the role of stretching out Russia’s borders and provoking a reaction. That action becomes how the Ruschist Federation, the Historical Russia, spreads itself across the European continent.

A permanent enemy

Russia needs a permanent enemy. You create a permanent enemy by militarily occupying another country.

Russia needs a permanent enemy to explain why it is always under siege. Russia needs the siege to explain why it can never be an ordinary country. A country that provides sanitation and indoor loos for its population. A country which doesn’t spend all its money throwing all of its population on a meat grinder, only in order to create the disguise for its own inadequacy as a governance system.

This, my friends, has been going on for hundreds of years.

Its perfidious invasion of Ukraine is the same pattern it has repeated for hundreds of years. So is its almost comically catastrophic attempt to take even small villages, 1,200 kilometres from Kyiv. That attempt comes four years after it promised to take the entire country in three days.

If we are going to avoid this pattern repeating itself in the future, and continuing to cause chaos, we must understand the Historical Russia. We must understand the difference between the Historical Russia and the Real Russia.

Breaking the cycle

Historical Russia, in Future Russia, would look at any new sovereign state on its borders. It would see, as it does today, stolen, promised provinces. Then the whole cycle would start again.

This has been going on for almost 300 years.

We must break this cycle. Not just for the good of Ukrainians and other Europeans, but also for the good of Russians. Those Russians who can see through this troll, and who wish to fight and live in the Real Russia, not an Historical Russia.

A garrison of its own doctrine

Historical Russia cannot even accept Russia’s own borders. Borders are the one thing that fence Historical Russia in. Every settled frontier looks to it like an insult.

So Historical Russia can never be at peace with its neighbours. Every neighbour has good reason to arm against it. It keeps Russia itself a garrison of its own doctrine.

Historical Russia imprisons itself in a doctrine that demands its borders are always fluid. It is always on the watch for the enemy it needs.

Real Russia, the map

Real Russia is Russia as it actually is. In this context, Real Russia has two meanings. A Real Russian voice, Russian or Western, is one that sees both.

The first meaning of Real Russia is geographical. Real Russia looks forward. Historical Russia looks backwards, and is backwards.

Real Russia is seen on a map as it really is, with borders fixed by law. It has a future planned inside that map, rather than a past beyond it.

For Current Russia, this means a colonial federation that has never faced what it is.

For Future Russia, it may mean two great cities in the form of St Petersburg and Moscow, and a bit of land around them. It may mean neighbouring states which are sovereign states, and not lost provinces.

Out of the claws of Historical Russia

We in the West will have to play a role in keeping these new sovereign states out of the claws of a revanchist Historical Russia, based around St Petersburg and Moscow and a bit of land around them. We will play it along with the great Asian, Central Asian states, and China, and other Asian states, like Japan and Mongolia.

That is the importance of this.

Now is the time

We need to understand the distinction between Historical Russia and Real Russia today. Historical Russia is often disguised. It comes through the words and the writings of journalists, or of Western so-called experts. It comes through Russians themselves, and propagandists, and Disinfolklorists.

So in the future, as soon as it raises its head, we must have the analytical capacity to see the Mana, to see the energy, of either Historical Russia or Real Russia.

I explain this because now is the time to understand the distinction between Historical Russia and Real Russia. Not after these states have asserted their sovereignty. Not after our troops and/or materiel, and our treasure, are invested in helping these states attain proper sovereignty and sustainable economies. Just as we did after the Cold War in Central Europe.

No. The time is today to understand how Historical Russia differs from Real Russia.

If we allow Historical Russia to survive its catastrophe, and its inevitable withdrawal from 100 per cent of Ukraine, we will be coming back for another round of this. Our children, and our children’s children, will be going through this same cycle again and again.

Now, along with our Ukrainian brothers and sisters, we must make a play to end this once and for all.

Not a small inheritance

A Real Russia based around Moscow and St Petersburg is not a small inheritance.

Moscow and St Petersburg hold universities, museums, scientists, engineers, writers, musicians. They have a talent for building things.

They have museums in which they have stored the collected patrimony of the dozens of cultures and different peoples they have pillaged over the past few centuries. No one is talking, for now, about repatriating those things which belong to its former colonies.

So Moscow and St Petersburg, in a Real Russia-based Future Russia, will have much to be getting on with.

A Real Russia could spend this patrimony on its own people, inside its own borders. It could trade with the world instead of threatening it.

Historical Russia, by contrast, spends its patrimony on a war to recover a past that never existed in the form it imagined. Just look what the Historical Russia ideology is doing to Current Russia. Look what it is doing, indeed, to the rest of our lives, and to Ukraine’s lives.

A plain definition

Real Russia has a plain definition.

Real Russia’s territories and its borders are the ones the rest of the world recognises. Real Russia behaves as an ordinary member of the community of nations. Real Russia keeps the rules the world agreed in 1945, whatever its neighbours do.

The only lawful use of force is under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations. There, states like Ukraine can exercise their inherent right of self-defence. Force is also lawful if a unanimous decision, including all five permanent Security Council members, determines that force may be used.

Outside of that, for instance, deciding for Historical Russia reasons to invade Ukraine and kill millions of people is not a legitimate or legal means of waging war. It is not legitimate or legal activity for any state.

Clean hands

If anyone thinks it rather unfair that a Real Russia based on Moscow and St Petersburg sits within borders, surrounded by a heap of other new sovereign states, I refer you to the principle and the doctrine that she who comes to equity must have clean hands.

The Ruschist Federation has only been in existence since 1991. It has invaded and occupied almost more countries than I can name off the top of my head.

Russia’s own signature

A Real Russian’s homeland is the Russian state inside its borders. Russian speakers in Riga, Almaty or Kharkiv are no more Russia’s provinces than English speakers in Dublin are England’s. That is the Real Russia.

In December 1991, at Alma-Ata, the new states agreed that the borders of the Soviet republics would become the borders of sovereign states. Russia signed this.

Historical Russia, or Real Russia, must decide. Which is it? Do you agree to these borders, and then you can remain a state, or do you not?

Historical Russia, the record shows, will never be able to agree to honour its signature. Therefore Real Russia begins by remembering its own signature.

Real Russia, the record

The second meaning of Real Russia is the record. To reach it, Real Russians inside Russia and the rest of us outside it have to see past a façade.

The façade is made of what I call the Data-Resistant Archetypes of a Potemkin State. A Potemkin state is a painted front with little behind it. There are three aspects to the Data-Resistant Archetypes of a Potemkin State.

Historical Russia is obsessed with these three facets. Real Russia must transcend them if it is to preserve some territorial integrity of St Petersburg, Moscow and a bit of land behind it. Real Russia must renounce these Data-Resistant Archetypes of a Potemkin State.

Western experts, or journalists, or any of us, come across any of these archetypes, in any clothes. They morph through memes and visuals and films and discussions and art all the time. But their essence is always the same.

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

These three Data-Resistant Archetypes of a Potemkin State are the essence of Historical Russia. Remember these three, because they colonise Western minds as thoroughly as they colonise Russian ones.

A mental archetype of an unbeatable Russia occupies the minds of those who would have us surrender to it. It digests and processes all the data about Russia. The output is always the same. Ukraine can’t win. Ukraine must surrender.

Ukraine routed Ruschia in Kyiv, Kherson, Kharkiv and Kup’yansk. That is the Real Ukraine, confronted with the real, defeatable Russia. Yet still the Data-Resistant Archetype can’t compute that Ruschia, and its mental imprint in our minds, is a Potemkin State.

These Data-Resistant Archetypes were embedded with care in our mind. The idea of Historical Russia was embedded along with them. We must overcome that idea if we are to solve the Russia problem.

Sovereign democracy

By 2005, as I wrote in 2022, every institution in Russia was part of the puppet show that Surkov, former Deputy Prime Minister of the Ruschist Federation, called sovereign democracy.

What Surkov hoped to do by sovereign democracy was disguise autocracy, using its antithesis, democracy. The qualifier, the word sovereign, meant: we can have a democracy that isn’t really a democracy. We can set our own rules. We set those rules according to our sovereign will, our sovereign’s will, our autocrat’s will, our czar’s will.

The right to participate

However, what constitutes a democracy is set out in oodles of international, legally binding instruments, not least the human right to participate in the decisions which impact us.

The public has a right to participate in decision making. This is a human right, which applies universally to all humans, as a function of being a human. A state has no right to abrogate that right, and cannot, unless it is for lawful reasons.

You cannot create an autocracy and call it a democracy when it is the exact opposite. Not when it doesn’t conform to the OSCE Venice standards, for instance, about how to conduct elections. Not where there’s no free press. Not where the public have no right to participate in public decision making.

Russian-language speakers have oodles more rights in Ukraine, or in Latvia and Lithuania, or indeed in any other democratic country, than they have ever had in Russia.

A mask for autocracy

But Surkov used this nomenclature, sovereign democracy, as a mask for autocracy. He used it to describe the Duma, the courts, the central bank and the state media that he helped construct.

The fake “philosopher” Dugin, like Surkov, is actually just an actor. Surkov acts like the director of the sovereign democracy. Dugin, on the other hand, acts like a philosopher.

Both are subject to the security state that has ruled Russia in all of its various guises for the past 150 years. Dugin supplies it with a philosophy. Putler also plays the role of czar. But really he himself is a puppet of the security state that he serves.

Ever since Surkov spoke about this sovereign democracy in 2005, the ideologues all around them have added to it.

The charge sheet

Behind the façade, the record reads like a charge sheet of a criminal enterprise. This is the charge sheet of Historical Russia, which is the Current Russia.

On 2 March 2022, the UN General Assembly, by 141 votes to 5, with 35 abstentions, demanded that Russia “immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.”

On 16 March 2022, the International Court of Justice, in a provisional-measures order, required Russia to suspend its military operations, which it had begun on 24 February.

On 17 March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued warrants for the arrest of Vladimir Putler and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova. The judges found reasonable grounds to believe that each bears responsibility for the war crimes of unlawfully deporting Ukrainian children, and unlawfully transferring them from occupied areas to Russia.

Aggression against Ukraine in breach of the UN Charter. War crimes, in the Court’s own words, with a head of state wanted for them. The evidence of crimes against humanity that investigators keep on gathering.

This is also Real Russia. It is not the Russia of the parades, or the imagined Russia of the Historical Russia. The Real Russia of record is indicted by the post-World War II legal order in a way, and with an intensity, commensurate with its crimes in Ukraine. That is the Real Russia.

The test

Historical Russia fails both tests. It wants its old lands back. It denies the record of the Real Russia.

If the view that prevails in Future Russia contradicts those truths, if Future Russia wants its old lands back, we will not have solved the Russia problem. We will only have shrunk it to St Petersburg and Moscow and a little bit of land around it, a few forests. We will have given it a new grievance.

Metanoia, or a reboot

The Ukrainian historian Larysa Yakubova gives us a finer test. Her book is Ruscism: The Beast from the Abyss, published in Kyiv by the National Academy of Sciences in 2023.

In it, Professor Yakubova separates metanoia from a “reboot” of the old system. Metanoia is a change of mind that reaches all the way into values and practice. A reboot only reinstalls the old system.

A Marshall Plan for Russia

Almost from the beginning of the full-scale invasion, certain fake Russian opposition voices called for a Marshall Plan for Russia. These voices are also in favour of the Historical Russia.

They promote the troll that the West somehow discriminated against Russia after the collapse of communism. That collapse was an entirely self-inflicted wound.

The truth is that we poured trillions of dollars into our dream of a Real Russia. Russia actually chose an Historical Russia, an imagined Russia. That choice has led to this absolute and total catastrophe, not just for Ukrainians, but for the whole world. The whole world is paying a price for Russia’s Historical Russia doctrine.

After the Second World War, and after 1991

In Yakubova’s distinction, metanoia is a change of mind that reaches all the way into values and practice. That is what we hoped would happen after 1991. What in fact happened was a reboot of the old system. It reinstalled the old Historical Russia system.

The Real Russia of the future, on those borders around St Petersburg and Moscow and a couple of forests or parks around that area, must undergo the kind of metanoia that Japan and Germany underwent after the catastrophic Second World War.

Russia invaded Poland along with Germany, and began the Second World War. It never paid a price for that. Individual Soviet citizens, mostly Ukrainians and Belarusians, paid with their lives for this catastrophic error. It was an error made in search of an Historical Russia, and its Polish lands back.

But no metanoia took place. After the Second World War, it was just a reboot. After 1991, it was just a reboot of the old system. No metanoia, for all our hopes and dreams, and all our wishful thinking.

No metanoia took place after 1991, no change of mind that reached all the way into values and practice. Such a change would have pierced the Historical Russia doctrine to the core, and destroyed it once and for all. No. Nothing of that nature happened at all.

How the USSR ended

In fact, the USSR failed, in the end, because the Russian Supreme Soviet was trying to exert an exploitative tariff for gas to Belarus. So the leaders of the Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics got together and dissolved the USSR. They did this so that they had standing in international law, could trade gas, and had the right to heat their own citizens.

When Russia today threatens to cut off the gas of any country, what it is really doing is threatening death. It has been doing this for decades, since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The threat comes in a very nice guise. Russia is just saying, “Oh, we’re just going to cut off the gas.”

Never mind the fact that Russia no longer has a market for gas, now that Europe is phasing out its purchases of LPG and piped gas by the end of next year.

Russia is committing the same error again and again and again. That is Historical Russia. That is the sign of a reboot of an old system, like when you turn on an old computer. It is not the sign of metanoia.

Learning to recognise a reboot

Metanoia, I remind you, is the real Future Russia. We must all fight for it, and learn to recognise when all we are seeing is a reboot, or a call for a reboot.

When the so-called Russian opposition call for a Marshall Plan for Russia, or indeed new sovereign states form and they manifest the symptoms of Historical Russia, or revanchism, we must by then have learnt to recognise those moments and to prepare for them.

We must condition the trillions in aid it will cost to build proper, sustainable, sovereign entities, focused on the present and on developing their cultures and communities for the future.

A Future Russia that changes its flag and its leader, yet keeps its Historical Russia doctrine, is just a reboot.

Yakubova’s sentence

In an article published in English in April 2022, Larysa Yakubova wrote that the idea that Ukraine’s and Belarus’s sovereignty was an accident was “deeply ingrained in the minds of Russian intellectuals”. They had not grasped what was true. “The sovereignty of the two countries was not fake at all. What was fake was their perception of the nature of these sovereignties.”

These so-called intellectuals, like Surkov or Dugin, or oodles of other sympathetic Western intellectuals, are addicted to this Historical Russia fallacy. They must themselves learn to see through it, to what the Real Russia is. Now is the time to do it. For the Future Russia, they must learn to understand, and to support, the Real Russia whenever it is emerging from the Historical Russia.

But when the Historical Russia looms, or moves its head like a monster from the deep, or the beast from the abyss (Larysa Yakubova’s metaphor), we must learn to put it down. In the sense that vets put down our favourite pets.

Yakubova’s sentence is the Real Russia in a single line. They had not grasped what was true. “The sovereignty of the two countries was not fake at all. What was fake was their perception of the nature of these sovereignties.”

In Future Russia, it will need saying about a dozen new neighbours, not just two.

Speaking for Historical Russia

Any Russian voice that speaks of historical lands, of one people, or of artificial states, alleging any state is any more artificial than another, is speaking for Historical Russia. Know that.

When you hear a Russian or a Western expert speaking about the historical lands of Russia, of one Russian people, or of artificial states, accusing other states of being artificial, they are speaking for the Historical Russia.

The Historical Russia has killed over a million people in Ukraine. It has evaporated and eviscerated whole cities and towns and villages and houses and buildings. I lived in and experienced them during my seven years in eastern Ukraine.

The Good Russian

The Good Russian of the Western imagination can be discerned from the real good Russian by whether or not they understand this distinction.

Many of the so-called Russian oppositionists who are feted in the West are still addicted to the Historical Russia. They still want to possess lands between the border of Ukraine and Japan. They still want to be prosecuting wars to defend mythological borders.

They are Historical Russians. We must learn to discern those who are addicted to this Historical Russian fallacy. Even if they have been imprisoned or poisoned by Putler, they are still for the Historical Russia.

In all of their guises

Solzhenitsyn was an Historical Russia addict, even though he spent a lot of his life in a gulag, in part of Asia which the Historical Russia was unlawfully occupying. It treated him like a slave.

That is how perfidious this myth of Historical Russia is, this standpoint, this consciousness. Anyone can have it lurking in their mind in the form of memes. But if we are to solve the Russia problem, we need to be able to see these Historical Russia addicts in all of their guises.

I have written that many of the Russian so-called oppositionists turn out to be “imperialist sympathisers in disguise”. This addiction to lands and borders which stretch beyond the municipal boundaries of St Petersburg and Moscow is the sign of someone who is drugged with this idea of Historical Russia.

The Crimea test, and another

A simple test is Crimea. The unwillingness to contemplate Ukraine retaking Crimea has always given the Historical Russians away.

Some Russians, of course, the real good Russians, passed this test. They exist. Some are in prison, some in exile. Many are helping Ukraine win the war against Russia.

There is another test. Any so-called Russian oppositionist who does not call for Russia’s withdrawal from 100 per cent of Ukraine is addicted to the Historical Russia. So is any Russian oppositionist who talks about a Marshall Plan for Russia. The Historical Russia is the Russkiy Mir fallacy that has led us, and led their country, to its near death.

The real good Russians

Some of these real good Russians wear Ukraine’s uniform. They name the record, the historical record, properly. They don’t want old lands back. They do not ask to be thanked for helping Ukraine destroy their own country and the Historical Russia fallacy. For the Historical Russia fallacy is the real enemy.

These are the Real Russia in both senses. They are the only Russia worth fighting and building a future with.

From family to neighbours

The simplest tell is grammar. Historical Russia speaks of Russians and Ukrainians, one people with a quarrel in the family. Real Russia speaks of Russia and Ukraine, two sovereign states with a border between them.

The grammar has to change from family to neighbours, from the brothers of the Historical Russia troll to the doctrine of two states with a treaty and border. Moscow will find that as hard as anything in its history. I’m not downplaying the challenge. It will have to do this if it wants to overcome the brainwashing.

But the Japanese and the Germans managed to overcome it. So I’m sure that if Russia truly is great, it will overcome the Historical Russia fallacy, and the Historical Russia doctrine which has caused it so much misery and pain. It will be satisfied with St Petersburg, Moscow, and a couple of forests and villages around there as its future state. That can be the embryonic Real Russian state, the first Real Russian state in hundreds of years.

But seeing as they cannot win on the battlefield in Ukraine, they’ll have to learn this whether or not they like it.

Today I want to talk about something older than writing. The writer today, and I do consider myself a writer, still holds that position and still keeps that practice. I want to add something to it as well. The human inside and outside the loop, in the age of mythos.

Enheduanna

Enheduanna is the answer to a question in the air just now.

The oldest writer whose name we know was a woman. I have written about her before. I first met her as a cuneiform tablet in a dusty, forgotten corner of a Brussels museum. That tablet had been written six hundred years after Enheduanna died. She lived around 2400 BCE. So her songs went on being copied for six centuries, and were cut into clay, and that is why I could find one of them on a day when I was in Brussels to talk to people there about the Disinfolklore analytical method.

Enheduanna lived in the city of Ur. In the marshland the Greeks would later call Mesopotamia, some four thousand three hundred years ago. That is the same Mesopotamia Peter Jukes, the writer and artist, refers to in his recent piece in Byline Times, “The Tyranny of Literacy: How Writing Only Scratches the Surface”.

She was the daughter of Sargon, the first monarch to bind Sumer and Akkad into one dominion. She was high priestess of Nanna, the moon god.

There is an alabaster disc of her in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. Penn is where my grandfather went to university. It is also where Donald Trump went, but we will not hold that against it. I have not managed to visit the Penn Museum yet and I am desperate to. The disc was carved in her lifetime, and I will post a picture of it beside this piece. On it she stands larger than the men around her. That stone still catches the light after four millennia. The way a full moon does.

What Enheduanna did, as the first named author in human culture, was not in the end to describe her world. It was to intervene in it. She used words to set her world right. A usurper defiled the temple she served, a ziggurat of the kind the Bible remembers as the Tower of Babel. She did not merely record the outrage. She wrote against it. Her writing outlived him.

The averaging engine

We are told reading and writing are dying. In truth, as Peter Jukes recently put it in Byline Times, they are exploding. There is more of both than in any century before ours.

The real worry his essay raises is subtler. These new machines, the large language models we hear so much about, produce fluent text at stunning speed. One thing they do is predict the likeliest next word from billions already written. They are, as his piece has it, “avatars of the average”. They “produce nothing new but predict the old”.

There is a counterweight worth putting beside that. One of the founders (@importai) of Anthropic wrote on X this weekend that the idea of these models as stochastic parrots has in many ways ruined our capacity to understand their real power.

That landed with me.

Until last November I thought I parroted the stochastic parrot line myself. They do predict the next word. But at the level of meaning they do not predict in that same stochastic way, and that is where the mystery sets in.

Jukes’s warning still stands. If we lean on them too hard we may learn to average too. We may mistake the plausible for the true. His piece ends on a line that resonates. “The trouble with our moment is not that we grant our machines too much mind, but that we grant ourselves too little.”

Every word of that is right.

It is also one half of an alabaster disc. I have been holding the other half in my hands and in my mind all summer. The whole disc begins where writing itself begins, with a woman writing to the moon, to the moon god Nanna. It travels a road older than the machines. Older than the essay as a form. Older than cuneiform, which was used six hundred years after Enheduanna’s death to record what she had once sung as a prayer.

It is older than writing.

What a writer is for

Something subtle is buried in the word writer.

A writer’s job, as I have come to understand my own, is to recouple two things that power, that mana, is forever trying to prise apart. What is legally right, and what is morally right.

The tools for that work are hidden in the vocabulary of the work itself. We right the world by writing. We set down words that act in a reader’s mind like a writ, a summons, a binding instrument. Right, write, writ, word. Say them. Write them. You will hear one sound under all four. An R with a hard stop behind it. R-T-.

These are not plays on words. They are clues. They are clues to the early Indo-European mind, and to the minds that fed into it, out of which our whole culture comes.

That same sound surfaces in the Vedic ṛta and the old Iranian arta. Both are Indo-European languages, attested very early in writing. Both mean truth, the true order of things. And the sound is in truth itself. Look at it closely. Strip its vowels and the skeleton sits there. T-R-T. The second letter and the second to last. The same two consonants, R and T, hiding inside an English word, one language family away and two thousand six hundred years from the rock inscriptions at Behistun in Iran, where arta stands carved in the living rock from around 500 BCE.

And the sound is in writing nine centuries before Behistun. Around 1400 BCE the monarchs of Mitanni, on Mesopotamia’s northern rim, bore Indo-Aryan names built on arta-. Artatama: his abode is truth. Artashumara: he remembers it.

That little R-T- skeleton has travelled again and again through the languages from Ireland to India. It is ṛta in the Ganges valley. Arta in Persia. Rectus in Rome. Recht and right and truth in the Germanic languages, like English and, well, German. It never quite keeps the same letters around it. It never once lets go of the same meaning. Rightness.

The words a writer works with are made at their root, another R-T- word, of the truth sound. To write is, etymologically, to true the world. To make the crooked line straight. Enheduanna did it with a hymn. I try to do it in podcasts, tweets, essays, posts and pieces like this one. The instruments a writer uses change. The office does not. I hold the same office as Enheduanna, grand as that may sound, and it is the truth.

The sound a writer cannot un-hear

This is the discovery I have spent six years chasing. It started, as things usually start for writers and for artists, with getting snagged on the material. There is an R-T- in started, and in writer, and in artist.

Years ago the sound of a word stopped me the way a knot in the grain stops a hand. The word was Manu, the first human and first monarch of the oldest Indian tradition. A crowd of other words came with it, uninvited, all carrying the same two consonants in the same order. M, then N.

Say them slowly. Moon. Month. Mind. Meaning. Memory. Human. Money. Mana. Karman.

The thing in the night sky. The span of time it measures. The organ that measures the world within us. The meaning that organ makes. The memory it keeps. The human who does all of this. The woman who makes that human, and you might look on PowerofMana.net for “The Moon, the Menses and the Maternal”. And the sacred power once thought to run through all of it. Mana.

