Decoding Trolls

First thing I wanted to talk about, which is something I noticed on my Twitter about five days ago. I first noticed I was getting a lot of pictures of David Bowie and the Rolling Stones. Never really liked the Rolling Stones. Really loved David Bowie from the age of about eight onwards. And that got me thinking, why am I getting this stuff on Twitter?

And then I realized, ah, for some reason, I had cut off images. There was a setting in Twitter which I used as part of my incoming troll radar to block images. And so I would never see images on my Twitter feed, just text. And suddenly that disappeared. And then I looked for the setting and the setting had disappeared. And then I Googled it and I discovered two days before I worked this out, because I was wondering why am I, what is different about this experience? And what is different is I’m getting two channels of information and I’m used to only getting one channel of information on Twitter, which is just text.

I would click sometimes on images to look at them if I wanted. But basically, it was my only way of controlling what was going into my mind, into my brain. And they got rid of the setting inside the app which is obviously very annoying because clearly there’s an intelligence behind this and what the intelligence behind this is trying to do is involuntarily feed us with visual memes which can have a greater impact on imprinting on our mind and printing archetypes on our mind. And so obviously that’s very annoying that I as the consumer who actually pay because it’s my main medium for initial writing.

And the algorithm trolls me and I troll it and it inspires it. I’ve trained the algorithm so that it hits me with my for you feed is, every now and again there’s a bit of a change but it’s basically exactly how I, I’m pretty happy with it the way it is especially if I can cut out the images. And because of that, I pay for it. And it’s extremely annoying to have my experience determined in this way. That’s one thing, because I think of it as a violation of my right as a consumer or to have the experience that I want. And then I think also, what’s behind it? Why is the intelligence behind the algorithm trying to feed me images which I don’t want to see. It should be no skin off their nose. And it’s very annoying.

So I worked out a solution for this, which I now have. I have quite a few different types of browsers on my phone, which I use for different applications. I use the DuckDuckGo browser now for YouTube stuff. It’s particularly well optimized for that and it doesn’t keep any of the cookies and I generally don’t have to sign in. And so, for instance, I was watching the great Chuck Pfarrer and Alan Brewer today on YouTube through DuckDuckGo.

But now for Twitter, I am fighting my instinct, which is to always go for the app, but I now go for the, it’s on Firefox, and that cuts out the images. Unfortunately, it still has video, but it’s easy for me to scan through there. And I’ve been doing this now for about five days. So I just say that in the context of incoming troll radar, how do I control the information coming into my brain, coming into my mind, because we’re all dealing with so much of it. And the visual, the image element of it is something I can do without because I work in text mostly. I always add images to my writing and I consider myself mainly a writer, but I do use different forms of media. So I just suggest that if other people have found this lack of a setting, that’s my practical solution to it. And so far it’s working quite well.

China and Russia: Territorial Ambitions

I noticed a tweet by Jay and Keeve the other day where he, Jay was referring to this. We’re seeing this story appearing more and more about the China coming in to take a bite out of China, taking a bite out of Russia. And I think it was actually mentioned on Times Radio today, which generally I don’t listen to, but I have started. They were interviewing William Taylor, who was the US ambassador to Ukraine in the late 90s and then the charge d’affaires after an acting ambassador after Donald and Lev Parnas and co got rid of Maria Jovanovich who I met in Dnipro once and who was really amazing really engaged with the granular aspect of what was going on in Ukraine. And so I listened to that interview. And even on that, which is quite mainstream, they’re referring to this idea that China is now talking about taking parts of Russia.

And I think maybe it was even Genesis Man raised it today on their show about how there’s a game, there’s actually a game now in China developed, which is, you know, which part of Russia do you want? So I can really get behind that. But Jay and Keeve made a point which I agreed with because when I first heard about this latest round of scary stories about China, not scary from our perspective, but scary for the Russians taking parts of Russia in this latest round. It was about two months ago by Constantine inside Russia. And as some of you will know, I have a slightly love-hate relationship with him because I am suspicious of him. Despite that I found I find him engaging some of the time and and and a good source of information and again going back to the incoming troll radar and one of the algorithm one of the parts of my algorithm which which I work on is if I find myself wondering about the authenticity of some account then the fact of me wondering about the authenticity, I now use as an indicator that probably I should be ultra careful with them.

And so I’m very careful about Constantine in Russia, inside Russia. However, he, about two months ago, he featured as one of his news stories on his show about how the Chinese media was running these stories about China getting ready to take parts of Russia. And I thought to myself, because I am slightly suspicious for a number of reasons, and we can talk about that again. Because of that, I was wondering, why is he telling us this? And what is the perspective? And my hypothesis was, this is a Russian operation attempting to scare us with the idea that China’s going to come in and take a bite out of Russia. So this is Russia trying to put itself in the place of the West and basically say, you know, we’re protecting, we’re keeping parts of China inside the white supremacist European envelope.

And we’re doing you all a service. And if you don’t give us what we want, then China’s going to come and take in a bite of Russia. Now, of course, and Jay and Keev, seem to come to this conclusion as well. Now, if it is true that there is this game which is approved in China, and any of us who know Russia very well and Russians very well understand they are, it is their primordial fear is of China, not of Europe. And so it’s completely plausible that China itself is generating some of these stories. But it’s equally plausible that Russia, in their madness, think that they’re going to somehow scare us into sacrificing Ukraine because we don’t want China to take Yakutia. And so I just wanted to raise, yeah, so I suppose I start from the, I want to avoid being automatically manipulated, having my manner pulated, moved up and down in such a way that I can’t control it.

Mental Hygiene and Visual Images

Visual images have such a powerful impact on our consciousness that there’s many things you can’t unsee. And so if anyone writes trigger warning or they say, oh, this is awful, and then they kind of show it to you, like if I scan in the text and I see that I never click, you know, click on it. I remember, for instance, when the Christchurch shooting, that shooter in Christchurch, I remember I was working in Dnipro and going to a meeting in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast with a colleague, a Turkish colleague, Turkish Canadian colleague, and all the way there, he was watching this first-person shooter video. And then I had another Kazakh colleague who, when we got back to the office, he said, oh, yeah, I was watching it as well. And then the next day, my Kazakh colleague said, I’m being haunted by this imagery of this thing, and I was watching it. And I was like, why did you watch it?

And so obviously that’s a more extreme case than a lot of the stuff that’s coming across our feed. I don’t need to see it to understand that someone else has seen it, like Chuck Pfarrer, for instance. I’m pretty sure he watches a lot of this stuff. I know, for instance, Denys Davidof, who I find to be a good source. I go through stages with him. He watches all of the videos. And I trust his judgment on the granular, the tactical level. If he says to me, this group of Russians were unalived, as he nicely puts it, I don’t need to see this imagery myself.

So it’s about mental hygiene and and it’s an intrinsic part of the Disinfolklore analytical method. And the code of positive trolls is this idea which I have to try and, if we’re operating in this space, as all of us are, we’ve made an active choice to remain with Twitter despite everything. And I’m sure not a week goes by when we don’t think, why am I doing this to myself?

But since we have chosen to dance with the devil, that doesn’t mean that we have to take everything on board. And I just found cutting out the images didn’t affect my Twitter experience in any negative way. And it was a good shorthand way of modulating what was going into my mind and moderating what was going into my mind. And when I was googling it I saw that it was a big thing when this was brought in to get rid of media previews in 2013 and then somehow so it’s been there for like 12 years and now suddenly it just disappears, which is very very annoying.

I just raise it here because, as I say, your incoming troll radar, whether it’s from your best friend sharing imagery from the Gaza Strip or Instagram or indeed from Ukraine, because obviously one of the reasons Russia does these horrific attacks is to create this disaster porn and to impact an imprint on our minds. So one of our ways of fighting it is to resist it. Now, obviously, normal people who don’t spend all day long scanning Twitter and trying to learn all the, they may not need this kind of prophylactic, you know what I mean? This incoming troll radar. And I have nothing against images per se. It’s just there’s certain things you can’t, I’m sure we’ve all seen things we can’t unsee. And I want to try and maintain some semblance of control over what goes into my mind.

US-Russia Spheres of Influence Deals

And so the thing about Donald’s national security officer, Fiona Hill’s 2019 thesis that Russia wanted to offer the US, Venezuela in exchange for Ukraine. Dave Troy, whose work I respect a lot, he was pushing this a lot. And it was good that he brought this into our minds, but it sounded plausible to me like a typical grandiose rushist master plan. But since 2019, Russia’s lost whatever, 1.4 million soldiers. It’s taken, what is it, 0.7% of Ukraine in 2025 at a cost of 400,000 of its soldiers. And it’s still 1,000 kilometers east of Kiev and probably won’t ever even take Pokrovsk.

So the Russians no longer have the power and leverage for deals like this. Yet we do see the archetype of Russia as a great power is a phantom limb. It’s still in our information space. That we see, for instance, Donald talking about how China and Russia are going to take Greenland unless he does. And what we need to obviously do is, which most of us have done, all of us have done probably, I should think, update our data-resistant archetypes of a Potomacan state so that Russia isn’t even part of it. So it’s one thing for Dave Troy to draw attention to this 2019 spheres of influence deal. But it’s another thing to not point out that this is six years later and Russia is not what it used to be.

I think it’s a really important saw as something to cut through a lot of the stuff in the information space, especially being promoted by people like this guy Gideon Rachman and the FT that I mentioned last week, they haven’t updated their data-resistant archetype of Russia to take account of the absolute disasters it’s undergoing.

Now, I do note a lot of these when I watch this Times radio and these more mainstream, these more mainstream media shows, that they seem to have got the point now that Russia’s basically absolutely hopeless. It just doesn’t, as Chuck Pfarrer and Alan have been pointing out to us, they just don’t seem to have neither the strategy, the tactics, or the force power to do anything.

So what I would prefer, and I tried to do this with Dave Troy, but he generally has his replies closed, was to try and modulate it. I think it’s fair enough to talk about the 2019 Fiona Hill’s testimony, very important testimony. It does us a disservice unless you constantly remind people who may not be paying that much attention to the granularity of the battlefield. It does us a disservice if you don’t remind people that we are changed as a result of the war, but Russia has changed and it’s lost the capacity. And again, Donald and the billionaires around him, they’re not charity people. Nobody gets a free lunch. And hopefully we’re seeing Donald realizing that he has the power. Now he’ll invoke Putla and Russia and China when he’s talking about this mad idea of Greenland. But it seems clear, and it could change tomorrow, that he’s finally got the point that Russia is basically pretty useless. So I would have preferred if Dave Troy had emphasised how this is 2019, but now it’s different.

Defending Against Donald’s Disinfolklore

Then the first line of defence against Donald’s Disinfolklore shtick is basically that, that understanding that Don’s Disinfolklore universe has taken over their minds. And this is what I’ve warned of in Munich in February 2025. So we see this bill introduced into the Congress to conquer Greenland, but now I see there’s an alternative bill. But there’s certainly people who are in brainwashing mode. And starting a war over Greenland is only a quick mental step away from them. War inside NATO is now a definite possibility.

The othering of Europeans in Europe is another mental trick, which I mentioned last week, that I think it’s the same trick that has been done on cities, which Donald is now, he’s now, as I understand it, he’s sent in ICE and the border force. He realized he doesn’t need to send in the National Guard into cities. He can send in ICE and the border force. And this feeds into, again, the complicity between the activities of these people and the Disinfolklore which is created of them, which is published in Fox News. I note there are some great counter Disinfolklore operations going on, whether it’s Midas Touch or Status Coup, who are doing some great recording of these events.

We’ve got to protect our minds from the madness that Don is transmitting into our minds goes back to something we talked about ages ages before where the the sharing of memes, oh, look at Donald’s latest ridiculous meme, and then you share it, you know, him archetyping himself as the Pope or something like that. Because you want to highlight its ridiculousness. You’re actually doing MAGA’s job there, just as you’re doing Russia’s job if we’re showing the terror and the horror in a careless way, in an automatic way where we just respond emotionally.

We’re like, and I do every now and again, I do share some grim things because it’s important to remind people, like the stories about Lisa and her mother and Vinytsia and these terrible events. If it’s a Ukrainian voice, particularly a female voice who has made the decision to share this, then sometimes I will share it as well because I, not because I agree with it, but because they’ve made this choice. They want the world to be aware of it. I have a tiny little bit of power to amplify it. So that is our first line of defense - protecting our minds from this madness, whether it’s memes that are involuntarily being thrown into our mind because the intelligence behind Twitter has decided that we shouldn’t have the freedom to decide what images we see.

Russia’s Antisemitic Agitprop

I wanted to just quote something which I came across in this great report, which I might deal with in a few weeks when I finish going through the fundamentals and the Disinfolklore and the battling archetypes part, which is a report that was published by a Polish think tank called Capturing Minds and Reshaping the World. I haven’t processed it all into my brain, but one thing which jumped out at me was this, and I wanted to bring this to all of our attention. This, I called it, I titled it Russia’s Antisemitic agitprop.

So again, it’s the complicity between creating the events and then the Disinfolklore. So the report is going back into the documentation and how the, how we got to this point in the Russian Disinfolklore apparatus where it creates the events, it creates the marches, the parades, it facilitates October 7th, then knowing that there is a deep antisemitic strand that many of us are unconscious or unaware of until we subject ourselves to being educated about it. Then they use these events to provoke responses and to cause chaos in all our countries. This is going on in Ireland, in England, in Spain, in many, and in France, in many different countries, this one antisemitic vector that Russia is doing so much to bring to the fore.

So it interested me to see this documentation from January 1959. So here I’m quoting:

“the establishment of a new separate unit called Department D in Russian operational jargon, Desa Disinformation, within the first chief directorate of KGB intelligence in January 1959, marked the beginning of a systemic approach to these operations.”

Initially, Department D consisted of around 50 officers who engaged in both verbal and operational disinformation. The unit’s first mission was to discredit West Germany as a neo-Nazi state, 1959. As part of this effort, East German agents were sent to desecrate Jewish graves, paint anti-Semitic slogans on synagogues, shops and the offices of Jewish organizations and to incite local residents to carry out similar actions. Within a year, by 1960, the West German government recorded 833 anti-Semitic acts, which exposed it to international condemnation and tarnished its image in the eyes of global opinion.”

This is something which Ireland is going through at the moment. Spain in Catalonia, they’re going through this at the moment. And France. So these are international patterns which fit in with the operational art of the Russians.

Andropov, who was head of the KGB before he became General Secretary, he signed off in 1964, personally, on the painting of Nazi symbols in New York City and in America.

When I was in Dnipro from about 2021 to 2022, swastikas started appearing around the city. I immediately intuited this was false, this was not real. It was what the Russians might call a provocation because it just felt wrong in the sense that it wasn’t an organic event. Since then, Rolling Stone then in March 2022 did a great story. I got in touch with the author and told them about the Dnipro issue which in turn led to a wonderful Rolling Stone piece on the resistance, resilience and patriotism of Dnipro’s Jewish community members. Yet Rolling Stone’s initial piece was about how a Russia-connected Ukrainian oligarch was paying people to paint swastikas in Ukraine.

So if you have family members or friends who aren’t aware that this is what Russia does, then… To put it in a positive way - when you become aware of the deep history of this particular vector of Russian Disinfolklore creation and a means to plug into deep archetypes in many of our minds that we’re not even aware of. We find it difficult to surface them because if anyone accuses you of being antisemitic, it immediately creates a defensive response. You may never have read the working definition on antisemitism.

But when you do, as I had cause to do after an event in Britain where the former head of the Labour Party had, and basically, and his leadership came out to attack a documentary, which was done a brilliant, very, from my perspective, brilliant documentary by Panorama, which got the people, there was a lot of accusations of antisemitism justified under his leadership. And thousands, tens of thousands of complaints were made. And so they set up a mechanism under public pressure, the UK Labour Party, to go through all of these complaints. And it turned out the six or seven party, young party faithful who had been given the job of sorting through all these complaints eventually realized that the leadership and the party was stopping them from investigating properly.

And they sang like canaries to this BBC Panorama documentary. And it was a very important moment for me because up until that point, I had always thought, oh, this is just the establishment being against this guy Corbyn. And these accusations of anti-Semitism aren’t correct. But then when I saw this BBC Panorama documentary, and heard the testimony from really, really true Labour Party activists, people like me. I worked for the Irish Labour Party in the Irish Parliament for a while, so I recognised them as genuine people, and they came to the conclusion that something really iffy, not only disorganised, but but not pleasant at all, was going on to stymie the anti-Semitism claim.

And then the UK Labour Party at the time, which is something we’re going through in New York City at the moment with Mamdami, and it disappoints me. But I haven’t taken the time to look into it quite deeply where he abolished the international or the working definition of antisemitism and decided to define it himself. And this is exactly what the UK Labour Party under Corbyn did. And because of that, I ended up reading it and it really taught me something and helped me see through the Russian agitprop, as I call it, into that.

So that’s why I found it quite interesting to see this. This goes back to 1959. And this is, as we see the Russians do on the battlefield, continuing the same strategy again and again. They took Kup’yansk, then they lost Kup’yansk in September 2020. Now they’re trying to take it again. They’re doing the same with Liman, hearing Alan and Chuck Pfarrer. Talk about it today. Again, Lyman, it seems to be safe now again. And that was the city which I went through every time I left Severodonetsk, so very close to my heart. But there is this kind of repetition that the Russians keep on doing. And we see this evidence in our information space from the antisemitic point of view.

These campaigns, which are tearing many of our communities apart - and I’m not saying in any way shape or form that we don’t all have to work this through ourselves in our own brains and stuff - but if you know that these are Russian paid operatives painting swastikas in rural Ireland on on the ground then it does enrich your analysis of what’s going on. So that’s why I think it’s worthwhile bringing to attention what’s going on with the Russian method.

International Law and Territorial Integrity

International law is not what you think it is. I studied it at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. It’s not international law that prevents the subversion of territorial integrity. It’s the memory that before sovereignty, security and territorial integrity were protected as a matter of law, hundreds of millions of humans were sacrificed on the altar of mobile borders. Those who, without having studied international law, opine on its irrelevance and obsolescence, well, fate has some surprises in store for you. Snarky arch social media commentary won’t protect you from mass graves. The joke’s now on you.

The cases that define borders and much of the content of international law are from the South American continent. Your children and community’s children are about to learn some hard and avoidable lessons. When territorial integrity is threatened by Donald or Putler or Xi and you cheer, you will deserve your fate. Those of us willing to die to defend territorial integrity as a principle, as a matter of law, and as the bedrock convention necessary in human communities committed to peaceful coexistence also have some surprises in store for you. You have been warned.

And obviously that’s not really addressed to anyone listening here, but to the people who were opining, oh, international law doesn’t matter anymore.

The Macron Cyberbullying Judgment and Free Speech

I wanted also to highlight the Macron cyber bullying judgment from two weeks ago, because it’s obviously very important for Disinfolklore. And especially listening today and seeing some of these videos that Status Coup are creating of the ICE operations, particularly in Minneapolis, where basically the groups of civil society activists are making it really uncomfortable for ICE to be there by exercising their First Amendment rights to basically say whatever they want to do, say and they shout using whistles. And Donald and his Homeland Security person have basically responded by saying, well, if you’re shouting at an ICE person, then you’re disrespecting them and they have the right to shoot you.

And so the vacuity, the cynicism of promoting a particular idea of free speech, which is one of the main organising fictions by the political right, moaning about the lack of free speech, archetyping Europe as a bastion of non-free speech, while at the same time those very same people are enabling heavily armed individuals to shoot unarmed civilians who are merely exercising their right to free speech.

So in the current moment, this is a great reminder, a daily reminder of how cynical the idea of free speech is being used, how cynically it is being used by the so-called or the self-declared right.

And so the Macron cyberbullying judgment, the war on free speech, the dividing lines. So the American far-right agitators now in control of the US government want us to believe freedom of speech always meant total freedom to commit speech crimes. However, this is a very recent meaning of free speech when you go into the literature. So we know, for instance, it was never legal to shout fire in a crowded theatre when there was no fire.

However, this absolutist idea of free speech is a relatively recent phenomenon and is a particularly provincial idea of free speech. However, it has taken hold in the minds of people. So people feel quite apologetic if they’re introducing moderation rules, for instance, on the internet. And since 1980 and the beginning of computer-based social media, I have catalogued over 45,000 articles on our collective attempts to prevent internet-based trolling criminals from gaining immunity from prosecution authorities for their crimes.

So if you incite violence as a troll online, that is a crime just as much as it would be if you’re inciting violence in real life. However, when people like the people who own this app talk about free speech and try to use Europe’s attempt to exercise control and sovereignty over the use of internet-based platforms to commit crimes in their jurisdictions. And they’re then archetyped as being anti-free speech.

I mean, for example, from 2007 onwards, I charted the rise of Facebook funeral trolling in Australia, England, America and elsewhere. Online anonymous, spontaneous trolls defacing memorial pages established by mourning families with hateful threats. The first conviction was in Australia and where today a social media ban for children is being piloted and a similar law is planned for the UK. The free-for-all enabled by those perverting the meaning of free speech that has enabled Russia and MAGA to use US-Russia Telegram and Chinese TikTok, internet, social media to subvert our democracies is not inevitable.

We have the power to resist, provided we’re clear-eyed about what is at stake and how far the far right will go to destroy our freedom with their phony free speech advocacy. Ne’er-do-wells, like some English listeners will know this character perhaps, like Toby Jones in England, who created this NGO called the Free Speech Union, basically to promote this troll that you can’t say anything these days, or America’s new national security strategy. They have the capacity to destroy our communities in the name of protecting a narrow and recent view of free speech.

So today, the United States government sanctions European Union officials who implement laws ensuring well-governed free speech on and offline which have been passed by the European Union’s 450 million population institutions. Americans and the far right everywhere have been trolled into thinking their rights are transgressed when they are prosecuted for engaging in behaviour online, which would be unlawful if engaged in real life. Threats of violence, assaults, sexual harassment and worse.

So the main content in Jack Smith’s Jan 6th federal indictment was Donald inciting violence, using speech to incite violence. So it’s hardly surprising then when Donald himself promotes the idea of free speech. But it has never been legal to commit crimes. And you don’t have freedom of speech. I mean, every crime basically will always involve speech and therefore we always will have some forms of speech which judges and juries and grand juries can determine whether it’s legal or not.

So this idea that free speech is something absolute is not only ridiculous in the light of this license to shoot people blowing whistles in the face of ICE agents, but it’s also ridiculous in the light of hundreds of years of jurisprudence. And in 2008, as social media was going mainstream, Facebook memorial page trolling was a niche operation. And you can see this as I’ve gone through all of the data using the Dow Jones Factiva database of tens of thousands of media sources. And you can see the rise of this from about 2008 onwards. And I have the documents on it. And it was the major piece of research which I did when I created the decoding trolls and positive trolling in February 2020.