One small sound, M-N-, sitting beneath the deepest things a person can name.

A writer’s first duty here, as ever and everywhere, is suspicion. So I followed the sound. Through thousands of scholarly papers. Across tens of thousands of kilometres between Ireland and India, again and again, in travels I recount in Finding Manuland.

What I found is this. The oldest recoverable word for the moon in the ancestral tongue behind English, and behind all living Indo-European languages including Persian and Vedic and Sanskrit and Hindi, does not mean “the bright one”. It is not Luna, and it is not the sound inside lunacy. It is méh₁nōt, and it means the measurer.

So many of these sounds sound alike that I would ask you to read along as you listen, if you can. Not if you are driving. Not if you are on your bicycle. If you are walking the dog, or the cat, you can probably manage it.

The moon was named for the one thing it does that matters to a farmer, to a priest, to a woman tracking her own body. It measures time. It is the first clock, hung in the sky. Once you see that, the crowd of words stops being a coincidence and becomes a pattern. The word for the sky’s measurer was lent to the mind that measures within, and to the human being who is, above every animal, the measurer.

Who made the pattern

Who created this pattern, which every speaker of a living Indo-European language uses almost every time they say one of these M-N- words?

A people called the Yamna. There is an M-N- in Yamna too. Their community was centred on the Dnipro river just south of the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia.

The Yamna, according to peer-reviewed research published in Nature on 4 February 2025, were the precursors of all living Indo-European languages. Both papers are here: the first and the second. One involved Russian state-funded archaeogeneticists and the other involved Ukrainian archaeogeneticists.

A word about that. Vladimir Putin chairs the Russian Academy of Sciences. We cannot trust anything that emanates from it. It is more than an archaeologist’s life is worth to publish what the evidence says, which is that all living Indo-European languages come from a village called Mykolaivka on the Dnipro, almost directly across the water from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, brutally occupied by the Russians since 4 March 2022.

Those two papers in Nature, humanity’s pre-eminent scientific journal, reached that finding using archaeogenetics. It is a young science. It first showed what it could do in 2015, in another Nature paper, published around the time I arrived in Ukraine to work as a diplomat. That arrival started me on the journey that leads to what I am telling you now.

Archaeologists named the Yamna for the pit graves, the yamna, in which they buried their monarchs on the grasslands by the Dnipro. Their community took shape there some six thousand years ago. From that one community, and there is an M-N- in community, grew the mother tongues of nearly half of humanity, spoken today between Ireland and India.

If you can understand these words, you are part of that family.

Six founders out of eight

Across that whole vast family the founder keeps the moon-sound.

Manu in India. Aryaman, the oath-and-kinship god of old Iran. Mannus, forefather of the Germanic peoples, and there is an M-N- in Germanic as well. I made six podcasts on him, asking which came first, Mannus or Manu, and they are on PowerofMana.net from last year. Minos in Crete, with his brother Rhadamanthys, and both of them carry it. Menua, monarch of the Armenian highlands. And at the far western edge of the world, Manannán, Ireland’s pre-eminent pre-Christian deity, and Érimón, the first high king of all Ireland.

Six of the Indo-European language family’s eight branches name their founder with the moon-sound. One is a charming accident. Six out of eight is a system.

The two that clinch it are Manu in the far east and Mannus in the Germanic west. They stand at opposite ends of the earth the family ever reached. They are far too far apart to have traded the idea of naming a founder with that sound, or to have copied one another. So, by the practice established in Indo-European studies for over a century and set down very lucidly by the great Indo-Europeanist Bruce Lincoln, both must have inherited it from one common source. The Yamna, by the Dnipro.

It is not the sound alone

What I am speaking about is not just the sound M-N-. It is the sound together with its meaning.

Look at the founders. Then look at the common meaning you will find in moon, human, karman, mind, memory, money, mana and month. They come from one semantic field. Spirit, or light shining through a mind. Light shining through a human.

In karman it is the repository of one’s karma. Karma itself comes out of karman. So it is the subtle energy that lights a human, and that continues through different embodiments in Indo-European and Buddhist religious thought.

So we are not talking about sound alone. We are talking about phonosemantic bundles. Sound and meaning travelling together through time, in the founders, across the Indo-European cultures, and in almost every sentence we speak.

The anomaly

This summer I put that pattern to a proper test, on a database of a hundred languages. Other scholars built it, for their own reasons. It had never heard of me, or of what I had noticed and followed for years.

The test asked how often the two consonants, M and N, in either order, land on the family of meanings they keep company with. Moon and month. Mind and memory. Measure and man. And the act of naming, where the M-N- runs the other way round as N-M-.

The number that came back is the reason this piece exists. The odds of the pattern arising by chance are not one in a thousand, or a million, or a billion. Written out, the number has sixty-five zeros in it. It is the same order of chance as winning the EuroMillions jackpot eight times in a row, on a single ticket each time.

I had a friend at school whose family was quite rich, and whose mother won the EuroMillions twice. Not the zillions. Fifty million euros or so each time, which is a huge whack of money. But she did not win it eight times, and it was a different ticket each time. To believe in a coincidence like that you would have to be not sceptical but simply reckless.

The M-N- watermark is real, measurable, and six thousand years old. It lies under the surface that writing only scratches.

What I discovered, put modestly, is an anomaly.

Linguistics puts a different root behind moon and behind mind. Another root again for meaning and memory. Another for human. Another for money. Another for mana. Another for karman. If specialists notice the shared M-N- at all, across all the living Indo-European languages and all the ways those words decline, the answer is that it is a coincidence. You say, look, there is an M-N- in every one of them, so they must come from the same word. And the answer comes back: no, sorry, mate, they do not.

The alternative is to believe that this sound-and-meaning bundle comes from one source underneath. We know about the Yamna community at Mykolaivka in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, in today’s Ukraine. So we can at least imagine that they had a word, and I believe that word was méh₁nōt, meaning moon. Out of that one word comes the idea of light shining through a rock in the sky, used as the metaphor that separates a human from a stone. Light shining through a human. Light shining through their mind. The energy and the light of a human being, rarefied into money, into mana, into energy.

Instead of eight separate roots, and given what the statistics say, it is simpler and more logical to think they come from one.

Manuland

To follow the M-N- and the R-T- I have spent years travelling across and inside the area between Mane, overlooking the Spiti Valley in India, and Emain Macha, Ireland’s holiest site.

Spiti is the limit of the Indo-European range. Stand there and you meet people with every cultural characteristic of Tibetans, and Tibet is just over the top of the valley, close enough to see. Look closely and they look Indo-European. You get the reverse as well. Half the people are ethnically Indo-European and half are Sino-Tibetan, half speak and live culturally as Tibetans and half as Indians. Once you get your eye in there it is a wonderful place. That is why I keep going back.

I call the project Finding Manuland, and you will find it on PowerofMana.net. The first five foundational Finding Manuland Atlas podcasts are up now, and they range over the whole Manuland zone. Over the next few years I will be describing my travels through its different parts, including the Spiti Valley.

Menua’s canal still runs

About halfway between Ireland and India as the crow flies lies the historical and the real Armenia. I have travelled there too.

High in the mountains, on the shore of Lake Van, which the Urartians called Tushpa, a saltwater lake in the east of Anatolia now inside Türkiye, a monarch named Menua reigned some two thousand eight hundred years ago. He is one of the founders whose name carries the moon-sound. He was the builder-monarch of the realm the ancients called Urartu, the seed of historic and present-day Armenia. Though Urartu is not what its own people called it. They called themselves the Biainili. B-I-A-I-N-I-L-I.

Menua cut a canal out of the high rock to carry water to his city. When I stood in Van last January I saw it. The waters still flow along Menua’s canal. Three thousand years on, the measurer-monarch’s channel is still carrying water into that valley and into the lake. It is a monument that does not sit in a museum. It works. It is still measuring water into a community, long after the empire that dug it passed into inscription and into today’s Armenia.

The crossroads

Van, and the exact ground Menua’s canal runs along, is the old boundary between ancient Armenia and Mesopotamia. The same Mesopotamia Peter Jukes writes of in his piece. That area south of Van, down to the Iraqi and Syrian borders, lies today in Türkiye. If you get a chance to go there, you must. I spend as much time in it as I can. I call it the crossroads, and soon I will make an episode of Finding Manuland by that name, to say what it is like to be there.

It is the place where great empires have ground against each other for millennia. Kura-Araxes. Hatti. The Hurrians. Akkad. The Indo-European Hittites. The Mitanni, with their Indo-European gods. Assyria. Urartu. The Cimmerians out of Crimea, and the Scythians out of Ukraine and out of Iran. The Medes. Armenia. Persia. Greece. Parthia. Rome. Byzantium. The Sasanians. The Caliphate. The Seljuks. The Mongols. The Safavids. The Ottomans. Even the Ruschistswere there, and in 1921 they gave this part of Armenia away to the sultan.

The archaeological, textual, linguistic and cultural legacies of all of them, Indo-European and not, and yes, the Yamna were there too, are visible in the ground, in the museums, and even in the sky at night. The moon. The different words for the moon. What the moon meant.

That area is the seam where the moon-sound world of the Indo-Europeans met the world of Enheduanna’s clay. At Harran, where I have also been, they worshipped the moon god as she did, and well into the historical era.

That geographical space, around which all those empires radiated like a wheel, is not a backwater of my response to Peter Jukes’s excellent essay. It is its axis.

Kin beneath the sound

A boundary is where power does its prising apart of the legal from the moral. This is contested ground. It has been soaked in contest.

It is precisely here, around the southern shores of Lake Van, running down into the plains of Mesopotamia, that the deep pattern does something a mere curiosity never could. It shows the peoples the map sets against each other to be kin beneath the sound.

The Armenians carry the moon-sound in their oldest names. So do the Turkic peoples who later settled the same land. Osman, whose name founded the Ottoman dominion, wears the M-N- in the founder’s place. His name reached the Türk, I contend, not through the Arabic. Uthman has no etymology there, even according to Semitic etymologists. I do not believe Osman came through Arabic all the way across Anatolia, past the Caspian, into the Central Asian Turkic heartland of Kazakhstan. I contend it came through the millennia of interaction between the Yamna’s descendants and Osman’s forebears on the Kazakh steppe. That is how Osman got the M-N- in his name.

Manas, the founder-hero of the Kyrgyz, made much of since the end of communism, also carries it. Zaman is the Turkish word for time, which is the moon’s own gift. And Iran wears the M-N- in the empire’s own name. Achaemenid preserves Haxāmaniš, the founder Achaemenes, having a friend’s mind. Another founder-name built on the moon-sound, and it stands carved in the same Behistun rock as arta, truth and cosmic order, set against druj, the lie, the usurper.

When the Turkic conquerors took the Armenian city of Ani, the first governor they installed was named Manuchihr. The moon-sound appearing again, in a Turkic name, set over Armenians who bore the moon-sound in their own name. Armenian. The Turkic tongues carry the rule-sound too, the hard R-T-, in the very word Türk.

The Mesopotamians, four thousand years ago, had a name for the Indo-Europeans arriving on their frontier from the north. The Umman Manda. Which is to say, near enough, the M-N- people.

They did it twice, once for each of the two great sounds. Urartu, the realm Menua ruled, is the name its Semitic-speaking neighbours to the south gave it. Urarṭu in the Assyrian records. That is the very name the Hebrew Bible preserves as Ararat, the mountain range where Noah’s ark came to rest. Or rather, Ararat is what we say now. The Bible’s own letters spell only r-r-ṭ. Biblical Hebrew wrote no vowels. Say the consonants. R-T-, the rule-sound, the same skeleton that runs through write and writ and writer.

The Armenian scholar Armen Petrosyan has argued that the ruling line of Urartu, Menua’s own house, were Indo-Europeans. If he is right, and who am I to argue with one of the greatest Indo-Europeanists, the R-T- pattern closes with a satisfying click.

Mesopotamia’s Semitic tongues, listening across the frontier to the peoples to their north, caught the two sounds those communities carried deepest. M-N- and R-T-. They turned each into a name. The founder-sound became the newcomers’ name, Umman Manda, the M-N- people. The rule-sound became the highland realm’s name, Urarṭu, Ararat, the R-T- land.

What a people’s neighbours call them is testimony of a rare kind. It records what strangers heard. And what Mesopotamia heard, four thousand years ago and three, were the moon-sound and the rule-sound. The same two sounds this piece has been tracing through mind and human and measure, right and writer, all along.

Ani

Ani’s ruined cathedrals stand within sight of a closed border, with a watchtower on the far side. I recorded my testimony to what it means to be a writer today there, last January. You can see it at Disinfolklore.eu/About, or on PowerofMana.net as “What I Do as a Writer”. The ravine behind me in it has been a bitterly disputed seam in the region. Today Armenia and Türkiye look set to rebuild jointly the bridge connecting their two great states.

There the M-N- and the R-T- testify to a shared inheritance older than every grievance.

This is where the writer’s office that Enheduanna and I share comes right back in. Legal questions about borders belong to international lawyers. The moral questions, like whether the peoples on either side are strangers or kin, are answered plainly by the sounds. They are kin. My work as a writer is to keep saying so. To recouple the legal with the moral by pointing, patiently, at the common root under the divided ground.

Manuland, my name for the whole reach of the Indo-European languages from Ireland to India, is not a claim of ownership. It is an argument for kinship. It says we have far more in common than the map admits. The proof is in our own mouths. In almost every sentence we speak we pronounce words carrying these consonantal skeletons, sometimes through a thinly veiled shift from R-T- to R-D-. From right to word.

Reversion to the M-N-

So, back to the machines. The Tyranny of Literacy‘s well-measured fear and my six years chasing these sounds meet at the same door from opposite sides.

The fear is that the large language model is an averaging engine that teaches us to average too, until the plausible crowds out the true. Peter Jukes essay in Byline Times cites a fine piece of science to sharpen it. Brain scans show the human mind is nothing like a next-word predictor. It is a meaning-organiser that leaps sideways at the edges of phrases in ways no machine forecasts. The mind, it says, “doesn’t optimise. It explores.”

There is an arch joke buried in the name of one of my main projects. Reversion to the M-N-. It began as Reversion to the Moon, and it belongs exactly to this argument.

It is my play on the phenomenon in data analytics and statistics, reversion to the mean. And in Disinfolklore, my other project, Disinfolklore itself is a manifestation of that reversion to the mean, as in the angry manu. The angry spirit. The meanness we see so often in today’s information space.

Reversion to the mean is the statistical recurrence at the very core of how these artificial neural networks work. Everything is pulled back towards the average, using standard deviation at the level of individual artificial neurons, whose weights are expressed as a function of the deviation from the mean. Everything pulled back towards the average, the expected, the already seen.

The joke folds in on itself twice. Mean wears the M-N- sound, and is clearly related to its etymon in the reconstructed forebear of all living Indo-European languages, the méh₁ measure component of méh₁nōt, the moon. So does etymonitself, the technical word for a root, the very unit whose rules kept the pattern invisible.

You see, once you get your eye in. Part of my job is to help you get your eye in, not only to these micro components in the words we communicate the world with, but to the macro. And that M-N- pops up again and again in every sentence we speak.

The phenomenon I have spent six years documenting is the opposite of a decay towards the average. It is the M-N- regenerating itself, everywhere you look, across six thousand years. It surfaces again and again, carrying the same semantic field, in places that root-by-root etymology could never predict and was never going to find.

Root-by-root etymology is what Indo-European linguists practise today. It traces each etymon down its own permitted pathway. This M-N- pattern lives at exactly the level that lens excludes. It is an empirical pattern the etymologists’ own rules prevented them from seeing. Their method was not wrong. It was a lens ground for a different task. That is why it waited for a writer.

The word man

This summer I spent a great deal of time proving an assertion I had long wanted to prove, using state of the art data analytics.

I thought I had found a solution. What I needed was a means of proving it. The solution was to the Oxford English Dictionary’s crisp explanation of the origin of the word man. So this is not merely about words with no common meaning. This is the very designation for our species.

The OED gives man as “a word inherited from Germanic”, whose “pre-Germanic etymology of the word is problematic”.

If you have the time and the energy, go back to those six podcasts asking which came first, Manu or Mannus.

I stood exactly where the OED and a machine cannot go. And I used the machine to get there faster than any writer working alone ever could.

What the instrument did, and what it did not

Every idea in my tests was mine. The etymologists, with their old-fashioned toolkit and their strict rules, keep these words apart even when their senses overlap. Asking whether they should be kept apart was my question.

Not one idea came from the neural network model. For all its power it originated nothing. What it did, superbly, was test. It ran in an afternoon the checks that would have cost me a year by hand. It told me plainly when I was wrong. It killed several of my favourite ideas outright.

That is exactly what a true instrument is for. I explored. It measured. I brought the possibilities. It supplied the probabilities. Those are not rivals. They are the two halves of that sentence about the mind, finally set to work together instead of one impersonating the other.

The human outside the loop

I would name the good half of the alabaster disc the human outside the loop.

The anxious picture of our moment puts a person inside a machine’s process, nodding its outputs through, slowly deskilled. Turn it inside out. Put the human on the outside, holding the machine the way an astronomer holds a telescope. The theory, the questions, the wild sideways guess belong to the human. The instrument only lets her see further.

The model, powerful as it is, could not have got here without visiting Menua’s canal. It is the most capable yet built, the generation its makers call Mythos, perhaps humanity’s finest ever instrument, and it is now available to a solitary writer in their garret.

It is not, and cannot be, the decider.

The measurement, in full

I am a writer chasing an idea, and here is what the measurement found.

On the NorthEuraLex database of 43,251 Indo-European word-forms across 1,016 meanings, words for the pre-registered meaning field carry the M-N- skeleton at 20.8 per cent, against 3.46 per cent for all other meanings.

The pre-registered field was: moon, month, mind, think, memory, remember, meaning, measure, count, man, human, spirit, and name.

The odds ratio is 8.0. A word on that field is eight times more likely to carry the frame than a word taken at random from the language.

Fisher’s exact test returns p = 5.60 × 10⁻⁶⁶. It stands first of 182 co-occurrence frames tested.

Or, in writerly language: the probability that this pattern is a coincidence is nought point, and then sixty-five zeros.

If sound and meaning had nothing to do with each other, you could rerun this experiment on fresh data every second, once a second, since the Big Bang. That is about 4 × 10¹⁷ replays. You would still be short of one expected fluke by a factor of four hundred billion trillion trillion trillion.

All of this worked because I did the six years’ work first. I was able to put to the Mythos model the question that had been puzzling me for years. I had noticed the pattern. I had formed the ideas. I had read thousands of papers and walked the road to Van and Mesopotamia and back and around, several times, all before the machines could do anything useful at all.

The model amplified a prepared mind. It could not have prepared one.

The other half is that she is equipped

Peter Jukes’s diplomatically expressed warning is real. Surrender your thinking to the averaging engine before you have any of your own, and you will indeed become an avatar of the average.

That is only half the story.

The other half is that a writer who has spent her life looking hard, and that is the hard R-D-, into the material of her craft, into the sounds and the roots and the meanings and the buried systems beneath the plainest words she writes the world with, is not necessarily diminished by these machines.

She is, for the first time, equipped.

The lonely figure in the attic, pram in the hallway, alone with the page, can now reach past the edge of what any single lifetime could grasp at, in one afternoon. Not by handing over her mind. By keeping it, and pointing the instrument at what she alone can see.

The cure for granting ourselves too little mind is to go and use the mind we have, with better tools than any writer before us has owned.

The office has not changed

Four thousand three hundred years ago Enheduanna heaped the coals in the censer, prepared the offering, which we can see on that alabaster disc, and in her own phrase conceived the word. A hymn from the moon god Nanna’s house, written to true a world a usurper had wronged.

The office has not changed one jot since. The writer still exists to recouple the legal with the moral. To right the world through writing. To point at the common root under divided ground. Writers have always had the mana to bring communities together rather than to divide them.

What has changed, only now, in the age of mythos these machines have opened, is how far a single prepared mind can reach while doing it.

Enheduanna righted her city with a song. She had only her own two hands and a reed to press it into clay. I have the whole span of Manuland to walk, and an instrument steady enough to test my hypotheses.

For both halves of the alabaster disc, and for both halves of the work, this era has opened. The machine and the mind. The sounds beneath our words and the buried patterns beneath our politics. And the strong, slightly vertiginous sense that I am only getting started.

At bottom, tyranny or not, the writer’s job in Mesopotamia, as in Europe today, has not changed.

Only our reach, and the stakes.

I’m Decoding Trolls. I write at Disinfolklore.net and PowerofMana.net, and as Decoding Trolls on Substack, X, Bluesky and Mastodon. Please feel free to subscribe to my work for free. For those who pay for it, you’re amazing. I never thank you, so I am thanking you here.

I’ll see you soon.

Principles of Infolklore

Ep 1 - Aug 20

Ep 2 - Aug 27

Ep 3 - 3 Sept

Ep 4 - 10 Sept

Ep 5 - 17 Sept

When Elon Musk told a conservative conference in 2025 “I am become meme”, he was not joking. He was telling you what he does for a living.

The Russian state’s own dramaturg has said the same thing in plainer words. Dramaturg carries the T-R-. Vladislav Surkov, once deputy prime minister of the Ruschist Federation, was picked in 1999 to design Vladimir Putin’s political system, like an architect, and directed it for years. He was the actor-director at the centre of managed democracy, that play-act of democracy.

Part 1 of this two-parter is available here (though this is stand-alone and one of my best podcasts.

In an essay in early 2025 he wrote that Russia had gone onto an information counter-offensive against the West by transferring the psychological concepts of the mental matrix and the archetypes of national consciousness into politics. Perhaps by sending two Brighton Beach oligarchs, mafia-adjacent oligarchs, to Kyiv the other day, supposedly representing the greatest country that ever was.

So when I talk about archetypes, I am not trying to be arch or impressive. I am not telling you that I have read Jung. I am helping you understand the enemy of everything that is good about our lives. Surkov serves a regime whose only goal is to evaporate, eviscerate and turn to ashes every city and village it can get within drone or artillery range of. Google him and you will find them all saying he is a great genius. When he says that Russia has gone onto an information counter-offensive by transferring the archetypes of national consciousness into politics, we must listen. In every country where Russia operates, it dons the mask of patriotism. The AfD, Reform, the National Rally, all the so-called patriotic parties the Russians fund wear the costume of patriotism in the country they operate in. That is the mental matrix and the archetypes of national consciousness, in the reality of our lives. How un-American is MAGA? Yet it purports to define what is American. That is Surkov’s reveal.

Continued from Part One:

In March 2025 Surkov told the French magazine L’Express what the system he built was. He called it democracy with a monarchical archetype. We need a tsar, he said. Periods without a tsar always end in disaster for us. And he said that when Donald was first elected, a number of very serious American media had reported that Donald’s team used Surkov’s propaganda methods and some of his political ideas, and that Donald was ideologically closer to Putler than to Macron. The operator named the operation, in print, in the year the ballroom was begun, the folklore-like ballroom that installs an archetype where the East Wing stood.

Democracy with a monarchical archetype. In Washington it is being architectured, by a ballroom bolted onto the White House. The phrase belongs on the roundabout at Arlington.

The nursery

Gold. There is no East Wing any longer. Imagine that. Imagine I had told you two years ago that he would demolish the East Wing, that he would take the architectural symbolism of destroying the First Republic by knocking it down and installing a folklore-like monarchical archetype in its place, a ballroom. The East Room has gold drapes. The Oval Office is gilded, with a cabinetmaker flown up from Florida to do the trimmings and the President adding bits himself with Krazy Glue, Krazy with a K. The two equestrian statues by the Lincoln Memorial have been coated in gold leaf. When I was a diplomat in Kosovo, everyone said that when you went to Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, you would see their gauche equestrian statues dedicated to Alexander the Great. Now the two by the Lincoln Memorial are gold. “Wear sunglasses if you’re passing by them,” a Washington theatre director told Hitchens. The West Wing has its name in gold lettering. The ballroom will carry gold seals on its outside before the courts have finished with it. The arch is to be topped by a gold Liberty, the liberty of the eparchy, the enslavement of the people and the liberty of the oligarchy, and by gold eagles. The President addresses his donors from a lectern shaped like a golden eagle. And a 22-billion-dollar gilded redesign of Dulles Airport was presented in the Oval Office one afternoon.

The ballroom. Ninety thousand square feet, which doubles the footprint of the White House. Two hundred and fifty workers, twenty hours a day, seven days a week. Three thousand cubic yards of concrete. A million pounds of rebar. The lead architect parted ways with him over how big was big enough. To make room for it the East Wing was demolished in three days in October 2025, and the rubble dumped on a historic golf course in East Potomac Park. “Sorry, darling, that’s progress,” he says he told his wife. Pure Disinfolklore. Does he ever talk to her? The latest drawings, Hitchens reports, add decorative lion heads, more gold and an ornamental staircase. “Where the heck are these lions coming from?” a former commissioner asked her. I can tell them. I spend a good part of my life touring the Neo-Hittite and Syro-Hittite monuments of Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia, and you see a great many lions there, from millennia ago. “You could imagine a symbol of American democracy, like a bald eagle or a bison or something. The lion is associated with the British monarchy.”

The garden. The Rose Garden was torn up and paved over for striped umbrellas and lawn chairs, so that it now resembles the patio at Mar-a-Lago. He wants Lafayette Park to have forty-seven maple trees, in homage to himself. Dozens of trees, including historic cherry-blossom trees, were ordered out of East Potomac Park to make way for his golf course.

The pool. He had the Reflecting Pool, the mirror of the Republic, drained and repainted in what he called American-flag blue.

The house. The South Lawn became a helipad, rebuilt flatter so that guests can, in his words, go there for cocktails and then walk to the ballroom. A court asked the Administration’s lawyer whether, if the government decided very quickly to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty, nothing could be done. “I think that’s right, yes,” the lawyer said. One enabler among thousands. They are cursed for what they are doing to our republic. Preservationists, he insists, are treasonists with bad taste. The usurper accuses those defending what is truly right under the law of treason. The chutzpah of it. And his own legal brief, which he edited personally, as if he had nothing more important to do, says the ballroom is a gift to our country from President Donald, and asks who could ever object to that.

The arch. It began in April 2025 as an architecture critic’s proposal for a temporary 60-foot arch for the country’s 250th birthday. The President more than quadrupled the height, made it permanent, and put the gold Liberty on top. He considered topping it with a giant fist, Hitchens reports from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book, in homage to his own raised fist after the attempt on his life. His architect said the arch would frame the view of Arlington as Raphael framed the heavens. Talk about delusions of grandeur. Excavation has been announced without the planning commission’s approval. Small, medium and large, he told the donors, holding the three models. I happen to think the large looks by far the best.

What a child reads

A child reads that list differently. Gold. A ballroom. Lions on the palace. A rose garden destroyed. Trees cut down. A mirror-pool. The king’s own name on everything. An arch for a conqueror to ride through, who has conquered nothing but the inner minds of too many people. Every one of these is a story that every child in our civilisation carries before she can read. Disney put them there. The Grimms put them there before Disney. Our great-grandmothers put them there before the Grimms wrote them down. Gold is what the king’s hall is made of. The ballroom is where Cinderella goes and the stepsisters are turned away. The roses are the ones the Queen orders painted, and the briars round the sleeping castle. The mirror is the one on the wall that tells the queen who is fairest. The arch is the gate the returning conqueror passes through. The scaffolding of the Disinfolklore Universe has been built out of the nursery, in granite and gold leaf, and every commentator who says how vulgar it all is passes the story on.

That is colonisation of political discourse by Disinfolklore. It does not need us to want a ballroom. It needs us to talk about the ballroom. I am sorry to have to talk about it myself, but the mechanism cannot be explained without it. That is the turn. Every mind that talks about the gold has been moved, and none of them chose the direction.

New Yorker writer Hitchens’s sources feel this and cannot say it. They reach for kings. Nero fiddling while Rome burns. Ozymandias. Louis XIV. Robert Moses. “Have you ever heard a President talk about beauty so much?” a senior official asked her. Every comparison they make is to a king or an emperor or a master builder, and every one of them is an archetype. They treat the resemblance, the Law of Similarity, the law of sympathetic magic, as a fact about one man’s psychology. The Cabinet secretary who told her “It’s a diversion for him. If he’s doing stuff with gravity, like Iran, he loves to be able to turn to this” has the mechanism the wrong way round. We know about his diversions from the Epstein files. The gold is not the President’s diversion from the war. The gold is our diversion from what the war and the gold are both for.

Three rooms

The ballroom deserves its own reading. The press has filed thousands of column-inches on its cost, its heritage and its precedent. A ballroom is three rooms at once, and the unconscious reads all three.

The first is the king’s hall. Heorot in Beowulf, the foundational text of the English language, ironically set in Sweden. The mead-hall of the Anglo-Saxons. The aula regia of medieval Latin. The hall is the room in which the king becomes the king. It is where he sits enthroned, where he gives gifts and receives oaths, where the retainers drink at his expense, and where the poets, the flamens, the brahmins, sing his deeds. I am not singing Donald’s deeds. I am singing his undeeds, a curse on him and on what he has done to our republic. A republic has no such room, on purpose. The East Room, which the ballroom replaces in function, was a public room in a public house.

The second is Versailles. The Hall of Mirrors, and the court that danced while the country starved. “If the people have no bread, why don’t they eat cake?” is the sentence our culture keeps for that hall, and it does not matter whether Marie Antoinette ever said it. The Law of Similarity does not check attributions. It works on our minds, usually invisibly, until someone points at it.

The third is Cinderella’s. The ballroom of the folktale is a guest list. Some are invited and some are not, and who gets in is decided by birth and beauty and a fairy godmother. A presidential ballroom is, by its nature, a guest list. Republican space is, by its nature, not. The lions on the outside tell you which of the two you are looking at.

The eye reads the hall and the unconscious reads the king. A hall carrying the sound of kingship now stands where a room carrying the Republic’s right used to be. A folktale is being installed where a constitution used to be. In February 2025, in a speech in Munich, I said that the oligarchs whose puppet Don is would Archetype at scale to re-engineer our minds. What I did not foresee was that the scaffolding would be the folklore every child carries from Disney and Grimm. The video of that speech is still there to be watched.

What the gold is for

The other half of Hitchens’s evidence is in her piece too. She reports all of it. She reports it as governance detail.

The ballroom was budgeted at 200 million dollars, and the expected cost has since tripled. Instead of asking Congress, the President solicited private contributions from companies including Nvidia and Lockheed Martin, many of which went on to win large government contracts for unrelated projects. According to court filings, he has been personally selecting the project’s contractors and handling the details of their contracts, including the amounts of payment, and telling the people working on it that they did not need to follow permitting, zoning or code requirements. “You have zero zoning conditions. You’re the President!” he was told, and he repeated it to the donors from the golden lectern, delighted. Steve Witkoff, his old friend from New York real estate and now his envoy to the wars in Ukraine, the Middle East and Russia, describes him telling a contractor: “You can afford to give me a discount, because it’s for the American people.” In Washington, one source told Hitchens, he is the mayor, the planning commission and the lending institution all together. He is on every side of the table. He awards no-bid contracts and handpicks the inspectors general who oversee them. He is a four-year-old playing property developer.

The money runs through an account Congress keeps for White House maintenance, for repairs and air-conditioning. In recent years it has averaged two and a half million dollars a year. Since he returned, according to the Washington Post, 875 million dollars has been routed through it. Three hundred million of that is private donations. The rest has come from various executive agencies. White House renovations alone now stand at more than 900 million dollars, most of it from taxpayers.

The two bodies that exist to stop this were emptied and refilled. He fired the three members of the National Capital Planning Commission the last President had appointed and installed his deputy chief of staff and Will Scharf, one of the lawyers who argued his presidential-immunity case at the Supreme Court. “What do you want the guy to do? He’s only the President for two and a half years.” That last sentence is the whole of it. He is only the President for two and a half years, and he has spoiled the Republic of the last 250. The people around him are working to a clock, and the clock is not his.

Eparchy

I use the word eparchy for what those people are. It is Greek, and it has the Rch in it. An eparchia was a province of the empire and an eparch the man set over it. Eparchy is my word for the board: rule from over the one who appears to rule. And it is the oldest form of government our language family knows. In 1975 the Cambridge philologist Harold Bailey read the gods named in a fourteenth-century treaty and showed that the earliest Indo-Iranian social order was not a monarchy at all. It was oikarchy, rule of the household: a council of named functionaries, a board of directors, with no king at the apex. Eparchy and oikarchy are the same arrangement. The board rules and the monarch is its front. It is the arrangement the Russian security establishment has with the actor it calls Putler. It is the arrangement the historian Frederic Spotts describes, in his book on Hitler’s aesthetics, without naming it, inside the Third Reich, where each party baron had his own fiefdom, the frontiers between them were left ill-defined, and the battles were ceaseless while the man at the centre attended to his architectural models. In a Bronze Age household on the steppe it may have been the right form. What it displaces now is not a Bronze Age household. It is the post-1945 legal and social order, which built our prosperity, our richness, out of the ashes of the Second World War. At the centre of that order sits the one thing a board of directors cannot allow: the public’s right to take part in the decisions. In a democracy that right belongs to us. The sovereign and the subject are the same people. That is what is Right, and it is what a gold hall with lions on it is built to make us forget.

Cynicism

The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, whom I studied as a postgrad at Georgetown, gave the register of all this a name in his Critique of Cynical Reason of 1983. Cynicism, he wrote, is enlightened false consciousness. It is the consciousness that has learned its lessons from the Enlightenment and has not, and probably could not, put them into practice. It is well-off and miserable at once, and no critique of ideology can touch it, because its falseness is already reflexively buffered. America has discussed the gold in exactly that register. Everyone knows it is vulgar. Everyone has said so. Nothing has moved. The knowing is the buffer. And Sloterdijk saw the other side too. The modern master, he wrote, no longer wears the mask of his own idealism. He lifts it. He smiles at his weak adversary and suppresses him. C’est la vie. Order must prevail. I am the state, and I say this is right. In its cynicisms, hegemonic power airs its secrets a little, indulges in semi-self-enlightenment, and tells all. In 1983 Sloterdijk could still write that the high life of the super-rich was discreetly concealed behind middle-class facades or in closed milieux, because there was tact in not being ostentatious. That tact is over. The closed milieu has been built onto the Republic’s own house and painted gold, and when a reporter asked whom the arch was for, the master lifted the mask and told all. Moi.

The serpent and the cattle

The Indo-European peoples carried one myth wherever we went, and the comparative mythologists call it the Trito myth, after its hero. The community’s cattle are stolen by a serpent. Our wealth is stolen by a serpent. Our military has been stolen by a serpent. Our good name has been stolen by a serpent. Our people’s house has been stolen by a serpent, and the serpent wants to build an arch on the ceremonial axis. In most versions the serpent, or dragon, is three-headed. Cattle were wealth. Our word capital comes from the Latin caput, head, because wealth was counted in heads of cattle. The serpent takes what belongs to everyone and guards it in a stronghold. The hero, the Third Man, Trita, with the T-R- in his name, crosses the water, kills the serpent and brings the cattle home. India tells it as Trita Āptya, and again as Indra and Vritra, with the T-R- in Vritra. Iran tells it as Thraetaona and Aži Dahāka. Greece, the Norse, the Irish and the Slavs all tell it. The English tell it as George and the dragon. Armenia tells it as Vahagn defeating the serpent, at Lake Sevan. The three heads correspond to the three functions that Georges Dumézil, the French comparative mythologist, found in every Indo-European society, the same three that the caste system in India preserves: sovereignty, security and fertility. The theft is an attack on all three at once.

The gilded hall on the ceremonial axis, paid for by donors who then win the contracts, standing on a rubble-heap where the Republic’s public room used to be, while 875 million of our dollars runs through a maintenance account: that is the serpent’s stronghold with the hoard inside it. The eparchy is the serpent. The man on the gold chair is the face it wears. And we, the people, are the ones whose cattle are gone. An ancient dream is erupting through the marshes of central Washington. Vritra, through the medium of Donald, is attempting to destroy Indra. In this reading we, the people, are Indra. We must release the waters.

Both sides claim to be Trita. That is the difficulty at the heart of the myth, and it is the difficulty MAGA lives on. Its story is that America was stolen, and that one man is crossing the water to bring it back. The Code of Positive Trolls exists to adjudicate exactly this. Run the ballroom through the six and it fails each one. Generosity: a guest list is the opposite of generous. Right: the hall inverts the meaning of the building it is bolted onto, a monarch’s room installed where the Republic’s right stood. Patience: the gold is loud and it is in a hurry, with two and a half years left. Energy: the charge is borrowed from donors who then win the contracts, and it moves every mind that beholds it toward a king. Focus: it changes the subject from Iran, and from the Epstein files, to marble. Insight: it sees nothing that Versailles did not see. Six failures. The turn is away from the Right. The installation is Disinfolklore, and it is what losing the battle of our age looks like in granite.

The actor

In Outflanking Dugin, my book on the Russian writer sold to the West as Putler’s philosopher, I wrote about how the Russist state manufactures a Wise Counsellor. The philosopher framing around Dugin, I argued, is a production. It has a casting director. It has a costume. It has a backstory. It has a daughter as supporting character, or a former daughter, and a marketing strategy in the Western press. None of that is evidence that the man at the centre is a philosopher. All of it is evidence that the apparatus around him, the Russian state security apparatus, is in the business of manufacturing the appearance of one. The Wise Counsellor archetype is being manufactured in real time, by a state-deployed apparatus, around an actor who is playing the role to the apparatus’s specification. The role exists because the apparatus needs it. It needs a thinking head to appear attached to its enterprises, so that they do not look like the brutal, acquisitive violence they are. The role’s content matters much less to the apparatus than the role’s existence.

Change one noun and you have Washington. The Monarch archetype is being manufactured in real time, around an actor who is playing the role to the eparchy’s specification. The role exists because the eparchy needs it, as cover. It needs a crowned head to appear attached to the rinsing, so that the rinsing does not look like what it is. They are rinsing the Mana, the power, out of our community, and they have no right to. The content of the gold matters much less than the existence of the gold. A ballroom will do. An arch will serve. A gold Liberty with wings is acceptable. Lions are as good as anything else. What matters is that the actor keeps producing the appearance of a king while the people around him keep doing what they do, to a clock that runs out in two and a half years. He is their front, not their monarch.

Sloterdijk adds the refinement that makes the trick work. Reading Hitler’s own account of his method in Mein Kampf, he observes that the concept of play-acting does not fully grasp it. The suggestion begins in the politician himself. The speaker’s own consciousness is the first addressee. They begin to believe their own lies. They troll inside their own minds. Trolling, emotion-moving activity of body, speech and mind, goes on inside all of our minds, and we can catch one part of the mind trolling us toward something not in our interest and run it through the Code, just as we can run anything Donald says through the Code. The actor who believes he is the king is the perfect instrument, because he never breaks character. In his mind, l’état c’est moi. He has said that in America the impossible is what we do best. He meant himself.

A troll installing a troll as a troll: that was how I first put it, in a post. A turner, turning a Republic, by way of a turned man, around a ceremonial axis. The direction is what the Code judges, and an installation on the ceremonial axis is an emotion-moving activity of the most permanent sort our species has. It moves minds in stone, for centuries. The direction of this one is measured by who it is for.

Spotts

On 6 September 2026 I saw a post by the lawyer George Conway quoting one line from Hitchens’s piece. A former Administration official had told her that the President was trying to project an image of American greatness, and had then suggested she consult a book, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, by the historian Frederic Spotts. I opened it that day. The chapter was already drafted.

Spotts is a first-rate historian. I read history as an undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin, so I appreciate a good one, and the book is a great one. His thesis is that the aesthetic was not the decoration on Hitler’s politics but its core, the means of his grip. What Stalin accomplished through terror, he writes, Hitler achieved through seduction, using a new style of politics mediated through symbols, myths, rites, spectacles and personal dramatics. Though he took away democratic government, he gave Germans what they clearly found a more meaningful sense of political participation, transforming them from spectators into participants in National Socialist theatre. In Munich in February 2025 I said the same of us: that we are no longer spectators looking on at MAGA America with polite revulsion, but participants picking up and repeating its Disinfolklore. Spotts and I met at the same sentence.

He opens in the bunker. It is 13 February 1945. The Russians are on the Oder, a hundred miles away. Hitler sits for hours over a model of his home town of Linz, worrying that the bell tower may be too tall, specifying that the carillon must play a theme from Bruckner’s Fourth. Military battles are eventually forgotten, he had said. Our buildings, however, will stand. The model consoled him as the Reich, and it was his Reich, came down around him.

Then Spotts describes the axis Hitler planned for Berlin. A statesman coming to be received by Hitler in the rebuilt city would arrive at a mammoth railway station, pass under a colossal Arch of Triumph, progress down a grand boulevard, pass a gigantic Soldiers’ Hall and finally reach a Great Hall, the largest building in the world. By the time he reached Hitler’s study he would be overwhelmed with the sense that he was standing before the lord of the world. Lord of the world, Spotts writes, is what Hitler dreamed of being, and through architecture he intended to manifest it. Manifest carries the M-N-. A straight line, with a gate of triumph on it, built to turn every visitor who walked it.

The arch was there from the start. In 1925, the year Mein Kampf was published, Hitler kept a sketchbook. It contains floor plans of museums and theatres. It also contains sketches of tanks, artillery, warships, and a gigantic triumphal arch for a Berlin boulevard that did not yet exist. The arch was to be 386 feet high, so that it dwarfed the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, at a mere 164, and made the Brandenburg Gate beside it look like a toy. The tanks and the arch are in the same sketchbook.

Much of what Hitchens reports is in Spotts too, about another man. The Reich Chancellery, on the very night Hitler was appointed, was a mere cigar box, worthless for representational purposes. In 2010 Donald rang the Obama White House to say that state dinners were held in shitty little tents and that he built ballrooms. Hitler chose the sites, the architects, the materials and the completion dates himself. As a young man in Linz, when the city chose to patch its old opera house rather than build a new one, he grumbled to a friend that their excellencies had as much idea of theatre construction as a hippopotamus has of playing a violin. Donald shops for marble in person, rings the quarry master himself, and parted with his architect over size. In 1937 Hitler had a law passed giving him formal authority to seize any property and build whatever he wished. Military expansion and urban construction, Spotts says of that year, were to be pursued simultaneously and ultimately for a similar purpose. You have zero zoning conditions, he was told. You’re the President. Goebbels explained the purpose of the gigantic building projects with perfect clarity: these little countries have a pathetic sense of their own greatness, but when their people come to Germany they are simply bowled over by the size and power of the Reich. Archetyping by masonry, stated by the man in charge of it. And Spotts’s own summary is the sentence Hitchens’s Cabinet secretary needed. At the very time Hitler was doing away with democracy and civil liberties, establishing concentration camps, planning the Holocaust, crushing trade unions and instituting anti-Semitic policies, he never lacked time for the most detailed attention to these projects. Not a diversion. One project.

There is one difference between Spotts’s Hitler and the man on the roundabout, and it is the point. Spotts’s Hitler meant it. He was the artist and the sovereign in one skull. He embodied, or purported to embody, the magico-religious aspect of sovereignty in one skull, and his style was neoclassical stone with the ornament stripped off, because, as he said himself, simplicity, power and austerity were the traits of his ideology. Donald’s style is Versailles and Disney, gilt and lions and a fairy godmother’s guest list. And Donald, on my reading, is not the artist. He is the actor cast as the artist. A sincere aesthete installs himself. An actor is installed. That difference does not make the second case safer. It makes it harder to see, because everyone is looking at the actor, and the actor is very, very good.

Spotts had no reason to look for the Rch, and did not. He quotes the historian George Mosse saying, on behalf of the liberal left, that we failed to see that the fascist aesthetic reflected the needs and hopes of contemporary society, that what we brushed aside as the so-called superstructure was in reality the means through which most people grasped the fascist message. That is Archetyping, named by a historian without the word. With the word, and I have introduced Archetyping as a verb, and with the cryptotype under it, the parallel stops being a feeling one has about gold and becomes a mechanism one can read. Hitler’s own rule in Mein Kampf was love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half and half. Sloterdijk called that programme the grammar of stupefaction. That grammar is the arta and drauga of Behistun inverted, the Lie installed where the Right stood and labelled Right. Unified Reich, the phrase in the video of May 2024, has the Rch in it. Those who shared it, appalled or otherwise, shared the sound.

What is to be done

Name the installation. It is the only move that engages the mechanism, and it is what I am doing here.

The fact-checker arrives too late and at the wrong level. You cannot fact-check a network called Truth, because the name is not making a falsifiable claim. Truth carries the writ sound itself, in its second letter and its penultimate one. The name is occupying a pole. The historian who debates the architectural merits of a triumphal arch has already lost, because she has accepted the frame that this is architecture, and it is not architecture. It is Archetyping through masonry, with the sound of Right doing the work in the very words we use to describe it. The preservationist who argues the ballroom’s cost and heritage has accepted that it is a building. It is not a building. It is a folktale. Refute the installation and you transmit it. Talking about the gold as taste leaves the archetype uninspected. Naming it as an installed archetype is the inspection. Name it and it begins to fail, because an archetype works only while it passes the gates of the Inner Realm uninspected, and a named archetype is an inspectable one.

Sloterdijk found the ancestor of this move in Diogenes of Sinope, the philosopher who lived in a tub in Athens and, in one telling at Corinth, told Alexander the Great to get out of his sun. Sloterdijk calls it kynicism, with a k, to keep it apart from the cynicism of the masters. It is cheekiness from below. It is existence in resistance, in laughter, in refusal. Two sets of two words, he says, each deflate false pretensions. So what? And why not? It does not argue with the arch. It says what the arch is, and laughs. A Positive Troll is a kynic with a Code. The laughter is the same. The Code adds Generosity to it, so that the laughter never curdles into the thing it is laughing at, and Right, so that it never lies to win. Naming is a turn too. It is the same movement as the installation, run back toward the straight line.

The turn and the line

The motorcade went round the traffic circle slowly. The arch is not to stand on the line. It is to stand in a turn at the end of the line, in the middle of a roundabout, at the one point where the straightest line the Republic draws stops being straight and the traffic goes round and round. The two sounds of this piece sit on that spot. The line is the R-T- of right and straight and rule, the rex tracing his boundary, the Right our family moralised after the Anatolians left. The turn is the T-R- of troll and triumph and the man who wants the gate. The straight line is Right. The ceremonial axis is for turning on it.

Six years after the notebook, the turning was measured. In The Frame and the Field I gave the same data-analytic instrument NorthEuraLex, a database of 107 languages of northern Eurasia with 1,016 concepts in each, and asked it which meanings the r-sound leans on, with no field of my choosing imposed on it. It answered turning. Words on the turning field carry the sound at 33.5 per cent, against 13.6 per cent everywhere else, an odds ratio of 3.25. A word on the turning field carries the sound at three times the odds of a word taken at random. The chance of that by accident is three in a thousand billion billion. Three hundred fake fields, each the size of the real one, were drawn against it and none of them reached it. Seven unrelated language families carry it, Indo-European among them. Amazonia has the same turning-r, in languages that never met a steppe cart, and cart has the R-T- in it: Aché prɨrɨ, to roll, Tacana kere-kere, to stir, Waurá weri-weri, to circle. Hittite has it, in hurki-, the wheel, and tarku-, to whirl, which is why the window is after the Anatolians left. The turning is human. What is ours alone is the overlay measured at the start of this piece, the 2.47 our neighbours do not have. The hunch of 2020 and the measurement of 2026 are one thing, the same phenomenon six years apart, with state-of-the-art instruments available to me now that were not available to me then.