Today, however, what had been a niche operation, Facebook memorial trolling, today it governs geopolitics. When Donald uses online platforms to threaten violence against Denmark, Donald is breaching European Union law. He’s also breaching the UN charter by the threat of the use of force. However, this is now normalized, but it is still a breach of the law. And if we can just keep this in mind, it will help us. It’s our first line of defense.

Russia, MAGA, Modi in India, Xi, Iran, they spend billions subverting our communities by injecting bile into our minds, which if done personally, person to person in real life, would be prosecuted and eliminated immediately. So the judgment in the Brigitte Macron cyberbullying case is very welcome. I celebrate that she and Emmanuel Macron, their courage in subjecting themselves to the pain of that trial, for all of our sakes. Because its significance is they want us to think that there’s no way to police speech and moderate it and that they can do whatever they want to do to our communities.

However, cases like this and what Australia has done and what they’ve done in England with the age. And I believe it’s been considered in the European Union as well. I remember Ursula von der Leyen, who I think has six or seven children, saying, I will never accept that a foreign media company will decide what my child sees. And I wonder, will the European Union react to this image? It’s very niche. Maybe I’m the only person in the world who’s even noticed they’ve gotten rid of this media previews thing. But I’d love to see action taken on that.

Surrendering to free speech zealots is a luxury of our brittle, sovereign, secure, and prosperous communities can no longer afford. Brexit and MAGA’s rise demonstrate how subversion of governance of free speech is how autocracy and the axis of misogyny win power and begin and sustain kinetic wars. So that’s what’s at stake. I wanted to mention that.

**Russian Liberal Narratives and Responsibility**

I did have one further, one last thing, which actually came up from Natalka from Ukraine. I think she’s Canadian. Is she American? But anyway, as we all know, she does amazing work. And she brought forth this testimony this week from a guy called Nikolin, who I hadn’t heard about before, but a Russian political analyst, a so-called liberal. And in it, he argues basically, so the bit which interests me about this is mainly his use of the term archetypes.

So I’ll go straight to that. So basically, he is arguing that Russia did not mean, it didn’t intend to create, to basically brainwash the entire, the whole of Russia. So he’s saying, he’s saying, so this is the guy, Nikolin, and he said, I’ve often come across the view that all the propaganda over the past decade targeting Russians and their dehumanization was the result of a cunning plan coming out of secret Kremlin laboratories and institutes. I must respectfully disagree with this. Fortunately, with some basis, as someone who is somewhat familiar with the murky waters of propaganda.

So then he goes on to argue that it’s a more apt analogy. So he’s trying to argue that

“this wasn’t planned. A more apt analogy would be a descent down a dark staircase. A hand feels along the wall. And so basically, he then says, there’s no strategy, only a stubborn desire to keep going downward because it’s easier that way. And then he argues that then the path became path-dependent, inevitable.

Perhaps the initial goal was to atomize and break society into atoms. They did that. Next, to confuse its consciousness with external enemies. They did that. To dig from the depths of public consciousness, archetypes of greatness, imperialism, and hatred of outsiders. They did that. But all of this was not for the sake of February 24th, but it was to solve the immediate problems of the distant, now forgotten years of 2010 and 2012.

Then Ukraine conveniently falls into the role of external bogeyman. And in the process of it being torn apart by propaganda…”

So basically, I have an intuitive counter-reaction to this. I mean, I’m very interested that he uses the term archetypes because we also have the testimony from Surkov, the former deputy prime minister of Russia, where he says

“Russia began to produce meanings itself and went on in information counter-offensive. And he, he transfers the concept of mental matrix archetypes of our national consciousness to the sphere of foreign policy.”

This goes again into what Russia is doing in our communities, say with antisemitism or particular, particular campaigns which is running to divide our society, where it’s going into antisemitic, the antisemitic archetypes are perennial trolls in our many of our minds until we do the mental work to get rid of them and we learn the methods. And so Russia can go into any culture, basically, and promote these archetypes. So Russia wasn’t only doing it to itself. It was and is doing it in other countries.

But I also react against his idea. I mean, in some respects, he’s right. But on the other hand, my testimony and the value of my work, in Disinfolklore and the collection which I made from early 2015 onwards of vast troves of the Disinfolklore apparatus inside Russia-occupied Ukraine belies his account that this was accidental. Because from the very first moment they were using these othering tropes to create inside Russia-occupied Ukraine a sense of identity, that they were Russian and subvert their identities. And this is from 2015 onwards, whereas he’s talking about this as if it was an accidental emanation and not a considered strategy.

Now of course my belief is they tested the methods and perfected them in Russia occupied Ukraine, in occupied, temporarily occupied Crimea, temporarily occupied Donetsk and Luhansk. And then using what they learned there, they switched over to, brought it back to Russia, the empire striking back in a way, and did it to themselves. And individuals from Putler down have all ended up brainwashing themselves. I sense there’s some kind of nitpicking in this guy, Andrei Nikolin, who’s trying to absolve Russia of its responsibility in creating this brainwashing apparatus and this perfecting method, which again, in the case of MAGA, I don’t think it’s an accident.

I’ve written before using the first-hand testimony from Chris Wylie, who was in the room. He and Steve Bannon conceived of MAGA. They conceived of how to create this movement and they executed that plan and and this is where we’ve ended up. And I don’t think Steve Bannon would complain about where we’ve ended up today. Perhaps he’d wanted to all move a bit more quickly.

So I do react against this idea of absolving responsibility by this Russian liberal thinking that it was just an accident because of what we have seen during the full-scale invasion and the use of meat assaults affecting the people living in Russia-occupied Ukraine whose identities were subverted with scientific brilliance. So that’s all I kind of had on my writing. That’s taken a whole hour, so maybe other people want to speak or have some questions or out.

It’s that energy of the persecution syndrome that I’m not responsible. I can see it in Konstantin inside Russia when he did his thing about, he featured in, Dugin apparently wrote about him because I think Constantine had done a thing about how rubbish the Russian army is. And then Dugin responded for this. And then, and then he did a show on how this makes him feel.

And yeah, obviously, it’d be a bit of a nightmare to be featured in, you know, for one of these people to take notice of the small guy. Obviously, Constantini is a half a million followers. He’s much less small than I am, for instance. But there is just this, but again, it’s a trait perhaps that all of us are susceptible to. We have to do a lot of mind work to overcome this idea of persecution syndrome. And we see so much of this in The Tales of Woe, for instance, that mockers will read or whatever, that it’s hard not to assume that this is a kind of a it’s a cultural trait among the russians but of course it’s in a particular authoritarian personality type we see it in Donald as well I mean god how how many positive signals do you need from the universe to just become a nice happy person.

You know, Donald has had so many amazing things happen and yet he still feels he’s hard done by. So we do see this kind of this habit. But when I see that energy in people, whether it’s in my own private life or in real life, in real life rather than virtual life, but also online, now that I notice it and I’m looking for that energy, I am a bit suspicious of it. And it is a bit too convenient when you hear it from one of these Russian so-called liberals. It’s a nice story that this stuff just happened accidentally, but either they’re really naive or they’re trying to pull the wool over our eyes. And it’s part of this campaign to say, oh, look, it’s not the Russian people, it’s just Putler who are responsible for this. It’s not the ordinary Russians. We’ve just been brainwashed.

I was going to start with reasons to be grateful, because as you know, one of the four aspects of the model in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method for noticing how information — what I call Disinfolklore, or Infolklore — affects us and changes us is through our moods. Moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations: these are the aspects of our consciousness, our identities, our beingness, which are impacted. A good piece of Disinfolklore will affect all four. Attitudes and moods are more long-duration elements — of course moods can be immediate as well, but in terms of feeling happy or sad over a six-month period, Disinfolklore and indeed Infolklore can affect us greatly.

When I talk about Infolklore, I mean really what Mokrushyna, for instance, talks about. Mokrushyna and Genesis Man’s partnership, for me on a day like today, buoyed me up, transformed my mood, made me happy. I love the way Mokrushyna tells the stories. The same story which is Disinfolklore when published on Telegram by the Rashists can be Infolklore when told with Mokrushyna’s mocking tone, drawing attention to elements we all recognise because we’ve been on this journey since February 24th, 2022, and some of us for longer.

Not all news is necessarily Infolklore or Disinfolklore. Part of my self-appointed job, my little contribution to helping us navigate the current age, is to characterise some of it as Disinfolklore, some as Infolklore, and to communicate how I do this in my head using evolving criteria. When news affects our mood and/or our attitude and/or our intentions and/or our motivations, then it’s definitely in the realm of folklore or Disinfolklore.

Reasons to be grateful today, given everything going on. Ukraine is, technically speaking, handing Russia’s arse to them. If we imagine everything happening — Venezuela, Greenland, everything in America — and we think of having this ogre in the back of our minds with Wagner, this storied mythological force able to fly in anywhere and do anything, we think of Russia having its four million tanks, the entire output of the Soviet Union. And then we see that Ukraine is handing Russia’s arse to it. Whatever happens from this moment forth, so much of that mythos and materiel is gone that it’s laughable when Russia is put in the same category as China, the United States, or the European Union militarily.

People’s algorithms, their data-resistant archetypes, their data-susceptible archetypes — if they are changing, they’re updating in real time according to these stories, which could be Disinfolklore or Infolklore. Whether it’s Kupiansk, where Putler announced it had been taken, and now it’s clear not only was it not taken but Ukraine retook it and cleared out most of the Rashists. Pokrovsk, obviously under pressure, but from what we can see it seems to be holding, and we see videos of Russia’s annihilation there. These elements of a story have a capacity, when amplified enough, to transform archetypal identities in people’s minds. Ukraine handing Russia’s arse to it every day is a wonderful thing.

Russian Arctic incompetence — absolutely wonderful. Mokrushyna was talking about it today. We hear this idea of a deal between the United States, Russia and China to divide up the world, and Russia’s propagandists are promoting it. But really, the guys around Donald — they’re not charity people. They’re hard-nosed. If they sense weakness, they pounce. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you can hold your own and pretend you’re rich enough in the country club, in Mar-a-Lago, you can be one of the gang. But if your Arctic seaports are falling apart and you don’t have any ships and your piers are crumbling — even Donald, whatever tie he has with the Rashists, will look at that and think, “Well, I was going to divide the world up, but...” That pressure is going on. Good to see.

None of us — particularly those who made the decision to speak out after February 24th, 2022 — are scared of Russia. There may come the knock on the door, but none of it is in any way as bad as what every single Ukrainian faces every night when they fall asleep, if they can fall asleep. We’re not scared of Russia anymore. A whole decade’s worth of popular culture promoted this idea of Russia as a giant, a massive bear that had to be feared and negotiated with in a quiet voice. But because of what we’ve seen since February 24th, 2022, we’re not scared anymore. When we hear Disinfolklore about Greenland, about NATO collapsing, we can be grateful this isn’t happening when we still feared Russia as somehow equal to us. We have Ukraine and its strength and power.

We have the 800 billion euros, which went almost without a blink — agreed last weekend in Kyiv with the national security advisors. 800 billion euros up to 2030 is a lot of cash. Ireland back in the day was getting sort of 10–11 billion over the whole course of a budgetary cycle and built all its motorways for that. An amazing reason to be grateful.

Russian air defence — it’s now mainstream that it’s absolutely rubbish, because of whatever went on in Venezuela and Caracas the other day.

We have the Epstein Act of Congress, which came out of nowhere. A miracle. We have a lot of work to do on that front, but it’s there. Every redaction, every lack of publication is now a breach of the law. It’s not enough, but it’s there. No one anticipated it. Chuck Schumer’s finest moment.

German, UK and French leadership, and many other leaders. We could have terrible leaders in those countries. We could still have Scholz, for instance. Imagine all the stuff we went through for the first two years of this nightmare with Scholz. Now we’ve got a proper German leader.

Ukraine will soon have its Gripen, its Griffins. Information wars are devastating Russia — all that stuff about Putler’s palace has gone into the mainstream. Donald kind of making fun of them. Story after story going into the minds of people who are interested in geopolitics but don’t pay attention at our level. Russia can’t take advantage of any of this.

We see this mental routine: “Putin must be really happy about this,” these Putin-understanders who articulate their mood through this rhetorical method. Perhaps he is — who knows, who cares. Think about how annoyed they must be that they don’t have any power left and everyone can see it, while Donald is doing all of this. That brings me enormous joy. If they had only waited for the full-scale invasion a year or two, had a bit of patience, they could have had everything. Now they’ve lost everything because they didn’t wait. When Russia could be at the moment of its greatest strength, had they not had their arses handed to them by Ukraine — there’s no real substantive advantage I can see. The Arctic ports are a perfect example.

I wanted to start with that positive thing because I should be practising Infolklore as well, trying to positive-troll us using proper, truthful, genuine reasons, not deception, and being ethically disciplined. There are many reasons to be grateful.

In 2018, when Russia seized two Ukrainian naval vessels off the coast of occupied Crimea, it caused a big crisis in the Sea of Azov. I was sent down to establish the OSCE’s monitoring model based in Berdiansk. Most Ukrainians of a certain age will remember this moment — another horrific humiliation. Whatever’s going on in the Atlantic right now — again, reasons to be cheerful. Medvedev, on the day of the raid, actually wrote that he wants the Americans to kidnap President Zelensky on Russia’s behalf. As Will characterises it, this is peak Absurdistan: the Russians justify their entire war based on a mythological coup which, if there was any coup, was executed by Paul Manafort, who’s still Donald’s adviser. And now Medvedev is admitting the Russians are so useless they can’t mount a raid and actually wants the Americans to do what they can’t. Peak Absurdistan. Let’s count our blessings.

What I noticed in eastern Ukraine was that the Russians used stories to create community. On the south bank of the Donets River, in Russia-occupied Luhansk, through this othering process, they convinced Ukrainians that they are Russians. Then they convinced them that the other wants to cross the river and kill them, and that their only protector is Russia — who is in fact their captor. Classic coercive control. You can understand it on a micro level: most coercive control relationships with a violent element are male to female. When Putin speaks, when individual Russians speak — in their family where the man is beating the wife — that’s a coercive control relationship. From the micro to the macro, the entire system inside Russia-occupied Luhansk, which I watched from the inside out by crossing into there every day for three years, collecting and analysing the media — what I now call Disinfolklore — this idea of coercive control: “If I’m not beating you, someone else is going to beat you harder, so you better stick with me.”

We saw that appalling headline yesterday in the *Washington Post* about Rubio saying America is going to use coercion in Venezuela, and in Greenland too. Coercive control, the use of fear, the use of ultraviolence to get their way. At the time, I didn’t know what they were up to. I could see something was really odd — the rhetoric in thousands of stories every day. But I didn’t know the objective. After the full-scale invasion, I realised: the game was to convince them they’re Russian, that they should fight for Russia, that they must participate in these meat assaults against their fellow Ukrainians.

Today, Russia uses Telegram to create community. What I noticed was that community identity is wholly formed through storytelling. This is the method, the means they use in this fake state — Russia-occupied Luhansk People’s Republic, or the Luhansk Folks Republic.

The modern nation state was created after Herder’s 1777 plea to unite the ten German tribes that Tacitus had written about in the first century of the Common Era. Herder asked: “Where is our Shakespeare?” He said, “We are ten disparate tribes who have never had a unified state.” He looked at England and saw that England had its Shakespeare. He made this plea to start collecting stories that characterise the German tribes — folk songs and folklore typifying Germanness. Ninety years later, the first unified German state was created.

This was also 1777, about five years before William Jones. Jones made his speech to the Asiatic Society in Kolkata, setting out the proposition that having looked at the grammar, the roots of verbs, the structure underlying Sanskrit — he was at the time a judge in India, a Welsh-English judge, but he had written the first English-language grammar of the Avestan language, so he understood the structure of ancient Iranian, Greek, and Latin. He was a Greek and Latin scholar at 15, spoke dozens of languages. He went to Harrow in England. William Jones realised that the structure of Celtic, Latin, Sanskrit, Gothic, German, Iranian, Greek — the similarities between grammar and roots of verbs in these languages were such that they could not have arisen accidentally, but must have come from a common source, perhaps one that no longer existed.

Herder, at the time, had no idea that German or Gothic was just one of many Indo-European languages, whose sets of stories themselves have similarities and come from a common source. In my other work, when I look at the M-N sound, we see this in Mannus, whose name is memorialised in German — Herminone is one of the founders, Mannus had three sons. But anyway, in 1777 Herder was saying, “Where is our Shakespeare?” Out of this programme, the Grimm brothers start collecting folktales, Goethe starts writing *The Sorrows of Young Werther* and creating this literature. I visited his house in Frankfurt — at the time he’s just a teenager and there’s a French general living in his house. He’s under occupation. Frankfurt — the French take their name from the Franks, the Germans, and then they go back to Germany to occupy Frankfurt. They’re trying to create a sense of Germanness, get rid of the French, and create their unified state. Then Wagner takes Tacitus’s stories about the ten German tribes and turns them into operas which all the educated classes attend and think, “We are one people.” They answer the call. Ninety years later, the first unified German state was created.

Identity is wholly a function of stories. Know this, and you will begin to understand how Russian Disinfolklore works to undermine and recreate identity.

In Ireland, we had the Celtic Literary Revival of the late 1800s. It led to the creation of a unified sense of identity — that Celtic language was something real and profound. I saw the other day this absolute idiot who writes in *The Guardian*, one of those old-timers — Simon something, I can’t remember his second name. I used to read him religiously, but he’s written a few things about Ukraine, always about how Ukraine should just give up, it’s just a proxy war. He actually wrote in 2022 that the Celtic language probably doesn’t even exist. There are whole libraries about Celtic culture, the Gauls, all of that.

Creating a sense of identity in Ireland: there was a language we spoke, which we think through, which got wiped out of daily use mostly. But the literature is all there. It’s the oldest vernacular literature in Europe — its monuments go back to the fifth and sixth centuries of the Common Era, when the rest of Europe had nothing comparable. Irish poetry and structures preserved the only written-down record of Celtic literary art.

MAGA likewise creates community through stories. These stories have similar structures: grievance, fear, memes, others coming over the river, the migrants coming in — so to stop them, we need to bomb the other people. They have the same kinds of structures as the stories I saw in Russia-occupied Ukraine. And what I saw in Russia-occupied Ukraine is where Druidy Don’s Disinfolklore universe is leading us.

I had this horrific vision this morning. Some of us will have seen the Epstein survivors’ analysis of some of the files released so far. There’s enough to see certain things which aren’t yet demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, but it’s possible that the mental model we have — a group of people for whom Epstein was the front, trafficking vulnerable young women and children to an island where extremely influential people coerced them — may not be all that was going on there, on that island which wasn’t properly investigated, and on Great St James Island.

This idea of Greenland being a distraction strikes me — no, the proof of concept of the enslavement of people and the extraterritorial nature of an island is perhaps what they have in store. It’s not about data centres or creating a sovereign state as a Silicon Valley on the ice, an Ayn Rand kind of place beyond the Rockies, a Shangri-La. What they may have in store is more akin to Auschwitz than Shangri-La. That’s the horrific vision I have. I want to share it so we bookmark it. I don’t know it for sure — it’s a sense, a feeling, because what’s going on is so unusual.

But hopefully that’s a bit inspiring too, because we saw Europe’s leaders yesterday make a very strong statement. No one is taking this as just trolling. The Danish military wasn’t taking this as a joke six months ago either. Whatever is going on in the background that inspired world leaders to say what they said yesterday, they obviously have a sense of things we don’t know about. But I also sense that what they want to do there is even worse than what the Rashists did in Luhansk, Donetsk, occupied Crimea, and across the whole Soviet Union. That should inspire us to campaign hard.

Our moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations are affected by these stories. We’re Disinfolklored into depression or sadness. All the work we put into Volya Radio, especially the presenters — this is our way of responding.

When I studied international law, most of the content — state responsibility, sovereignty, what is a state — a lot of the case law comes from South America in the 19th century, specifically on borders, extradition, rendition. The Monroe Doctrine: I’d obviously seen it suddenly in our information space. I’ve spoken about how characters — part of the Disinfolklore Analytical Toolkit — can be tracked in data. This new character suddenly arose: the Monroe Doctrine. I didn’t look into it deeply because it seemed like one of those characters you see when watching a Netflix series — a new character comes in and you don’t know if they’ll stay. Some stay the course, others get killed off.

What Scouts Green just quoted about the White House press secretary — that’s one voice, then Donald’s another voice, and you have this cacophony. It’s really hard to put them all together. *The Waste Land* itself as a motif in literature comes from early Irish literature, passed into Welsh mythological literature, went to Chrétien de Troyes in the first Grail tale, and came right back via Monty Python and this whole effusion of Grail tales into British and European literature. The whole idea of the Wasteland arises when the king tells a lie, has a lying thought. The result of these lies is what we’re seeing in Russia at the moment.

T.S. Eliot’s *The Waste Land* was originally to be called “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” from a Charles Dickens novel, *Our Mutual Friend*. When you read it, it’s just a character in Bermondsey who says, of another character, “He do the police in different voices.” Eliot took that and the poem is indeed lots of different voices, a concatenation. “He do the police in different voices” keeps coming back to me when I hear these different voices.

If we look at all of these different stories as part of this attempt to put us into what I call a Disinfolklore universe — the totality of them — that’s the main way I’m trying to assimilate them. I’ve got a category in my head: Disinfolklore universe. Donald’s saying this today, saying that. I’m trying to avoid going with the flow of these trolls and allowing them to hack my mind.

If we really want to go to the Monroe Doctrine as Scouts Green describes it — 1830-something, about South America — then most of the content of international law when it comes to borders and territorial integrity, I postulate, is the result of the Monroe Doctrine: a century of conflicts over borders, the Bolivarian Revolution, one country going into another, complete mess until the post-World War II legal order and the idea that territorial integrity is sacrosanct. That’s my way of putting a negative spin on the Monroe Doctrine. While the archetypal MAGA patriot goes, “Oh great, we’re going back to 1830,” I’m sure we’ll see articles in *The New Yorker* and *The New Republic* about the devastating results of the Monroe Doctrine on these countries and indigenous populations. If we have this new character being introduced into our information space, introduced as an explanatory character — like a Netflix show introducing us to our favourite character’s parents to soften them — I postulate the Monroe Doctrine is an ogre, not a friendly giant. That’s my way of undermining what they’re trying to do.

There’s clearly something going on in the background they know about. My best suggestion is something to do with Epstein Island: a sovereign state and really horrific things, worse than *The Handmaid’s Tale*. Everything else is froth to distract us, including the Monroe Doctrine, which probably has positive elements but I suspect a very dark side. There’s also the huge irony that they’re trying to destroy the primacy of international law over domestic law. But this tripartite splitting of the world would have worked only if Russia could take Pokrovsk — an exaggeration, it wouldn’t matter even then, but the fact that it can’t. Then you go back to the people around Donald: hard-nosed people with an animal sense of pecking order. They won’t give Russia anything for free.