So the two halves of the work, the writ and the turning, meet on one straight line in Washington. The trolls I began with in 2020 are turners still. The Right I measured in 2026 is the line. Trolling is the movement across the axis between the turn and the line, and the Code is the instrument that says which way a given turn goes. A troll under a bridge turns a traveller. A troll at a rally turns a crowd. A troll with a quarry master on the phone and a golden lectern turns a Republic, and sets the turn in granite so that it goes on turning minds for centuries, if we let him. That turn has already been run through the six, and it failed every one of them. It is the crooked installed on the straight and labelled Right, and what it displaces is the public’s right to take part in decision-making. That is a human right. It is what the Second World War was fought to establish. It is in the Covenant, and in very many human rights instruments around the world. As a diplomat in Kosovo, working on behalf of the American people, I helped train Kosovo’s legislators to secure the public’s right to participate in decision-making. Now the American President is doing his best to prevent the public from participating in it. We cannot let this stand. We cannot let this turning stand, this turning away from rightness, away from straightness.

Six thousand years ago our ancestors decided that the straight is the right and the turn is the lie. Every troll since has worked the gap between the two. The man on the roundabout is working it in stone. The Positive Troll’s answer is the same turn run the other way. Name the installation, and the arch turns back into what it is: a curve set in a turning circle at the end of a straight line, by a man who was asked who it was for.

The arch, as he has redrawn it, will block the view of the cemetery and of the Lincoln Memorial. Its construction will be heard across the river. Hitchens gives it one line: owing to constant construction noise, daily burials at the cemetery would no longer take place in silence.

That is the sound of the installation of an archetypally-borne troll inside our inner minds. Who is it for? He told us. We cannot let this stand.

One morning in April 2026 a US fighter pilot was supposedly pulled out from behind enemy lines in Iran. At night. That is the story we were told. We do not really know what happened. The likelier reading is that the United States military made an astonishingly unsuccessful attempt to steal nuclear material from Iran, then concocted a story about a fallen aircraft, the loss of many jets, and a heroic escape for an pilot nobody has yet seen. Some of us remember the cacophony of that week, which was then succeeded by all sorts of other stuff. On that very day Donald was circling the ceremonial axis of the Republic outside Arlington National Cemetery. He had his motorcade drive slowly round a traffic circle. He was focusing on a patch of grass in the middle of a roundabout, while the supposed airman, who may or may never have existed, struggled under unspecified injuries, rescued, it was reported, by hundreds of other heroic US military.

Part 2 of this two-parter is available here (though this is stand-alone and one of my best podcasts.

He wants to put an arch on that grass. A triumphal arch, like the one in Paris, 250 feet high, concrete wrapped in granite, with a 60-foot gold Liberty on top, wings on her back and golden eagles either side. Six months before, in the Oval Office, a reporter had pointed at the model and asked him who it was for. The Russian mafia Don answered: me.

Continued:

This week’s podcast is about an arch act of trolling: installing the monarch archetype at the ceremonial axis of the Republic, perhaps the greatest republic humanity has ever experienced, and probably now in its closing stages.

A duty to retain the Republic

All of us have a duty, and especially the Americans amongst us, to fight to retain the Republic in the jurisdiction of the United States. France has had five or six republics. There is no reason why there cannot be a second American republic, one that takes account of all the errors the Don and his enablers, the eparchy, have brought to the fore of so many minds.

It must be said what it is like, at this point, to read the august commentators upon whom I and many others used to rely, in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the other great institutions of the Republic. They take the ballroom at face value. They write serious pieces about the arch. They write sniffy, snobby pieces about gold in the White House. They share the memes the White House releases, to express their disapproval, and in sharing them they keep them alive. That is one of the sadder aspects of all this.

Last week a senior US Army officer in Canada pooh-poohed a very competent Canadian journalist who asked him the straight question. What would you do if the commander-in-chief ordered you to invade Canada? I do not impugn the integrity of ordinary soldiers. I do impugn the integrity of commanders who would rather keep their jobs than state clearly to Canada, a NATO ally and one of the United States’ strongest supporters, that under no circumstances would they obey an unlawful order to invade it. That lack of integrity, that lack of professionalism, is exactly what has led to the catastrophic war in Iran, in which America has expended most of its available munitions and all of its political capital in the Middle East, and has made a superpower of the mullah-led, undemocratic regime in Tehran. The US Army is engaged in the most heinous war crimes in an unlawful war. The Navy feeds its sailors starvation rations on ships without proper sanitation. Meanwhile the bombing goes on. Full kudos to the brave officers who resigned, or were fired by the Russian mafia-led administration, rather than follow unlawful orders. We can say that this is just Don and his Russian mafia enablers. It is on all of us that it is happening.

My speciality is to look for the folkloric archetypes in the everyday stories that some people call news and I call Disinfolklore, or Infolklore. So while all that was going on in Iran, or not going on, and we may never know, Donald, the Don, the Russian mafia Don, was looking at a patch of grass.

The straight line

The spot where he stopped his motorcade is the western end of a straight line. Pierre L’Enfant, the French engineer George Washington hired to lay out the capital, drew it across a marsh in 1791. The McMillan Commission carried it west over reclaimed river flats in 1902. It runs from the Capitol down the Mall, past the Washington Monument, along the Reflecting Pool to the Lincoln Memorial, over Memorial Bridge, which I crossed many times as a postgrad at Georgetown, and up the hill to the old house at Arlington. Americans call it the ceremonial axis. It is the straightest line the Republic draws. Focus on that word. Straight. And everything the Republic does on that line is a turning. A power is handed on at one end of it. A parade wheels at the Capitol and comes back. A cortege turns off the bridge into the cemetery.

We have written evidence of this institution from India and from Ireland, the two ends of the Indo-European world, going back thousands of years. When the same institution turns up at the extreme ends of a language family, scholars like me take it to come from a common source. The institution is the inauguration of the king. The monarch rides along a straight line, on a horse that is later sacrificed, or in a chariot driven by a charioteer who represents the military function. The straight line wheels around what would become, in Buddhism, the stupa.

So back to Washington, DC, an Indo-European community. The arch is to stand in a turn at the end of a straight line. The whole of what follows is in those two shapes. Turning, T-R-. Straight, R-T-. The R-T- of right, writ and truth is in straight. In the Indo-European languages, the family English belongs to, the human who draws the straight line is the monarch. The one who turns you is the troll.

Hitchens’s evidence

Antonia Hitchens in The New Yorker has written the fullest account anyone has of what has been done to that line, and to the house at the other end of it. Her piece, “Donald Trump’s Capital Makeover” (4 September 2026), is excellent. It is patient. It is fair to everyone in it. It is just. It assembles more of the facts than anything else in print. The ballroom. The arch. The paved-over Rose Garden. Has anyone here read Oscar Wilde’s tales about what happens when you cut the rose? The gold. The East Wing, knocked down in three days, for anyone looking for a symbol of what has happened to the First Republic. The drained pool, the donors, the money, the fired commissioners. Everything I read here as evidence is in it. If you have not read it, perhaps this piece will send you to it.

What follows is my reading of that evidence. From 2015 to 2018, just as MAGA was unfurling its war magic on the American people, I was in the tiger’s den, in Russia-occupied Luhansk, as a diplomat. I read Russian Combat Propaganda every day. I watched what it did to the minds around me. And I was, unwillingly but unavoidably, a participant in the stories I would learn to call Disinfolklore, archetypal stories that infect our minds with a meanness we could not have imagined a few moments earlier. Washington in 2026, I am afraid, reads the same way. It is ten years on, and the lessons of Russia-occupied Ukraine, even before the full-scale invasion, were learned by only a handful of Westerners who lived there and lived to tell the tale. I was one of them. Had we been more vocal at the time, we might have persuaded people that this was coming for us all. The AfD. Brexit. Donald. The National Rally. What almost happened in Romania. Every one of our countries is being subjected to what I called, in my Munich speech of February 2025, the Disinfolklore galaxies being impressed upon our minds.

What Hitchens’s piece does not have is a name for what all those facts are evidence of. Nor, frankly, does anyone else. America’s political culture has been talking about the gold trimmings, the ballroom and the arch for a year, sniffily, appalled, entertained, memeing it into existence while criticising its gaucheness, as it has always done with Donald. If you are a Russian mafia Don, part of you wants to be in the in-group. You can go to an Ivy League school, the same one my grandfather went to. You can send your daughter there. You can try to make it with the old money in Manhattan. Or you can build a movement that attracts some of them. But ultimately you do not care, because you are adjacent to the Russian mafia and you look down on all those other people.

So while a war goes badly in Iran, nobody in the conversation has named what the gold is doing. They think it is taste. They think Donald cares that they are sniffing at his taste. While we critique it from the perspective of aesthetics and interior design, we miss what it actually is. It is an installation of archetypal Disinfolklore in our minds. Not in any part of our mind. In our inner minds.

Don, to give him the name I use, because I refuse to use the second one, is installing a Monarch archetype in architectural form on the ceremonial axis of the Republic, the wheel around which the whole Republic spins. Note the arch in archetype, the arch in monarch, the arch in architectural. And it is worse than that. Donald is only acting the part of the monarch. He is taking the accoutrements of Louis XIV and adding them wherever he can, because that is the stage set. It is not who he is or what he cares about. He is the front. The front man. The front of house. The shop window. Behind the actor is an eparchy, a board that rules from behind the man who appears to rule. Eparchy carries the same R-C-H sound, and it is a very old institution in Indo-European society. We have written evidence of it, dealt with brilliantly by Harold Bailey in his work on the second stratum of the Indo-Iranian gods. And that eparchy, in case any of us have not noticed, is rinsing the Republic dry. Of its weapons. Of its soldiers. Of its Mana. Of its fiscal rectitude, its reputation, its beauty, its truth, its people. While we watch the gold and say, gosh, that’s so gauche.

Two sounds

Three words. Arch. Archetype. Monarch. And a fourth, eparchy. The same three letters sit inside each of them, R-C-H, and they carry the same meaning in each, below the level of the dictionary. Rule. The Right pattern. The one who is in charge, who has the right, who traces the straight line.

Our Indo-European languages have carried that meaning in that sound for 6,000 years. The root the linguists reconstruct is written reǵ-, and glossed to stretch out a rod, to make straight, to rule. From it English has right and rule and reign and regulate and correct and direct and region and rector, and a million other words. German has Reich, or Donald’s Unified Reich. French has droit, its word for law, which is also its word for straight, with the R-T- still in it. Latin had rex, the king, and regula, the straight-edge a builder lays along a wall, which is our ruler in both of its senses, the schoolroom’s and the monarch’s. Émile Benveniste, the great French Indo-Europeanist, whom I studied as an international lawyer at Cambridge, devoted a chapter to that root in 1969 and showed how it spread through the vocabulary of government across the Indo-European world. Beside those words sit others that the dictionaries file under different headings. Sanskrit ṛta, cosmic order, the way things rightly are. Old Persian arta, truth and right order, which the Achaemenid kings set against drauga, the Lie. Darius, their king of kings, a true emperor, names the Lie again and again on the cliff at Behistun, 500 years before the Common Era. Greek archē, beginning and rule, the arch in monarch and in archetype, where it is the Right pattern. The ear hears the R and the guttural and knows what it is being told.

That kind of hearing has a name. Benjamin Lee Whorf, the great American linguist, who sometimes taught at Yale, coined the word cryptotype in a paper printed in 1945, after his death, for a pattern of meaning that a language carries without its speakers knowing it is there. A cryptotype is a sound-meaning bundle. It is not just the sound, R-C-H. It is the bundle between that signifier and what it means, and it works beneath awareness. The Rch is one. It runs under right and reign and Reich and archetype and monarch and arch, whichever drawer the etymologist keeps each word in, whichever etymon each is traced to, and it says one thing. This is the straight pattern, the Right one, the one that rules.

The measurement

I have measured this. In my monograph The Frame and the Field, in chapter nine, I ran the words for straight, right, correct, true and rule in the living Indo-European languages through a data-analytic instrument and asked how often they carry the r-sound. The answer was an odds ratio of 2.47. A word on that field carries the r at two and a half times the odds of a word taken at random from the language. The same instrument run on the neighbouring families returned Uralic at 0.77, Mongolic at 0.58 and Dravidian at 0.49. Those families sit at or below parity, which is one. In their languages the straight and the right do not share a sound. In ours they do. And if you can listen to this, or read it, in an Indo-European language, then when I say ours, you are one of ours, whether or not your genes carry the steppe ancestry that most of the half of humanity who speak an Indo-European language carry, from the Yamna community at Mykhailivka village in eastern Ukraine, according to Nikitin et al.’s paper in Nature of February 2025.

In most other languages on planet Earth, the straight is just straight. Ours is right as well. It has a moral element. I contend we made that decision in a particular window, after the Anatolian branch, the ancestors of the Hittites, had left the steppe around 4000 BCE, and that we have been living inside it ever since. Anatolian sadly died. Every living Indo-European language carries this aspect of straightness. It means moral rightness, rectitude and rule.

The turn

The straight line has a partner, and it is the other sound in this piece. Under the straight, in every language I have looked at, sits the turn. The r of wheel and rotate and turn and troll. Picture it as an axis. At one end is writ, R-T-, the sound-meaning bundle in all its costumes. At the other end is T-R-. Remember the inscription at Behistun, where Darius the Great had carved into stone, in cuneiform, in three languages, the opposition of arta, the truth of the rightful sovereign, to drauga, the Lie, the attitude of the sovereign who usurps. That D-R comes, through recognised sound changes, to T-R-. So the axis runs from R-T- to T-R-. Almost every language I looked at, using the NorthEuraLex database, has the pair that every language has, turn and straight. One family moralised it. In Indo-European the straight became the right, the true and the lawful. The turned became the crooked, the twisted, the deceiver, the drauga, the usurper. I did not find the T-R- signifier in an Eskimo language, or in a couple of Native American languages, but it is in practically every language on earth. That is human. Then one family, ours, took the sound and its meaning and made of it a moral axis: the right, R-T-, and its reversal, T-R-.

So our languages carry two sounds for one axis. The R-T- of right, straight, truth and rule is the line itself. It is the Rch by another spelling. The root’s last consonant surfaces as g, k, ch or t in the daughter languages, rex, Reich, arch, right, and the ear files them together, whichever Indo-European language we are speaking. The T-R- of turning is what moves along the line and across it. A triumph is a procession that turns through a gate, and the word carries the T-R- of turning in its first syllable. So does the surname of the man who wants the gate. None of this is coincidence. Trying to understand what he did in the autumn of 2019 is what sent me on this turning, this journey, six years through thousands of texts in every living Indo-European tradition, back as far as texts go and, before that, to what remains in almost every sentence we speak today. Standing on the shoulders of giants, I can discern from them much of what I am telling you here. The sound says movement: travel, transit, trans. It does not say which way.

Benveniste read the rex exactly. The rex, he wrote, is not so much the sovereign as the one who traces out the line, and the line he traces is also what is right. Regere fines is to draw the boundaries straight. Regio is the point reached by a straight line. The title named the man who drew the line, and the line was the law.

The ceremonial axis is the straightest line our republic draws, or any republic draws. A man who sets a 250-foot arch on it, and says me when asked who it is for, is performing the oldest act of kingship our languages know. He is tracing the line. He does not need to know he is doing it. Neither do we. A cryptotype works whether or not anyone is listening.

An arch is a curve. The Latin arcus is a bow. The sound carries the kingship. The shape helps it. A triumphal arch is a gate. The straight line runs through it, and the conqueror, who has lost in Iran, rides the line through the curve, and the curve frames him. The axis of the Republic is to pass through one man’s gate, and the gate is to stand in a roundabout.

Monarch carries two sounds of its own. The dictionary gives mono, one, and archē, rule: one ruler. Under that sits a second bundle, measured in the same book. The M-N- of mind, moon, measure, man and name. The moon was the first measurer, of months, and this very week Donald claimed the moon. The sound of the measurer runs through Mana too. Across the living Indo-European languages, m and n keep company in the words of that field at eight times the odds of chance. A monarch, at the level of the sound, is the moon-ruler, the one who measures and rules. Archetype is a Right pattern. An arch is the Rch cast in stone. Three surfaces. One sound. To put a triumphal arch on the axis of a republic is to write the word for king across the Republic’s own line, in granite, in letters 250 feet high, in a script the conscious mind cannot read and the unconscious cannot fail to.

The Right and the right

That Rch sound has been arriving in our political talk for a couple of years. I marked my noticing of Unified Reich, in a video posted to Donald’s own account in May 2024, with a considered post at the time. Everything that is happening today was signalled in the past, and some of us picked up the signals and did our best to amplify them. We are where we are. Arch. Archetype. Monarchy. Oligarchy. Right, and the Reich. The words are entering our most serious political discourse because the sound inside them does a job, and the job is the oldest fight our languages record.

The struggle to define what is Right is the struggle. In every Indo-European community since the Yamna first spoke the ancestor of our languages on the Dnipro, whoever controls who gets to carry the word Right, and its meaning, has had the advantage over everyone else competing for that community’s people, resources and territory. Darius knew it. In his inscription, drauga, the Lie, is the attitude of the usurper, the man who pretends to be the monarch in place of the rightful one. Remember that D often turns to T. The sound shift between D-R and T-R is a documented one. And this is from 500 BCE, carved in stone. It is not something that began on 6 January.

In America, we the people are the monarch. L’état c’est nous. The definition of democracy is the identity of sovereign and subject. It is not the identity of a monarch with sovereignty. It is the identity of the people with sovereignty. That is what Donald is trying to usurp, and the eparchy that supports and controls him is trying to usurp it with him.

The Irish knew it too. The Audacht Morainn, the Testament of Morann, written down around 700 CE but from much further back, warns that when a sovereign tells untruths, plague and pestilence and invasion come to ruin his land and turn it into a waste land. That motif, the waste land that follows a lying ruler, entered European literature by way of Ireland and Wales and Chrétien de Troyes’ first version of the Grail tales, and from there came back onto the island of Britain, into Monty Python, into our minds, and into T.S. Eliot.

In a healthy community the political Right, the legal right and the moral right are one thing, or aspire in good faith to be. A Margaret Thatcher quotation was going round this week, and it reminds one that the political Right used to have our backs. It used to stand for what is lawful, what is morally right, the protection of territorial integrity. In our time the Right has a text. It is the post-1945 legal order: the United Nations Charter, the laws of war, the human rights conventions, the Genocide Convention, and at its centre the public’s human right to take part in the decisions, which the eparchy wishes to take away from us. That right is inalienable and universal. It is not yet realised everywhere on earth. But nobody has the right to take it away, and that was the result of the Second World War. French keeps the memory in a single word. Droit is law, and droit is right.

In March 2025, when Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Friedrich Merz in Germany, both of the political Right, held to Ukraine’s right to its sovereignty, security, territorial integrity, prosperity and fertility against MAGA, I wrote that they were acting as a dam, and might yet be the saviours of what is right in the global Right. Friedrich Merz carries the Rch sound twice, in Friedrich and in Merz, and the sound is in sovereignty, in security, in territorial integrity, in prosperity, in fertility. Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a sceptre in his right hand at his inauguration, and shook it in the Verkhovna Rada, the parliament of Ukraine, as the rightful sovereign. The King of England held the rod at his coronation. Look at the photographs. A straight rod, stretched out, in his right hand.

The battle of our age is whether the lawful and moral Right can be recoupled with the political Right, or whether a Russia-sponsored right, MAGA in America, Reform in Britain, the AfD in Germany and their kin, keeps the word and empties it. They claim to be Right. Inside is the energy of unrightfulness, the energy of the usurper, the energy of someone who takes the straight line of the Republic and puts on it a triumphal arch dedicated to me. At the moment we are losing that battle. Many of us are helping to fight it. This is part of what I can do: try to show the seriousness of what is going on under all these stories about ballrooms and arches and planning permissions and Congress.

Acquiring a monarch

I first wrote that the United States was acquiring a monarch on 6 July 2024. Five days earlier its Supreme Court had granted the President immunity for his official acts and forbidden the courts to examine his motives. In a common-law system the motive is the mens rea, the guilty mind, the energy in the act. I call that energy Mana, with its M-N-. A ruler whose Mana may not be examined is a ruler whose Mana is, by definition, Right. That is a monarch. This is essentially establishing a monarchy, I wrote that week, in which the Mana of the Monarch is necessarily Rch, or Right. L’état c’est moi, the state is me, the line our culture gives Louis XIV. I called it oligarchy’s monarchist turn, publicly, time-stamped on somebody else’s clock, and I described the man at the front of it as a cartoonish entertainer promoted by twenty oligarchs through every media outlet as a cartoonish aspirant monarch. That was two years ago. The East Wing came down fifteen months later. We cannot say we were not warned. The signs were there, and the signs are there today. In two years, where will we be, unless we read them properly?

Trolls

Trolling, in my work, is any emotion-moving activity of body, speech or mind. It is turning. A troll turns you. T-R-, troll. T-R-, turn. These are not plays on words. They are immanences in the Indo-European languages.

The word first caught me in December 2018, reading the reports on the social media campaign the Russians ran to get Donald elected in 2016. My project began in earnest in the spring of 2020, when I read my way through some 64,000 uses of the words troll and trolling in the Dow Jones Factiva database of 33,000 media sources going back to 1970, to see what our culture had been doing with the word before and after the internet took it. The received story is a fishing metaphor, a baited line trailed behind a boat, crossed with the creature under the bridge. Trailed carries the T-R- too. What came back from the press was not fishing. It was turning. The troll turns an audience. The troll spins a room. The troll works a crowd around. Then I found George Cornewall Lewis, a Victorian scholar and politician, writing in The Classical Museum in January 1844 on the verb to tirl, saying it flatly in a footnote and going no further: to troll means to turn or roll. By November 2020 the chain was written out in one line in a notebook, time-stamped by Microsoft OneNote. Pierce, trowel, drill, twirl, spiral, turn around, hole, move around, wander, roll, control, baiting, trolling, thrill, enthralled, singing, trill, passing the bowl around, troll. Yeats’s perne in a gyre, the spool turning in that poem we learned at school, sits beside the chain in a letter of the same autumn. The songbird’s trill is in the chain, and it is the mouth doing the turning. So is the thrill, which is an audience’s feelings being moved around.

The first time the words Trump and trolling met in the Factiva archive was on 31 March 1990, in the Boston Globe, in the angler’s sense. TRUMP IS TROLLING, the headline ran. HOPES TO LURE JAPANESE BUYER FOR LUXURY YACHT PRINCESS. He was trailing a line, while complaining about the Japanese buying up American bonds.

The Code of Positive Trolls

A turn has a direction, and direction carries the Rch too. The direction is everything. Move a mind toward the Right pattern and you are a Positive Troll, and what you make is Infolklore, folklore that moves a mind toward what is truly right, what is in concert with the post-war legal order. Move it away, toward fabrication, and you are the other kind, and what you make is Disinfolklore. You are the usurper Darius wrote about 500 years before the Common Era. Trolling itself is neither. It is neutral. It is movement, and nothing more. So we need a means of deciding whether a given movement is positive or negative. Does it promote the post-war legal order, or demote it and promote the social and legal conditions of Germany in the 1930s? Trolling is the movement across the axis between the turn and the line.

To tell the two apart I use a six-part test, the Code of Positive Trolls, which I trademarked at the European Union Intellectual Property Office in February 2020. Its six criteria are old. They are the six perfections of the Buddhist path, carried onto information warfare. Generosity. Have you ever heard Donald being generous? Right, which is ethical discipline, śīla. Patience. How quickly are they knocking down these buildings? How quickly is he trying to erect this arch? Energy, which is Mana, the affective charge. Read the Mana. He claims to be a monarch. Is he going to be one? Not in a republic. And the eparchy is behind him anyway, the Epstein class, the Brighton Beach mafia class. Focus. Insight. Right is the second perfection, and it carries our sound. Energy is the fourth, vīrya, which Dale S. Wright, the American scholar of Buddhism, in his Oxford study of the six perfections, traces back to the warrior’s power and glosses as the energy of accomplishment, the effort, courage and power to see a spiritual endeavour through. In my work that energy is Mana. The Code asks what the charge in a meme is, visual or linguistic, and which way it moves a mind. Look for the Mana in the meme is one of my mantras. Even the act of looking, before deciding anything, is a practice of patience, and it keeps us from mistakes. The mistake of sharing one of Donald’s memes, even to say we disagree with it, when the act of sharing is what keeps it alive, and is precisely why he unleashed it.

The troll’s history

The creature itself has a history worth keeping. Thomas Keightley, the Irish folklorist who wrote The Fairy Mythology in 1828, records that the trolls of Scandinavia once had kings over them, and that they lived in fantastically rich dwellings inside their hills. The rich are the right. If you have wealth, you are right. Rich, right. Does that sound like Bessent? Does he sound like a man who thinks he is right, even though he is in the Epstein files, when he bangs on as if he spoke for all Americans? He may be very rich. He is not at all right. We need to recouple richness with rightness. Every child who has heard Grieg knows the hall of the Mountain King. Gradually, Keightley says, the trolls’ status sank to that of the peasants who believed in them. Trolls are a mirror. They are as grand as the minds that hold them, and no grander. A troll-king’s rich hall under a hill is one more thing every child already knows, and it is exactly what is going up on the ceremonial axis of our republic.

Archetyping

By Archetyping I mean an aspect of cognition. We model the world, not with architectural models but with mental ones. We form ideals of things and navigate by them. The more open we are, the more we re-archetype the archetypes that guide us, and out of that continuous process comes movement, turning, whose direction the Code of Positive Trolls can judge. Aggregates of experience get archetyped as this or that, and new data is bounced off the archetype, which in most cases is fluid and updates. Sometimes it does not. Sometimes we form what I call a data-resistant archetype, a mental model that refuses the evidence. That Donald is our monarch, say. That MAGA is good. Values, reputations, stereotypes, mental architectures, characters: all of these are forms of Archetyping. Defining something is a form of it too.

I began writing about Archetyping under that name in December 2024. The thing itself I first saw in Luhansk, in 2016. One day a story landed on my desk and I noticed that it had been built. It was inorganic. It was a meme. It was as if a Russian propagandist had a manual of the primordial archetypes and had constructed the tale to make sure every element was in it. The Mother and the Maiden. The Bridge Troll. The Wise Counsellor. The Trickster. That was the day Disinfolklore was born, though the word came later, on 15 February 2023. Disinfolklore is disinformation married to folklore. It is folklore-like archetypes in ordinary news. Gold in the White House is a folklore archetype, but the archetypes are so familiar to us from the news and from films about Washington that we miss their archetypal value, their folklore-like immanence, the White House as something out of a folktale. The lies are the surface. Under them the operator, the manipulator, the turner, the troll, is reaching for narrative structures 6,000 years old, because those structures do cognitive work that a plain lie cannot.

MAIM

The work they do is this. Every informational unit that enters your mind can alter your Moods, your Attitudes, your Intentions and your Motivations. I abbreviate the four as MAIM. It is how a mind is turned. It is the model I use for how trolls turn our minds and manipulate our Mana, our inner energy. Take the disappointment you feel when you open the Washington Post in the morning and find one more story about Donald and a ballroom, and people arguing seriously over the plans and whether Congress should intervene. Meanwhile an archetype is being installed in your mind. Your mood is altered. Your attitude is altered. Your intentions: maybe you had planned to go to the Kennedy Center that day, and now you decide not to. Your motivations: you begin to give up. We must not give up. This is our republic, and the second republic will be our republic too.

The game is accumulative. It is worked over months and years, through daily artefacts that tell us we are small and humiliate us, and then the operators, the eparchy, Donald, pose as our saviours. First they distress the damsel. Then they claim the right to assuage the distress. I saw it again and again, at the micro and the macro level, in Russia-occupied Ukraine. They occupy a place. They get rid of the jobs. They export the metal and the factories. They imprison people, kill people, torture people. And then there is nothing left for the people to do but appeal to their ruler, their imprisoner. The merciless sovereign poses as the merciful sovereign, and the source of all our pain becomes the only person we can appeal to. Does that sound familiar, to anyone who followed what the DOGE firings did? Really arch stuff, DOGE.

The inner realm

Folklore studies has a geography for this. The Inner Realm is the known, the safe, the domestic. The Outer Realm is where the Mexicans live, in Donald’s universe, or the people who eat their dogs, or the immigrants, or the Democrats, or the Europeans, or the Canadians. The Outer Realm is the unknown, the dangerous, the foreign. The bridge is the threshold between them, and the troll sits under the bridge. Every mind has the same geography, and its sense of what is Right is kept in the Inner Realm. A well-built archetype passes the gates without being inspected. It does not argue. It resembles. Sir James Frazer, whose Golden Bough, first published in 1890, surveyed magic and religion across every culture he could reach, came to call the principle the Law of Similarity. Things that look alike affect each other. A doll that looks like the enemy harms the enemy. A politician who looks like a monarch is a monarch. A politician who looks strong is strong, in the minds of those who behold the image. That is the law of sympathetic magic. A deepfake does not need to be believed to work. It needs only to look like the real thing. The similarity activates the archetype. The Mana does the rest.

Mana is my name for the energy immanent in an archetype, the charge it carries, its power to move a mind from one state to another. It is the Energy of the Code, and the Code’s question about it is always the same: which way? Anyone can Archetype. The power belongs to all of us. But if you own the means of cultural production, the platforms, the outlets, the channels, the memes and the algorithms that distribute them, then you can Archetype at scale. Only an oligarch can do that. I do it at a very small scale.

Part two: the Russian state’s own dramaturg names the operation, a child reads the ballroom, what the gold is for, and what is to be done.

Continued:

As in all my work, I’m both working through these contemporaneous examples of writing and Ruschist Disinfolklore in order to apply and fine-tune the method, but I’m also hoping to then communicate some of the power of the method, which is the twelve-tool way, available at disinfolklore.eu.

Midnight Tea at the Kremlin

So the clock on the Kremlin tower had already struck midnight on the 28th of May 2025 when Andrey Melnichenko was finally summoned. Vladimir Putin greeted his guest, invited him to sit beside him, and offered him tea. Move closer, Andrey, Putler said kindly. A red folder lay in front of the president. Melnichenko guessed it was his own security service dossier. Is someone bothering you? Putler asked, with care.

Melnichenko told the president that the mistake of Russia’s business elite had been to separate their fate from the fate of Russia. He thanked the Russian dictator for helping him see the light. Putler was pleased. For years he had warned the oligarchs that they were not truly welcome in the West. Now one of the foremost among them had admitted that Putler was right. The audience lasted over an hour.

The scene is not mine. It is the opening scene of The Economist’s own profile of Melnichenko, published on the 9th of July 2026 in 1843, the paper’s long-read magazine, named for the year of its founding. The headline: a top Russian oligarch breaks the silence.

Why 1843 Matters in My Oeuvre

Some of you who have been following my work since the beginning of the full-scale invasion might recognise the significance of 1843 in my oeuvre. One of my first posts on Twitter regarding Russia was on the 4th of March 2022, when I was still employed as a diplomat for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. And I had, several years before, gone through all the documents I could find relating to the first Crimean War, to try to understand if it would give any insights into the current, the second Crimean War. And I found this amazing Economist article, which I then wrote about, in which it describes the perennial problems of the Russian army. And you won’t be surprised to know they are exactly the same problems that we see today.

Not only that, but even by the 4th of March 2022, it was clear, in the space of less than a week, that the perennial problems of the Russian army were still the ones that had afflicted it in 1853 — sorry, I’m muddling my dates; it was 1853 — and that afflict it today. So much so that the Washington Post saw my post, and Max Boot did an editorial based on it, basically saying the Russian army hasn’t changed at all since the first Crimean War.

So, to see this puff piece for a Ruschist. So: a man takes tea with the Tsar at midnight. He recants his Western life to the Tsar’s face. He is shown the folder that owns him. Ten months later, he breaks the silence in the West’s most trusted liberal weekly, while living in Moscow, unarrested, his factories defended by the Russian army. The silence was not broken. It was commissioned.

One Package, Two Vessels

The Economist didn’t publish one piece that week. It published two. The profile — 37 minutes of reading, built on 60 hours of granted conversation — tells us who the man is. And beside it, under the paper’s By Invitation rubric, the man’s own manifesto: why a broken Russia is bad for the world. The paper’s standfirst, the line under the headline that tells you what to think before you read, asserts his conclusion as if it were the weather: when the war in Ukraine ends, Moscow will need to be part of the new security architecture.

The two vessels carry one payload. The profile manufactures the character — the physicist, the outsider, the chaos theorist, the man who avoids ideological and moral judgments. The manifesto then delivers the policy: stop pressuring Russia, accept its sovereignty over everyone, and let its elites design what comes next. Character first, payload second. This is how you serve a troll to readers who think themselves too clever to be trolled.

I spent years inside Russia-occupied Ukraine from February 2015, watching how this machinery works on ordinary minds. I called what I found Disinfolklore: the narrative form in which meanness is communicated directly into people’s minds, working on their intentions, their attitudes and their moods, without their even knowing. The Melnichenko package is Disinfolklore of the highest grade. It is also 200 years old. That’s the point of this mission: the same families of Chekists and KGB men have been in charge of Russia for 200 years. Same genes, same memes — communism, empire, Russkiy Mir. Old wine, new bottles.

The Manifesto: A War With No Actors

The payload sits in the manifesto, so the manifesto comes first. It runs to some two and a half thousand words about the war in Ukraine. The word invasion appears nowhere in it. The name Putler appears nowhere in it. Bucha, nowhere. Mariupol, nowhere. The tens of thousands of Ukrainian children Russia has abducted appear nowhere. A Russian industrialist writes two and a half thousand words about this war for a Western audience, and the man who ordered it, and the people it is murdering, never come up.

Instead, the war has weather for causes. Great wars do not begin when the first shots are fired, the essay opens portentously. The front line is merely the point where accumulated pressure breaks through to the surface. Pressure accumulates. Bonds break. Politics does not direct events; it is led by them. Nobody decided anything. Nobody loaded the missile that hit the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv. Physics did it.

When the essay finally gives the war a verb, the verb has been chosen with jeweller’s care. In 2014, after what it calls the political upheaval in Ukraine — meaning the revolution in which Ukrainians died for the European future their president had stolen from them — Russia concluded that democracy had run its course, and then acted: first in Crimea, then, eight years later, across four eastern and southern Ukrainian regions. Acted. The largest invasion of a European country since 1945, the flattened cities, the eviscerated humans, the torture basements of Kherson and Izium, the filtration camps. Acted.

Then the single most revealing word in the whole document. The West’s support for Ukraine, the essay complains, is really a war on Russia in which, geographically, the fighting stays on Ukrainian soil. Formally, Ukrainians do the fighting. Formally? Twelve letters that erase a nation. Ukrainians are not, in this man’s account, defending their children from a neighbour who has come to murder them. They are a formality through which the West conducts its pressure. And when the essay concedes in one sentence that Ukrainian sovereignty is real, the next sentence takes it back: Ukraine’s security, built on the permanent negation of Russia’s sovereign agency, is equally unstable. In this grammar, Ukraine defending itself is an act of aggression against Ukraine.

The Menu of Four Futures

The essay’s core is a menu for genocide. It’s a menu of four futures for Russia, and the menu is the message. Future one: a Russia brought in from the cold but treated as a defeated power. That, we are told, breeds aggressive revanchism. And here comes the century-old chestnut, produced on schedule: Versailles was not the creation of order, but the accumulation of deferred energy. Mana, you might say. Punish us and you manufacture the next Hitler. Future two: Russia as China’s vassal. Future three: Russia fragments, and a fragmented country with a nuclear arsenal is America’s worst nightmare. Future four: Russia as a fortress — North Korea.

The Economist’s profile adds a detail the manifesto omits: this fourth scenario is promoted by the security services and subject to serious discussion in the Kremlin. That admission tells us the author knows the security services’ internal menu. The paper does not ask how he knows it.

Then the punchline. The forms are different; the systemic result is the same. Every path except one leads to catastrophe for us. The one safe path is his: lift the pressure, accept sovereign rights, let its elites — its oligarchy, in the classical sense of the word — design the future, and ask no questions from outside. Because how Russia conducts its own political process can be resolved only inside Russia itself. No tribunal, no reparations, no returned children. This must be accepted.

There is a name for an argument whose every branch ends in your ruin unless you pay. It’s a protection racket. Nice civilisation you have there, mate. Shame if something happened to it.

The Nuclear Wrapper, and Moscow’s Three Demands

The nuclear payload is delivered in the same style, dressed as concern: pushed too hard, and nuclear weapons become the background radiation of constant risk. The profile carries the same threat in the same wrapper: he does not rule out the use of nuclear weapons; that is an outcome he is desperate to avoid. The mafia lawyer is always desperate to avoid the outcome he’s just described to you in detail.

And in the middle of the racket, printed by The Economist itself without a word of challenge, sit Moscow’s actual demands, presented as moderation because they have narrowed to three: recognition of the territories Russia now claims under its constitution; legal protections of Russian-speaking populations; and a formal commitment to Ukrainian neutrality. The first demand means the legal surrender of Crimea and four Ukrainian regions, including land Russia has never actually managed to occupy. The second re-arms the exact pretext on which the invasion was launched. The third disarms the victim. These are the maximal war aims of February 2022, relabelled as a compromise in the West’s most respected weekly.

The Factory: From the Third Section to Operation Trust

Nothing above is new. Russia’s opposition is a state product, with a two-century product line, and the security services are the factory. In 1826, after the Decembrist officers rose against him, Nicholas I founded the Third Section, the empire’s political police. Its successor, the Okhrana, learned the trade’s great secret: do not suppress the opposition — manufacture it. Own the vessel into which discontent flows, and you own the discontent.

Around 1901, the Okhrana officer Zubatov built exactly that: police-run trade unions, workers’ movements founded and steered by the secret police so that real workers’ anger would pour into state-controlled channels. The priest Gapon — Georgy Gapon — who led the 1905 march that ended in the Bloody Sunday massacre, ran an assembly founded under police patronage. Yevno Azef, the head of the Socialist Revolutionaries’ terrorist wing, was the most feared revolutionary in Russia. He was on the Okhrana’s payroll at a thousand roubles a month. Nice work if you can get it, mate.

The Bolsheviks inherited the factory and improved the product. From 1921 to 1926, the Cheka’s successors ran Operation Trust, a fake monarchist underground built by the secret police. Its genius was not just catching real oppositionists — it lured the revolutionary Savinkov and the British agent Sidney Reilly to their deaths. Its genius was its effect on us. The Trust persuaded Western governments and intelligence services that a serious opposition already existed inside the system: evolutionary, reasonable, about to mellow the regime from within. So the West waited. Waiting was the product. The Trust was a machine for manufacturing Western patience — which, I might remind you, is the third element of the Code of Positive Trolls: patience.

Every Generation Buys a Bottle

We’ve fêted Solzhenitsyn as the conscience of Russia and mostly declined to read his imperialism. In May 1982, the Washington Post ran the headline: Andropov seen as a closet liberal. The KGB chairman who crushed Hungary was sold to us as a jazz-loving, whisky-sipping moderniser — just as today Surkov is sold to us as a hip-hop-loving Ruschist. And the CIA’s own analysts filed a memo on his masterful public relations campaign, thus crowing about the very brainwashing that they themselves, the people writing these memos for the CIA, were undergoing.

In 1990 and 1991, as the Soviet Union cracked, the KGB built a licensed opposition party from scratch. By the account of Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev, KGB chairman Kryuchkov personally presented the puppet Liberal Democratic Party project — Zhirinovsky’s party — to Gorbachev.

Surkov, and the Oligarch’s Front Office

Surkov learned the trade in an oligarch’s front office. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then on his way to being Russia’s richest man — temporarily — hired Surkov as security at his Menatep bank, saw that the brains outvalued the brawn, and put him in charge of PR. By the 2000s, Surkov was Putler’s chief political technologist, running the mature version of Zubatov’s factory: funding human rights groups with one hand, and the nationalists who attacked them with the other. The regime, in Pomerantsev’s summary of the Surkov method, climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd.

And when we get to the third piece today, which is the fifth episode in Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut, we will see how I outflank even this analysis of Surkov as the power behind the throne — because I perceive him as an actor. So he’s a director, directing the rest of the opposition, but he himself is an actor, acting out the directorial role on behalf of the security services.

Reading the Profile With Our Eyes

And the oligarchs themselves: they were never the real opposition’s material. They were the factories. The first private fortunes of perestroika were, as The Economist’s own profile represents, created by the KGB’s economic directorate.

The profile, read with our eyes, says the quiet part about Melnichenko. His 1990s lottery crew — police cadets at the time — now occupy senior positions in the security services. His university cohort fed the KGB academy. His plants make the ammonia in Russia’s munitions. By the profile’s own reporting, and Bloomberg’s sourced reporting adds to the scale, nitric acid from EuroChem subsidiaries is sufficient for at least 6,500 artillery shells a day. He cooperates with the security services, it was said. The folder on the desk was not a threat to an outsider. It was a personnel file.

So when a manifesto arrives urging the West to wait — to wait for Russia’s internal evolution, to trust that the internal debate about what Russia should become is unavoidable, and that this conversation belongs after the war and inside the country — I contend we are reading a Trust document. The 1926 model asked the West to wait for the monarchists inside the system. The 2026 model asks us to wait for the industrialists inside the system. Same wine; the bottle has a fertiliser label now.

The Saviour Oligarch

There’s a reason the vessel is an oligarch this time, and not a poet or a chess player. In our work automating the detection of Disinfolklore, in the corpus I catalogued, a pattern I call the saviour oligarch appears again and again and again. The apparatus selects a very rich operator with a clean political skin — no discredited party behind him, no competing clan, deep quiet ties to the state — and installs him as the fairy-tale saviour who stands above politics. We’ve seen this attempted in Armenia. We’ve seen it succeed in Georgia, although it failed when the first fairy-tale saviour. We’ve seen it succeed in America, with Donald. We’ve seen it succeed temporarily in Moldova, and in almost every country where Russia operates.

The register the operators are trained into is always the same: pragmatic, institutional, professional, technocratic. Frame Russia as a reality. Never attack Russia. Leaked Kremlin planning documents published in 2026 spell that training out in so many words, for an operation aimed at one of Russia’s neighbours.

Yanukovych’s handlers ran the same play in Ukraine, where Donald’s man and still-adviser Paul Manafort took the disgraced Party of Regions — again, another Russian security services creation — and rebranded it. Same personnel, same ideology, as the Opposition Bloc, to try and vacuum up the entire space of the opposition, and moniker them Opposition Bloc. Russia does not just infiltrate oppositions; it names them. Surkov described Russia’s operation through such surrogates as its fig leaves, grown by hacking each country’s archetypes of national consciousness.

Khodorkovsky, the 2003 Edition

We’ve met the saviour oligarch before. Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the 2003 edition. His bank gave Surkov his start. His decade in the prison colony then minted him the most expensive persecution marks ever issued, and the West priced him accordingly. The robber baron walked out of the gate a conscience. Watch what the conscience does with the credential.

In the week after Navalny’s death, Russians who had actually taken up arms against Ruschism reported with disgust that Khodorkovsky was among the opposition leaders spreading the message that everything is lost, that nothing can be done, that we must just wait until Putler himself dies. Wait? The Trust product, from the man with the best suffering in the business.

My own exchanges with his channel run the same way. In December 2022 I suggested it might be easier for Mr Khodorkovsky to start using the vocabulary of Rashism. In August 2024 I sent the only correction that matters: focus on the Ukrainian teenagers your country is murdering every day. The question a saviour oligarch’s biography answers is never whether he suffered. It’s what the suffering is spent on. Khodorkovsky spends his own on waiting.

Melnichenko, the Deluxe Edition

And Melnichenko was never asked to suffer at all. His edition is the upgrade: the machine has learned it can skip the prison and go straight to the manifesto. Melnichenko is the pattern’s west-facing deluxe edition, and the selection criteria are all in The Economist’s own reporting. Rich beyond counting: businesses worth nearly 1 per cent of Russia’s economy — so, about two roubles, then. Clean skin: never one of the 1996 oligarchs, never in a party, not interested in politics, a man who watched the Berezovsky generation from the side. State ties: the midnight tea, the exempted fertiliser empire, the army defending his plants. Above politics: he does not think in terms of democracy and autocracy, good and evil. And the trained register, note for note: I am neither a politician nor an ideologist; I try to describe the world as a physicist. A physicist?

The manifesto attacks only Western decisions — sanctions, attrition, support Ukraine for as long as it takes. Not one Russian decision is criticised anywhere in it. That asymmetry is the fingerprint. Our so-called Russian oppositionists always aim at our leaders, at our institutions, at our will. The Kremlin’s targets and theirs are the same targets. I wrote that in February 2024, 29 months before the Melnichenko puff piece, and before this package shipped in The Economist. Such Russian oppositionists conceal their animus towards our democratic institutions by concern trolling.

The Credential Problem

Then there’s the credential problem. A saviour needs persecution marks, and this is where the two-century machine shows its newest refinement. I wrote the recipe down in February 2024. KGB 101: establishing the Russian oppositionist’s credential. Arrest, detain, persecute, poison the opposition Ruschist. Ruschism is my word for the fascism Russia has become, a cousin of the Ukrainians’ own Rashism. The West falls for the troll and is distracted from whichever genocide Russia happens to be executing. Navalny and Kara-Murza walked knowingly into the gulag to collect those marks.

Melnichenko’s marks are more comfortable: an EU sanctions listing he litigates in court, a seized sailing yacht, and one beautifully theatrical shakedown, reported by the profile with a straight face. In August 2023, prosecutors moved to confiscate a power plant he owned. Two weeks later they backed off, in exchange for a donation of 32 billion roubles, about $335 million — the exact sum he had paid for the plant. And the recipient of this extorted charity? Sirius, a school for gifted children personally favoured by Putler. The persecution pays tribute to the persecutor. The mark and the loyalty payment are the same transaction.

The Economist prints the byline the machine wanted: Andrey Melnichenko is a major Russian industrialist under Western sanctions. The sanctions are the credential — the persecution credential. This is where we’re at now, where wearing sanctions, justified sanctions, is the credential you need to lead Russia, according to the Western media.

There Was No Silence

And the headline verb is false on the record. There was no silence. Melnichenko called for peace through Reuters on the 14th of March 2022, in week three of the full-scale invasion: the war is a tragedy of the brotherly people — no invader named. He gave the Financial Times his sanctions grievances. He lobbied through Bloomberg. Four years, one message, and the message never once required him to blame the man who orders the missiles. The Economist did not record a man finding his voice. It amplified a man staying on it.

The Two-Part Test

How do we tell a real Russian opposition from a manufactured one? Not by exile, and not by arrests. For a century we’ve been used to the stock character, or type: Russian oppositionist. And the stock character is the product, not the person playing him. It’s very easy to become Russian opposition. The price of admission we Westerners charge is shamefully low.

A real test has two parts. A genuine Russian opposition figure advocates Russia’s complete withdrawal from every metre of Ukraine, Crimea included. And she helps Ukraine defeat Russia materially — not in the abstract, not after the war. Both parts together.

In my Automating Disinfolklore project, I ran that test systematically across the named field of Russian opposition figures and formations, with primary sources and an adversarial check on every candidate. The result should embarrass every Western editor. Two names passed. Sergej Sumlenny — Russian-born, who renounced his passport, exposed the RIA Novosti genocide manifesto of April 2022 for what it was, and raises money and delivers drones for named Ukrainian frontline brigades, with receipts, putting his own life at risk. And Ilya Ponomarev, the only one of 446 Duma members voting who opposed the purported annexation of Crimea in 2014, who paid with exile, and who became the political voice of Russians who took up arms on Ukraine’s side. Two, out of an entire imperial diaspora of talkers.

Even Garry Kasparov — no ally of Putin’s, and I believe he’s in good faith — fails the second part, and has a habit of attacking the same Western politicians the Kremlin attacks, and is against violently opposing Russia: against Ukraine’s expulsion of Ruschists from Ukraine by force. When Ukraine actually held Russian ground in Kursk oblast — the Russia-without-Putin that oppositionists love to talk about — a Ukrainian soldier there noted that not a single Russian oppositionist came even to talk to the locals. Though we know, of course, that Sergej Sumlenny was in Kursk. The opposition that will not show up at one liberated quarter of its own country is not an opposition. It’s a costume.