This was part of how ridiculous it was for Medvedev to say the Americans can seize President Zelensky for them. How well do you know these people, Mr Medvedev? If America goes in and seizes President Zelensky, they’re not going to give Russia Ukraine — they’re going to take it for themselves. They’re not charity people. If they think you’re one of them, as tough and rich as them — sure, you’ve got a sixth of the world’s surface. But you can’t organise a booze-up in a brewery. You can’t even take Pokrovsk. You’ve been saying, “Give us four more months.” Some of us will remember when Donald said, “You’ll have two more weeks.” Then they gave them a few more months. I believe Lavrov said to Rubio, “Look, we just need another two months to wrap this up.” And Donald and company really gave the Russians time from early March onwards — when, as Will always remembers, around the 22nd of March, Ukraine suddenly stopped hitting the oil wells.

If it’s a tripartite split, I think Russia’s lost its place. Today I was thinking about the Unified Reich a lot. Some of us will remember when Donald revealed the “Unified Reich” back in April 2024 — some of us immediately spotted it and understood: this is to revert us to the 1930s, *Handmaid’s Tale* America. Maybe the Unified Reich consists of China, Russia and the United States. But Russia is not going to get a free lunch, because all three states are characterised by what I call the Axis of Misogyny. They want to reverse the post-World War II legal and social order. They have a perspective on half of humanity — the female half — that they should be subjugated. There are many commonalities among the MAGA paleo-conservative approach.

I don’t believe Greenland is a distraction from the Epstein files. Whatever was going on there that we now know about, there’s a lot more — we know the tip of the iceberg. We should have ten million records released, unredacted. The vision for humanity: slavery, sexual slavery, coercion, no laws, the island nature, the use of Disinfolklore to brainwash and conceal and confuse — I believe this is part of it. The tripartite split is possible, but this is why I started with the positive: if this had been going on before Ukraine started devouring, picking apart the corpse of Russia like a bald eagle eating a dead carcass in a field, we’d be in a much worse position. I don’t say this to create complacency — there’s a lot to be cheerful about.

Ukraine is just doing it. All this stuff about peace troops — as Mokrushyna reminds us, this is after a so-called peace. But there’s going to be no peace until Russia leaves all of Ukraine. It doesn’t worry me that British and French troops aren’t going in now. Ukraine is handing Russia’s arse to it, trading land for a little bit of local peace, and we see the state of Russian forces on horses and the like. The main danger, as I’ve spoken about before, would be a Minsk situation where it’s frozen. Ukraine offered a ceasefire that enables it to satisfy Donald’s ridiculous position. We could be pretty confident the Russians would never accept it — a good bet, and so far it’s worked. Then it’s easy to talk about.

President Zelensky has managed to change the archetypal identity of Ukraine in people’s minds. It drives me nuts that Ukraine has to do this — that people think Ukraine was too belligerent. I have people in my own life who said things I now realise they either believed or had picked up from the information space: that Ukraine kind of wanted this war. “She was asking for it. She wanted me to hit her.” Now we’ve gone through this ridiculous charade since Donald came in, of Ukraine modelling wanting peace. We may have to go through some of those stages again. But ultimately, I remember Budanov saying about a year and a half ago — and I remember a member of the Verkhovna Rada saying, “This ends this generation. I’m not going to subject my children to this again. We are going to finish them off this time.” Everything Ukraine does is very skilful, all about trolling Russia to its destruction, moving it forward, tickling it. President Zelensky as a 21st-century troll.

Merz, from my perspective, is doing exactly what we need. We wouldn’t be in this situation had Macron and Scholz been in the position Merz is in. We saw that thing a few weeks ago which moved me a lot, where he says he wakes up every morning and thinks, “I am in a bad dream,” and then remembers: no, Ukraine is going to be hit by missiles. Merz models feeling this as a human being. I haven’t seen anything from him that annoys me, whereas Scholz and the people in his cabinet — “Ukraine won’t be able to use the tanks” and all of that.

Is Germany ready to lead? It’s certainly ready to lead Europe. A lot of us will remember Thomas Theiner’s brilliant work in the old place. But I notice a hectoring tone — he’s only got one key in all of his tweets. I think he’s coming from a positive place, trying to motivate Europe. But it’s a constant negative tone, and the danger is it’s the same archetyping of Europe as weak that MAGA is continually attempting. This isn’t archetyping for archetyping’s sake — it’s to archetype Europe as weak so they can scare Europeans and take Greenland, which is part of the territorial integrity of the European Union. Strategic archetyping, exactly the kind the Rashists were doing inside eastern Ukraine and in the run-up to this war, trying to demotivate people.

This constant hectoring — “You’re so weak, America’s so strong” — is psychologically unsophisticated and really demotivating. Being told you’re rubbish and stupid doesn’t help. Tell me if I make a mistake, fine, get the hectoring tone out, but move on. You don’t have to do it in every single tweet. You might see this energy, this immanence in there, because the substance of the story — this came up again with the person who phoned in to Volya trying to denigrate Volya and Ukraine, archetyping Ukraine as desperate. Then we saw from the former defence minister that Ukraine got 30% more money last year from its allies for military means than in any previous year. An escalator going up. We have the 90 billion coming on stream from the European Union. Merz was very much part of getting Ukraine that. There’s Disinfolklore and drama about loans, but that’s just noise. Now we have 800 billion for Ukraine, a non-EU member. It’s in the budget. Extraordinary. No other country in history is about to benefit from so much. As Will has been saying for ages: make sure you put it on budget like Sweden has done, and then the Russians will calculate, they’ll see. Now it’s on budget. The Russians, because they’re desperate and have no exit strategy, will archetype Europe as weak. But when we as discerning consumers of Infolklore and Disinfolklore look at what is actually happening — objectively, this is extraordinary stuff, impossible to dream of from most of 2022 and 2023. Including the Gripen incoming and everything else.

The document dump. It reminds me of another aspect of my past, where I worked for this New York law firm called Fishbein Badillo Wagner Harding, which was closely associated with Giuliani and Herman Badillo, who was one of the first Hispanic council members in New York City. We also worked for Donald Trump. The case I was involved in — before I went to Cambridge to study law, so I was a paralegal — was a Bear Stearns matter, where Epstein worked as well. This was obviously long before Bear Stearns exploded, but when Bear Stearns exploded, I was not surprised.

It occurred to me today as I was listening about the document dump: the chaos of these files is a catastrophe for Donald and everyone. There are tens of millions of documents. We have enough documents now to know there are tens of millions more to come. But from the perspective of a lawyer, you have — I’ll say infinity as a metaphor — infinity of different ways to charge particular criminals. Well, you don’t — there’s a set of different ways for any particular set of facts. You develop a theory, take a view on the most solid charges, and if the person is guilty of huge numbers of crimes, you try to take the most solid one.

Any of us who followed the Stormy Daniels case from the first time Michael Cohen was charged and jailed — it was done on illegal funding of the election, because the payment to Stormy Daniels should have been registered. That was the most solid case they could make. Donald was unindicted co-conspirator number one. But then it was dismissed, and when it came back, it turned into a business records fraud case.

By analogy, you can see the clearest case against Putler. He’s entitled to sovereign immunity because these are acts done as head of state. But because international law — this principle which sadly the current US regime and Putler and all the paleo-masculinist conservatives want to get rid of — holds that international law has primacy over domestic or municipal law, certain crimes cut through that immunity. The stealing of children under the Geneva Conventions is a really clear-cut crime. And the idiot has admitted to it. He is just as idiotic as Donald in the sense that if you were their lawyer, you’d constantly have your head in your hands, because they keep admitting to crimes from which they’re not immune. He has admitted on television to stealing these children, as has Lvova-Belova. The Council of Europe has established the tribunal to try Russia for the crime of aggression, and Putler and all the leadership will be responsible for that. They’ve committed so many crimes — the genocide case is going through, tortuous and complicated, and will go on for years. And the Compensation Commission was signed last week in The Hague.

This is where Ukrainians will be able to claim compensation. And again, this goes back to Putler understanding what awaits him and Russia, and why they will never relent. There’s no chance, as far as I can see, unless the European Union gets catapulted into a Disinfolklore universe — which I don’t see happening at the moment, thankfully. When I made my Munich speech, I wasn’t sure. It was the same day President Zelensky was speaking in Munich, and J.D. Vance spoke the next day or perhaps that day as well. It wasn’t clear to me how things would go after the White House visit. The typical pattern would have been everyone trying to assuage the Americans and selling out Ukraine — that’s what had happened since 2014. But that didn’t happen.

You see this huge pincer movement, like a lobster claw, against Russia — notwithstanding Ukraine’s execution of justice by blowing up long-term assets. Yes, it would be great to see him charged for absolutely everything, but this crime is serious enough that the key would be thrown away, and it’s the easiest to prove — he’s admitted it. They could convince even extremely conservative judges.

Why hasn’t it happened? Unfortunately — I won’t go into too much detail for personal reasons — but I think five judges at the ICC are now sanctioned by the United States, including the chief prosecutor. I’m hoping that now Europe has to say to America: sorry, we’ve helped you for decades, but now it’s over. The chief prosecutor is accused of something which I suspect he didn’t do. We see this coalition between the United States, Israel and Russia trying to destroy the International Criminal Court — the apex of the system established after World War II. It was almost unimaginable that the ICC would be established before the Rome Statute was founded, around the turn of the century. Now Israel, the United States and Russia together are trying to destroy it through all sorts of disgusting means. I suspect the court is under great pressure, but the warrants for Putler’s arrest, and indeed Netanyahu’s, are still alive. The case against Russia is much stronger. I’d say it’s the best, the easiest chance of a conviction — getting a warrant against a sitting president is really, really almost impossible, but we’re seeing justice being rigged every day. That’s my explanation from a lawyerly perspective. I recognise the frustration that we don’t see a massive charge sheet and constant pressure.

I’ll also mention the European Court of Human Rights case, which is the definitive history for as long as our civilisation lasts. That 600-page judgment will stand as the definitive history of Russia’s war of annihilation against Ukraine, starting in February 2014. It settles as a matter of law and fact basically everything about the war in Ukraine, and it should be the last word. I wish we lived in a world where that judgment — those 600 pages and all the decisions about when the occupation started, the destruction of all freedom of religion in Ukraine by the Russians, the murder of people, the Disinfolklore crimes in Russia-occupied Ukraine, the killing of journalists and people like Victoria Amelina and Victoria Roshchyna — formed the framework, the mental frame for humanity. But alas.

One of the ideas I’m pretty clear on this week is what I call the zero-sum war. Putler and President Zelensky understand this is a zero-sum war. Whichever side loses will, as the Manchu Qing dynasty or the Hittites did, completely disappear from history. The Hittite is the first attested Indo-European language. The Hittite empire lasted from about 1500 BCE to 1100 BCE. They signed the first treaty we have in international law. I’m about to visit Mitanni, where the Mitanni empire was, which I’m really excited about. The Treaty of Mitanni between the Hittites and the Mitanni — the Mitanni themselves were Semitic-language-speaking people, but they worshipped Indo-European gods. We know this because in the Treaty of Mitanni the guarantor is Teshub the storm god — I’ve just named my new kitten Teshub — but also Indo-European gods like Indra, in charge of the sovereignty element, and various others.

Today we see the same dynamic. Most of us are pretty convinced the Ukrainians aren’t going to accept another Budapest Memorandum-type arrangement. But everyone’s talking about who will guarantee, who will protect the treaty. In the Treaty of Mitanni, 1500 BCE, you have the god Mitrashil — who is Mitra, the god of juridical law — and the god Indra, who embodies both the legal and magical aspects of sovereignty. And then the gods Nasatya, the horse-born divine twins. We’re scratching around looking for guarantors of peace, and this is where it began in 1500 BCE.

By the zero-sum war I mean this idea — which we see in the *Financial Times*, which just continues to get rolled and trolled — that Putler is unknowing and misled by all around him. This is such a childish fantasy that I’ll never listen to any serious commentator who argues it as the sole explanation. We have to bank on Putler having a clear-eyed idea of what is going on. He knows, as far as I can see, because he understands all of Russia’s crimes. He pretends not to, and Russians pretend not to in their Disinfolklore, but they understand what they did in Bucha. They knew they were planning to blame Bucha on Ukrainian Nazis and then invite the Germans and the EU to see — “Look what the Ukrainians did, our war is justified.” They know all of their crimes. They pretend they’ve forgotten, but they understand. And because they know all of their crimes, they know what Ukraine is going to do to avenge them. This is why I call it a zero-sum war. This is my governing concept, and has been for a long time, even more so now during this peace process.

If you think Putler doesn’t know about this, then you’re falling for the old-fashioned “good tsar, bad boyar” troll — which we laugh at when we see those videos of Russian citizens appealing to him as if he gives a damn. Therefore, Putler’s dominant strategy is to continue the war as long as possible to save himself. He’s talked about Russia’s ethnos — that we Europeans just want to destroy his ethnos.

A slight bit of trolling from me, but I think it’s positive trolling: I saw this about the Manchu Qing dynasty, which ruled China for about 400 years until around 1911. Today it’s virtually impossible to find anyone in China who self-identifies as Manchu. It just disappeared — a dynasty and an ethnos, an ethnicity. People identified as it, and it vanished. So what I say to, as Chuck Pfarrer might put it, our Russian listening guests — though I doubt we have any — don’t worry about your ethnos disappearing, because the Chinese have a very gentle way of disappearing ethnos, and you won’t even notice it.

Like Putin, Putler may not know whether Russia is occupying Kupiansk, for instance. But he knows that Kupiansk is a thousand kilometres east of Kyiv. And he wants Kyiv. He doesn’t want Kupiansk. So while the minutiae of the occupation may escape him, he knows the entire war is a complete and utter disaster. Ukrainians know it too — Anne of Odessa, among other sources, is saying that even if this peace treaty were agreed by the Russians, they’re not going to stop. There will only be one ethnos at the end of this war. My money’s on the Ukrainians and not on the Russians. But if you know that as a Russian leader, you will continue to the very end.

It does seem as if European leaders get this. The mad uncle in the attic — Donald — and the people around him, I don’t think they get it. I presume there are some people around them who do.

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

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

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

See:

and

Ancient Ukraine birthed modes of social organisation like the Indo-European model of monarchy,

A world-beating model of domesticated horse-powered pastoral farming, and wheel-powered migration that conquered Manuland was born between the Don and Dniepr (Don Apris) rivers of Ancient Ukraine:

From 4,200 BCE when the cultural ancestors of the first Indo-Europeans to conquer all of Anatolia (today’s Türkiye) left Ancient Ukraine

to 2,500 when further waves of migrants left Ancient Ukraine to found Greek (the first olive branches for the Olympics came from Ancient Ukraine and Zeus Pater and his son Apollo were Ancient Ukrainian innovations) culture:

and Celtic cultures.

Italic (yes, Ancient Rome is Ancient Ukraine’s daughter culture),…

Ancient and contemporary Ukraine has been at the centre of our world, yet not our mental models of our origins for millennia:

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

This is what my Finding Manuland project is about.

From the 17c onwards the idea that “western” culture was somehow founded in Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome has been relentlessly promoted:

Today, due to new sciences like Isotope analysis of Ancient humans

linguistics

comparative mythology

and Archaeogenetics

we know for certain that Ancient Ukraine birthed Indo-European culture. Let’s re-centre Ukraine, and transform our mental models accordingly.

⚡️ “Kammalia” is one of the oldest attested Indo-European words.

Today, over half of the world’s population speak an Indo-European language.

This is a list of the oldest attested words in any Indo-European language.

These are the personal names of Anatolians living in Kaniš / Kültepe which feature in documents dated to 1,900 - 1,800 BCE (I visited the site where these documents were found).

Among them is the name of a man called Kammalia.

Four centuries of linguistic evolution and Kammalia had become Kammaliįa in Hittite / Nešumnili

(the earliest attested Indo-European language).

Now, in English 4,000 years later it’s Kamala, and a female name.

First Writing in Any Indo-European Language:

⚡️What Will Ruschia’s De-occupation of Crimea be like?

Like this is how Ruschia announced the deoccupation of Lyman, 24 hours after purporting to incorporate it into the Ruschist constitution:

“In connection with the creation of a threat of encirclement, the allied troops were withdrawn from the settlement of Krasny Liman to more advantageous lines - RF Ministry of Defense.”

Ukraine will then exchange 2m forcibly disappeared Ukrainians Ruschia is holding hostage (and for which Putler received his first IC arrest warrant) for 1.5m illegal Ruschist occupiers in Ukraine who have illegally entered Ukraine since March 2014.

⚡️GOP’s Project 2025 Talking Points

✅ Women must have children to participate in public life.

✅ No civil rights for unwhites.

✅ Only blonde, whites get DEI hired.

✅ No joy. No laughing (I’m not joking).

In the Autumn of 2019, I was trying to understand of what Don’s power/Mana consisted. I wanted to understand in order to counter how Don Disinfolklore used Twitter to roil humanity’s minds into believing trolls like the Hunter Biden troll or Pizzagate Conspiracy.

At the time I was a diplomat in eastern Ukraine- I could see how Donald’s trolling even then had real world effects on the battlefield.

So of all the gateway concepts to Master/Magister, I chose “trolls and trolling.”

Then, when I formed the hypothesis in the note below about Trolls, Trolling and energy exchange, I became @DecodingTrolls to test the hypothesis and to troll others into perceiving how we become part of the problem when, unthinkingly / unknowingly, we perpetuate others’ trolls, like, for example the idea that Europe and Ukraine are “weak,” in whichever guise such trolls are conveyed.

As emptywheel notes below, trolling and Don’s motivated trolls are CENTRAL to his mana/power. And the key/core/dominant determining troll that yields/yielded Don’s power was about pedophilia (cf. PizzaGate troll that recruited many MAGA adherents to their Magus Donald due to the disgust it engendered, unjustifiably, about his main rival Hillary in the minds of those who fell for the PizzaGate troll).

This is why the public cover up through ‘redaction’ of the Epstein files goes to the core of Don’s Mana/power.

“The very trolls that Donald Trump has relied on since 2016, people like Jack Bysiobieck, people like Benny Johnson, people like Charlie Kirk while he was still alive….

There’s this whole group of trolls and they have been instrumental to Donald Trump’s ability to grab attention and refocus it somewhere else…

In other words, these people, so long as social media, so long as Twitter is viable, they have been able to swamp the public’s fear with Trump’s b******t and in the process drown out other things.

‘A new report by Reuters uncovered that in the first half of this year alone, President Trump’s family has raked in more than $800 million from sales of crypto assets. This on top of potentially billions more in unrealized on paper gains.’

Now, much of this cash has been coming in from foreign sources, which doesn’t come as a surprise when we factor in.

So they are an instrumental tool to Donald Trump, to his ability to be able to be always the center of tension, but ensure that it’s the kind of, you know, ensure that he can direct the attention where he wants it to be.

‘Mr. President, why wait for Congress to release the Epstein files? Why not just do it now?’

Donald: ‘I think you are a terrible reporter. You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter.’

Those trolls, that troll in the effort, is fundamentally tied to conspiracy theories about pedophilia.

Fake worrying about pretend pedophiles is an easy way[…]…

He relies on these trolls. These trolls rely on conspiracy theories about pedophilia. He installs these trolls as the FBI director and deputy director, and he’s stuffed.

And then when he tries to make it go away in July, he can’t, those trolls at first, even the Psobe act…

What happened is that he threatened those same trolls, the same trolls his power utterly lies on, and they stopped chasing Epstein.

But by that point, it has this weight and salience throughout the MAGAbase…

[Don’s chief of staff Wiles is] the same woman who’s telling us there’s no ‘there there’s inside the Epstein files, is also telling us it’s not central to Donald Trump’s power, which not only was it up to the moment in July when he tries to shut it all down, but if you look at what has happened since July, if you look at the way effectively Democrats plus Tom Massey plus Marjorie Taylor Greene have been able to take the speaker’s gavel away from Mike Johnson over and over and over again, it is fundamental to his power right now. “ [From Ball of Thread: Young Playboys Gone Wiles, 19 Dec 2025

This material may be protected by copyright.]

⚡️Trolls are energy (Mana) that only moves when we share them.

Then, we become the troll.

The informational unit (Troll) consumes us as it instrumentalises us to keep it in motion.

Like a virus hacking our mind, the troll uses us to keep their troll moving.

Ruschia’s Nordic troll monarch Putler is very successful at provoking us into doing his mental work.

We are the petrol fuelling the troll, even when we disagree with its content.

That’s the point of trolls like Nigel Porridge, in fact. Their oligarch backers pay to promote their trolls. Then, by reacting and perpetuating the trolls, we fuel and energise that which we think we’re opposing.

We become the Useful I***** of Useful I******.

One solution I’ve found if I must talk about Nigel Porridge or the Chef Wanger Nazi, the Chef of Disinfolklore, of the Chief Sorcerer Putler is to corrupt their monikers.

⚡️Biden Resolved Perennial Plight of the Sorcerer - Can Starmer?

Two aging Sorcerers: Deva Biden vs. Asura / Danava Dæmon Donald.

Fighting for power (Mana) / Sovereignty over our world.

Both Sorcerers know their mantic powers (Mana) fade further and further with every dawn.

Both have apprentices.

How can they know the right moment to empower their apprentice?

How can they be certain that, once empowered with all their Magus Master Monarch’s Magic, the Apprentice won’t destroy their Master/Magister?

How can the Magister/Master immunise themself against treachery by their Minister/Apprentice, should they stand down?

The Plight of the Sorcerer from the first moment Indo-European patriarchal Monarchy began in eastern Ukraine.

The complication is always some variation of:

What if I convey my Mana to my Apprentice Magus, and then they use my own Mana against me?

How do I immunise myself from my ambitious minister/apprentice?

Sorcerer Donald tried to solve his plight, by hanging his Apprentice Magus Pence (out to dry) on Jan 6.

“Pence’s former counsel, told the panel that Pence refused to get into the vehicle after being evacuated from the Capitol, raising concerns that the driver would have taken him to a secure location & thus prevent him from certifying the electoral results.”

Then Sorcerer Donald was convinced by Sorcerer Thiel and Musk to take on their Apprentice Magus Vance, in return for immunity, and $1b+ - a true Devils’ bargain:

Yet, of course, Donald doesn’t trust Vance.

A dæmon recognises other dæmon’s and their apprentices from 1,000 paces.

Donald, once again, like a folktale ingenue has made the same mistake: his apprentice, he’s sure, will betray him.

By contrast, Sorcerer Biden chose his apprentice from good stock.

Apprentice Magus Harris was as loyal as Magus Pence had been to Sorcerer Donald. Wise Sorcerer Biden, unlike Sorcerer Donald, knew the right time to pass on the Right to her.

And it is done.

Contrast too how Sorcerer Putler dealt with his Apprentice Magus the Chef of Disinfolklore Prighozin himself:

England’s anti-mask pro-Covid Sovereign gave his mother Long Covid:

She dies. He gets Sovereignty over all the English as a result.

Shakespeare loved a good succession battle.

Brown agreed a devil’s bargain with Blair, lost his soul over Iraq, then lost Mana (power) almost as soon as he managed to get rid of Blair. Ségolène Royal and Francois Hollande, similarly, destroyed each other. Starmer, current UK PM’s popularity’s in minus figures (manifestly unfairly in my humble opinion). Yet, Ed Miliband his predecessor’s popularity among party members is above 40%. Can Starmer effect a transfer of the crown, before his unpopularity leaves the way open for pro-Russia “Reform” party? This remains to be seen. Ireland’s former prime minister Leo Vradaker, similarly, was unpopular. He surrendered power / mana to one of his deputies, who then did well in the subsequent general election.

On and on, back as far as Indo-European culture’s first empire the Hittites, we have seen issues with Magisters unwilling to surrender power/mana. After 500 years, around 1,200 BCE Hittite destroyed itself over how to pass on power (Mana).

Resolving the Plight of the Sorcerer is THE trickiest magical trick any Indo-European sovereign faces.

Doing so is, perhaps, President Biden’s greatest achievement.

⚡️State of Donald’s Mana - Post Kamala Update.

Donald’s power / Mana depends 100% on his value to America’s top 20 oligarchs. Only value is Donald’s electability.

Donald’s *x’aranah / Mana is a creation of our media space controlled as it is by 20 oligarchs.

Once Donald’s chance of election affects these supporters, Donald falls to earth, as Ancient Iran’s Lord of Death Yima did.

In Iran’s ancient Avesta it is said of the Lord of Death Yima (who corresponds to Odin in Germanic cultures - for whom our Wednesday is named - and Donn in pre-Christian Ancient Ireland):

“For a long time Yima holds the ‘sovereign empire over all the lands,’ and his reign, of untold prosperity, is protected by the *x’aranah / Mana / fake polling data, those marks of divine election which guarantees and expresses the legitimacy of a king.

But one day he commits a sin.

According to the single passage that mentions it in the remaining Avesta, the sin is lying:

Donald’s extraordinary prosperity, Yast 19,33 says emphatically, lasted until ‘he lied,’ until he ‘began to think the lying word, contrary to truth.’”

Etymologically “truth” corresponds to what “is. That which exists, is positive and not illusory.”

“Rtá” is opposed to “drúh” in the ancient Indian Vedic language.

“Arta” is opposed to “druj” in the ancient Iranian Avestan language.

The idea and form of the signifier “Art” as that which is created which reveals truth stems from this.

In the language of Darius’s inscriptions, drauga, the “lie,” is essentially the attitude of rebels, of usurpers or potential usurpers who deceive the people by pretending to he “king” in place of Darius himself (Darius I (522–486 bce) founded the Achmenaid Empire that ruled Judea, Greece, and other lands for 300 years).

No-one wants to back a loser, especially the billionaire anti-loser class.

⚡️Tulsi’s Nuclear Disinfolklore Trolling

To remind myself why this relates to what we’re going to talk about today, which is Tulsi Gabbard’s meme. James, I’m 100% comfortable with you using the term meme. I use the term meme interchangeably with the term informational unit in my work, and also with the term troll — where troll describes the item of Disinfolklore, the item of information. Meme for me is more than simply a visual image, which is what we’ve come to think of it as. When the term was coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, it described informational units — what I call informational units — which are communicated in cultures in the same way that genes are communicated biologically. So I’m very comfortable with that.

I discovered Disinfolklore as a narrative form in eastern Ukraine, where I gradually realised, while working in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, that what I was looking at — particular items of Disinfolklore, particular memes, particular units of information, the quotidian daily ebb and flow of news — there was a system behind it. I began to look more deeply and realised that in Russian military strategy, they have this idea of information confrontation, which has two elements: the means, which is the instances of information, and the information environment. That’s one path to what I now call a Disinfolklore galaxy — which is what Russia created inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, where every thought you have, every movement you make, every aspect of your reality, from where you work to how you get there, to the people you talk to, whether family or colleagues — every aspect is injected with Disinfolklore. Ideas meld with the actual texture of your life. Unless you profess certain memes, certain beliefs, certain informational units — if you get them wrong, you’ll lose your job. You’ll be like that ABC journalist who called Stephen Miller full of hate and lost his job. A perfect example of how the information environment impacts every aspect of your life.

That’s eastern Ukraine, where I discovered what I now call the Disinfolklore galaxy. The Disinfolklore universe is made up of many different galaxies. The MAGA Disinfolklore galaxy has many continuities, many similarities with what I saw in Russia-occupied Ukraine. Then I had this vision in early November 2024, just after the election, that what had happened to those who are part of MAGA was going to happen to all of humanity and all of America first. This became the talk I made at the Pirate Party conference in Munich during the Munich Security Conference: “Welcome to Our Disinfolklore Universe.”

Now we see this same melding of reality in everything to do with America’s relationship to Ukraine, which is primarily why we’re here — we’re interested in Ukraine and Ukraine winning. We’re hoping against hope, and I think most of us understand it’s never going to happen that America would tip the scales in favour of Ukraine. Now we’re just hoping it doesn’t tip them against Ukraine. Ukraine has been central to US politics since 2016 and the Republican National Convention in August 2016, when Paul Manafort — whose work led directly to this war in Ukraine, and who was imprisoned for operating as an unregistered agent for Ukraine’s former president — had the commitment to support Ukraine militarily taken out of the Republican National Convention’s platform.

I’ve posted before about the exact moment when MAGA went pro-Russia. Now we’ve seen reported in the last couple of days — Reuters reported two days ago, and Hegseth actually said it in Congress yesterday — that there’s evidence the United States would not fund Ukraine militarily next year. We see this path from an extraordinary secret act, which caused a fuss when publicised, to now being mainstreamed and just one of thousands of different memes invading our information space. The totality of all of these makes up what I call the Disinfolklore galaxy.

That’s my main teaching, for want of a less grand word: when we’re tuned into individual memes and informational units day to day, what is actually being arranged around us is a Disinfolklore galaxy, just as powerful as that which surrounds and embeds and encapsulates the people who went MAGA and the people in our own lives who we know went MAGA. It’s nothing about intelligence or education or learning. It’s a deliberate attempt to hack people’s brains and minds, to surround them in what the Russians call an information environment in which all of these different memes are operating all the time to ensure we do or don’t do what those creating it want us to do.

I bring up Paul Manafort because he is the dark force behind much of the division in Ukraine between 2004 and 2014. The irony of the people he worked for and MAGA claiming that the Maidan was a US-engineered coup — when the very person who supported Yanukovych, who according to his daughters’ texts we saw publicly, arranged the massacre on the Maidan in February 2014. At the time, the current Polish foreign minister was in Kyiv trying to tell the demonstrators, along with Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, to pipe down and make a deal with Yanukovych. But Yanukovych fled. And Paul Manafort now works for Donald Trump. We don’t see him in the public light, but we did see him at the National Convention last time. What we see now with Tulsi Gabbard’s video about nuclear war has all the hallmarks of this same playbook.

That’s the link between Ukraine and America — a multi-layered link. On the positive side, we have the one force in the world who can actually confront and defeat this: President Zelensky. That’s the overall conception of how my Disinfolklore perspective helps me understand what is currently going on in the United States — these demonstrations by the president, illegal orders trying to create Disinfolklore which affects the minds of ordinary citizens who don’t know which way to go. Tulsi Gabbard is throwing in with her nuclear speech a very potent weapon — a statement of intention, is how I read it — with her idea that elites don’t care about nuclear war because they’ve got shelters.

I have the Disinfolklore universe — “Welcome to Our Disinfolklore Universe” — the speech I made in Munich at the Pirate Party conference. Note, the Pirate Party itself is an example of the unreal melding with the real. They always had an intuitive sense — just as Elon Musk dresses up in superhero costumes — pirates from literature, from art, became part of their moniker. The folk heroes of pirates. They were going to be the pirates. So it was appropriate that I made the speech there. Since then, I’ve worked carefully on detailing the whole idea: the Disinfolklore narrative form and Disinfolklore Analytical Method, many different things concerning the Disinfolklore universe.

Today, when I saw Tulsi Gabbard’s Nuclear Ashes speech, I decided to apply the method — the Twelve-Tool method, an algorithm we can learn in our own minds to interpret any informational unit, any meme, whether it’s a photograph or a picture. We see them sometimes in the English information space, and we’re probably seeing them in Northern Ireland at the moment, where there are riots because two alleged immigrants have allegedly attempted rape. As a result, we see tumult and communal riots. This is a perennial theme in Disinfolklore and indeed in Indo-European thought: outsiders, immigrants, come into the inner realm and affect its fertility. It’s either the sovereignty, the security, or the fertility — always one of those three themes. These are the essential archetypes in Indo-European societies, according to the great theorists of Indo-European language, linguistics and religion. Since I realised this, we can use it as a tool for analysing whether it’s riots in Ballymena in Northern Ireland. I haven’t looked into it yet, but it won’t surprise me if Telegram is somehow involved in stirring this hatred.

I decided to apply the method because it should be useful for us to understand what Tulsi Gabbard is doing. We see it — it comes up on our Twitter feed. This is what I’m trying to do. I’m not trying to write academic theses. I’m trying to understand what the people leading our communities are doing or trying to do, whether in Ukraine, whether it’s the Russians. The Russians show us where this leads, because they’ve created this nightmare inside Russia, as has the CCP and North Korea and Iran — communities deeply embedded in Disinfolklore, where they use these stories to hack the minds of their population.

I applied the method to the Tulsi Gabbard video because it’s archetypal Disinfolklore, really what she’s doing there. The moment I saw the aesthetics, I thought of a video a Ukrainian friend from eastern Ukraine sent me about a year into the war — a really strange artefact. She was asking me what I made of it. She didn’t really understand it, but she felt attracted by it. It was a man in a very 1970s aesthetic, like we might remember from the news in the 1970s, but he was talking about ultra-hypermodern things — how war in Ukraine was going to lead to an environmental catastrophe, and really we should be focused on global warming. The aesthetics of Tulsi’s video reminded me of this, because it communicated this mood of darkness, like being in a forest, of just feeling off. It’s so cynically and carefully produced — even her hair.

I haven’t paid much attention to her because I try to control what enters my mind. This is in fact the first time I’ve probably ever watched anything consciously by her. But to see this grey hair strand, reminiscent of Lily Munster from *The Munsters* — it’s deliberate archetyping as a witch. To put us in that space, our minds in this negative space. And then the imagery flashed up: the darkness of the background aesthetics, then the imagery of ashes. To someone like me who tries to control what goes into my mind, this came out of nowhere. I don’t understand what prompted it in terms of the news cycle. Is she responding to something? Or is this an artefact pumped into our space? Either way, it is a very deliberate announcement, in my interpretation, of what we see going on — the activation of the National Guard, the military parade in DC — that she is announcing that this coup, which they have been prosecuting since the 2020 election results were first disputed, they’re really going for it now. They’re not happy with how things are going.

I applied the Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy tool — Tool 1 — and got to this idea of her deliberately archetyping herself as a witch-like figure, like Lily Munster, with the wisp of grey hair, and the archetypes of nuclear war, ashes, elites. It’s replete with archetypes.

The Incoming/Outgoing Troll Radars — Tool 2 — should obviously always be switched on when you’re on Twitter, because everything there could be a troll designed to affect our emotions and hack our rational thought processes. The overall idea Gabbard’s video communicates is fear, a negative mood which has the power to overcome our radars, so that we allow this in — even just wondering, “Why is she talking about nuclear ashes?” It goes into our inner mind, and we start getting worried. This triggers different thought routines and traumas, deliberately provoked by the aesthetics, the mood, the words, her expression, the strangeness of this coming from the head of sixteen national intelligence agencies. This is as deep state as you get. And here she is archetyping herself as not part of the elite — who she says have nuclear bomb shelters and are therefore trying to spark a nuclear war. Which is itself nonsense, because just because you’ve got a shelter doesn’t mean you’re going to spark a war.

Tool 3 is looking for the mana in the meme — trying to find the energy. The energy is communicated through the mood, the darkness, the messaging. But what is she actually saying? I heard several discussions today about what she was saying, and people have different interpretations. It works on so many levels. But for me, the ultimate energy is a statement. Mana for me is an energy in memes. You look for what the energy is — the different levels, negative or positive, what it’s saying, what it’s doing, what’s the intention. For me, the intention is to say: “We are going to protect you. If you surrender to us, we’ll protect you from this nuclear war which the elite, the outer-realm people, want to start.” And for those of us who don’t fall for that, the message is: “We’re so powerful that there’s nothing you can do. You’re powerless. We’ll arrest you. The army will shoot you.”

Tool 4 is the inner-outer realm immanences. Every item of Disinfolklore — whether it’s a picture of a dark-skinned individual ogling a classic European female, a trope I see often in the English information space — is about inner realm and outer realm. Migrants coming in to take away the fertility of the inner realm, the daughter of the inner-realm people. That’s really what the anti-migration discourse is doing — taking away the sense of security in our communities. This inner-outer realm immanence was deeply embedded in Gabbard’s message. It was a minute and twenty seconds long. But the main message is: there is an elite who have nuclear bomb shelters, who will be protected, and they are the ones stirring nuclear war. She could easily have said this is Russia, this is the CCP. But she didn’t. She left it open to interpretation — which in itself, from my perspective, is a statement that she and the people she works for are all working together, whether it’s her boss, the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans. All nuclear powers. She could have said they were the ones threatening us — a Ronald Reagan-type stance, or an axis-of-evil framing. But she didn’t. She left it to the MAGA interpretation. This has been built on decades of this idea, especially in America, of cities as lawless lands, where the MAGA base lives in safe communities. The people I know, my relatives who’ve gone MAGA, are quite wealthy and safe, but even from a young age they’ve been going on about how unsafe the cities are. What’s happening in the information space about LA is built on decades of this outer-realm idea.

Tool 5 is the idea I got from the Dalai Lama and the great psychologist Paul Ekman, who did this amazing work available online called the Atlas of Emotions. They have this system, which I adapt into the Disinfolklore Analytical Method: Trigger, Experience, Reaction. Any of the emotional journeys we go on each day — thousands, millions perhaps — whether scrolling down our timeline or in real life with work, spouses, children, pets, or walking down the street as stimuli bounce off us. All of us who are experts in filtering and responding to information — we may not understand how amazing we are at this now, simply from being on Twitter. We have so many algorithms in our mind to filter things out. But ultimately, we’re being taken on oodles of emotional journeys.

In the Ekman–Dalai Lama model: there’s a trigger, we experience a feeling — disgust, sadness, one of the five emotions — and then we react. The message is that once you separate the experience from the reaction, you can avoid falling for the troll or sharing it. We talked last time about the conference in Moscow, where famous people have gone, and many of us shared pictures of them — which, from my perspective, is part of the purpose of the conference. We react to the experience by sharing it.

With the Tulsi Gabbard video, the experience I had was curiosity. My reaction is this monologue. As soon as I saw it, I thought: let me apply the Disinfolklore Analytical Method.

The other six tools — the Code of Positive Trolls — I won’t go through now. But the most important one for me here was Generosity. There was nothing generous in what she was saying. Nothing positive. It wasn’t even a cynical attempt to please us. It was a cynical attempt to put us at dis-ease. For that reason, it’s a perfect example of Disinfolklore — as indeed is what we see when Russia sends missiles into Ukraine and then broadcasts the footage, or conducts human safaris, which we talked about the other week when the UN reports came out, where they’re using Telegram to send FPV drone footage. They’re boasting about it. They’re creating Disinfolklore.

This is the same thing I saw in eastern Ukraine, where reality — the pictures of burning cars in a tiny area of LA — is being used repeatedly by the mainstream media as a pretext to create what I call the Disinfolklore galaxy, to really depressing ends, unless more of us wake up to it.

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Archetyping is a very important aspect of Disinfolklore as an analytical method. And archetypal Disinfolklore literacy is the first tool in the Disinfolklore Analytical Methods handbook. So you won’t be surprised to find that I’m starting today with MAGA archetyping Ukraine and Europe as weak.

The US is trying to archetype Europe as weak, yet it’s led by a guy who can’t stop sleeping. We had this fantastic photo of Rubio looking over at Donald and seeing that he was basically asleep at this press conference. Weak. MAGA followers like Donald archetype Ukraine as weak and Russia as strong. Meanwhile, Ukraine deals with 7,000 tactical Russian drones and 600 strategic Russian drones daily while attacking Russia with similar quantities in ways which America, NATO collectively, nor any NATO country individually, between 1945 and today, could ever do. Now America is trying to archetype Europe as weak — in the same way that Russia archetypes Ukraine and Europe as weak, in their view, as a woman.

We remember Putler referring to this hard rock song from the Soviet era, by a band called Red Mould, on February 20th, 2022: “Sleeping Beauty in a coffin — I went up and effed her.” As the New Lines Institute noted in its first genocide report, this was evidence of genocidal intent because it was archetyping — they didn’t use the word archetype — Ukraine as a woman, as a corpse, and as the victim of necrophiliac rape. What America is now doing to Europe is what Russia has been doing to Europe and to Ukraine. They’re attempting this through the National Security Strategy, but also through figures like Jamie Dimon, a well-named chap, who referred to Europe as a weak continent. It’s this strongman-versus-weak dialectic, which Ruth Ben-Ghiat has been brilliant at helping us see through.

The implication of this archetyping is that 27 individual EU states acting unilaterally would somehow be strong. Of course they don’t think that, because we’ve heard today the long version of the National Security Strategy in which several countries — Hungary, Italy, and a couple of others, and I don’t think Italy will be happy to be part of this — will be privileged by American attention, while all the other European countries will be consigned to the gulag, basically.

The shame of allying with child-stealing Russia, which can’t even protect itself, and China run by another weakling. The stance of a jealous spouse who won’t let their wife speak to other males. Weak. How they’re archetyping Europe is that they don’t want individual European countries to talk to anyone else.

Today we see reported in the *Washington Post* by David Ignatius, who I’ve never paid any attention to. I instantly archetyped him in my mind from seeing him. I have a subscription to the *Washington Post*, so I see him there all the time: “I’ll answer all your questions on Ukraine.” I’ve never been tempted for a second to dive in. And boy, was my intuition confirmed today when I see his breathless reporting, clearly from inside Donald’s gangster Russian-mafia circles, about their breathless chutzpah of a deal where they think for a second that Ukraine will surrender Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant to the Russians and let the Americans oversee it, as if that’s some sort of sweetener.

After the thousands of people who have been murdered, raped, kidnapped by Russia using ZNPP and Enerhodar — and I was the environmental security focal point for the OSCE for Zaporizhzhia, I covered Enerhodar, I met Mayor Orlov — some of us might remember him pleading with the international community in early March as Enerhodar’s native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainian residents tried to stop the might of the Russian army by erecting roadblocks. I’ve felt the Enerhodar occupation quite personally — obviously not even a millionth as much as the people there, the Ukrainians. But just the idea that these criminals, these gangsters would come in and offer Russia ZNPP — it’s absolutely preposterous. It would only happen in another universe. And obviously, given my framing of Disinfolklore, where I talk about in my Munich speech last February — which is the second part of today’s episode — how my fear was that the United States and Donald and Russia would collude to project all of us into the kind of Disinfolklore universe that I saw Russia projecting Ukrainians into in Russia-occupied Luhansk, when I worked and lived and travelled there daily between 2015 and 2018. This is my overarching interpretation of what we see now going on with this ridiculous peace process.

The Ignatius article today — apart from the chutzpah of thinking Ukraine is going to give up the largest nuclear power plant in Europe — they think the European Union is going to admit Ukraine next year because America says it, or that the European Union is going to give up this money so that Russia can reconstitute itself. A Marshall Plan for Russia.

I first tweeted about this troll in November 2022, when so-called Russian liberals — the so-called Russian opposition — let it be known that they wanted a Marshall Plan for Russia. That was on the 23rd of November 2022. I often talk in Disinfolklore, and in the analytical method, about characters. So we have this character of a Marshall Plan for Russia. They obviously believe in this, and now Donald and his criminal gangster mafia cronies have taken this troll and are now trying to use it to troll Europe and Ukraine into paying Russia for its destruction.

As I mentioned last week, the European Parliament’s recent very stiff resolution against Donald’s and Russia’s 28-point plan rightly calls upon Russia to repay all the material and immaterial harm and damage. These are legal terms: the material damage — the 500 billion in infrastructure damage and counting — but then the trillions, I calculate back of the envelope, in trauma and inconvenience and death. It’s called quantum in law. You look at when someone has suffered a tort, when an individual has suffered a wrong, and 42 million Ukrainians have suffered a tort, and each of them has an individual claim for compensation.

Quite apart from anything else, what they are trying to do with this breathless reporting by this clown Ignatius — who clearly has no genuine expertise, who holds himself up as an expert on Ukraine but is now so seduced by his access to Donald’s entourage that he can breathlessly report this stuff as if it’s normal — when we have these laws and very fixed ideas of wrong, when we have the European Court of Human Rights judgment establishing Russia’s culpability, the Council of Europe chamber established to try Russia for the crime of aggression. We have the legal basis for Russia’s culpability and financial liability. And then we have Donald and his cronies trying to create this Disinfolklore universe where up is archetyped as down, where it’s a bit like the First World War — “right and wrong on both sides” — whereas of course this war is like the Second World War.

I always remember going to my old Cambridge college, going into the chapel. We were shown the book commemorating all of the college members who died during the First War, as they refer to it. And there are German names there — the German aristocracy would send their children to be educated at Cambridge, even back in those days. Then the person showing me around showed me the condolences book for the Second War and pointed out that there are no German names in it. Not that there weren’t German college members who died, but they fought on the other side. As they said, the Second War was a different kind of war. As indeed is this one.

What Donald and this entire saga we’ve been going through, quite apart from everything else, is an attempt to re-archetype this war as something akin to the First World War — right on both sides. And the chutzpah of them taking this call by the so-called Russian opposition — we can trace this meme from the 23rd of November 2022 when I first picked it up. We can trace it from there through into the Kremlin, because of course the so-called opposition are just surrogates and proxies to air preposterous ideas, like Russia gets its Marshall Plan. Which of course it got during the Second World War, and then again after 1991. And then it goes from the Kremlin straight into the Russian-mafia-adjacent coterie of people like Kushner. Who is this guy? It’s just preposterous that the greatest community of human beings ever assembled in the history of humanity — America — should be led by this group of ne’er-do-wells. But my job is to help elucidate what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.

The Marshall Plan element is one character, but I also talk about trolls as characters — following them through stories and memes, tracing their trajectories, just as we would in a fairy tale or Netflix series or a great novel. We get to know these characters and their characteristics so that when they pop up again in a later scene or a later episode of Disinfolklore, we recognise them immediately. This is a skill we all have from listening to Volya Radio — from listening to Mokrushyna’s stories. She has a fantastic memory for these characters which pop up again.