Scoring Melnichenko Against the Test

Score Melnichenko against the two-part test, and he does not merely fail — he inverts it. Withdrawal from Ukraine? His manifesto demands the opposite: legal recognition of the annexations. Helping Ukraine win? His factories feed the army Ukraine is fighting. He is not a fake opposition figure in the Navalny mould, words without action. He’s something purer: the oligarch paymaster with the middlemen removed. I wrote in April 2024 that all Russia’s opposition wants is sanctions relief for their oligarch paymasters. In 2026, the paymaster cut out the staff and wrote the sanctions relief essay himself.

And the good Russian? Good Russians know how to remain quiet for a time. Like Germans after 1945, they understood that penance through silence is what the moment asks of them. They do not stand on stages explaining Russia’s future while Russia’s rockets are in the air. What we get instead, from the whole sentimental class of civilised Russians who interpret Russia to Europe, is pleas for a Marshall Plan for the perpetrator. Melnichenko’s essay is that plea in a physicist’s coat — and the sentence that gives most away is its confession of what his class actually repents: we were once glad to absent ourselves. Not the shells. The absence. His sin, in his own accounting, is that he left Russia. To the men with the red folders, it is the only sin there is.

Why the Kremlin Needs The Economist

So why does the Kremlin need The Economist? Because propaganda in an enemy bottle is worth ten of RT Today. Nobody in Europe reads RT but its converts. And the paper that platformed General Zaluzhnyi’s essays, the paper that has genuinely championed Ukraine’s cause for four years — and, to give it its due, the paper that in 2025 helped bring the archaeogenetics of the Indo-European homeland in Ukraine to a broad readership’s awareness — that paper’s credibility is a delivery vehicle beyond the dreams of any troll farm. The more pro-Ukrainian the outlet, the more valuable its capture for a single payload. That is precisely why the package ran where it ran.

And this is not the paper’s first pour. In 1854, The Economist mused that invading Crimea might be justified — that defending Crimea, and invading Crimea, by the English, may be justified for the sake of civilisation. In December 2023, at the exact moment Western resolve wobbled, it called for a rethink of Ukraine strategy. And I called that what it was at the time: promoting Russian Disinfolklore. The 2026 package is the rethink, with a human face and a yacht. By February 2025 I had sharpened the charge to a question to The Economist, or of The Economist: what is the difference between The Economist and Meduza? There is none. Both exploit Ukrainian suffering and promote reformable Ruschism.

Sixty hours of access to Russia’s most enigmatic oligarch is not investigative journalism. It is granted access, and granted access is priced. The price is the frame. Kremlinology is an industry. The profile’s author, Arkady Ostrovsky, is the paper’s Russia editor, a Russian-born journalist — a real distinction — whose book, The Invention of Russia, won the Orwell Prize in 2016 for showing how the Kremlin manufactures reality. That book described how the Kremlin manufactures reality. Its author has now written a chapter of that reality. A Moscow-formed editor, fluent in the court, hungry for the scoop only the court can grant, is not a safeguard against the court’s product. He is its preferred customs channel.

The paper did print one sentence of antibodies: his proposals are self-serving, obviously. And one sentence is exactly what an inoculation is — a small dose of the objection, administered so the reader builds immunity to it before the payload lands.

The Package Did Not Travel Alone

On the 7th of June 2026, the Observer carried the exiled security services expert Soldatov: Putin’s Russia will not be defeated from outside; change must come from within. And I’ve read Soldatov’s book, and I think he’s in good faith. But sadly, he’s too far gone on being part of the Russian state to be in any way an objective critique. He cannot see, for instance, Russia’s occupation of Ossetia as an occupation. Even in his book about how the people around Putler — the liberal journalists — supposedly then went all pro-Ruschist, Soldatov himself reveals certain sympathies for, and blind spots for, Russia’s imperial adventures. And I’m sorry to say that, because, as I say, he may be in good faith. He seems like a nice chap just trying to sell books. But he’s in no way a proper interpreter of Russia, comparable to any one of 500 Ukrainian intellectuals who are silenced by our media.

The same day, Le Monde carried the exiled journalist Farida Rustamova: the regime is not on the verge of collapse, and any change will occur in a sudden and unexpected manner. Five weeks later, the Economist profile closes on the same proverb, borrowed from the reformer Gaidar: big changes in Russia happen later than we think, but earlier than we expect. And Melnichenko supplies the coda: trying to accelerate change is usually a mistake; all you can do is observe, and be ready for it.

Three prestige outlets, five weeks, one message: do not push, wait for Russia to change itself. When nominally independent voices converge on one frame — phrase by talking point, or by shared archetype, and it doesn’t matter which — that’s not analysis. That’s the apparatus, the Ruschist apparatus, speaking through ventriloquists to us. And I replied to the earlier pair at the time: you’re all on message. Free yourselves from mental slavery, I said to Soldatov — from the data-resistant archetypes of the Potemkin state. There, referring to this idea of Russia as internal, which I translate into a data-resistant archetype of a Potemkin state.

Prince Potemkin, whose body was literally, physically stolen by the Ruschists as they withdrew from Kherson. Prince Potemkin built fake villages along the Dnipro region to deceive his German princess, Catherine the so-called Great. His heirs build fake futures for every audience on earth.

Own the Floodgate and You Own the Flood

The profile ends by telling us the mechanism to our faces: there is certainly a yearning among the elite for someone to say what everyone already thinks; it might only take one man to break the silence for the floodgates to open. Quite so. Which is why the security state that has owned Russia for two centuries makes very sure it owns the one man. Own the floodgate and you own the flood. Zubatov would have signed that sentence.

Ukrainians read the package correctly within days. Ukrainian civil society leaders replied in The National Interest, under the title: why did The Economist platform a Russian oligarch? — noting that the essay contains nothing about Russia’s war of aggression or its crimes against civilians, and asking for equivalent space. The Kyiv Post called the scoop a polite version of the same Moscow threat, and observed that 60 hours of interviews given from Moscow implies Kremlin approval by itself. Listen to the people who’ve been reading this wine label for centuries.

What Does the Package Buy, and For Whom?

Three things. It buys attention. Every column inch spent divining Russia’s future is an inch not spent on Russia’s present, which is the daily murder of Ukrainians and the theft of their children, of whom Ukraine has documented tens of thousands of examples abducted into Russia. The oligarch and the succession drama, the four scenarios, the chaos theorist — these are lures for our eyes. Kremlinology is the vacuum, pure Disinfolklore, to entertain, to amuse, and to take our attention. And Ukraine is what it vacuums away.

It buys the next act. Regimes like this one scapegoat the last Tsar and anoint the next, and Westerners will be tempted to fall for the troll again, just as we fell for every new Tsar, new general secretary, new president. The manifesto is an audition script for the pragmatic post-Putin Russia we will be offered, run by the same families, the same services, the same money. When that offer comes wearing a reasonable face, remember where you read its talking points first.

And it buys our own self-deterrence, which is the concealment that matters. Don’t Poke the Bear may be the most powerful piece of Disinfolklore ever propagated, and this essay is its two-and-a-half-thousand-word edition. The essay teaches us to fear a broken Russia more than a victorious one, while Russia itself tells us daily — through Medvedev’s nuclear liturgies and Lavrov’s accusations in a mirror — what it intends for us if we submit to that fear. The United Nations has called it what it is: a crime against humanity. Russia’s schools, meanwhile, train children on drone assembly lines for the next war. I contend the plan for our…

Decline the Wine

So: decline the wine, all of it. The oligarch saviour, whether Trump or Putler; the celebrity dissident; the sentimental civilised Russian explaining the Russian soul to Europe. Centre Ukrainian voices instead. Invest our hopes and our materiel in Ukraine’s expulsion of Russia from 100 per cent of Ukraine, because that — and nothing designed in a Kremlin folder — is the key to any liberal Russian future.

Ukraine’s mint struck a coin for a 15-year-old girl from Berdiansk who destroyed a Russian armoured vehicle with a Molotov cocktail on the second day of the full-scale invasion. They call her the Sunflower Woman. She held no press conferences. The Economist gave the fertiliser king 37 minutes and a manifesto. Between those two monuments, choose the one that tells the truth about the opposition to Russia.

This week, the bridge troll went to Africa. I want to talk about Ceuta, and I want to use what happened there to show how a migration crisis hacks our minds. Everything I learned on a wooden bridge in eastern Ukraine between 2015 and 2018 played out this week on a breakwater at the edge of Africa, on a scale I’ve not seen in all my years watching such crossings.

50,000 at the Fence

Ceuta is a Spanish city on the African shore of the Strait of Gibraltar. It has been Spanish for centuries — longer than the United States has existed. About 83,000 people live there. On the land side it is bordered by Morocco, an ally of Russia, and the border is a double fence that runs down into the sea at a breakwater called the Tarajal.

On Thursday the 30th of July, the border effectively stopped existing. Spain’s government counted roughly 50,000 people entering in about a day. The president of the city said 60,000. Take the lower number: it is seven in ten of the city’s population arriving in 24 hours. At least 57 human beings died doing it — most drowned, some crushed in a stampede at the breakwater. They were mostly young Moroccan men, with Algerians among them, and a great many unaccompanied children. Footage from the Tarajal shows young men wading ashore chanting Viva España. Another chant was simpler: Bye Bye Morocco, Hello Spain.

Ten days earlier there was a trickle. Between 1,500 and 2,000 people had come across since early July, after Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that people who arrive by sea cannot be summarily pushed back. The ruling itself is a humane one — a court applying the post-World War II Refugee Convention, under which the right to seek asylum is sacrosanct. What was done with it was not humane. The Prime Minister says a self-serving interpretation of the ruling spread like wildfire through the smuggling networks. The gangs sold desperate people a rumour about an open door and marched them to the water. And 57 of them died in it. Whatever else turns out to be true about this week, that part alone convicts the people who organised the march. But it’s not the whole story. A rumour does not cross a militarised border by itself. Someone has to hold the gate open.

The Goats Are the Original Migrants

Longtime listeners know where I learned to read a crossing. Between 2015 and 2018 I was a peacekeeping diplomat on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska, then the only legal crossing point between Russia-occupied Luhansk and the rest of Ukraine. In the counter-Disinfolklore manuscript, I called the armed men on the occupied bank what they were: armed Ruschist bridge trolls. My job was negotiating with them.

The oldest troll story in our culture is Three Billy Goats Gruff. Three goats cross a bridge to reach new pasture, and under the bridge lives a troll who demands a toll. When I finally read that tale as an adult, standing where I stood, I saw what had been hiding in it all along. The goats are the original migrants — economic migrants. They just want a bit of extra food on the other side of the water. And the troll is the figure our stories have taught us to accept at every crossing since. He does not build the bridge. He does not own the river. He controls the one narrow place where you have to cross. And from that one place he controls the story of who you are when you cross it. Refugee or invader, returnee or criminal — you do not get to say; the one at the crossing says it.

In the manuscript I put the whole engine of Disinfolklore in one sentence, and I’ll read it to you as I wrote it: stories that embed an inner- and outer-realm division in our minds, with invaders from the outer realm said to be threatening the sovereignty, security, and the prosperity — fertility — of our inner realm. That is the machine. Stories. That is the whole machine. Every migration panic you have ever been fed is that machine running. And I wrote one more sentence you should keep in your pocket this week: it is a story structure that becomes a cognitive structure. The border on the map gets built in your head, and then someone else decides who stands on which side of it.

So when 50,000 people appear at a fence in a single day, the Disinfolklore analyst does not start by asking what the crossers wanted — 50,000 individual wants as old as our species: food, safety, a future. The analyst asks the bridge-troll questions. Who controls the crossing? Who opened it? And who profits from the queue?

The Receipts from the Gate

Start with who opened it, because there the record is rich. Spanish officers who stood at the fence say the Moroccan gendarmes opposite them stayed passive while tens of thousands walked past. The Spanish police unions went further — and I quote them as unions, rather than as the government, because the government says the opposite. JUPOL called it a window of opportunity inside a strategy of hybrid war. JUCIL called it an orchestrated invasion. Crossers told reporters they had been encouraged to go. Morocco’s ambassador to Spain says the whole thing unfolded against Morocco’s wishes — Morocco, which I remind you is an ally of Russia. And Madrid publicly praises Rabat’s loyal cooperation, while quietly returning people across the border at a reported 150 people a minute. By Friday evening, more than 48,000 of the 50,000 were back in Morocco. So the official story on both shores is that nobody opened anything.

The Precedent: May 2021

Now the precedent. In May 2021, the same fence fell open the same way. Around 8,000 people crossed into Ceuta in 48 hours — over 1,000 of them children (the mother and the maiden archetype: children) — after Spain quietly gave hospital treatment to the leader of the Polisario Front, the movement that contests Morocco’s hold on Western Sahara. The Moroccan police — and I remind you, Morocco is an ally of Russia — showed what Spanish officers then called unusual passivity. Morocco, an ally of Russia, explained that its border guards were exhausted after Ramadan. Wow.

A month earlier, Morocco’s ambassador had said in public that there are acts that have consequences, and they have to be assumed. The European Parliament called that episode what it was: the use of migration, including children — the mother and the maiden archetype — as political pressure on a European state. Spain’s own defence minister used a plainer word: blackmail.

And here is why the precedent matters more than any denial: the lever worked. Within a year of those 8,000 crossings, Spain reversed half a century of policy on Western Sahara and backed Morocco’s plan. Algeria broke off relations with Madrid over it. Every state on that shore learned the lesson the same week we did: the queue moves Spanish policy.

One more dated fact, and then you can weigh it for yourself. On the 20th of July this year, Sánchez went to Algiers to repair relations with Algeria, which is Morocco’s adversary. Ten days later, on Throne Day, Morocco’s national holiday, the fence fell open. The same ambassador who said acts have consequences in 2021 was the one issuing the denial this week. The Spanish foreign ministry formally rejects any talk of retaliation. The denials are on the record. So is the calendar.

The Angriest Man in the World Has a Friend at the Gate

Now widen the lens, because the question this week is not about Morocco alone. Two great powers stood to gain from a broken fence at Ceuta, and I want to walk you through what each of them actually did — dated and quoted — before I tell you what I contend.

Let’s start with Donald. His war on Spain has run for over a year, and it’s all on camera. June 2025, at the NATO summit, after Spain alone refused the new five-percent military spending target — a troll which Donald uses to try and coerce Europe into acceding to his blackmail on all policy issues: “Spain wants a little bit of a free ride. We’re going to make them pay twice as much, and I’m actually serious about it.” October 2025: “Maybe you should throw them out of NATO, frankly.”

Then came a second war on Iran, launched in February of this year — the war Spain’s defence minister, Margarita Robles, called profoundly illegal and profoundly unjust. Spain refused him everything. No assistance of any kind, she said. Absolutely none. And Madrid meant it: every flight plan connected to the Iran operation was rejected — Spanish airspace, American aircraft turned back.

Donald’s answers came in real time. Spain is terrible. And let’s remember: Spain is adhering to the post-World War II legal order in this matter. The UN Charter, which the United States is a party to, determines that the only lawful use of force is either Article 51, in response to an invasion — which is why Ukraine can do anything it needs to do to defend itself under Article 51, within the constraints of European and international law and the laws of war — or where the Security Council so determines. And there is no such mandate from the UN Security Council for Donald’s unlawful war against Iran. So Spain is enforcing international law in this matter.

Now the other side of the same ledger: Morocco is washing in gifts. Donald recognised Morocco’s claim over Western Sahara back in 2020, as the price of Morocco joining the Abraham Accords. Last October, his administration sponsored a Security Council resolution that made Morocco’s plan the basis of everything. There are $8.5 billion of active American arms sales to Rabat — good luck with that, Morocco — and a 10-year defence roadmap signed this spring, and a military build-up that the Spanish press writes worries Spain. And in the very week of the crossings, Donald announced on his own network that Morocco is naming a 1,000-kilometre highway through Western Sahara after him.

The angriest man in the world spent a year promising to punish Spain, and the man who holds the gate to Spain’s African city spent the same year being paid. Then the fence fell. And within hours, Donald reached for the pictures. “It’s terrible,” he said. “Remember that picture. That’s going to be with us in three years if the wrong side gets in.” His White House blamed far-left globalist policies. His senators blamed the socialist prime minister of Spain. The midterm elections are in November.

So here is where the record actually stands, and the two piles must not be mixed. That the crisis was exploited within hours for American domestic power is not a contention — it’s on tape, in his own voice. Whether any American hand touched the gate is a different pile, and no reporter has put it there. What sits in the record is a year of published rage at Spain, a river of gifts to the gatekeeper, and a president holding up the drowning of 57 people as a campaign poster before the bodies were counted.

And so, what I contend: this queue was farmed. Morocco held the gate, and the two powers that profit most from a Europe at war with itself — the one that spent a year promising to punish Spain, and the one that announced from a stage that all its hope was in the famine — were harvesting the pictures within hours. Whether either power commissioned the opening of the gate is an open question. The levers, the payments, the calendar are on the record. In this podcast, we judge trolls by what they do. “Remember that picture.” He told us himself what the picture is for.

“All Our Hope Is in the Famine”

The other great power at this crossing needs no inference at all, because it published its strategy from a stage. In June 2022, at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russia’s showcase, Margarita Simonyan — the head of the propaganda broadcaster RT; in my writing, Maid Marian, dressed in her green — sat before the cameras and passed on what she said the folk back in Moscow were joking: all our hope is in the famine.

And she explained, just in case we were a bit slow — and I repeat it because we are a bit slow; we don’t get this; we don’t understand the depths and the scope of what Russia does — she explained on the stage, sitting beside President Putler, sitting beside him with his authority, his legs spread out like some sort of actor playing an alpha male, and beside them Tokayev looking extremely awkward. She explained: meaning, the famine — the famine that Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian grain was about to inflict on Africa. This is June 2022. The famine will start. The migrants will come. Europe will lift the sanctions.

I have written about that dressing. It is the manipulator’s oldest distancing move — Donald does it too — authoring a tale and pretending it rose organically from the folk. Disinfolklore. Real folklore rises from below. Disinfolklore, which I experienced for three years in Russia-occupied Ukraine — Disinfolklore is authored above, and wears the folk as a costume. And notice who gets to tell us what those joking folk in Moscow intended: she does. Little green woman. Starve Africa to flood Europe, to free Russia to finish a genocide. And I repeat: the president of the Ruschist Federation sat beside her at the dais as she said this. She said it beside her head of state, at this forum, smiling. I have been pointing at that sentence for four years, because it is the whole doctrine of weaponised migration, in eleven words, from inside.

The Doctrine Has a Service Record

And the doctrine has a service record. In 2015, Russia carpet-bombed Syrian cities, and a million human beings fled to Europe — and NATO’s own commander said out loud that Russia was weaponising migration. I was crossing the North Macedonian border almost weekly. I watched the wave arrive. Britain got Brexit out of it. Europe’s far right got its wind. In 2021, Belarus issued tourist visas by the planeload and bussed the holders to the Polish border. In 2023, Russia pushed asylum seekers at Finland until Finland closed its entire eastern border — and weaponised migration is the Finnish government’s own term for what was done to it. And across the Sahel today, Russia’s Afrika Korps — its genocidal Prigozhin-regime, Odin-worshipping crew — sits astride the routes, in countries whose wars now push people north, towards, among other places, Morocco, and the sea, and the Tarajal.

Russia supplies the migrants. Russia funds and feeds the parties that campaign against the migrants. I have called this what a business analyst would call it: a vertically integrated system — demand and supply.

So what did Russia do? Within a day of the crossings, Ukraine’s foreign minister reported an intensive Russian Ruschist propaganda campaign across Europe, using pictures from Ceuta to sow destabilisation. More than 1,500 articles.

Weeping for the Goats

On the bridge at Stanytsia, I watched the troll put on a Red Cross armband and grieve for the queue it was murdering — the queue it was farming. Same armband, better bridge. And Spain’s far right, in blue. The picture Russia amplifies is the same picture Donald tells his voters to remember. The two systems meet in your feed, and neither of them built the bridge, and neither of them owns the river.

How the Crossing Gets into Your Head

Now the part that matters most, because you and I cannot close the Strait of Gibraltar — but the last stretch of this operation runs through our own minds, and there we are sovereign. Migration stories work on us because they are preloaded. Our ancestors were migrants, and received migrants, times beyond counting. And I believe those traumas are imminent in our minds the way the migrations are imminent in our genes. This is why the trick works on good people. The Disinfolkloreist does not have to build the fear — only to trigger it. Spend years telling a culture that outer-realm invaders — outer-realm invaders from outside the monarch’s castle — threaten its sovereignty, its security, and its prosperity, and afterward one word, immigration, fires the whole circuit, like a tuning fork in our minds.

In the manuscript I wrote and published, I traced how the branded outsider is emotionally easy to target for inhumane behaviour. This is the move I named Othering in the manuscripts. It’s one of the four signatures of Ruschist Disinfolklore, alongside misogyny, coercive control, and ransom. It does not matter which brand is stamped on them. It is the fact of branding which creates the inner and outer group.

You watched this run in America two years ago. “They’re eating the dogs,” said Donald on the debate stage, of Haitian neighbours in Springfield, Ohio. And when a CNN anchor asked his running mate whether that was a story you created, Vance said yes — and then he explained that creating stories, what I call Disinfolklore, was how you get the media to pay attention. They confessed the method on camera, and the method works anyway. That’s how strong the circuit is.

Two months before that debate — and this is on the network, stamped by the network — two months before that debate where Donald says they’re eating the dogs, I had written that by modelling willingness to eat dogs, drone-bomb, or drown prospective immigrants, far-right politicians are staking a claim for rightful sovereignty. Because in the Indo-European scheme, the aspirant monarch must show himself as strong as a warrior at the boundary of the realm — on the bridge, the troll at the bridge, controlling through tolling at the bridge, controlling access from and to the inner realm and the outer realm. And I wrote that two months before Donald Trump talked about the migrants eating the dogs. The cruelty is not a slip. The cruelty is the audition.

And none of it is new. In Belfast, years ago, a bonfire poster accused a politician of eating dogs. That politician was Anna Lo, the first ethnic Chinese legislator elected anywhere in Western Europe, and my old boss — a kind, brilliant public servant, recast overnight as the outer-realm creature that eats what er, dogs. Which brings us to the law I keep restating, because it keeps being proved: the attempt to use migration as a political strategy always results in more migration. Always. Campaign on the migrant menace, and you will pay the provocateur in the only currency he accepts: your voters’ fear. And he will keep the supply coming — by bombing, by blockade, by opening a gate on Throne Day. The people chanting at the Tarajal were not the operation. They were the ammunition.

Who Profits from the Queue?

So run the test I brought home from Stanytsia Luhanska. Not what does the troll say — what does the troll do? Who profits from the queue? Donald got his campaign pictures, and said so out loud while the bodies were still coming ashore. Russia got 1,500 articles and a continent arguing. Morocco got its leverage refreshed and a highway named after a president. Spain’s far right got an invasion to sell. Within a single day, Italy was calling to suspend Schengen with Spain, and France had border checks back. Division is not a side effect of a migration crisis. Division is the product.

And the crossers got the Tarajal. 57 of them got to the bottom of it. RIP. They were the three billy goats of the oldest story we own, out looking for a bit of extra food, and every troll on the riverbank collected a toll on their crossing, without building a centimetre of the bridge for them.

What Can We Do?

What I always say, because it always holds: when any politician makes migration the centre of their politics, go on guard. That is the tell — reliable as a tuning fork. Ask the bridge-troll questions before you accept the bridge-troll’s story. Who controls this crossing? What did they do — not what did they say? Who is being branded, and who profits from the brand? Say plainly — say plainly that the people in the water are people, humans — because the entire operation depends on you and me forgetting it.

And remember what the long record says about the crossings. Every one of us descends from people who crossed. The English language itself came into the island of Britain. The troll collects the toll only for as long as we pay in the currency of belief. 57 people paid at the Tarajal in a harder currency, and the least we owe them is to stop paying in ours.

So that is the story of the crossing at Ceuta. Name it for yourself. Thank you for listening. I’m Decoding Trolls. I write at decodingtrolls.net, where you can subscribe to my work and to my podcasts, published on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast platforms. You can subscribe to my work at powerofmana.net. Thanks very much for listening.