The other perennial character in Russian Disinfolklore since the beginning of the war is trying to archetype its full-scale invasion as somehow akin to Korea. The Korea scenario has popped up again and again. I’ve written about it quite a few times. It initially appeared very early in the war when it became clear that what Russia was trying to do was divide Ukraine into two — it wanted the left bank of the Dnipro River. It didn’t really care about legal ownership of the right bank; it was quite happy to let it be. The story Russia was planting this aim through was by talking about what it called the Korea scenario.

In March 2022, I wrote about it, where Budanov first revealed that the Korea scenario for Ukraine meant Russia would occupy all of left-bank Ukraine, including Odesa and the entire sea coast. Somehow normalised. Then it transmuted — in September 2022, the *Wall Street Journal*: “Ukraine war gives North Korea reasons to draw closer to Russia. Pyongyang plans to send labourers to eastern Ukraine.” Again, a very clever way of infringing on Ukraine’s sovereignty and sneaking it into the *Wall Street Journal* as if it’s normalised.

We all laughed when we saw Russia was getting 40% of its ammo from North Korea. Then I discovered — I think it was Jay in Kyiv who revealed — that the GDP of North Korea is $18 billion. That same week, I read that Taylor Swift’s world tour had added $5 billion to the United States’ GDP. So basically, three North Koreas is a Taylor Swift tour. That was my way of counter-archetyping how ridiculous it was that Russia was relying on North Korea for its ammo. Then of course the Kursk invasion, 10,000 North Korean soldiers.

Now we have this perennial troll popping up again in Ignatius’s breathless article. He’s straight reporting what’s in the peace plan — trying to normalise the division of a modern nation state into two parts along the lines of North Korea and South Korea, archetyping it as somehow tragic, unavoidable. Giving people a meme so they can just go, “Oh well, Ukraine should just give it up because it’s going to be like North and South Korea.” These villages and hromadas, these communities where I visited and was shown European-standard schools between 2018 and 2022 when I worked out of the Dnipro office of the OSCE — they’re just going to become some sort of no-person’s land. And somehow the Europeans will be like American mercenaries, as they were in Afghanistan, holding the Ukrainians back from regaining their land. The whole thing is preposterous.

But the positive thing I take from it is how united and outspoken European powers are — all European countries. This is unconscious counter-archetyping by Europe, by the European Union, by Britain, France and Germany, when they saw the National Security Strategy. You think in your MAGA, America First Disinfolklore that Europe is weak, but you literally don’t have the power to get Ukraine into the European Union in 2027. Maybe there is a secret deal, but I suspect there isn’t, because there’s a process, and many of us are very frustrated how slow it’s taking. The idea that America and Russia can shoehorn Ukraine into the European Union so that then presumably Russia thinks it can take over Ukraine and cause more trouble — it’s absolutely preposterous.

I wrote before about how this whole peace process is Donald selling skyscrapers he doesn’t own. Then a jokey thing about FIFA demanding Donald returns his peace prize because of war breaking out in Thailand and Cambodia. I felt slightly guilty about that because it’s no laughing matter, but he did say he had solved it — apparently Ukraine.

We saw this perennial troll popping up again yesterday — America wanting President Zelensky to hold elections. President Zelensky said, okay, sure, we need a ceasefire and security guarantees. This has popped up since January 2018 and was very much in the air throughout 2017. I remember this vividly because a colleague — an ex-British Army colleague — and I, in occupied Luhansk City at the time where I was working, did the maths on how much it would cost to run free and fair elections according to OSCE standards in Russia-occupied Luhansk and Donetsk, over hundreds of polling stations. This is even apart from trying to get one and a half million Ukrainians who Russia had expelled, who were forcibly transferred, back into the occupied territory so they could vote. The cost in materiel and forces would have been about one and a half billion dollars. The idea of Western countries paying that amount was preposterous — there just wasn’t enough interest in Ukraine. Therefore you couldn’t have these elections, and that became the big sticking point in Paris in December 2019, when President Zelensky said no and made fun of Putler at their one and only meeting, when Zelensky was supposed to agree to the Steinmeier Formula — under which Ukraine would allow Russia to hold elections inside Russia-occupied Ukraine before Russia gave Ukraine back control of its borders. That deal failed.

The elections troll has popped up again and again. All of us will remember three or four times since the full-scale invasion, including articles by Masha Gessen in *The New Yorker*, trying to archetype President Zelensky as the dictator — when of course Russia is the dictatorship that has never had free and fair elections, never in its history. It pops up again even yesterday. We can never really sleep when these things pop up perennially. And let’s not forget: these are January 6th insurrection supporters calling for illegal elections during wartime in Ukraine.

One aspect of the National Security Strategy which tickled me was the use of the term “civilisational.” Some of you will be aware of my Power of Mana and Finding Manuland work, where I dig back into 6,000 years of discernible Indo-European history to interpret quotidian data. Huntington’s 1993 book *The Clash of Civilizations* interestingly mentions Crimea and quotes Zhirinovsky. I came across it when I was doing research in 2015–2016, looking at early warning signals of an invasion of Crimea by Russia, because I didn’t anticipate it. There are these little breadcrumbs, and one was in Huntington’s book.

For those who don’t know, the clash of civilisations thesis posits that the choice for humanity is between Christianity and Islam — those are the two civilisations. But as I’ve demonstrated throughout my work in Power of Mana, Islam is an Indo-European religion whose content was generated mainly in Iran, an Indo-European culture. As indeed is Christianity, generated in a place under Roman occupation where the lingua franca was Greek, in Judea — an area which had had Indo-European rulers for 1,500 years at the time of Christ. We know this from the Amarna letters of 1400 BCE, which reference Indo-European-named rulers in Canaan and Judea. The idea of Christianity being somehow a distinct civilisation in itself, rather than just a new layer of an Indo-European tradition succeeded and complemented by others like Islam or Buddhism, gives us a means of seeing through these trolls.

Whoever wrote the National Security Strategy read this book as an undergraduate and hasn’t really thought about it since. But for them, it’s their big idea. And of course this goes back to the culture war troll — the political strategy invented by Pat Buchanan in 1991. New wine in old bottles, because he was doing the “divide the Democrats” stuff in the early 1970s, which came out in Watergate. But the culture war troll, which he announced at the Republican National Convention in 1991: a cultural war between conservatives and mystical traditionalists on one side versus the transnational cosmopolitan elite on the other. Academics then spent fifteen years trying to discover whether this was a real thing, and they could find nothing apart from people who self-identified as culture warriors. He wasn’t describing a reality — he was creating one.

Pat Buchanan wrote a piece very important for my intellectual development, on December 17th, 2013 — a few months before Russia invaded Crimea — called “Putin’s Paleo-Conservative Moment.” In it, he praises Putin’s vision, writing: “As the decisive struggle in the second half of the 20th century was vertical — East versus West — the 21st century struggle may be horizontal, with conservatives and traditionalists in every country arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.” This is the declaratory war which unites Putler and the people around Donald, the people around J.D. Vance. This is why they’re so obsessed with talking about civil war in Europe. They see the whole of Europe as militantly secular, multicultural, transnational elite — even though, ironically, J.D. Vance is married to someone of Indian heritage and Donald keeps marrying people from Europe. But the truth isn’t what matters here. It’s the organising fiction, the rhetorical fiction, and now it’s part of the National Security Strategy. So we see this troll popping up again.

I call Donald “Druidy Don.” The Druids were the priestly class in Celtic religion, pre-Christian, akin to the Brahmin in India, and the Flamines — notice the M-N sound in both Brahmin and Flamines — in Roman society. It was out of that tradition that the idea of Christ and the self-sacrificing first king arose. We saw President Zelensky meeting the Pope in Rome the other day. I call him Druidy Don because he’s druidic in the sense of truthiness — he does connect with people’s minds and persuade them of things they otherwise wouldn’t have believed. He’s leading society, which is what the Brahmin in India, the Flamines in Rome, and the Druids in Ireland and Pretani did. Pretani was the ancient name for the island of Britain. The Romans sadly wiped out the Celts — apart from the Welsh, basically. The Celts in Scotland came from Irish Celtic immigrants, and the name Scotland comes from Scota, the original name for Ireland.

Every news broadcast for the past week or two has been talking about peace talks. But all of us understand this is not about peace talks. I am, and I know many of us are, on the edge of our seats in some senses. But in other senses, we’ve seen this rodeo before and understand what’s going on. I have one of many different ways of interpreting data in real time. I call it the Disinfolklore Analytical Method. There’s a particular version of it which I worked on for six months before I revealed it in my Munich speech. I’ve never actually spoken the whole speech properly before, so I thought today I would do about half of it, then we can talk, and next week I’ll do the other half and move on to truth and sovereignty — core concepts with very deep origins in our psyche and language. They’re no longer abstract. As an international lawyer, I studied sovereignty in that sense, but here we hear Rubio talking about sovereignty — and what he really means is Ukraine can sacrifice its territorial integrity. We hear the Irish government and others using these three terms: sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity. We also hear Donald and Witkoff appealing to prosperity — Ukraine can lose its territorial integrity but be prosperous in ten years.

And then we see America and Russia colluding in the most bizarre fashion, as if the European Union isn’t the largest trade bloc on the planet and the most powerful group of countries ever to assemble in a free alliance. They’re attempting to archetype Russia as somehow not on the hook for the 500 billion in material damage it owes — but also the trillions in psychological and traumatic damage.

In municipal law — the law in America, Ireland, Ukraine — if you’re found liable for tort, for doing someone wrong, you run them over, you kill the breadmaker in the family, then you’re liable for damages. This applies just as much to Russia and the 42 million Ukrainians who have had their lives turned upside down. Every Ukrainian has a cause of action which can be determined. There will be formulas. It will take years. But they are all entitled to financial compensation for the stress and trauma that Russia has caused them.

I note the European Parliament resolution — an extremely strong resolution, a real resolution compared to this so-called peace process — underlines the settled will of the European people, the 400 million people in Europe and their political representatives. Opposite this, you have a very small group of Americans — Donald’s son-in-law, no idea what this character is doing. Once we saw the Kushner character reappearing on stage, we knew something was up. In Disinfolklore Analytical Method, we follow characters. The way he is described in mainstream news broadcasts, it’s as if it’s the most natural thing in the world for the president’s son-in-law to be there. The very same people who drove us nuts over the Hunter Biden troll for eight years — over the alleged skewing of American policy, even though Hunter Biden had never been to Ukraine — seem to have no problem seeing Kushner suddenly appearing as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

On the one side, we have this bizarre soap opera which has taken over America — this Russian-mafia-adjacent group of people who have sadly taken over the United States and have the chutzpah to think they can also take over Ukraine, when Ukraine has the most powerful military in Europe. An extraordinary and laughable situation in many respects. On the other hand, you have real power: the European Parliament resolution and the European Commission.

Let me talk about this story which came up last Friday — America’s recognition of Russia-occupied parts of Ukraine. I wrote a piece on this straight away because we may see this character popping up again, this perennial troll. I had three thoughts.

First: good luck determining which areas Russia occupies. Good luck getting Putler to agree with Donald which parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Russia actually physically occupies — never mind the parts it doesn’t occupy but claims. The front line, as we all know, but which low-information people probably haven’t registered yet, is a grey zone of 30 to 50 kilometres with sparsely spread Ukrainian and Russian forces along an 1,800-kilometre-long frontier. Putler’s supreme general was recently shown briefing him with a map showing areas of Ukraine that Russia does not, has not, and never will occupy. Putler recently said Russia occupies a town in Ukraine which doesn’t exist — we saw that from Sergei Sternenko last week. And yesterday Putler was talking about towns which don’t exist that Russia occupies. He’s trying to archetype Russia as strong and Ukraine as weak. America is leaning into this; we’re not, and Europe isn’t. Six weeks ago, Putler said Russia controlled Pokrovsk and Kupiansk — yet Russia doesn’t occupy those towns.

Interestingly, I went onto the Information Warfare Initiative on YouTube today on DuckDuckGo — a browser with no cookies, blank from my perspective. All the suggested shows after Information Warfare Initiative were pro-Russia, talking about Ukraine’s disaster in Pokrovsk and such. That was quite revealing because one of my other daily sources, Denys Davydov — who I’ve got back into, he’s no longer a doomer and his political analysis is more incisive now — his suggested shows are all Times Radio, Jason Jay Smart. A completely different universe. It gave me an idea of the Disinfolklore ecosystem trying to promote these trolls that Russia currently occupies Pokrovsk and Kupiansk. The fact is, they don’t. Whether or not Putler believes they do — I tend to think he probably does.

So we’re not even at the stage where people — and I hear President Macron talking about stabilising the current front lines. This doesn’t really worry me because it’s so removed from the reality of the front line. The wording they’re using is the same wording they used when they established the OSCE monitoring: “relying mainly on technical means to monitor the ceasefire.” But I myself would certify violations of the ceasefire and did so thousands of times. We had this formal mechanism and those legal papers exist. Agreeing on what constitutes a violation is virtually incomprehensible — Russia will never agree to the proper definitions. Anytime Russia threatened any Ukrainian inside the occupation, for instance, that would be a violation. A gun going off. This is why I have never been truly worried about this peace process — I didn’t think it was going to happen. The idea in the 28-point plan that you stabilise the lines is so complicated as to be virtually impossible at this point.

Second point: America has a lot of power, but forcing Ukraine and the EU to recognise Russia’s destruction of the post-World War II legal order is beyond America’s power. Donald would be impeached. It would be the end of him or the end of America, and Americans get to choose which. This isn’t just about Ukraine recognising Crimea as Russia — it’s literally the end of the post-World War II legal order and the end of America as it was. It’s painted on the news as a big thing, but its implications are enormous.

Third: recognising parts of Ukraine which Russia claims to occupy as Russian will convulse America’s relations with every country — Israel, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan — a hundred countries with border issues. Sixty million people died during the Second World War for the idea that territorial integrity is non-negotiable. That’s what Russia disrupted when it moved into Crimea in February 2014. For the United States as a permanent UN Security Council member to approve this has implications for every one of those countries. The embarrassment would transform America from being the world’s only indispensable ally into the enemy of the international legal order. As the European Parliament’s resolution states: the US and Russia’s 28-point peace plan raises legitimate concerns regarding the United States’ commitment to international law and the security of Europe and Ukraine.

I’m not predicting that these issues will stop Donald and the war criminals and mafiosi he is operating with from doing this in America’s name. But it would be a world-changing event.

I wanted to put that in context, because I suspect it is going to happen — we see this moving forward. So that’s what I had to say on this week’s events. Now I want to move into our Disinfolklore universe, because what is going on here is the mere talking — the rhetoric — that is creating what I call the Disinfolklore universe.

We look at individual news items and perhaps fact-check them or defeat them or put them out of our minds. Sometimes they disappear, like the Alaska talks. But they exert a permanent change in our culture, psychology, information space and world. When people — and many of us probably agree — say the whole 28-point plan is an information attack, as Ukrainians talk about because they’re wiser about this than many of us, what they really mean is it exists to transform the Disinfolklore universe, which is our culture.

In Disinfolklore Analytical Method, I’ve tried to forge new words and terms to describe what I see and how I see it, because otherwise we get trapped inside the vocabulary of the Russians — “disinformation” — or MAGA, with Donald’s archetyping of “truth” or “post-truth” or “truthiness.” I want to get outside what they’re trying to do and give us the tools to interpret it in real time.

⚡️FIFA demands Donald returns Peace Prize.

Now that war has broken out between Thailand and Cambodia, Donald’s peace price is in jeopardy.

President Zelenskyy offered Donald a portion of Ukraine’s spoils - part of Siberia - to cheer the old buffer up.

Last month Qatar politely asked Donald to return the gold 747 after Donald trolled Hamas terrorists to visit Qatar only for Israel to use US fighter jets to kill them.

⚡️Ignominious Ignatious breathlessly falls for the troll

⚡️America trolled by Russia’s ever-changing ‘Korea Scenario’ troll normalising genocide in Ukraine.

Wash Post reports breathlessly Donald wants Russia to keep Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. Which Russia has used as a base to murder, torture, r*pe, fire missiles, drones against thousands of people.

“It’s a Korea Scenario,” says Donald.

Russia said in March 2022: we will divide Ukraine Korea style.

Then Russia said in 2022 “we will import North Koreans into eastern Ukraine.”

Then when Ukraine invaded Russia. Russia used 10,000 North Korean soldiers. Donald won Kursk back for Russia by halting intelligence sharing suddenly.

Now America is colluding with a Russian troll that ‘normalises’ division of a sovereign country by saying it’s ‘just like Korea.’

More evidence of USA’s capture by Russia’s Mental Wars.

⚡️Russian asset confiscation a warning to those engaged in War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity and the Crime of Aggression.

If a country is found liable by ECrtHR for violations of human rights on the scale of Russia’s violations since its occupation of Crimea began in Feb 2014, then ALL overseas assets (including those of its oligarchs) are liable for confiscation.

⚡️Hands off ZNPP ☢️America, Ruschia!

Enerhodar is Ukraine. You don’t get to steal a nuclear power plant after using it as a base to murder and terrorise and kidnap thousands of Ukrainians.

This is America’s most shameful moment since slavery.

⚡️MAGA Archetyping Ukraine and ‘Europe’ as weak.

US is trying to Archetype “Europe” as “Weak.” Yet, it’s led by a guy who can’t stop sleeping.

Weak MAGA followers, like Donald, archetypes Ukraine as ‘Weak’ and Russia as ‘Strong.’

Meanwhile, Ukraine deals with 7,000 tactical Russian drones and 600 strategic Russian drones daily, while attacking Russia with similar quantities in ways America 1945-2025 was too weak to even contemplate.

Now, America is trying to archetype “Europe” as “Weak.” Jamie Dimon and that Undersecretary of State think a united Europe is ‘Weak’ whereas 27 individual states acting unilaterally would be ‘Strong’?!

Of course they don’t think that! They’re playing mind games. They’re revealing their fears, their weaknesses, and America’s shame.

The shame of allying with childstealing Russia which can’t even protect itself and China (run by another weakling)!

The stance of a jealous spouse who won’t let their wife speak to other males. Weak.

⚡️When America states that it wants to “restore Europe’s civilisational confidence” Donald’s apparatchiks mean: we want Hand Maid’s Tale Europe.

We want the human rights architecture to be disassembled.

Our 1930’s archetype of Masculinity must be privileged over societies where discrimination against humans on certain protected grounds (sex, sexual preference, political views, national origins,…) is outlawed.

The United States has decided to “reestablish” “strategic stability” with Russia, which seeks to kill millions of Europeans. Having murdered around 2m people since its full-scale invasion and forcibly transferred more than 700,000 Ukrainian children into Russia, the credibility of Russia’s threats against us is high.

More sinister than that is the capture of US national security strategy by those inside America who wish to promote Russia’s political proxies inside Europe. Far Right and far left political forces in Europe operate with Russian funding and know-how. In Romania MAGA “data analytics” guy Brad Parscale boasted of helping Russia’s proxy to capture a NATO state, just before Romanian intelligence services published documents demonstrating Georgescu was cheating.

That time the Romanian government and its Supreme Court cancelled the election.

However, now America, in coalition with China (through its brainwashing TikTok) and Russia (together with its brainwashing Telegram Disinfolklore propagation App) are claiming, as a matter of National Security Strategy, the duty to “cultivate resistance” inside democratic European states to Europe’s priorities of maintaining and retaining the post-World War Two legal orders.

The credibility of these threats by America is bolstered by information this week that US is lobbying bilaterally European states to oppose loaning Ukraine €100b so it can accelerate its destruction of the Ruschist Nazi state.

Ultimately what this schizophrenic National Security Strategy is attempting to do is to embed, intensify and promote the troll that Europe is a basket case. It’s precisely the same immanence in Russian and Chinese anti-Western propaganda: archetype Europe and Ukraine as helpless.

Sadly, many inside Europe adopt this archetype and promote it. The solution is for Europe to act in concert as it it did against the United Kingdom’s three-year campaign to separate Ireland from its EU allies during the UK’s Brexit saga.

English ministers were dispatched by Cameron, May and Johnson governments to every EU member state repeatedly to importune them to abandon Ireland. The EU remained and remain united against such external enemies. Now as Joseph Borel, former EU high commissioner for Foreign Affairs recently opined “America is no longer our ally,” this situation must be more widely recognised.

In some ways the United States now is simply continuing its policy of rescuing Russia from its own funks.

Ukraine is the only obstacle. As it exhausts Russia’s army and continues, daily, to destroy every part of Russia’s manufacturing and fossil fuel infrastructure inside Russia, Ukraine has an opportunity to destroy the Russia state. It’s an opportunity which must not be missed.

5-6 sovereign states instead of the current so-called Russian Federation must be our endgame. America’s policy today - to save Russia- is an echo of Bush’s “chicken Kuiv” speech when he visited Kyiv to implore Ukraine to stay within the Soviet Union. Biden and Obama too did everything in their power to help Russia when it occupied Ukraine.

For example Ukraine was about to kill thousands of the retreating Russian troops from Kherson in September 2022. According to Bob Woodward’s reporting Biden prevented this because he was afraid of “WWIII.

⚡️His use of the term “civilisational” suggest to me that he read Huntington as an undergraduate, and never was able to see through Huntington’s troll that the choice for humanity is only between two (of many) Indo-European religions.

⚡️Free elections in Ukraine: the cost.

In 2018, in the OSCE, we did informal calculations as to how much it would cost to protect the electorate and polling stations in temporarily occupied Luhansk and Donetsk.

To guarantee free and fair elections.

In terms of staffing and materiel. Around EUR1.5b.

Idea of West ponying up that then was ridiculously out of reach.

To carry out elections all over Ukraine, today, so that they were free and fair would cost more than it would cost for the West to arm Ukraine properly. Sufficiently to expel Russia from 100% of Ukraine.

⚡️Tough decision: an administration which wouldn’t defend NATO states OR European Union which defends Europeans from rapacious foreigners every day a billion times.

⚡️America trolled by Russia’s ever-changing ‘Korea Scenario’ troll normalising genocide in Ukraine.

Wash Post reports breathlessly Donald wants Russia to keep Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. Which Russia has used as a base to murder, torture, r*pe, fire missiles, drones against thousands of people.

“It’s a Korea Scenario,” says Donald.

Russia said in March 2022: we will divide Ukraine Korea style.

Then Russia said in 2022 “we will import North Koreans into eastern Ukraine.”

Then when Ukraine invaded Russia. Russia used 10,000 North Korean soldiers. Donald won Kursk back for Russia by halting intelligence sharing suddenly.

Now America is colluding with a Russian troll that ‘normalises’ division of a sovereign country by saying it’s ‘just like Korea.’

More evidence of USA’s capture by Russia’s Mental Wars.

⚡️Kellogg’s Marshall Plan troll.

Russia’s oligarch-funded fake “opposition” has been calling for a Marshall Plan -for Russia.

Now Kellogg prepares the ground for a Marshall Plan for Russia to benefit Russia’s oligarchs (for whom Donald is negotiating “peace”).

Ukraine, as ever, is being instrumentalists by America’s rapacious rulers in bed with Russian oligarchs.

Kellogg is probably well meaning (apart from his treat Ukraine like mule by starving it of the weapons America promised it). But he must understand his job is to bring peace between Russia’s warring oligarchs (who want to return to St Tropez) and Putler.

Ukraine is just an instrument: sell out Ukraine so Putler has a fig leaf for halting his war so Russian oligarchs can return to the West without sanctions. This plan will never succeed but it’s all Russia has. Now that Russia has been found liable for patterns of violation of every main human right in Ukraine by humanity’s highest court Russia will never return to civilisation until it is defeated on the battlefield.

⚡️Russian oligarch assets belong to Ukraine.

Once Russia’s ‘legally’ Sovereign assets are confiscated and used by Ukraine to defeat Russia, we must move on to assets of the 1,000 richest Ruschist oligarchs.

These are ‘equitably’ owned by the Ruschist State, and thus fair game for Ukraine.

Ruschia’s debt to Ukraine includes €500b in material damage. And trillions in immaterial damage (trauma, lost bread winner, lost earnings, inconvenience,…).

Every single Ukrainian has a cause of action against the Ruschist state. It’s nice of course as is happening here if Ruschist state confiscates its own assets back from its oligarchs. Makes recovery easier for Ukraine.

Deripaska stated all his assets belong to Ruschia.

Legal basis is already established by European Court of Human Rights 500page judgement holding Russia 100% accountability and responsible for the war in Ukraine.

So it goes.

⚡️MAGA Archetyping Ukraine and ‘Europe’ as weak.

US is trying to Archetype “Europe” as “Weak.” Yet, it’s led by a guy who can’t stop sleeping.

Weak MAGA followers, like Donald, archetypes Ukraine as ‘Weak’ and Russia as ‘Strong.’

Meanwhile, Ukraine deals with 7,000 tactical Russian drones and 600 strategic Russian drones daily, while attacking Russia with similar quantities in ways America 1945-2025 was too weak to even contemplate.

Now, America is trying to archetype “Europe” as “Weak.” Jamie Dimon and that Undersecretary of State think a united Europe is ‘Weak’ whereas 27 individual states acting unilaterally would be ‘Strong’?!

Of course they don’t think that! They’re playing mind games. They’re revealing their fears, their weaknesses, and America’s shame.

The shame of allying with childstealing Russia which can’t even protect itself and China (run by another weakling)!

The stance of a jealous spouse who won’t let their wife speak to other males. Weak.

⚡️US declares war against European Values.

United States’s newly published National Security Strategy is a declaration of war against those of us fighting to retain the post-World War Two legal and social orders.

When America states that it wants to “restore Europe’s civilisational confidence” Donald’s apparatchiks mean: we want Hand Maid’s Tale Europe.

We want the human rights architecture to be disassembled. Our 1930’s archetype of Masculinity must be privileged over societies where discrimination against humans on certain protected grounds (sex, sexual preference, political views, national origins,…) is outlawed.

The United States has decided to “reestablish” “strategic stability” with Russia, which seeks to kill millions of Europeans. Having murdered around 2m people since its full-scale invasion and forcibly transferred more than 700,000 Ukrainian children into Russia, the credibility of Russia’s threats against us is high.

More sinister than that is the capture of US national security strategy by those inside America who wish to promote Russia’s political proxies inside Europe. Far Right and far left political forces in Europe operate with Russian funding and know-how. In Romania MAGA “data analytics” guy Brad Parscale boasted of helping Russia’s proxy to capture a NATO state, just before Romanian intelligence services published documents demonstrating Georgescu was cheating.

That time the Romanian government and its Supreme Court cancelled the election.

However, now America, in coalition with China (through its brainwashing TikTok) and Russia (together with its brainwashing Telegram Disinfolklore propagation App) are claiming, as a matter of National Security Strategy, the duty to “cultivate resistance” inside democratic European states to Europe’s priorities of maintaining and retaining the post-World War Two legal orders.

The credibility of these threats by America is bolstered by information this week that US is lobbying bilaterally European states to oppose loaning Ukraine €100b so it can accelerate its destruction of the Ruschist Nazi state.

Ultimately what this schizophrenic National Security Strategy is attempting to do is to embed, intensify and promote the troll that Europe is a basket case. It’s precisely the same immanence in Russian and Chinese anti-Western propaganda: archetype Europe and Ukraine as helpless.

Sadly, many inside Europe adopt this archetype and promote it. The solution is for Europe to act in concert as it it did against the United Kingdom’s three-year campaign to separate Ireland from its EU allies during the UK’s Brexit saga.

English ministers were dispatched by Cameron, May and Johnson governments to every EU member state repeatedly to importune them to abandon Ireland. The EU remained and remain united against such external enemies. Now as Joseph Borel, former EU high commissioner for Foreign Affairs recently opined “America is no longer our ally,” this situation must be more widely recognised.

In some ways the United States now is simply continuing its policy of rescuing Russia from its own funks.

Ukraine is the only obstacle. As it exhausts Russia’s army and continues, daily, to destroy every part of Russia’s manufacturing and fossil fuel infrastructure inside Russia, Ukraine has an opportunity to destroy the Russia state. It’s an opportunity which must not be missed.

5-6 sovereign states instead of the current so-called Russian Federation must be our endgame. America’s policy today - to save Russia- is an echo of Bush’s “chicken Kyiv” speech when he visited Kyiv to implore Ukraine to stay within the Soviet Union. Biden and Obama too did everything in their power to help Russia when it occupied Ukraine.

For example Ukraine was about to kill thousands of the retreating Russian troops from Kherson in September 2022. According to Bob Woodward’s reporting Biden prevented this because he was afraid of “WWIII.” Because of this weakness Russia was able to regroup and continue to kill thousands of innocent Ukrainians. So the new National Security Strategy is in some ways a continuation of US foreign policy.

However today Ukraine and Europe has agency and capability. Both Europe and Ukraine must preserve our freedom so that when America wakes up from this MAGA nightmare, there is at least one island in our world free of the Hand Maid’s Tale world of perpetual war that Donald, China, Iran, Russia and the other Acis of Misogyny powers are trying to enmesh us in.

⚡️“Russian mafia Russian and NYC chapters meet in Miami to cos-play Yalta.”

No country is safe - Israel, America, Russia itself,… when ‘territorial integrity’ is no longer protected.

Ukraine must take back the Kuban and China Inner Mongolian, Czechia, Lithuania, Germany and Poland can share Konigsberg, and deport its Russians to China.

⚡️The Styx and idea of rivers being associated with the after life in Indo-European cultures originated on the shores of the Dnipro. In Mykailivka in Zaporizhzhia.

The essence in all Indo-European religions of the passage into the afterlife has been deduced by distilling all known early Indo-European religious texts.

Bruce Lincoln, an American specialist in Indo-European religion, achieved this remarkable feat and set it out:

“The picture that emerges is as follows. On the way to the otherworld, souls of the dead had to cross a river, the waters of which washed away all of their memories. These memories were not destroyed, however, but were carried by the river’s water to a spring, where they bubbled up and were drunk by certain highly favored individuals, who became inspired and infused with supernatural wisdom as a result of the drink.”

Given what we now know about how Indo-European language and religion originated in the area affected by the explosion of the dam by the Russians, it’s now possible to assert with a reasonable degree of certainty that an idea that later evolved into other Indo-European cultures’ descendant religions - Greek, Iran, India, for example - was first formulated by Sredni Stog-Yamna humans in this area of the Dniepr river.

⚡️Russia-USA’s ridiculous offer to Ukraine

Putler: “If it costs me 2m Russian soldiers to occupy temporarily a few more villages in eastern Ukraine, I’ll do it.”

USA: “Ukraine: don’t make Putler expend 2m Ruschists. Capitulate!”

Ukraine: “Bring it on. 2m fewer Ruschists is a win.”

⚡️What Ukraine victory looks like?

Written extensively on this issue: How this war ends?

From the perspective of one of the few foreigners to live inside Russia’s brutal, brain-hacking, murderous and mad occupation of Luhansk. I worked there as a diplomat 2015-2018. Even I did not anticipate Bucha.

Besides, wars are won on the battlefield. Russia, having lost on the battlefield, as of early March 2022, has ONLY been playing since for people like @BorisJohnson and @nfergus to persuade Ukrainians to accept occupation in exchange for a mythical peace. 2014-2022 we had the Minsk Accords, which it was my job to monitor the implementation of: on the ground. Many nights I documented many thousands of murderous ceasefire violations by Russia in Stanitsia Luhanska. No-one cared in the international community to support Ukraine properly.

So today Ukraine will end Russian economy and provoke the continuation of the 1990 collapse of the Russian empire. With strikes on oil refineries in remote republics Ukraine is initiating the carbon copy process that led to Belarus SSR, Ukraine SSR and Russian SSR dissolve the USSR - so as sovereigns they could enter into gas and oil deals to keep their people alive.

TimothyDSnyder SPlokhy and HrytsakYaroslav explain patiently to nfergus why Findlandisation/sacrifice of Ukrainian lands will not yield peace:

September 13, 2025, Victor Pinchuk Foundation and Yalta European Strategy (YES) held a discussion “What Will Historians Consider a Ukrainian Victory?”

https://www.youtu.be/5JxKRAl6kJw

⚡️ In the Fairy Tale, Trump and Ruschia always triumph.

Notice the similarity in structure?

That’s Disinfolklore. An illusion. Doesn’t correspond to reality. It’s promoted by Disinfolklore.

Now, start reassessing ALL such “inevitabilities” (Ruschia always wins, Trump gets away with everything).

Such “inevitabilities” are deliberate Disinfolklore injected through repetition into our minds by those wishing to hack our consent.

⚡️Biden’s Counter Disinfolklore.

Likens Donald’s campaign to a “Made Up novel.”

@POTUS says Donald’s moniker for those convicted of Jam 6 crimes “hostages” is like “a Bad Færy Tale.”

@JoeBiden intuitively gets what I teach in Disinfolklore.net

Authoritarians use certain tropes to induce the emotion of fear into the minds of their traumatised and cowering supporters.

Donald, like all authoritarians, is a master at Disinfolklore.

Think of how the abused child grows up to abuse their spouse.

They get caught up in a cycle of abuse. Stockholm Syndrome.

Donald, emotionally abused as a child, through linguistic violence, delivered through Disinfolklore (stories that create in the minds of its consumers the emotion of fear), abuses his supporters. Constantly.

They are aroused by the care Donald invests into making them tremble.

Project 2025 and Donald’s Unified Reich are Disinfolklore, par excellence.

Masquerading as dry policy, Donald enfears his abuse hungry supporters with their tales of what he will do to us all if he gets a chance.

Their aim is to arouse submission in Donald’s abuse-hungry supporters.

This is how MAGA works.

@POTUS emphasises Donald’s rambling about a fictional horror figure Hannibal Lecter.

Note how Donald’s Disinfolklore clumsily and purposefully mobilises fictional horror character to manifest his own self-portrayal as a pantomime villain.

Donald’s fear of sharks is legion.

And he mobilises the Jaws film image (eaten by a shark, while Donald a man-child playing a shark gets) to frighten his submission-eager supporters into an aroused state during.

Every.

Single.

Speech.

President Biden’s Counter Disinfolklore belittles Donald’s deepest fear (of sharps consuming him).

Makes a joke of Donald’s rambles about being eaten by a shark.

Disinfolklore is always about coercive control.

Disinfolklore appeals to those who act out their own trauma by abusing women.

The antidote to Disinfolklore is Counter Disinfolklore that belittles the Disinfolklorists.

President Biden totally gets this.

Donald “raped her” (judge’s words, not mine or President Biden).

This is fair game for President Biden.

Donald’s Disinfolklore involves visual images and speeches about his supposed sexual prowess.

Yet, in fact, he is a serial abuser of women.

Finally, the ultimate quality for Sovereigns in Indo-European communities since at least 2,500 BCE is Truthfulness.

I’ve written, as have many others, about this extensively: powerofmana.net/p/trumpian-rig…

President Biden, rightfully, is drawing attention to how Donald deliberately tries to turn The Lie into Truth (Donald’s Truths on his fake Russia-funded Twitter Truth Social are predominantly Lies).

⚡️’Core Ukraine’ is Manuland

What Haass, Dugin & Ruschist nationalists most fear: widespread realisation that ancient 🇺🇦 & ancient Ukrainian is THE founder culture of Indo-Europeans from India🇮🇳 to Ireland🇮🇪.

I call the area of ancient 🇺🇦’s persisting linguistic & religious domination: Manuland.

Finding Manuland VVIII: Archæogenetic and Isotopic Revolutions.

I’ve been occupied with the 28-point plan all week and this saga. A lot of what I’ve written is about that. Basically, the first intimation I had of the capitulation plan was on the 11th of November, when a journalist wrote in the *Kyiv Post* that the United States was attempting to remove the reference to territorial integrity from the annual UN resolution condemning Russia’s occupation, invasion and aggression against Ukraine. That was an ominous sign. The moment I saw this capitulation plan, I thought of that report.

I first wrote about it on the 21st of November: “Russia’s Escalations in Europe — Scenarios and How Witkoff’s Capitulation Plan Will Backfire.” One: attempt by hitting Ukraine’s allies to intimidate them into even subtle changes of behaviour towards Ukraine. Two: desperately trying to goad a NATO country into attacking Russia back. Like a dead cat on a table, this could be Russia’s only forlorn hope to somehow get something positive out of its current predicament.

I was wondering, as many of us have been, what Russia hopes to achieve by attacking NATO countries and sending drones in. I do have this sense that the unwillingness of Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and other countries to respond aggressively is partly a function of the lack of American support under both the former and current president for NATO. But I also have a strong intuition that they are allowing Russia to exhaust itself, to create these kinetic attacks — and that the purpose of this lack of response, which frustrates all of us and especially Ukrainians, is to allow Russia, in the way you might a toddler, to just play out its aggression. Meanwhile, the main game is arming Ukraine. I saw this week that Norway’s response to the 28-point capitulation plan was to front-load a billion euros in planned arms deliveries to Ukraine.

I’m leaning towards this idea that desperately trying to goad a NATO country into attacking Russia back is what Russia is up to. Like a dead cat on the table, Russia wants to distract us — as it did after Crimea by occupying parts of Luhansk and Donetsk, trying to spur revolts around the rest of Ukraine, then escalating in Syria. We’ve seen this pattern again and again. When Russia hit that LNG carrier on the Danube, that was a big sign — and nothing really seemed to happen in response.

I then wrote: “Donald’s Russian mafia controllers’ latest attempt to goad Ukraine into surrender, at a moment when there are 15 dead Russian soldiers for every Ukrainian casualty in Pokrovsk. Likely it will backfire. It will help bolster President Zelensky when he says no for the nth time since 2019 to Russia’s attempt to troll the West into forcing Ukraine’s capitulation. Meanwhile, the project to dissolve Russia into four to five sovereign states continues.”

I noticed, as some of us might have, this kind of briefing against Umerov, the former defence minister and head of the security council. This journalist who wasn’t on my radar — a lot of people seem to rate her — Kathleen Dombos, extraordinary name. She was briefing about Umerov and Yermak. It struck me that just because we support Ukraine doesn’t mean every journalist covering it understands what’s happening. If one thing we’ve seen this week, it’s that a lot of journalists I’ve never heard of are part of the White House press room and are probably very esteemed in their professions, but that doesn’t mean they know anything about Ukraine or have any understanding of what all of us have been monitoring so closely since the 24th of February 2022 — and which many of us have been monitoring since February 2014, when Russia first invaded.

This kind of breathless reporting of things which you and I, having followed this very closely and having listened to Mokrushyna or Will or Wendy or others each day, understand is just a new cycle of the same old stuff — that’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed. It seemed to me that someone, probably a faction within the American administration, was trying to weaken Ukraine by getting rid of Umerov and Yermak. Yermak in particular has been on this rodeo since November 2019 and is the best person for the role. Because of Rubio’s status as national security advisor, Yermak can meet him directly as his interlocutor, which is very helpful.

I just noticed that undercurrent. I think all of us on Volya Radio do our best not to intervene in Ukrainian internal politics, because just because we support Ukraine 100% doesn’t mean we’ve earned the right to intervene in whatever’s happening internally. But I’ll be watching the campaign against Umerov and Yermak quite closely.

Donald is at his weakest. He can still choose to go all in on Ukraine. He lost the Epstein files vote, with his own party turning against him for the first time this presidency. Then this month’s election defeats — the NYC mayor, Virginia, across the board wins for the Democrat Party, Pennsylvania school boards — mark the beginning of the end for a physically depleting Donald.

Since then, we’ve seen him announce he was going to introduce a bill to restore parts of Obamacare. But Congress members, as soon as they heard, threatened mass resignation. The bill was pulled. The reason they threatened mass resignation — something we haven’t seen over the cutting of USAID or ICE or anything else — was because they hadn’t been consulted and they’re sick of being treated like slaves. The White House handling of Congress has weakened Donald considerably. Because of this weakness, he’s allowed Russia to come out with this ridiculousness of the 28-point plan.

Then there’s the fact that Russia’s central bank printed 1.65% of Russia’s GDP equivalent in new rubles last week — the Bank of Russia is the source for that. To put it in context, the United States printed about 20% of GDP during COVID and an equivalent amount during the financial crisis. Russia is at 1.65% of GDP — and of course that GDP denominator is probably a lie from 2023, so the real figure is likely higher. We’ve got a little way to go, but the trajectory is clear. I think that’s what explains this haste with the plan.

I was quite happy with this one: “Donald’s Thanksgiving Turkey.” Americans are mad at Donald for two and a half thousand appearances in the Epstein files. Ukraine needs to give Donald a Thanksgiving turkey. Crazy reasoning from Donald’s people. Thankfully, nothing is going to happen over Thanksgiving. This is the same pattern we’ve seen again and again.

I thought Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation was a significant bellwether. Now these threats by Congress members en masse to resign their seats and give the Democrats a majority underpin my immediate reaction to her resignation: she is archetyping herself for a run for the presidency. She and Steve Bannon — who I believe is her controller, her puppeteer, the person who gives her her lines — he clearly sees her as a vehicle to propel him to the presidency. According to Michael Wolff, Epstein’s biographer, Steve Bannon sees himself as presidential material. Maybe he sees MTG as a better vehicle. But in any case, that was a harbinger for what we’ve subsequently seen with the other Congress members.

All of this feeds into interpreting what Donald is up to. His chances of success in forcing Ukraine into surrender or withholding intelligence support are in proportion to his power fading.

A lot of people are questioning what’s going on inside the administration. When I was studying intellectual history at Georgetown University as a postgraduate, I had this amazing teacher, Hisham Sharabi — one of the great Arab intellectuals, Palestinian intellectuals of the twentieth century. He ran the full gamut from helping the PLO in the armed struggle, to teaching Bill Clinton at Georgetown, to being celebrated at the time of the Oslo Accords and given credit for helping Clinton put that deal together. By the end of his life, Sharabi was against the Oslo Accords. He taught me intellectual history and was a great scholar and writer.

The gender aspect — my ability to perceive that Russia conceives of Ukraine as a woman and to look for that language in Putler’s speeches — comes from Sharabi. When Putler used that phrase on the 20th of February 2022, citing this song “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin” by Red Mould, a Soviet-era hard rock band — “I did a horrid thing to her and she was dead, and I said to her: take it, my beauty” — international lawyers saw this as an expression of the intention to commit genocide against Ukraine and the perception of Ukraine as a dead woman, a corpse.

My ability to see this comes from a great book Sharabi wrote called *A Theory of Neopatriarchy*, in which he tried to explain why the Arab world’s worship of the father was the reason it hadn’t developed along democratic lines. He introduced me to Frantz Fanon, the great intellectual who wrote *Black Skin, White Masks*. The idea is that we constantly get fooled by identities. Georgian Dream archetypes itself as nationalists, but in fact they’re Russians. Confused American commentators don’t understand what’s going on. Do they think Witkoff is stupid? No — he’s Russian mafia adjacent. You just have the Russian mafia negotiating with itself. All of these real-estate millionaires, now billionaires — Donald, Kushner, Witkoff — these are all Russian mafia adjacent people, and the Russian mafia situation is just an internal negotiation.

Fanon’s masterpiece describes the strategy white-supremacist colonialists use: conceal the white-supremacist occupiers by coercing Black Africans to impose the settlers’ will. Similarly, Russia gets Americans to act as a veneer for its imperialist advances into the American mind. Russia’s Brighton Beach, New York real-estate mafia — Donald, Epstein, Kushner, Witkoff — running America. American foreign policy being directed by the Russian mafia. It’s that simple.

Then we’ve seen these tapes today, which I think were probably leaked by the Russians, by Ushakov, mainly because he’s the one who appears on both of them. I also had this idea from Evelyn Waugh, the great English novelist and one of my favourite writers. He did this great parody of what Hollywood screenwriters are like: you start off with the script for Macbeth, and by the time everyone’s put their oar in three months later, you end up with Julius Caesar or something.

I had this idea that Kvartal 95 — the part of Kryvyi Rih where President Zelensky grew up, which I visited many times — that this notion of rewriting scripts, which President Zelensky and his wife and all those around him are very professionally good at, applies here. You start off with a 28-point plan and then you turn it into something opposite. Ironically, it’s precisely Kvartal 95’s infinite script-rewriting experience that enables them to transform *The Tempest* into *Cymbeline*, one character at a time.

I’ve been very curious about why Silicon Valley is so anti-Ukraine. By Silicon Valley, I really mean these four South African billionaires who were part of the PayPal mafia and made PayPal go public. The money they earned established the seed capital for Google, Facebook, LinkedIn — everything. The whole second wave. When I was at business school, we studied Silicon Valley and its institutional and cultural makeup that enables it to repeatedly resurrect itself and transform itself over the decades. A lot of the literature I read was from the 1990s, and it always struck me as amazing that Google and Facebook and all the companies that enabled the AI revolution weren’t even existing then.

These four billionaires — Andreessen and David Sacks, whom I’d never heard of before the Ukraine war, and Elon Musk, who was kind of a late arrival, and Peter Thiel, who literally isn’t South African but spent his teenage years in a South African boarding school as his father was in mining — they brought capital from apartheid South Africa. That capital established PayPal, then colonised Silicon Valley, and now that money has colonised our minds. They own everything from Substack to you name it.

It was always very curious to me why they’re so anti-Ukraine. I’ve previously written about how Putler’s money — whatever it is, a trillion dollars or euros that the Russian elite have — I suspect there’s a big missing chunk. If you look in venture capital funds, that money will be there. What could be precipitating this very fast acceleration? I suspect billions of Putler’s money is invested through surrogates in Silicon Valley venture capital funds. The VCs know whose money it is. Much of the so-called AI bubble is powered by illicit Russian cash going around Silicon Valley.