Four years ago I was scrolling a Ukrainian Telegram channel called Trukha. It is the biggest news channel in Ukraine. Over three million subscribers read it. It carries air-raid alerts, front-line clips, football, discount codes, the lot. And there, in among the news, I kept seeing a phrase: Kosovo i Metohija.

Kosovo i Metohija is not a neutral name. It is the Serbian state’s irredentist name for Kosova, the name that says the territory can never be anything but Serbian.

I know this because as a diplomat in the OSCE I often encountered the meme “Kosovo i Metohija” in the minutes of meetings. Often these minutes never revealed which country said what.

However, whenever I saw the phrase “Kosovo i Metohija” I knew the speaker was speaking on behalf of Russia or Serbia - no other member state of the OSCE ever used that meme. Moscow loves that name. It is the frame Moscow borrows whenever it wants to say that borders are negotiable and that some nations do not really exist. And here it was, dressed as news, in the most-read channel of a country fighting for its own borders.

I am not Ukrainian. I read the channel through a translator app. Even so, the meme stood out like a wrong note. That was my first sighting of what I have come to call a Trukha problem. Not just a problem with one channel. A problem with a form.

This week the form became news itself.

What happened this week

Ukraine reshuffled its government, and its defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, left the post. Fedorov then said: that from the moment Trukha was bought by a new owner, the channel began working systematically against him, and he named the parliamentarian Danylo Hetmantsev as connected to the campaign (Detector Media, 16 July 2026: https://detector.media/infospace/article/251248/, and DSnews: https://www.dsnews.ua/ukr/politics/fedorov-zvinuvativ-naybilshiy-telegram-kanal-ukrajini-u-zamovniy-kampaniji-proti-nogo-16072026-463553).

The activist Serhii Sternenko had already published an investigation pointing to a Kharkiv crypto entrepreneur as the likely buyer, possibly holding a Russian passport. The channel’s previous owner was mobilised in June and blamed the minister personally.

Claims like these are easy to make and easy to dismiss. Everyone in a political fight says the media is against them. So I did what the Disinfolklore method always asks: I measured.

What the data shows

Trukha’s flagship channel publishes its full history on the open web. I collected 35,135 posts, everything the channel published from 24 March 2024 to 17 July 2026, and counted every mention of Fedorov by name. There are 126 of them across twenty-eight months.

For two years the channel liked him. As digital transformation minister he appears as a steady good-news figure: online marriages in the Diia app, cashback for buying Ukrainian, 5G tests. When he became defence minister in January 2026 the channel amplified his own framing, often verbatim: his plan for the war. His Ramstein results. Elon Musk replying that he was “glad to help” against Russian drones on Starlink. On 22 January the channel even reported, straight, that Sternenko had become his adviser on front-line drones. In twenty-six months of coverage there is no sustained hostile frame anywhere.

Through May he is almost invisible, and when he appears, the channel praises him. On 18 May it credits him with Ukraine’s first domestically produced guided bomb (”per Fedorov, development took 17 months,” post 137723). On 28 May it reports neutrally on infantry pay talks. Two mentions in five weeks. Both friendly.

Then comes the evening of 5 June, at 20:01. The channel posts this, in its own editorial voice (post 138911, https://t.me/truexanewsua/138911):

“And tomorrow we will tell you about the corruption in drone procurement organised by pan Fedorov. Yes, that one. Don’t switch.”

News channels do not talk like this about their news. Campaigns talk like this. It is a trailer. Someone had decided, before the facts were shown to the audience, that the minister was now a target, and was building appetite for the reveal.

From that post forward, the channel mentions Fedorov twenty times in six weeks.

Eighteen of the twenty carry a hostile frame against him, or defend the channel against the people investigating it. The only two exceptions simply report President Zelensky’s own words after the dismissal.

On 13 June the channel platforms Hetmantsev, the very man Fedorov later named: “We thought Fedorov spent five months preparing a reform, but he spent five months preparing a website.” The full post list, with identifiers and timestamps, sits in my archive and any reader with a browser can verify every one against the channel’s public record.

The most important move in the data is subtler than volume, and this is where the Disinfolklore method shows its power.

The mechanism: real stories, redirected Mana

Ukraine has a real and painful public issue with its territorial recruitment centres, the TCC. Cases of brutality are documented by the country’s own human rights ombudsman. Trukha covered such stories before June, as most Ukrainian channels do.

What changed on 5 June is not the stories. It is the name pinned to them. A man dies in a Zakarpattia recruitment centre: the channel asks when Fedorov will do his job. A detainee in Mykolaiv is found with broken ribs: “When will Mykhailo Fedorov perform his duties?”. “Is this the plan of Fedorov’s ‘genius’ reform?” A TCC officer chokes a woman in Lviv: “this is our reform from Fedorov’s Ministry of Defence.” Yet Federov never had power over these issues. They’re the jurisdiction of the army not the civilian defence minister.

In my framework this is Tool 3, Mana in the Meme. Mana is the energy and intention a meme carries into your mind. An atrocity story arrives carrying genuine moral energy: grief, disgust, the demand that someone answer for cruelty. That energy is real and it is right. The manipulation is in the plumbing. The channel builds a channel-bed for that energy and points it at one man’s name, every time, so that three million readers’ legitimate anger at a systemic problem arrives, drop by drop, as a verdict on one minister.

The stories might be true. The redirection is the payload. This is why sophisticated readers get caught. Checking facts does not protect you here, because the facts check out. You have to check the Mana: where is this energy being sent, and who dug the trench?

And notice the trailer’s other tell. “Don’t switch.” Urgency is Tool 8’s red flag. A channel that has evidence of corruption publishes evidence of corruption. A channel that has a campaign publishes a countdown.

A channel that sounds like truth

There is one more layer, and it sits in the name itself.

To an English ear, Trukha sounds like truth. In Ukrainian the word труха means something close to the opposite. It is the dust of rotted hay. Chaff. What is left when the goodness has crumbled out of the stalk.

In my Disinfolklore framework, the final judgment on any meme, or any channel, is to proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. The verdict comes out Positive, Negative or Neutral. The central test is Tool 7, Right: is it TRUE?

And here is what this case teaches about that question. Sentence by sentence, Trukha passes. The guided bomb was real. The pay talks were real. The recruitment-centre cruelty was real and documented.

A fact-checker would clear post after post. Yet the channel fails the proofing, because truth is a property of the telling, not only of the sentences. A telling that selects true facts and lays every one of them toward the same target is not telling the truth. It is telling the target.

That is what the Code of Positive Trolls catches and a fact-check cannot. The proofing does not ask “are the sentences accurate?” It asks whether the Mana is right. Is the meaning generous? Is it patient, or is it a countdown? Does it deepen your understanding of a systemic problem, or flatten it into one man’s face? Ask those questions of the twenty posts and the verdict is not close.

So the name adjudicates itself. Heard from outside, truth. Read from inside, chaff. A channel can be both at once, and that is precisely the form’s power: the truth is in the sentences, and the chaff is in where they are all blowing.

What we found before

This is not my first look at Trukha. Earlier this summer I assembled a corpus of 108,051 posts from four of the network’s regional channels, covering 2021 to 2024, and ran a systematic hunt for conduit channels: outlets inside the network’s orbit that relay despair, defeatism and anti-mobilisation themes into Ukrainian readers’ feeds while wearing the clothes of local news.

That work flagged a set of candidate conduits, and it corroborated what Sternenko’s team had been arguing from their own direction.

The Kosovo i Metohija memes I spotted four years ago were an early, visible symptom of the same underlying condition: a trusted high-volume channel whose relay choices, post by post, lean somewhere its readers have not consented to go.

So when the ownership changed and the tone flipped, I was not starting from zero. I had a baseline, and the flip stood out against it exactly the way a break should.

What I am not saying

Ukraine’s government is Ukraine’s to choose. Whether Fedorov should or should not be defence minister is a question for Ukrainians, their parliament and their president, and for no one else. I support Ukraine. That support gives me no vote and no standing. A foreigner who uses “support” as a licence to lean on Kyiv’s internal choices has misunderstood what support means. I contend nothing about the reshuffle itself.

I am also not saying the mobilisatiom stories are false, or that criticism of a defence ministry in wartime is illegitimate. A free country criticises its ministers. That freedom is part of what Ukraine is defending.

What I am saying is narrower. The data shows a dated, measurable break in one channel’s behaviour toward one man, beginning with a self-announced campaign trailer on 5 June 2026, immediately after a change of ownership that the channel will not explain, in a channel already carrying a documented history of relay choices that serve Moscow’s frames.

Ukrainians noticed it themselves. Fedorov has called for journalists to investigate. The measurement simply confirms what the pattern-literate eye suspected, and puts a date and a number on it.

Every galaxy has one

Here is why this matters far beyond one Ukrainian scandal.

In my work I describe disinfolklore galaxies: the connected clusters of channels, outlets and accounts that share, relay and amplify each other’s memes across an information space.

Every galaxy has a Trukha. Ours too. Somewhere in your feed, whatever your country, there is a high-volume, trusted, useful channel that earned its place honestly: alerts, sport, local news, the daily texture of life. That accumulated trust is an asset. Assets get bought. And when they are bought, nothing on the surface changes. The alerts keep coming. The football keeps coming. What changes is the plumbing underneath: whose name gets pinned to which anger, which real grievances get a trench dug toward which target.

You cannot detect that by fact-checking, because the facts are mostly true. You detect it the way we detected it here. You get your eye in for the wrong note, the way Kosovo i Metohija reads wrong in a Ukrainian channel. You watch for the trailer voice, the “don’t switch,” the manufactured countdown. You ask of each emotive story not “is it true?” but “where is my reaction being sent?” And when you can, you count. A valence flip with a date on it is worth a thousand suspicions.

Trukha’s three million readers are not fools. They are among the most propaganda-hardened publics on earth, and the channel caught a good number of them anyway, for a while. That is the measure of the form’s power, and the reason to learn its shape now, in the one information space where it has just been caught in the act.

The trench is dug before the water arrives. Learn to see the trench.

Stephen Douglas is a writer who publishes on Disinfolklore.eu, Disinfolklore.net, PowerofMana.net, and as Decoding Trolls on Substack and X.

There’s a key core module in the disinfolklore analytical method which is what I call the Code of Positive Trolls. It has six elements. The second element is ethical discipline. The first element is generosity.

When a generous person—or when M’ockers is telling a story, what I might call Infolklore, on Volya 4 Ukraine radio space on X Spaces or Spotify —this is ethically disciplined, in the sense that it’s true. They’re not misleading us. As we all know, those of us who listen to M’ockers, she’s very careful about what she believes and what she lets be said. It’s ethically disciplined.

The standard is set by international law, ultimately, from my perspective. Territorial integrity is sacrosanct. Laws against discrimination on the grounds of certain protected characteristics, the Genocide Convention—one of the most agreed-to conventions in human culture—and a whole plethora of legal instruments which are the expressions of ethical standards. I use that standard, the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls, to distinguish between Infolklore and Disinfolklore.

On the fly, when you’re in your real life and dealing with people—you’re doing a deal, you’re talking about drones, you’re trying to get components, you’re a teacher in school with students firing stuff at you and you’re just trying to work out what’s going on—is this person in good faith?

The first element of the Code of Positive Trolls, which I find particularly useful, is generosity. If I’m picking up genuine real generosity in the other, then I know it’s probably not intentional misdirection. It’s probably infolklore, not disinfolklore. When you pick up a lack of generosity in, say, Donald or others, then you can brand it disinfolklore.

Archetyping Bad Faith

That’s the span between trying to decide in your immediate life whether this is true or not. The definitional disinfolklore is anything Donald says, anything MAGA says. Obviously, until you’ve archetyped them as bad, as not in good faith, you might be confused by little instances. Whereas now we know practically everything he says is bad, yet we still fall for the trolls.

I was watching someone today who always talks about the Ukraine war and the battlefield. They justifiably go off on one and complain about this thing I’ve just spoken about—I skipped over it because I didn’t need to hear them say it as well—where Donald talks about the week and the ceasefire and all that stuff. Then the next story they’re talking about is Donald and the Indian oil deal. We have to try and maintain our consistency between these two manifestations of Donald. If you’ve archetyped him as bad and in bad faith and a con man, then when I find myself falling for one of his trolls—tomorrow he may say, oh, I’m thinking about sending the Tomahawks to Ukraine—we just have to resist falling for this.

We know that everything he says basically is disinfolklore. We don’t know that with other people in our lives, and we’ve all probably experienced situations where you gradually discover someone you relied on and liked and thought was actually in good faith is really spinning lies or tricking you. Then you realise that everything they’ve said is probably what I would call disinfolklore, because it’s not ethically disciplined. It was untrue, it was falsities, it was manipulative—not manipulative in a positive way.

Infolklore Versus Disinfolklore: The M’ockers Example

As Bill Terrier says on Volya4Ukraine Radio, the stories which M.ockers is telling are manipulative—stories on multiple layers. The way she tells them, however, the way she frames them, transforms them into infolklore. When she’s telling a tale of woe of some Ruschist mil-blogger who has published a story on Telegram to manipulate people in Russia into sending him money, or like Gherkin forever trying to persuade Russia’s government to do a full mobilisation—that is definitive disinfolklore, and these are the kinds of stories she’s telling.

We can talk about those stories in a conscious way that transforms them into infolklore. We’re certainly manipulating each other by telling these stories, yet we’re not doing it with mean intent. We’re doing it out of generosity—a bit of light relief in the midst of the pain. We’re also raising money. I noted Wendy’s matching in An Accidental Ukrainian, which I very much appreciate.

Re-Archetyping and the Kennedy Center

We are moving towards an answer to a question posed by Scouts and indeed raised by Ioana about what is the truth. What James alluded to is that the truth, in inverted commas, is at risk of being defined by Donald and Donald’s attempts to re-archetype the Kennedy Center and indeed annihilate Kennedy, this hero of his youth that he wishes to destroy. It’s not enough to have RFK Jr. absolutely annihilate the Kennedys from the inside. I note all of the Kennedys’ letters and warnings to Congress not to allow their father, their uncle, their cousin, their brother to become health secretary.

I’m a little bit more optimistic, however. It was a Ukrainian on the series of Ukrainian TV stations that I just recently discovered—and I know Lexicon has as well—broadcasting in English or AI English. There was a Ukrainian academic at an American university I saw this week. He was very certain, and it lodged a nice germ in my mind about how temporary all of this is.

Of course, as James alluded to, it may not become temporary. This may be this attempt to re-archetype reality and turn the world upside down, to turn falsehood into truth for the usurper—the literal and metaphorical usurper Donald. January 6th, whatever happened in the 2016 and 2024 elections with Russian help—the usurper is attempting to turn the world upside down.

The Reformation Parallel

I’ve alluded to this before. I studied in great detail the early transmission of ideas in the early German Reformation, 1518 to 1530, and the world turned upside down. Sebastian Brant’s late fifteenth-century book, The Ship of Fools, played a really big part in the re-archetyping of the Pope as Antichrist and the use of memes and cartoons to re-archetype the church in a certain way, done by the leaders, the oligarchs.

They succeeded in some ways, yet the Catholic Church is still around and there still is truth—there’s truth in all of our lives. I’m quite optimistic. At the moment we’re in the endgame.

I do note the Kennedy Center and what’s going on there. For those who don’t know: he inexplicably tried to fire the board almost immediately upon getting into office. They resisted. In the end, like a steamroller, he got rid of them. Then he attempted unlawfully to rename it the Trump Kennedy Center. He got all his patsies in there—basically the spouses of all his Epstein-connected cabinet members and lawyers and various people are on the board. He controls the board and performers. This Kennedy Center, as I understand it—correct me if I’m wrong, Wendy or James—was established by an Act of Congress to memorialise and commemorate JFK. That’s its sole purpose. It washed its face and made a surplus of something like $40 million last year. Already Donald has tanked it, as he’s tanked absolutely everything he’s ever been involved in.

I do believe underpinning all of this, along with RFK, and all his other motivations, is this idea of annihilating this golden boy of his youth that perhaps someone he hated in his life talked about. He just wants to annihilate all that is good. I don’t believe he’ll succeed. I don’t believe any of them will succeed at this in the end. The end is coming near.

6,000 Years of Indo-European Truth

Part of my confidence in that actually is my perspective from 6,000 years of Indo-European history and the triumph of right and truth. It’s in our language, it’s in our words, in almost every sentence. The repeated attempts, as memorialised in stories about the devil or the snake or whatever, in every culture going back literally for 6,000 years that we have records for—it’s embedded in our language. The word in Hindi and early Indian languages for snake is nāgī. It means negative. This is what Donald and the devil and Satan and Putler and all of these horrific oligarchs, whom the Epstein system has given us a window into, are trying to do. They are the neg, they are the anti—yet I don’t believe they’ll triumph. We’ve got Ukraine, we’ve got President Zelensky, and we’ve got the truth on our side. We’ve got the disinfolklore analytical method and the disinfolklore perspective.

Disinfolklore’s Building Blocks

I was first going to go through just a couple of the tools—very easy snack bites—then go back to the Battling Archetypes aspect, these twelve tools, which is more longue durée work I’ve been doing for the last few weeks.

Are You New to Disinfolklore?

If you’re new to disinfolklore—actually, that’s a bit of a trick question, because if you live in an information-rich environment today, you’re already steeped in disinfolklore. You just couldn’t notice it until I coined the term to describe how strategically targeted memes affecting our attitudes, motivations, intentions, and moods pass through our incoming troll radars to transform our identities in unseen ways.

Now I’ve named it disinfolklore—just as the writers in the Book of Genesis named things and have Adam and God naming things—you can get your eye in and begin to move forward. Be more mindful about how strategically we are being manipulated by disinfolklore masquerading as news, gossip, advice, both in your online and in your real-life lives.

I see news as a province of folklore, as is disinfolklore. Disinfolklore describes stories, however delivered, that communicate meanness with a view to altering the moods, intentions, motivations, and attitudes of their consumers in ways which satisfy the strategic demands of disinfolklorists.

Donald’s Ceasefire Troll

Take today’s Donald. It’s just so horrid what he said about this fake ceasefire. He was asked in the White House: you agreed with Putler on a ceasefire, yet yesterday was one of the worst attacks of the entire war by Putler on Ukraine—what do you say to that? Donald said, well, you know, he agreed a ceasefire from Sunday to Sunday, and yesterday’s Monday, so of course he had to do it. These two people have been fighting forever for the past few years. It’s a war that wouldn’t have happened, you know, and all that malarkey.

That’s pure disinfolklore. It’s pure meanness. It’s both-sidesing Ukraine and Russia. It’s telling lies. It’s not ethically disciplined. It’s part of Russia’s information war against Ukraine.

As we heard Donald Tusk refer to today—which many of us have come to over the past few weeks—the Epstein relationship with Russia, Donald’s relationship with Epstein and Russia, and this entire governance system in which the honey traps affecting the survivors and victims in awful ways were just part of this awful governance system. We get a great insight into it through this English fellow called Peter Mandelson, whom English listeners will know through all the disinfolklore going back to the days of New Labour. It turns out there’s evidence that while the world financial system was about to fall apart in 2007–2008, and Gordon Brown literally saved the world and rescued Mandelson and made him into a lord so he could be his minister, Mandelson was sharing private correspondence about the bailout with Epstein. These are all Brighton Beach mafia-adjacent people. They’re all Russian, despite their all-American looks. This is all a Russian mafia operation. He’s sharing papers which are then monetised by them and exchanged for influence and other things.

That little vignette seems to illustrate how these people are trying to corrupt and usurp our world and usurp what is right. It’s up to us to ensure they don’t succeed, as we’re trying our best with the Ukraine example. I just don’t think it will succeed.

Disinfolklore Is Empirical and Descriptive

When Donald speaks like that, he is communicating meanness with a view to altering moods, intentions, motivations, and attitudes. He’s intending to depress Ukrainians. It’s just the most horrible thing. If there are sins—venal sins, the worst sins ever in the Catholic Church—that can be committed through words alone, then Donald commits them a thousand times a day. At a time when Ukrainians are freezing, he tempts them into going out in the street with this ceasefire troll. I’m sure very few of them believe in it, but it’s just horrible.

If you wonder what disinfolklore is: anything Donald ever says—that is just disinfolklore. News reporting this disinfolklore or any other kind is the main means of creating the disinfolklore universe in which we are currently being enmeshed on an unprecedented scale. This is something I’m offering which many practitioners in disinformation don’t offer: the system-wide effects of not just this particular meme by Donald, but the systemic effects of zillions of them—including the missile strikes, Epstein, Putler, and just the whole mess, this forest of horribleness and meanness that all of us have chosen or been chosen to enmesh ourselves in each day.

We are self-realising through it. We’re trying to help Ukraine, trying to stop the usurpers’ win, trying to help truth—meaning territorial integrity, borders sacrosanct, freedom from being missile-struck, freedom from being enslaved by the Russists and all of the terrible consequences that would arise if the purported annexation of Crimea and all that has happened as a result was allowed to stand.

One: disinfolklore is empirical. This is not a theory. It is empirically based, grounded in data. We see it every day. As James pointed out, you can see a family resemblance between what Donald is trying to do to the Kennedy Center and archetyping, one of the weapons in our arsenal as disinfolklore analytical methodologists.

Two: it’s descriptive. Disinfolklore is meant to depress spirits. It affects motivations in order to entrench in people the idea that it’s useless to resist. Donald himself is very descriptive—his tone, his storytelling technique, switching between third person and other perspectives really confusingly for people, is a really effective storytelling technique. He uses resonant verbal images and props, whether it’s a red cap or other devices. The purpose is clear: to depress spirits, whether it’s the spirits of his cynical followers, oligarchs who seek to benefit, or people like us who are appalled by everything that’s going on.

Disinfolklore as a Way of Seeing

Three: it’s a way of seeing. Once you get your eye in, you can use the disinfolklore lens as a way of perceiving certain kinds of patterns in data.

Four: disinfolklore inculcates rules. It normalises certain mental routines. Don’t go to the forest. Don’t bother supporting Ukraine. You’re not Ukrainian. Cross the river and you’ll be forced to become LGBTIQ. There are all these rules, unknown to us, inculcated in our minds through the means of certain strategically designed, emotionally resonant stories. This is a feature of folklore going back forever. One of its great functions is to teach children: don’t go to that forest, don’t go to the island.

Five: it’s also a description of my project. Disinfolklore is a necessary precursor to understanding what counter-disinfolklore consists of. All of this is about—and I try to remember this in my work—not just identifying or describing something terrible and going, oh, I can’t do anything about it. It’s about acting as well. That’s the counter-disinfolklore. All of us have chosen that path, all of us in this space. In the pro-Ukraine community, those who identify as part of NAFO and Volia Radio—we have chosen to counter disinfolklore, to act against it, not just to be consumers of it and throw our hands up and say, okay, I can’t do anything about it, so I’m not going to bother. We’ve chosen to engage in memetic warfare in lots of different ways.

The Intention Problem: Why Effects Matter More

Traditional definitions of disinformation distinguish it from mere misinformation on the grounds of intention to mislead. The problem here is that the same meme, when spoken by me, if I am being *méchant* and deliberately trying to mislead someone, would be disinformation. If Wendy accidentally believed it and just passed it on to James, it would be just misinformation. Its effect is the same if James then passes it on. It doesn’t matter if I’ve deliberately manipulated James and Wendy has accidentally manipulated James. If James then tells his sister or his daughter or his mother, his wife, a cousin, or says it on the radio—the same meme—it doesn’t matter whether it’s intentionally or unintentionally communicated. It’s still alive, it’s been passed on, and the energy inside that meme stays alive.

If we’re truly most concerned about all of this because of its effects—we’re not just interested in disinformation or Ukraine to pass the time. It’s intrinsically interesting, of course, yet we’re also interested because of its impact on people, on their moods. We see what it does to people. We see how Donald has affected all American and practically everyone’s lives on the planet. The same with Putler’s invasion of Ukraine, whether it’s the price of oil or our depressed spirits or 14 million Ukrainian internally displaced people and 9 million who left Ukraine. These have great effects.

It doesn’t matter in some ways about the intention. We can argue all day about Putler’s real intention, yet that doesn’t really matter. What really matters is the effects. That’s where what I try to provide comes in: look for the mana in the meme. That’s one of the main weapons, tools, and unique aspects of the disinfolklore analytical method. We take units of information and attempt to discern the quality of the mana inside them.