What happens as Russia’s economy implodes, which we’ve all been watching for months? Russian mobsters and their proxies will start calling that money in. If you’re running a venture capital fund in Silicon Valley — Andreessen Horowitz or whoever — with maybe twenty-five funds at various stages involving billions, and Russian mobsters start calling that money in, it’s very complicated to unwind funds. The Russians have the FSB and state security forces behind them. It’s much simpler to get 42 million Ukrainians to pay the price. Save Russia at all costs to save the Palo Alto housing market. Now you know why David Sacks and other South African billionaires running Silicon Valley care about Ukraine’s capitulation.

The Fourteenth Amendment — which meant that people who engaged in insurrection could not hold official office in the United States — had the political will been there, the case in the Colorado Supreme Court, which found that Donald Trump shouldn’t have been on the ballot, could have been dispositive. Had the Republican Party not planned for this eventuality by owning the Supreme Court, and had the obstruction of the federal January 6th case not led to the immunity decision, and had the Georgia case not been obstructed — I see that in Arizona they’ve just resurrected one of the January 6th fake electors cases. The mechanism was there: Donald Trump was ineligible. He engaged in insurrection. This was ruled on by the Colorado Supreme Court and in a variety of different cases. I read the federal indictments. It was an open and shut case.

Because it’s such a multi-dimensional takeover of the government — from January 6th itself to the decades-long Federalist Society takeover of the Supreme Court to this kind of hypnotic stuff — the law wasn’t enforced. I have enormous respect for the founding fathers and anyone trying to come up with constitutions. I studied the English constitution in great depth at Cambridge as a law student.

I had this debate with a great human rights law professor who was always more worried about America than I was, and I was always more worried about England. What happened around the prorogation — the unlawful suspension of Parliament to stop them voting — that same weakness has become commonplace. You can close down Congress for two months because you don’t want the Epstein files released.

One of my other great teachers, John Collier at Trinity College, Cambridge, taught us — in reference to South Africa and apartheid — about how the parents of some people he’d been at Cambridge with were Supreme Court judges in South Africa in the 1930s. They tried to hold apartheid back, and eventually the Parliament just legislated to put more members in the upper house and rammed it through, and darkness returned. His teaching, which in 1999 was quite quaint but also very emotionally charged — I didn’t think that fifteen years later he’d be talking about exactly the same thing with the ERG and the absence of a deep state in England to protect us from the prorogation. Boris lying to the Queen, the head of state, trolling her into proroguing Parliament.

He said: politicians and judges can only do so much. At a certain point, the politicians will come in and ram things through. Sometimes the judges can hold things up long enough for the heroes to ride to the rescue. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court held the line, but Johnson won that election in December 2019 and did his terrible things. We’ve seen the same structure in America.

Let me finish with where I think we’re at. The chances of any peace plan working are zero. Ukraine are masters at ensuring there’s something in any proposal that the Russians will never accept. Failing all else, Ukraine would just drop the Kerch Bridge if peace requiring the abandonment of its people under occupation or territory was imminent.

For example, Ukraine agreeing to a limit of an army of 800,000 souls may sound entirely reasonable to an American negotiator. However, to the Russian who supposedly invaded Ukraine to demilitarise it, it’s impossible to accept. Likewise, when President Macron says “we have a multinational force from 13 nations ready to enter Ukraine the moment peace is agreed,” I believe he’s subtly trolling the Russians. Not that it is any of the Russians’ business what Ukraine does on its land. But having falsely alleged that NATO moving closer to Russia was the reason it had to sacrifice almost one and a half million Russians to kill a few hundred thousand native Russian-speaking Ukrainians and eviscerate old cities, it would be impossible to sell any peace that involves a multinational force inside Ukraine.

Russia will continue fighting until it destroys itself utterly. I think Ukraine will end up keeping Donald on board only to provide intelligence assistance, which, as we know, is all America is really providing now. As Will Thiel set out perhaps four months ago, Ukraine’s dominant strategy is to maintain that intelligence assistance but not hope for anything more.

The leverage the European countries have is significant. Norway this week front-loaded a billion to buy American weapons. This gives tremendous leverage over Lockheed Martin and the other companies, who in turn will put pressure on Congress members and senators to pressure Donald to continue allowing Ukraine to buy these weapons systems. Germany, Portugal and others are paying for them. So Donald’s America has limited leverage — but is acting like Ukraine’s ultimate victory depends on America, which it doesn’t.

The intelligence support is really helpful but not irreplaceable now, as Japan and other countries are helping Ukraine with satellite targeting. By respecting Donald so much — when really any normal human being would tell him to take a hike — President Zelensky is maximising the chances of retaining intelligence support and maintaining the strong support of important senators and the people around Donald. It’s an investment for the future. By not alienating Donald and handling it so well, this is a masterclass in diplomacy.

The Epstein files vote, the threatening to resign en masse over Donald’s healthcare bill, and the universal characterisation of the 28-point plan as a “capitulation plan” are all significant. I went through the real capitulation plan in November 2019, when I was working in the Dnipro office, when Yermak had initialled the Steinmeier Formula. There were “No to Capitulation” rallies across Ukraine. Even the introduction of this term “capitulation” — the Ukrainians had it ready-made because we went through this whole process where tens of thousands of people rallied across Ukraine. I monitored many of these rallies for the OSCE. I was immediately convinced these were real — not tітушки, not fake paid protesters. These are true patriotic Ukrainians who have fought, and whose families have fought since 2014, and who will not capitulate.

That point of view is now mainstream. We see in the polls released in the last couple of days that 76% of Ukrainians believe Ukraine can win, and about 75% believe that even if America withholds intelligence support, they should fight on. Even low-information people saw this as a capitulation plan. The Russians kind of overdid it.

Then we see Budanov meeting Driscoll in the UAE to troll him with drone tech. Ukraine has something significant. Obviously there are dangers ahead, but I think Ukraine will get through this and continue exhausting and destroying Russia — which I have believed since I tweeted about it on the 1st of March 2022.

Ukraine’s dominant strategy — what its leaders are actually doing, aside from what they have to say they’re doing — and what many of our countries’ leaders understand, whether it’s the Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway, Poland and others, is that Russia, just as Napoleon exhausted himself, will exhaust itself in Ukraine. It won’t accept any deal. But Ukraine has the capacity to tickle it whenever it’s getting close. I didn’t even think this latest plan was getting close, but Ukraine can always find a way to ensure the Russians refuse the deal and get archetyped — archetype themselves — as being a mess and not wanting peace. Obviously the whole thing is ridiculous, that Ukraine has to archetype someone’s peace. But that’s where I think we are at the moment.

⚡️Donald’s Thanksgiving Turkey

‘Americans are mad at Donald for 2,500+ appearances in Epstein Files.

So Ukraine needs to give Donald a ‘thanks-giving’ Turkey.’

Crazy reasoning from Donald’s people.

P.S. note the function of Donald’s signature on his Epstein card.

⚡️American Skins, Masking Russians.

Fanon’s masterpiece described the strategy white supremacist colonialists used: conceal white supremacist occupiers by coercing Black Africans to impose the settler’s will.

Similarly, Russia gets Americans to act as a veneer for its imperialist advances into the American mind.

American Russian mafia fronts

Russia’s Brighton Beach New York real estate mafia-adjacent dons (Epstyn, Kushner, Trump, Witkoff,…) running America.

“American” foreign policy being directed by the Russian mafia.

It’s that simple.

⚡️Evergreen “Trump admin plans Ukrainian coup” again tweet.

Rubio claims “Ukrainian input” into capitulation plan. Ex-Party of the Regions (pro-Russia) Ukrainian MP @GoncharenkoUa supports it.

Paul Manafort, Donald’s felon adviser, earned $30m from advising @GoncharenkoUa former party - 2004-2014.

Before Party of the Regions’s attempt to divide Ukraine and hand it over to Russia failed.

Today, treacherous Ukrainians in league with Donald, his Russian mafia fronts and others attempt to hand Ukrainian and Russian security over to Russia.

They will fail.

⚡️Bannon, for whom MTG works/acts, clearly sees Marjorie Taylor Greene as his vehicle to capture the US (vice presidency for himself) presidency for her. Her resignation is the canary in the coal mine and harbinger of doom for Don’s presidency (and so it goes).

⚡️Ruschia’s Weimar Inflation Consolation

Ruschia printed more than 1.64% of GDP in new money.

Ruschia may have printed 1.64% of its GDP this week - but don’t worry: Weimar and Zimbabwe printed more than that in one day.

Ruschia went full-on Nazi first.

Now, Ruschia has gone full-on Weimar.

According to Russia’s central bank (https://cbr.ru/eng/hd_base/repo/) Russia printed the equivalent of more than 1.64% of its GDP in new roubles this week.

2,830,000 Million new Russian roubles were born this week. Russian banks then use these newly minted rubles to buy Russian government bonds.

This is on top of massive Repo sales (quantitative easing) every week over the past eight months.

In case you haven’t yet gotten the memo: Russia is dissolving.

P.S. this 1.64% of GDP figure is overly generous. It’s based on Ruschia’s false gdp number for 2023.

⚡️Donald is at his weakest.

He can still choose to go All In on Ukraine.

He lost the Epstein Files vote, with his own party turning against him for the first time this presidency.

This month’s election defeats for Donald (NYC mayor, Virginia, Pennsylvania school boards,…) mark the beginning of the end for physically depleting Donald.

Instead in his weakness he allowed Russia to come out with this ridiculousness.

Last week Russian central bank printed 1.5% of Russia’s GDP in new roubles. The highest Repo printing yet. Its people are freezing. Internetless. It’s rumoured the defence minister is being lined up by the elite to replace Putler.

Russia could just leave Crimea, pay its debts, say sorry.

Instead it chooses every day atrocity after atrocity.

There will be no peace in Europe until Russia is utterly defeated, denazified and turns into 5-6 new sovereigns.

⚡️On Russia’s escalations in Europe - Scenarios, and how Witkoff capitulation plan will backfire.

Why does Russia keep attacking European powers?

1. Attempt by hitting Ukraine’s allies to intimidate them into even subtle changes of behaviour towards Ukraine.

2. Desperately trying to goad a NATO country into attacking Russia back. Like a dead cat on a table, this could be Russia’s only forlorn hope to somehow get something positive out of its current predicament.

I’m erring towards the 2nd view, mainly because of how unresponsive NATO states are being to these kinetic armed attacks:

Russia hit a Turkish LNG carrier on Ukraine’s side of the Danube three days ago-Romania had to evacuate 200 people and all their animals from two villages on their side of the river, etc.

Meanwhile, western countries are giving Ukraine hitherto unheard of weapons systems like the Gripen, Rafaele and US allowed Ukraine to use US ballistic ATTACMs cluster munitions on a Russian airfield well inside Russia, for the first time, the other day.

Inside Russia: it’s fucked: steel-making down hugely (in the middle of a war!!), lots of industries (cars, steel) down to four day weeks, wired Internet suspended in 23 regions across Russia except for government services, many regions facing immediate financial bankruptcy, black outs, glut of Russian oil no one will buy on the high seas cos Ukraine keeps hitting oil terminals, infrastructure and storage, electricity substations out all over Russia due to strikes, 400 of Russia’s most elite nuclear researchers recorded a video to put in appealing for back wages (their employer state-owned Rosatom still has ~50% of global uranium market yet they can’t pay their scientists), and heaps of other such indicators.

Donald’s Russian mafia controller’s latest attempt to goad Ukraine into surrender (at a moment when there’s 15 dead Russian soldiers for every Ukrainian casualty in Pokrovsk (a town Russia was supposed to have taken two years ago)).

Likely, it will backfire: it will help bolster president Zelenskyy when he says ‘non’ for the Nth time since 2019 to Russia’s attempt to troll the West into forcing Ukraine’s capitulation.

Meanwhile the project to dissolve Russian state into 4-5 sovereigns that can no longer pose a threat to Ukraine continues.

⚡️Donald’s BBC America shake-down in collusion with far-right English pro-Brexit establishment English nationalists.

Ambush of the BBC by the far right who, ironically, run the BBC (all Sunak, Johnson’s mates and the pro-“Reform” promoters).

Highly suspicious that it was the far-right paleo-conservative pro-Brexit/pro-‘Farage-‘Reform’ Torygraph which exposed what appears to me to be a completely non-story:

It’s clear from both the Federal Jan 6 indictment and the Georgia Jan 6 indictment (both approved by grand juries) that Donald was guilty of insurrection against the US.

Donald planned Jan 6 as a means of seizing power.

Amy documentary which does not communicate this truth is wilfully participating in Donald’s sinister campaign to erase the truth about Jan 6:

cf. pardoning those convicted of sedition and insurrection, persecution and prosecutions of those who exposed it.

Branding Jan 6 criminals as ‘hostages.’ Playing Kash Patel’s co-produced ‘Jan 6 anthem’ instead of the national anthem at election campaign events.

Chances of Donald actually going to court against BBC are nil.

It’s a shake-down and attempt to get the already obsequious BBC not to report any truth in relation to Donald in the US. BBC is one of the most trusted news sources in the US. It’s actually only in the UK where BBC news coverage seems to have a far right, paleo-conservative bias.

Would be nice though if Labour would exploit this situation to get rid of all the far right Tory-appointed pro Brexit pro-Reform people in BBC including the board.

⚡️ something macabre and comical about Russia’s megalomaniacal insistence on taking towns they’ve turned to ashes.

All the while Ukraine eviscerates. Russia’s SOLE revenue earning industry (fossil fuel).

I mean, Russia if you’re listening, can’t you understand that while Ukraine and your blood-lust is distracting you, you’re being bombed back into the Stone Age? All 1/6 of the world’s surface of you.

Kvartal95’s greatest production.

⚡️Russian ‘Hunter Biden’ troll author, Duma member Derkach suspected in Energy scheme.

It’s indeed possible Mindich and co were merely well remunerated un/knowing Russian assets.

“It is essential to understand that in Ukraine, corruption is often intertwined with state treason and with advancing Russian interests. In this case, the suspected money-laundering schemes connected to the energy sector lead back to the network of Andriy Derkach—an officially designated Russian agent. Though formerly a Ukrainian politician, he is now a member of the Russian parliament. Members of his team were employed inside Energoatom and participated in the corruption scheme.”

⚡️Ruschian missile aimed at Kyiv’s main children’s hospital.

The “successful” strike is yet more evidence of genocidal intent (Mens Rea).

The actus reus of the crime of genocide is the hit itself.

The aiming of the missile against the children’s hospital discloses the Mens Rea (Intention / Mental Element) of the crime.

⚡️To naive letter writers about peace.

Do you think Ruschia would welcome your naive letters about peace, if Ruschia had a chance of winning on the battlefield?

Ruschia bombs children’s hospitals because in the past year it lost 250,000 soldiers to capture 750 sq.km of Ukraine.

Ukraine de-occupied 1,500 sq.km from Ruschism in 2022!

At this rate the f attrition Ruschia would need a further 200m Ruschists to capture all of Ukraine. Yet, of course not only does Ruschia no longer have an army (guys on electric mopeds don’t count as soldiers), Ukraine is manufacturing 120,000 armed drones a month.

This war will be won on the battlefield- by Ukraine.

Ruschia understands this - which is why it’s so desperate for a ceasefire.

This is what you are being used by Ruschia to secure. A ceasefire, because Russia understand that within the next year Ukraine will be sending 50,000 armed drones to hit military targets across defenceless Ruschia. This will happen, whether you write letters or not.

I spent 2015-2022 in eastern Ukraine, as a diplomat, monitoring Ruschia’s compliance with Minsk I and Minsk II.

Ruschia broke its commitments every single day. In 2003, Putler himself signed a Treaty with Ukraine recognising Ukraine - Ruschia border.

Ukraine is not stupid.

Ukraine will press on until there is a 200km wide waste land inside Ruschia along side the border. A waste land without ANY humans. A sanctuary for wildlife and animals. A demilitarised zone.

Ruschia’s only strategy is to withdraw from 100% of Ukraine, pay Ukraine £2t in compensation, and return the 700,000 stolen Ukrainian children and 2m stolen Ukrainian adults.

Sooner it does that the better - for itself and for you letter writers.

⚡️Why Ruschia Bombs Hospitals?

To please International Relations (IR) Scholars.

‘Escalate to deescalate’ is Ruschia’s governing Military Doctrine as communicated into the minds of Western security policy makers.

Ruschia’s ‘Escalate to De-escalate’ Military Doctrine is a Troll.

Ruschia uses self-declared military doctrine memos to troll International Relations (IR) into misinterpreting reality.

Ruschia’s published military doctrine doesn’t include the Meat Wave Assailts that have killed 300,000 of its soldiers in Ukraine.

Yet, IR hacks still believe Ruschia adheres to the doctrinal instruments it publishes about how it fights wars.

IR educated souls in charge of our security (and who study in Ruschia-funded institutions like @BlavatnikSchool at my Alma mater @UniofOxford) read Ruschist doctrine, not as an example of hybrid warfare, but as a description of how Ruschia fights wars.

So instead of interpreting Ruschia’s war of aggression as a means of killing and destroying EVERYTHING west of the Don River that Ruschia can get away with obliterating.

@JakeSullivan46 and co see Ruschia’s ‘Escalations’ as a Good Thing. “Ruschia’s Signaling it Wants to De-Escalate.”

Result? Ruschia escalates by occupying Crimea, then Luhansk and Donetsk, interfering in our political systems (Trump-Brexitism). Carpet-bombs Syria (Sept 2015-), … Full-Scale invasion of Ukraine…

And instead of perceiving the reality of the situation (Ruschia won’t stop until it is stopped), IR professionals and amateur geopolitical strategists interpret these activities as: “Signs Ruschia Wants Peace.”

In reality, Ruschia has brainwashed these lost souls, using IR Disinfolklore, into seeing Ruschist aggression as some kind of Faery Tale with a happy ending of peace. “Just surrender,” Ruschia’s Big Bad Wolf Disinfolklore brainwashes us, “We promise we won’t gobble up anything else. We just want to eat Crimea, we mean Luhansk, Donetsk, okay Kyiv too, maybe a bit of Poland… but by the time we get to Lisbon, okay just Oporto, and a smidgeon of Alaska…”

As @ZelenskyyUa said ages ago: “Ruschia is the fatted calf who won’t stop eating.”

Yet, IR educated ‘strategists’ think every time Ruschia blows up another dam, commits Ecocide, that’s just Ruschia escalating to de-escalate.

Don’t fall for trolls, however disguised. Ruschia’s Disinfolklore troll “Don’t Poke the Bear” is the most successful means of deterring us from exercising our UN Charter Art 51 right to self-defence EVER. It feeds our hunger for passivity. Our desire for a happy ending. Our dream that Ruschia really just wants peace even though you don’t even need to wear a short skirt to provoke it into turning your body politic and your land into a crime scene.

But “Escalate to De-escalate” is a close second.

And ‘Putin is quietly signalling he wants peace’ while he murders dozens of Ukrainians, tortures thousands, and keeps millions captive daily, a close third.

Look at the data, not what Ruschia says it’s doing.

Arm Ukraine now.

⚡️Russia’s Reverse Napoleon - Reversed. Then, Reversed again, before meeting its Waterloo.

By invading Ukraine with insufficient supply lines even to take Kyiv, Russia, a victim of French Napoleonic imperialism, mirrored Napoleon’s error.

This First “Reverse Napoleon” led to Russia’s defeat at Mostyn on 27 March 2022, and its retreat from Kyiv Region by 29 March 2022.

The first signs that Ruschia’s army was rubbish emerged by early March - I called this a “Reverse Napoleon” invasion on 1st March 2022, as the Ruschist army couldn’t communicate, ran in easily destroyed convoys with chaps casually sitting atop tanks,… Errors, which still haven’t been rectified.

“Reverse Napoleon 2” was when Russia decided to invade itself - the Chef’s March on Rostov was less Gates of Vienna, and more Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

Having lost 75,000 souls failing to take a small Ukrainian city in nine months the Chef Wanger Nazi could have reached Moscow in less than 24 hours -

So much for the second army in the world!

The Third Napoleon: Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine itself is a Napoleonic scale tribute act of disaster piled on disaster that must have Ukraine, Germany, Sweden, China, Japan, and Finland (and maybe even Jupiter Macron) planning to retake their historical lands from Muscovy.

Currently, Ukraine has gone from a few mouldy Javelin missile systems to being able to use US provided artillery inside a 100km zone of Ruschia itself. F-16s are imminent. And Ukraine is (currently) manufacturing 120,000 deadly drones a month - and it only takes one of these to detonate a massive missile storage facility inside Ruschia’s Voronhaz region. Pop.

Now, the Pièce de La Resistance:

Having put all their “hopes” in one madcap scheme after another (famine Africa, Republicans will win Senate, Ukraine will surrender,…), after Macron went All-In in France’s military support for Ukraine, Ruschia hoped for a victory of its client party.

Instead, a pro-Ukraine coalition has won the balance of power.

So now, that hope is reversed too.

Meanwhile, since February 2024, Ruschia been sacrificing 1,200 Ruschists a day in Ukraine (RIP), its tanks have been replaced with electric scooters, its guns with sticks, and its PPE with wooden ‘armour plates.’

Ruschia needs to send its midget Napoleon Putler to Elba, as soon China will reoccupy its ancient territories in the east.

Ukraine is true reversal for the current Czar that cannot be reversed.

⚡️Why Vance/Silicon Valley Want Ukraine’s Capitulation.

Billions of Putler’s money is invested through surrogates in Silicon Valley Venture Capital funds.

The VCs know whose money it is.

Much of the so-called AI bubble is powered by illicit Russian cash.

Now, what happens as Russia’s economy implodes?

Russian mobsters and their proxies start calling that money in.

Venture Capital funds will need to be unwound.

Much simpler to get 42m Ukrainians to pay the price.

Save Russia, at all costs, to save the Palo Alto housing market!

Now you know why David Sacks and other South African billionaires running SV care about Ukraine’s capitulation.

“According to a report by the Russian Okno Project, an increasing number of families across Russia are not being paid their 1 million ruble ($12,739) initial death benefits due to the growing budget crunch…

“According to public information published by the Ministry of Finance, Moscow’s 2025 budget deficit has grown to $51.9 billion through October. Currently, the shortfall is 1.6% of GDP, but the Kremlin has admitted that by the end of the year, the deficit will grow to an estimated 2.6% of GDP. Almost 40 kopecks of every ruble is going to fund the military, military benefits, and internal state security. Another 16 kopecks is needed to service the national debt…According to the Moscow Times, 61 of 83

Russian federal subjects are facing regional budget deficits. The Volgograd Oblast has a 24% shortfall, and the Irkutsk Oblast is facing a 35% budget deficit. Last month, the governor of the Kursk Oblast, Alexander Khinstein, sought a loan to bridge the region’s budget deficit. No Russian bank was willing to assist, forcing Khinstein to announce sweeping austerity measures.” (h/t @MalcontentmentT)

“Izvestia: Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant has temporarily suspended production of the expedition version of its model, the UAZ SGR Expedition.”