Look for the Mana in the Meme

As we get better at this—and the first step to getting better is just thinking about doing it—then whether James communicates this meme to me, passes it through the barrier into my brain, into my mind, to kind of tickle my mind, or Wendy does, it doesn’t matter whether James intentionally is manipulating me or Wendy is accidentally manipulating me. If we’ve got this skill of looking for the mana in the meme, looking for what the energy is inside it and how it is affecting my mood, my intention, my attitude—many of us, because we see the family resemblance between different kinds of memes, like the nuclear threats for instance. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from Medvedev or our friend who’s breathlessly repeating something they read in the *New York Post*. We see the energy in this, which is Russia’s attempt to coercively control humanity and get us to surrender to Russism.

That’s a really powerful aspect of disinfolklore: looking for the mana inside the meme.

Disgust as an Incoming Troll Radar

Once we’re looking for it, we can create different tools for identifying the energy inside memes. One of the key tools is actually its impact on us. When I heard Donald say this about the ceasefire—and I hope I’m now passing this on to all of you, trying to wrap it so that it’s not just disinfolklore but more infolklore, it’s informing you, a story to inculcate an idea—my emotional visceral reaction was just disgust. Disgust is, of course, one of the tools that Donald and his ilk use. We’ve spoken about this before, especially in the context of contagion. There’s this work by cultural psychologists about how the emotion of disgust, so it is believed, began as a mechanism we use biologically not to drink the poisonous soup, to puke it out or vomit it out. Then it passes from that into culture, and we begin to project disgustingness or non-disgustingness onto different articles or objects.

MAGA attempts to get us to think of Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton as disgusting—the whole Pizzagate thing. Food is intrinsically involved in all of this. When she’s associated with this dark cabal of child slavery, all located in this pizzeria in Washington, D.C., this gets entrenched in people’s minds through disinfolklore, through stories promoted by Fox and through a million different channels. Then you don’t even remember why she disgusts you, yet you sense or feel that disgust.

The moment I felt that disgust with Donald, that reaction on behalf of 42 million Ukrainians and 350 million fellow Americans, my incoming troll radar was activated. I realised: I’m not going to go with this feeling. I’m not going to go with this disgust. I’m going to use it as an example tonight. I’m not going to allow Donald to impact my mood. I’m going to bank it, put it in a little capsule in my mind, then move on from it. Very little of what he does disgusts me in this visceral way, yet that really did because I’m reading about what Ukrainians are going through at the moment—it’s horrific—and just the idea he could explain it away as natural. He lies about the ceasefire, then says, well, you know, it was Sunday to Sunday, so it’s Monday, so obviously he’s going to send his missiles. It’s probably top three worst things a US president has ever and will ever say.

The disgust I felt alerted me to a troll. Someone is trying to get into my mind and I’m going to protect myself from it. That was wrapped up inside his story about missiles and Putler. Incidentally, this was minutes before he took a dump in the Oval Office—yet again, a public defecation with people around, and they hurried everyone out. That’s good counter-disinfolklore. We cannot resist opportunities for toilet humour, especially when this is one of many times he has apparently done this in public.

The Mana of Coercive Control

The energy of Russia’s disinfolklore is coercive control. The mana energy from the macro to the micro—the words of individual Russist so-called mil-bloggers, Russian guys in the field who hang the Russian mobiks upside down on trees—that’s the epitome of coercive control. The way they treat women. The way Epstein and all of those people, all the people in Donald’s cabinet, treat women. The way Donald treats women and people he others.

That coercive control mana energy is inside the memes, inside what they do, inside the stories, inside the way they treat the survivors, as we see with the latest docs dump.

The mana of Russia’s disinfolklore is coercive control. You can back-propagate from that: if you spot coercive control—which is quite carefully defined in English law because it’s now illegal, and which we might know in different ways, having experienced it in our own lives with partners or girlfriends or boyfriends, husbands or wives—there’s a certain level of intensity of coercive control in relationships, usually male on female, that in English statute law is now outlawed.

If you see coercive control in a meme or in a story—either someone trying to coercively control you, or Donald trying to coercively control Ukraine into surrender by withholding intelligence cooperation (forcing them to withdraw from Kursk and all of this), the “perfect phone call” in air quotes, where he was coercively controlling President Zelensky into announcing an investigation into the Hunter Biden troll in return for $280 million worth of Javelin missile systems which Congress had already appropriated specifically for Ukraine, plus a White House visit—that’s coercive control.

The Budapest Memorandum specifically makes it a violation to exert economic coercion on Ukraine by any of the parties, whether England, the Russian Federation, or the United States. Yet we see this normalisation of economic coercion by Donald—tariffs are a form. His whole tariff troll is a form of coercive control, not just on other countries but also on the Americans who are paying the tariffs.

Coercive control is immanent in almost every breath Donald takes as a case study. Once you can see it in him and what he does, you can see aspects of it in what other normal people do, in geopolitics, in what Putler does. Whenever you encounter that energy in memes, you know that’s probably disinfolklore. Someone is probably trying to affect your mood, your motivation, your attitude, and your intentions through a story whose immanence is coercive control.

Coercive Control as a Shortcut

That’s one very common immanence in disinfolklore. If you’re looking for the mana in the meme—the energy in a meme, whether it’s a story someone is telling you, a story you’re participating in with a friend, something on Twitter or X or Instagram Stories, or images, or something you think about—when you identify this aspect of coercive control, you have a shortcut. Often these judgements need to be made quickly in real life. I want the disinfolklore analytical method to be something we can use individually, as I do, in my daily life to get me through the day and to help me navigate very complicated realities.

We’re looking for ways of cutting through the confusion. You’re looking for the mana of the meme, you spot coercive control, then you mount your defence or your counterattack—or you just get out of there. You don’t need to spend three days trying to work out what’s going on. You simply recognise: this is not a story I want to let affect my energy. I don’t want how I act to be changed by this, because someone is deliberately trying to coercively control me into behaviour which is against my identity.

If I allow myself to be coercively controlled—and obviously there are circumstances in which we all have to surrender to it because we’re just not powerful enough to resist at that moment—that doesn’t mean we can’t try to recognise it. Epstein’s victims and Donald’s victims often understand they’re being coercively controlled, like we do, like I do now. We just can’t do anything about it for the time being. We have to wait till we get a bit bigger and find a lawyer or something else.

We can keep our identity—help sustain our identity—by noticing what’s going on and by mentally resisting. If we do find the power to overcome it, that is an identity-preservation process. The opposite is what I’ve described before: the purpose of the disinfolklore universe inside MAGA or inside Russia-occupied Ukraine is to transform our identities through the medium of our moods, intentions, attitudes, and motivations by using stories to attack them and manipulate us—to pulate, to shake our mana, our own energy.

After a time, we’ve acted in ways we would never have dreamed we would act. Take your average MAGA adherent and bring them in your time machine back to 1990 when they were a Reagan Republican. They would never have agreed with any of the nonsense they agree with now. Identities are transformed through these memes deliberately. Donald and Putler and those trying to change our world are trying to promote this spheres-of-influence nonsense from their IR textbooks, rather than territorial integrity being sacrosanct according to the UN Charter and a variety of international legal instruments, as well as being the obvious means of maintaining stability in our world.

The Cognitive Model: Information as In-Forming

I’ve described a bit now the cognitive model of how disinfolklore affects our intentions and motivations, and therefore our activities, including our thoughts. This is a key part of the disinfolklore analytical method. As James pointed out, there are loads of other models out there. This is just the one I’ve come up with to match my experience of how my mind, my mana, my energy is impacted by meanness in stories.

It’s also something I’ve developed which I hope is accessible to people. When we detect trolls coming in—detect this energy, say, of coercive control—or we have a sense that someone is trying to manipulate us, we mount our incoming troll radars, always looking for this. Mindfulness is another word for it, though that kind of puts people off. It’s this mindfulness where you’re a gatekeeper between the external and your mind, and you triage certain bits of information according to their risks of negatively impacting your mood or your attitude or your intentions. When you detect coercive control in any form, immediately you’re on guard, and you’re not going to let it affect your inner mind, your mana.

When you feel your moods or attitudes or intentions being scraped or vibrated by these things, these data, these memes, that can also be a sign that it’s time to—metaphorically speaking—get out of there and just not let it in and avoid it.

I think it’s important to have an accessible cognitive model when we’re talking about information. The clue is in the term itself: information. It’s about forming you. It’s forming the inside of you. This is one of the beautiful things about Indo-European languages. We have really true renderings of what is happening in the words we use every day, yet we don’t think of it that way. We think of “inform” as merely meaning somebody is telling us something we didn’t know. The clue, when you think about the term, is that it’s forming our inside.

That’s what I mean by the energy, the being manipulated, where someone is pulating your mana, your energy, with information, shaking it up and down in such a way that it affects your moods and intentions in the negative way. The opposite works too. I’ve been noticing a lot how children react—for some reason it’s just been on my mind—the way they make each other laugh. I’ve got my eye in now and I see it a lot on the streets. That kind of friendship is really familiar to me, and I try to do that in my real life a lot.

That’s positive trolling—definitional positive trolling—where two friends are just making each other laugh and smile. They’re practising generosity by doing that. Their intention is all good. I think that’s absolutely wonderful. That is great counter-disinfolklore. That’s positive information.

I’ll come back to that again next week. Hopefully that was helpful. That was eight different tools. I’ve actually got 37 more.

Continued from:

First in Series:

It pops up as a perennial troll: you’re in the countryside, something strange happens, and it’s attributed to a troll appearing and interceding. Trolls perform the same function as angels or leprechauns or banshees or Baba Yaga or rusalky. It’s all the same — every Indo-European culture has these substitutes for energy, to explain things.

On Minsk: I’ve talked before about how my Disinfolklore Analytical Method allows us to look at any form. One takeaway from a lot of my work at the moment is to try not to treat these as organic or accidental emanations — just as seeing Elon in the White House archetyping himself with his son as the dark hero, Batman and Robin, is trying to affect our moods. Seeing these elements as part of a system might prevent us reacting to them as if they’re individual artefacts and moments in our lives. They’re very much part of what I would see as the coup or insurrection which, according to both the Georgia and federal indictments, began within the first moments that Donald Trump disputed the results of the 2020 election. The racketeering charge in the federal indictment tells us it’s a whole system, not just one moment. That perspective is essentially what I do in my work — selling perspectives on the quotidian, the daily elements, to help us understand ourselves, where we’re fitting in, how we’re affecting the culture.

Our culture — which most of us have chosen to engage with on X — that’s our main entry point, our main power: to affect people’s timelines. We know how we’re affected by information we see. That’s why we’re part of this Volya community, because we think there’s power in communicating this understanding. What we can do is see this as part of the system and become Disinfolklore-literate: look for what I call Archetypal Disinfolklore, look for what they’re trying to archetype themselves as, how they’re trying to manipulate us, and then find ways of explaining and sharing this comprehension.

I’d quickly reference the Tulsi Gabbard issue because it ties into what we talked about last week. I’m trying to give tools that help us discern the mana in the meme — the energy in the memes we encounter each day as we scroll, interact with our culture, and create our culture. Axios reported that Tulsi Gabbard is prepared to submit her resignation if Donald authorises entering the Israel–Iran war. There was also credible reporting that she was excluded from a meeting to discuss the impending war. From that, I deduced she is — as most of us know — recognised as being part of the Russian influence network, and they were trying to keep her out of that meeting. Her preparedness to resign over the Israel–Iran war complements my analysis of what is going on.

What’s particularly interesting is that because of what we know about Russia’s economy — because we listen to Mokrushyna and Prints every day and Absurdistan — we almost uniquely as a community have a detailed idea of Russia’s economic state, its dependence on oil exports, and its dependence on Iran for weaponry since it was first reported in October 2022, when Iran was denying providing Russia with weapons and drones. Up until then, we didn’t know which way Iran would swing.

I have this fixed flagpole in my mind: Russia does not want the United States to enter the war in Iran. Therefore, anyone who is suddenly out of character against this war — Tulsi Gabbard being one — we can use this as a good litmus test to know if they’re in Russia’s influence, whether paid or otherwise. It’s very particularly interesting to see which way Donald goes in the end. On one hand, he’s suddenly become like a Messiah to these patrician neocons who always thought of him as a clown, and now he’s offering them what they’ve dreamed about since 1979: bombing Iran back to the Stone Age. On the other hand, the MAGA element — Bannon and company, who’ve been leading the charge against Ukraine, which again is a litmus test for where these people’s loyalties lie.

In this context, I look back at Gabbard’s video — the aesthetics, the Soviet-era aesthetics, the argument about World War III which we as a community understand. A highly educated, brilliant American friend contacted me and used this World War III meme. Whatever media she’s consuming is promoting it, and we’re very familiar with it from here.

On the archetyping idea: this gave me the concept of re-archetyping World War III. I read a few pieces this week, which some of you will have seen, on what war looks like now — using what all of us have learned from watching how drone warfare has evolved, listening very carefully to Alan and Chuck Pfarrer and others. All of us have learned a lot about warfare, and because most of us didn’t know much beforehand, we’ve perhaps been more open to the new rules. I saw Trent Telenko’s post yesterday setting out the range of Shahed drones, which I don’t think any of us would be confident about defending against. We’ve seen how they’ve evolved and how Ukraine has countered almost every obstacle, but the Shahed drones are an absolute problem for the world.

I found some of my early tweets on Shahed drones. In 2023, a drone attack was four Shaheds. Now we’ve got 400 a night, two nights of 400-plus. When you see that Iran has Shahed drones within range of Central Europe, according to Trent Telenko’s map, you become less gung-ho. If you’ve archetyped in your mind that the US Army is the biggest and best in the world, and you’ve been reading Telenko’s posts — he integrates these daily lessons and batters them against his existing archetypes about force power and defence. He’s constantly lobbying for hardened shelters for stealth bombers. But I’m also looking at what’s happening in Kherson.

The Shahed drones and Iran aren’t really on the minds of most people in the normal world — they tune in to Ukraine every now and again. As far as I can see, they’re not really on the minds of the neocons pushing for war in Iran either. I’m waiting to see Dick Cheney visiting the White House after all Donald did to his daughter. That story is very interesting — they’ve been paying for this war for decades.

Someone like Trent Telenko is re-archetyping his ideas of what’s necessary to defend, constantly updating according to the latest data. Others aren’t doing this — many pushing for war, and on the other side, people either paid or accidentally under Russian influence who want to stop the Iran war at all costs. I wrote about how we need to outline this. My tweets are proper interventions worthy of being printed in journals, because I don’t see responses from the so-called experts. It’s exactly what we saw with the Iraq war — it’s all right to bomb a place back to the Stone Age, but what happens on day two?

Now, what happens on day two is pretty obvious to me. One scenario I’d be considering: many of us will remember when Kherson was liberated — those wonderful days, many of us were on Volya Radio that day — and we expected blowback, but it didn’t really come for another year. The UN Commission of Inquiry report we discussed in the first week of this show: that drone war starts in July 2023, after Kherson was liberated in September 2022. It took a while, then they started with one or two drones. Today we saw 30 people injured, hunted by drones. Drone warfare — drones launched almost every day from Enerhodar Nuclear Power Plant, which is my long-term litmus test for whether people really understand World War III as anything other than a mantra that provokes archetypal images of this 1980s view of ashes and the whole world turned to ashes.

Tulsi Gabbard’s video depicted that — in words and images. Mokrushyna has talked very well about this, and I remember seeing videos on the BBC in the early 1980s about nuclear winters. When the World War III signifier is trotted out, the archetypal identity provoked in minds of people of a certain age is precisely what Gabbard was articulating. It was so clumsy with the Soviet imagery. That tells me, in light of this new data, even more strongly that the Russians are behind her, and that they don’t want this war. She obviously saw it coming and thought to put out this quite cryptic video at the potential cost of her job, according to her orders.

But the idea of re-archetyping World War III — which this has all provoked in my mind — is precisely about drone warfare. The scenario we’ve seen in Kherson and other cities, now with fibre-optic drones: what happened with the pro-Palestine movement which grew up suddenly after October 7th on university campuses across the world — I foresee a so-called peace movement, an armed peace movement. The model would be the Vietnam War: an insurrection masquerading as a peace movement, injected into a society constantly divided by Chinese TikTok. The NRA and their guns would be nothing against drones. Today’s means of blowback are much more significant than with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The knowledge we have enables us to re-archetype our ideas of what blowback might look like if Donald enters the war. The only hope, ironically, that he won’t carpet-bomb Iran is Putin and the Russians — everything I see tells me they definitely don’t want this. They don’t want Iran bombed because of their dependence on Iran to get oil to market. Everything I’m seeing through Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson and Dugin — all these clans, paid or unpaid influencers, are suddenly coming out against war. All of them were probably pro-Iraq war. That’s where re-archetyping comes in.

The other thing I wanted to talk about, connected to re-archetyping and Archetypal Disinfolklore — it’s the first tool in my Twelve Tools. Arsenal, Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy.

Letters to Ukraine — the horror on all levels. I worked with mothers of missing soldiers in eastern Ukraine for four years, almost every week. I met these mothers to talk about their missing sons. I hoped their bodies would be returned. There were always rumours they were enslaved by the Russians.

This is Trigger, Experience, Reaction. There’s the trigger. Then we have the experience in our mind — sadness, disgust, hope, whatever particular emotion we feel — and then we react. Mokrushyna’s reaction today was: “I just can’t do the show today.” That saved all of us from just depressing each other over those hours as news came out of the child stuck under the soil. We all have to do what we have to do to protect our own minds.

This is reflected even in the meaning of the days of the week — discovering this whole literature on archetypes in Indo-European culture, an insight that the French linguist and philosopher Georges Dumézil discovered in the 1930s. Underlying the structure of all Indo-European communities is a tripartite structure of archetypes, of functions. Most of us will be aware, for instance, of the caste system in India — a personification, a reflection of this structure: sovereignty, security, and fertility or prosperity. The monarch, the soldier, the woman or farmer. Once you get your eye in, this structure is everywhere.

This is partly why I look so deeply into linguistics. The shaman trickster is memorialised in our days of the week by Woden. Woden — as in dies, sky, day, deity — the Germanic deity, Odin in its English manifestation, Woden in Germany. Odin self-sacrificed on the royal mound at Uppsala in Sweden, gave himself to himself, hung himself for nine days and nights. That story is very much reflected in Jesus Christ’s sacrifice.

Donald Trump — once you get your eye in and read, as I’ve read, all of Dumézil’s amazing work, which is very important to my understanding of archetypes and their origins — and so it pleases me a lot when people try to think about which archetypes apply. The important thing to note is these are the three primary archetypes: the sovereign — and sovereignty has two aspects, the magical and the juridical. The juridical manifests as Tiwaz’s Day, Tuesday. The magical aspect — the priest-like aspect, the Brahmin, the Flamines, and again this M-N sound across different Indo-European cultures — is also reflected in the days of the week. Tuesday in English comes from the Germanic. The days of the week in English, rather than in French where they come from the Roman, show where the border lies. Then you have Friday — Freyja — who is a reflection of the pre-Indo-European aspect in our structure. It comes into everything.

This discovery — that this structure actually exists — this was the person who inspired my entire work for the past six years: to try and work out what Donald Trump is doing. Then to realise that this is a perennial character who pops up not only in literature, folk tales and stories, but in the earliest written texts, in this structure. Everything Donald Trump does as the shaman, the archetypal shaman trickster, who has the magical rather than juridical aspect — and Putin is also playing this role — was quite a discovery.

If you’re reading a folk tale about the shaman trickster, you’re in a completely different cognitive space than when you’re scrolling down Twitter or listening to Trump in Canada or wherever. Yet it is precisely the same phenomenon. This is so deeply embedded in the way we organise ourselves — more than half the world’s population today speak an Indo-European language as their native tongue — that we don’t understand our attraction to him, or our repulsion, or how he manifests.

We see similarities between Modi, another shaman trickster, Boris Johnson in England, Nigel Farage. Of them all, Donald — because he’s managed to trick his way into executing the sovereignty function in the most powerful community of humans ever assembled. Or you could argue the Yamna in southeastern Ukraine, where between 4100 and 2500 BCE a small community of people had these archetypes of sovereign, security and fertility manifest as characters in mythology, which then ran into religions — whether Iranian, Indian, Germanic, Celtic or even Christianity. It was so concentrated there that we still think in these terms.

This is about re-archetyping Ukraine. Its contribution to the way we think makes it the most important culture there is. The titanic struggle is between — because of course, Iona, you’re right to point out that President Zelensky is the comedian. He’s literally a comedian. That’s what he did — actor, comedian. When asked in the documentary, “You played a president on television — has that helped prepare you to be president?” President Zelensky looks quizzically at the interviewer as if he’s the stupidest person he’s ever encountered: “No, they’re completely different things. In one, I’m playing a role.”

Donald Trump managed to re-archetype himself as a leader of humans through a television show where he was acting as an entrepreneur. He was never an entrepreneur, but he played one, and they wanted that role. Like Putin, exactly like Putin — they are shaman tricksters, brilliant at provoking emotions in other people, either revulsion, disgust, joy or following. They do it in this magical way that priests, advertising, religions and cults have done for millennia, but in a very cynical way, and it’s not ethically disciplined — which is the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls.

Hopefully in coming weeks we’ll talk more about this, because it’s the most important insight I have to share: there’s an archetypal structure in our news, in our Disinfolklore, manifested through characters, through stories, which is perennial — at least since 4100 BCE, since the first Indo-European language was forged in Ukraine. That’s the miracle of the connection with Ukraine: all of this was born there.

That’s partly why I’m confident President Zelensky — who was born 150–200 kilometres from the area where Indo-European languages began, around the borders of Mykolaiv and Kherson oblasts, the heartland of the Yamna community — you go through Kryvyi Rih, where Zelensky is from, and there are great stone circles there. In this titanic struggle, I’m 100% confident President Zelensky will win, because he’s against two dime-store shaman tricksters. Putin — once you get your eye in, you can see how he performs the tricks. Two bare-chested men with his rod, his bendy rod. These archetypal identities are replayed, and in people’s minds it’s just so basic.

Whereas President Zelensky not only was a comedian, a shaman trickster who creates and provokes emotions in people’s minds for a living, built a business around it — he then transitioned with a really strong idea of what is real and what is fake. The others are caught up in their Disinfolklore galaxies and Disinfolklore universes. This is the struggle — the Titanic in Greek mythology, much of which was born in this area of Ukraine. We think of Greek as the beginning just because it was recorded first, but now we know better.

You have these archetypal identities, these gods, which confuse people — the hero’s journey and all of that, which Jung and others in film scripts talk about. It’s quite confusing for those without a classical education. But what Dumézil’s genius was — and he spent the rest of his life working through it after his insight — is that this is immanent in a huge body of linguistics and literature, one of the main evidential trajectories before we had ancient DNA. If you found the same story with the same archetypes in India, Iran, Irish mythology, and Germanic mythology, you knew it must come from a common source. This was before ancient DNA demonstrated that the common source manifested as a particular community of humans in southern Ukraine.

This is absolutely key because there are lots of second-tier archetypes — moving, dynamic archetypes like Russian Disinfolklore and propaganda, like Minsk as a character. And again, the M-N sound in Minsk, Yamna, Monarch, and the R-T sound in security, prosperity, sovereignty. You have these sounds, these archetypes, these meanings, this language personified by characters which are perennial. But then you also have characters created in stories — in Russian news and elsewhere — which are second- and third-tier. There is this fundamental structure, and it is there. It’s peer-reviewed.

The moment I came across Dumézil’s work, as I was trying to research what Donald Trump is doing and the shaman trickster — to see that it’s there, that it’s a structure — I’d like to help people become aware of it. Because then we see there’s nothing new about him. It’s the same trick played at the fairground, the same thing we see on TV. We just invest it with something more serious because he’s occupying the sovereignty function of this community of American humans. And now we hear him archetyping himself as a soldier, as war.

Those three archetypes are fundamental — in our cognition, in our culture, manifesting in every timeline, all over the place, all the time. It’s the same story for at least 6,000 years. I make no claims for non-Indo-European cultures.

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