“Bloomberg: Russian oil offered India refineries $7 discount per barrel.”

“Newsweek: Russia Has Run Out of Money to Pay Its Soldiers—Regional Finance Minister”

“Russia’s oil and gas revenue may fall in November by 35%,

Reuters calculations show.”

“The Ministry of Finance has noted the creation of artificial sources of financing for budget deficits by regions.

Moscow. October 8. INTERFAX.RU - The Ministry of Finance wants to put a stop to the practice of regions artificially creating sources to finance their budget deficits, which has been identified in several federal subjects, through amendments to the Budget Code.”

“Despite Putin’s attempts to revitalize the arms export industry, no one wants Russian weapons anymore.

2021 $12.5b

2023 - $3 billion

2024 - $1 billion.

@JamestownTweets”

“Moscow Times: Dimitriev’s NWF held 405.7 tons of gold before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The Finance Ministry has since sold 57%, or 232.6 tons, to cover budget shortfalls, leaving 173.1 tons as of Nov. 1.”

“Deficits across the regions have exploded to $8.1B this year, after a surplus last year. More than eight regions have already slashed enlistment bonuses from the equivalent of $30-35k down to just $4.5k.” @KShevchenkoReal

“MilitaryNewsUA

@front_ukrainian - Nov 6

Uralvagonzavod, Russia’s largest manufacturer of railway cars and the main supplier of tanks to tharmy, is launching a major wave of staff cuts, E1 reports. According to the publication, 10% of its workforce will be laid off by February 2026. The company will also stop…”

“The body is not healthy.” The government has reported almost complete lack of economic growth for the second month in a row.”

“Russia’s oil revenues are collapsing.

Minus $25B in 2025, crude selling at half price. Sanctions + Ukrainian strikes are hitting hard — U24.

Ukraine strikes Novorossiysk and refineries almost daily. Seaborne exports fall 130k bpd. 350M barrels sit in tankers with no use.” @Mylovanov

⚡️Russia is collapsing.

“The total amount of problem loans of legal entities on bank balance sheets by the end of the third quarter reached 10.4 trillion rubles, the Central Bank of the Russian Federation said on Friday. Since the beginning of the year, debts for which companies and individual entrepreneurs could not pay off on time have increased by 1.9 trillion rubles, and in the third quarter - by 600 billion.”

“@Beefeater_Fella Putin was informed about the collapse of raw material revenues and the increase in collections from Russians

Oil and gas revenues of the Russian budget have decreased by 2 trillion rubles this year, Federal Tax Service head Daniil Egorov told Vladimir Putin at a meeting in the Kremlin.

Despite the decline in raw material revenues and a deficit exceeding 4 trillion rubles, “the budget is stable,”

Egorov assured.

According to him, more taxes are being collected from the non-raw sector of the economy — plus 3 trillion rubles since the beginning of the year.”

“@Jonpy99: One of the biggest MT-LB bases prewar, the 7004th is now all but empty. Even most trucks are gone, but what’s interesting, I can only spot 3 bad looking MT-LBs left here.”

“Yakutia’s Minister of Finance Ivan Alekseev went on television to report that payments to participants in the war in Ukraine are suspended due to a shortage of budget funds.”

“Russian AvtoVAZ just admitted: 2025 car sales crashed 25% to only ~370k units.

Advertised by Putin Lada’s market share plunged from 25% → 20%.

Even Putin’s “save Russian cars” scrap fees got delayed twice after public outrage.

Russians panic-bought foreign cars while the Chinese quietly take over the market.

The Lada era is dying.”

“Russia’s Novatek, the country’s largest LNG producer, is now selling #LNG to China at !. 30-40%.! discounts — a direct consequence of U.S. #Sanctions pressure on the Arctic LNG-2 project. The company couldn’t sell a single cargo for 20 months.

Exports only resumed after Novatek offered gas at $3-4 below the Asian benchmark and at $28-32M per shipment — far below the $44M+ market value. Such”

“Russia’s largest coal mining firm Mechel continues to spiral into oblivion as part of general collapse in Russia’s natural resource sector, today posting catastrophic 3rd quarter earnings.

Coal production down another 38% over 9 months, and TOTAL anthracite production stopped, zero production in the third quarter.

From earnings report.” @JayinKyiv

“kremlin no longer tries to hide behind excuses and openly admits: mobile internet shutdowns in russia are approved at the highest level

putin’s spokesperson dmitry peskov stated that the kremlin “fully supports” mobile internet restrictions allegedly introduced to counter drones”

“AKORT noted that past experience with price fluctuations for buckwheat, sugar, eggs, and other products has shown that such fluctuations are difficult to predict. Attempts to regulate them result in products flowing into the

“gray market,” where dealers sell them at reduced prices without official permission.”

“Bank of Russia prints 1.65% of GDP to buy government bonds, just last week.

Minsk is one of these characters I’ve been watching very closely. The Disinfolklore analytical method enables us to feel free. It prompts us to look for archetypal characters in the data — characters which aren’t typical. It’s not always Kellogg. Sometimes it’s Ukraine, the country itself. Ukraine archetypes as David or Goliath. Russia archetypes itself, switching between David and Goliath — on the one hand, “everyone’s ganging up on us, let me into the G8”; on the other, “we’re the mighty second army.” The power of this as an analytical tool comes to the fore when we recognise, for instance, that Kellogg is going to Minsk.

I bet you Kellogg doesn’t know what I’m talking about here. He doesn’t understand why he is going to Minsk. The reason he’s going to Minsk, I believe, using the Disinfolklore analytical method, is to push this perennial troll about Minsk into the information space again.

For me, Minsk is a living character. A living being. I was in eastern Ukraine on the day Minsk II was signed in mid-February 2015, and my job immediately changed. Under Minsk II, Russia and Ukraine agreed to withdraw their weapons systems a sufficient distance from the line of contact, which in the area I was in ran along the middle of the Donets River in eastern Ukraine, in Luhansk Oblast. Artillery had to move more than 30 kilometres away on each side. Myself and my colleagues from the OSCE — our job was to monitor the withdrawal and then, over the coming years, to ensure it was maintained.

For instance, Russian occupiers on the Luhansk side, the Russian-occupied side of the river, used to go home in their tanks for lunch. We went through this whole debate about whether this was a breach of Minsk. Then we found out they were just going home for their lunch in the tank. So it was less than 30 kilometres, but we let it go. When there were breaches of Minsk, I had to certify them in a legal sense. These were then reported. Sometimes I certified thousands of breaches of the ceasefire.

Minsk for me is a living character. It’s the difference between knowing a famous person because you’ve seen all their films or read the character in a book, and actually living in the same house as that famous character. That’s why I particularly tune in to the dynamic meaning of Minsk in Russian Disinfolklore. That’s why I tuned in immediately when I saw Kellogg was going to Minsk.

My working assumption — and no data has displaced this yet — is that what Russia really wants is Minsk III. I archetype Minsk III as actually the agreement which was then breached between Duncy Putler and the Chef of Disinfolklore himself, Prigozhin, brokered on the day of the coup — the agreement that Prigozhin gets to go to Belarus and disappear, and they’ll fake the aeroplane crash. So that’s Minsk III. I then wrote about Minsk IV. What I’m trying to do in my small way is re-archetype Minsk, because what Russia really wants is the contact line to be frozen as is, faking in the tiny advances they’ve made since February 2022.

I heard today that Donald in Canada was again pushing for Crimea to be recognised as Russian. This is what they’re fixed on. This is why I call Duncy Putler the village idiot, the village dunce. They fix on these things and they want their Minsk. We even saw the head of the OSCE in Moscow a few months ago — I wrote about it at the time. Russia denied there would be OSCE monitors, which told me Russia actually wants them. But of course, in the era of drone warfare, the job I did would be absolutely impossible today.

The 30-kilometre withdrawal zone either side of the contact line for artillery, tanks and different weapons systems according to their range — that’s a really quaint, old-fashioned way of maintaining a ceasefire or a peace. Now you have drones which no one can see, which radars can’t detect and can’t stop, as we see with the Shahed drones. Monitoring a ceasefire would be absolutely impossible. Someone flies a drone — that should be a breach of the ceasefire.

But that doesn’t mean Russia isn’t still madly trying to push Minsk as a concept, as an idea. James, you mentioned someone in President Zelensky’s team said there will be no Minsk. I recall it from that meeting in Indonesia where Ukraine set out its 10-point peace plan. The first point is: there will be no Minsk III. Ukraine cannot say this enough. It has said it a thousand times. Thankfully, all of our leaders are now on board with this — apart from one, sadly, who is indulging the Russians. And that is the purpose of Kellogg going to Minsk.

Publicly, Russia says it can press on and keep going forever. But what it really wants is to stabilise the front lines and rerun this whole Minsk III troll — where you had five years after the Minsk agreements, in December 2019, President Zelensky in Paris at that very memorable, important meeting with Macron, Merkel and Putin. Russia just wants to replay the same tune again and again.

I don’t think Kellogg would understand this. Paul Manafort might — he is probably the liaison between the oligarchs, Putin and Donald’s team. He may understand why they’re pushing Minsk. But as far as Kellogg goes — he’s the one who said “we need to hit the mule to teach the lesson.” He’s just like a mule, a dumb mule, who is probably doing this without understanding it. He still thinks people are listening to what he is doing in the peace process.

I didn’t pick up any vibes from Merz or Meloni or any of them suggesting otherwise. If we look at the body language from Meloni — some epic photographs from Canada. There’s no one pushing for Minsk III now. I think all of our leaders have been convinced of what I knew immediately: that after the full-scale invasion, you would never have another Minsk. This war goes on to the end, until Russia leaves the whole of Ukraine — if that’s in a hundred years or in a few weeks. All of us are working for it to be in a few weeks or a month or two. But there will be no Minsk III.

It’s not technically possible. Belarus entered the war. We remember this. It is a party to this war. Ukraine remembers this. Ukraine would be fully within its rights — and may well do this — to take out all of the Russian matériel and troops supposedly assembling in Belarus. The idea of Lukashenko playing coy and innocent — he is very much party to this war and sanctioned as such. Ukraine is perfectly within its rights, as Will has pointed out, to strike sites in Belarus.

That’s why I believe Kellogg is going to Minsk. It’s an embassy on behalf of Russia, and it’s mainly to feed the information space. We’re going to see Minsk for the next week or so. It’s supposed to provoke in people’s minds this halcyon moment where we had a ceasefire and people stopped dying — and Russia was able to get on with brainwashing the people in the areas it occupied, disassembling all the factories, licking its wounds.

As an American, it astonishes me that the people around that great country — the greatest country there’s ever been — can be laid so low as to have Kellogg unknowingly going merely to serve as a prompt for a Disinfolklore character, “Minsk,” in our information space. That’s really what I want to talk about today.

⚡️Russia’s Core Competency? Industrialisation of suicide-bomber creation.

Sculpting Suicide Bombers out of ordinary humans used to be an artisan trade. Russia learned it from Assad’s father, who perfected the art.

Every day since March 2023 1000+ Russian soldiers, knowing they will be killed, have executed assaults in Ukraine which are doomed to fail.

How does Russia get ordinary humans to participate?

We have seen thousands of videos of such assaults, ghosts crossing no-man’s land turned to dust by Ukrainian drones.

We’ve read hundreds of first-hand accounts like this one:

“A Russian soldier fighting in Chasiv Yar says that new recruits sent to the front die almost immediately, with his own unit taking over 90% casualties. The fields are strewn with rotting corpses. To avoid having to pay compensation to relatives, collecting IDs is banned…”

Drugs, of course help. Yet, it’s the systems inside Russia’s army which have enabled Russia to turn artisan workshop-created suicide bombers of Isis, Hamas, and Al Quada into a mass production industry.

At every point in the assembly line between recruitment and death on a hopeless meat assault in Ukraine Russia’s corruption system propels recruits forward towards their inevitable death.

You go to buy eggs for your dinner in Russia.

You wake up, still drunk, on a train to Ukraine. In a stupor you’ve signed a mobilisation contract.

Multiple Russians have already pocketed segments of your sign-on bonus.

At training you’ll die unless you bribe the Sargent.

You’ll starve unless you bribe the cook.

On the way to the front, you’ll freeze, unless you bribe someone else for a blanket. You’ll be put in the carriage with the ex-prisoner convicted of cannibalism.

The list of iterations and market opportunities for Russia’s army of parasites is endless.

Guilty of corruption? Pay your way out of jail with the corruption proceeds by spending the rest of the war in a boarding house in Berdyansk.

At the position you’re tied to a tree as a sacrifice to a Baba Yaga drone until you hand over your money card to the commander…

Eventually you end up in a video like this:

Be warned though, this system is not an accident.

It’s Russia’s core competency.

⚡️How NATO can prepare for today’s wars.

Probably the only way militaries will innovate commensurate with challenge facing them is if, as I still maintain might well yet happen, Ukraine, Poland, maybe Türkiye,Baltic, states, aided by Finland, Scandinavians and Nordics will eject Russia from 100% of Ukraine.

Way things are going (currently) US may join in.

Otherwise, our militaries appear to be wishing drone warfare will just disappear.

Military leaders mostly retired I read a lot of these days (like General Mick Ryan) understand virtually everything from am institutional, procurement, structure of units, electronic warfare,… everything needs to be transformed within NATO armies.

Naturally conservative armies don’t change unless they’re at war. Pictured here is the legendary “Magyar” head of Ukraine’s unmanned systems force (still the only army on earth that has a dedicated entity for UAVs).

The era of the gamer / soldier is nigh.

Last night Magyar’s birds took out one of Russia’s most important electricity substations and its main Black Sea port Tuapse for exporting oil. No other army in the world has that capability all the while eliminating hundreds of invading Russians across a 1,400km contact line every day with thousands of drones.

80% of Russian casualties are caused by Ukrainian drones. Yearly budget for drones this year is €5b.

⚡️Russians’ panic about their ‘ethnos’ disappearing - unfounded.

Sure, as Russia disintegrates into 5 or 6 new sovereign states over the coming months (see below) Russians worry about disappearing.

They ought to be reassured that China assimilated the Manchu so successfully that today it’s hard to find anyone in China who identifies as Manchu. Even though the Manchu/Qing dynasty ruled China from 1644-1912.

Jeffrey Sachs was in my mind because he was this kind of devil from the early 1990s, when he was responsible for shock therapy or whatever. But I hadn’t encountered him in reference to Ukraine until I was on holiday on the Turkish Riviera in the summer of 2024. A really close friend of mine — who, like many people, has no sympathy for Ukraine and loads of sympathy for the plight of Palestinians — and I said to him: “Look, you’re really lucky, because I’m one of the few people who has spoken to more local elected officials in Ukraine than almost any Westerner.” I spent four years of my life, every working day, going into the villages and the hromadas — the decentralised former Soviets — and speaking to people. That was my level as a very low-level diplomat and member of the international community. I discovered I could get meetings with these village heads who had been elected under this amazing decentralisation plan which Ukraine introduced on the 1st of April 2014. President Poroshenko did amazing work with it, and so did President Zelensky.

Power was decentralised to these villages, former Soviets which had never had any power. They used to have to go to the district councils to get money to change a light bulb. All the elections were fixed. All these communities were designed around the communal farm. Until relatively recently, many of the people there didn’t have a passport — they couldn’t even leave their villages without permission. Suddenly this new process comes in, and you have these amazing leaders, male and female, in Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kirovohrad — that was my area of operation. In Dnipropetrovsk, half of the hromada leaders were women. I went to each of them and asked: what made you do this? It was a voluntary process. They would bring me around these amazing schools — European-standard schools funded by the European Union, the Ukrainian government and USAID.

It’s an amazing story of decentralisation of power, of governance reform, which is virtually impossible in most of our countries because there are so many vested interests. Ireland, for instance, still has the same governance structure it had when it was ruled by England. It’s just impossible to change. So it really impressed me that in Ukraine, in the midst of a war, over the course of five years, they rammed through this really democratic process. This is probably why the left — and there are many people in the English left who full-throatedly support Ukraine and have been over there a lot — anyone who looks into Ukrainian governance will be really impressed by what they do. They keep 50% of their taxes.

I’m saying to my friend: “This is my experience. I can tell you there are no Nazis in Ukraine. I can tell you they will fight to the last person. I can tell you these are the areas that are now occupied, and I met the leaders there. Some of them are dead now. Some of them are in jail. Others are just waiting, biding their time to come back. I think every day of the people I met in schools there, the older people who gave us gifts and bread, who are in these places the Russians have been brutally occupying.”

And then he quotes Jeffrey Sachs to me. I said: “Who is Jeffrey Sachs? I don’t even know if he’s been to Ukraine. And somehow you believe him over me — your friend whom you’ve known for decades.” That has always stuck in my mind. Whenever I hear Jeffrey Sachs, I think about it. I think about what kind of algorithm is serving this stuff up to my friend — that he’s watching Jeffrey Sachs talking about things — and why is he believing Jeffrey Sachs over me, someone who has actually been there and talked to the people?

I used to think, when I set out on this path in 2018 to try and understand Donald’s magic — how did he troll people so successfully? — that it was just a matter of getting the truth in there. I wrote my first things online in 2019. Up to that point, I was completely invisible. But now I realise it’s about amplification. It’s about bot networks. It’s about the financial motivations of these people. But in a way, it isn’t even about financial motivation — all of us spend most of every day on Ukraine, and none of us are earning any money from it. So it’s about amplification and bot networks. And someone like Sachs — he lost his soul a long time ago. Like Donald, he has no shame.

The shame of being called out won’t make him skulk away, because he’s not in good faith. He’s not right. He’s not looking at the Code of Positive Trolls. He knows what he’s saying is a lie. He knows how much money he’s got from China, from the UAE or wherever else to do this. It’s part of this whole system. I think I saw he’s got seven bookings in twelve days. Who’s doing that? No one’s doing that for you, Wendy, or for me. There’s a whole network — a paid, financial network behind it, of Russians, of the oligarchs he helped enrich — whatever his motivation. I guess we’ll still see him popping up again and again. It’s always a bit annoying when people like Will Thiel and people like me, who know a lot more in a provincial, regional way about governance in Ukraine — why is no one platforming us? We just have to keep on trucking.

It was great to see him exposed in that way, and I’m glad to see it. But I guess he’ll keep selling his wares. We see these people — like Putin, like the war itself — as a complete disaster repeating again and again. He’ll probably continue doing that.

I’m always usually quite happy when I try — as gently, as astutely, as skilfully and as unemotionally as I can manage — to challenge people. I often think about this conversation I had in Turkey about Jeffrey Sachs. I’m glad I had it. I don’t know if I changed my friend’s mind, but I hope so. We need to challenge these things and find skilful ways — emotionally resonant ways, clever ways, different voices — not to go on about it, but to find skilful means to convince people. Definitely call out the lies. When we have knowledge that the person is lying, call it out. But the real lesson is that presenters aren’t doing it, and we see this in America a lot at the moment, which is terrible.

Volume and frequency — that’s one of the key patterns. Take the Jeffrey Sachs thing. He’s not on my mind at all. When I look at YouTube, I clean all my cookies so I just get the default feed. But clearly my friend has probably got six years of vatnik stuff brainwashing him in his algorithm. With Jeffrey Sachs, I remember scanning my timeline and you suddenly see this thing in a positive sense — and you know that’s going to be the issue of the day. So you try to come up with a response.

We see these repetitive patterns, which many of us are tuned into — particularly coming from Russia, because they just come up with the same lines again. It’s on a calendar, like an Outlook calendar. “Six months now, we have to go for peace negotiations again.” “Let’s accuse Zelensky of buying a castle in God knows where — should we say Italy or America this time?” The repetition, volume, frequency — then you see the same energy outward. It’ll always be Zelensky buying something. The energy is “corruption.” But it won’t always be a castle in Italy. Sometimes it’s California. I think he was buying a ranch today. Of course, that repetition also works — it convinces people it’s true. But for us who are deliberately trying to look out for it and not fall for trolls, when I see something repeated like that, I’m suspicious. It gets me to look closer.

We no longer have to rely on some quaint Italian TV programme. We are making the news ourselves, trying to make it as engaging as possible by sharing interesting things, creating interesting things with different voices, different colours, humour. That’s a very positive thing which never existed before. We are fighting back. What Volya Radio does with Mokrushyna, with Will and all of you — Genesis Man, Midwest Fellow, yourself Wendy, Iona of course, Yeni, and everyone — is countering this in our own way. We’re creating spaces that never existed before, when we used to have to rely on people like Jeffrey Sachs or the talking head on the weekly current-affairs show in whichever village or country or town we lived in. That is quite wonderful. It’s also part of the problem, but at least we have a voice and we’re not just shouting at the TV.

The things I’ve spoken about before are character. You see character in memes, in tropes — not just individuals but these tropes coming up again and again. The Victoria Nuland one and all of that. Part of the really annoying thing — when people like my friend start talking about this conspiracy, when you know the truth — is that Sikorski, who is now obviously a hero and has learned from the experience, had negotiated with Klitschko. He and Klitschko had persuaded the demonstrators to stand down and allow Yanukovych to continue. It was only that Yanukovych did a runner that the deal fell apart. The idea that the Americans and the American establishment wanted the demonstrators to take over — it just betrays a worrying lack of understanding of the character immanent in our governance structures and our leadership and our leaders. The last thing they wanted was a revolution.

This idea of Victoria Nuland passing out these really cheap biscuits — anyone who’s been to Ukraine will know Yulia Tymoshenko’s supermarket chain. You buy the biscuits by the weight. That’s what Nuland was giving out. Anyone repeating this conspiracy betrays a worrying lack of understanding of the character of people in our political establishment. They did not want this to be happening. They’ve done everything they can since the time General Electric built the Zaporizhzhia Dam in the 1930s as part of Stalin’s five-year plan. They’ve done everything they can to give Russia respect and keep it alive. The idea that they would have done this coup thing is absurd.

Of course, the people accusing the CIA and Victoria Nuland of doing what they in their conventional world would never have done are the very ones who were creating the coup — by hiring Paul Manafort, a Republican strategist who is now advising Donald. We may see Donald pursuing a coup in Ukraine again — every now and again he talks about President Zelensky’s legitimacy. Onwards.

Frequency and repetition — we see these same things coming up again and again. On one level it’s maddening, on another it’s hilarious, on another it’s just really worrying that people who supposedly know something about geopolitics think the world works that way. They’ve just read too many of that guy from MIT’s stories about CIA coups, and not enough of Michael Weiss’s stuff on the GRU and Russian intelligence. They have a completely wrong understanding of the character of our very conservative governance structures. And it’s a bit annoying.

Yesterday was the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a white supremacist. In the wake of that murder, the movement from the right and the far right was to archetype those like George Floyd, but mainly those supporting George Floyd in the demonstrations afterwards — those who awoke to injustice and are awake to injustice. The far right and the right ran a coordinated, globally important, significant and successful campaign to archetype those of us who are woke, and proudly woke to our rights, as “woke” and somehow weak. The weak woke.

I would never have predicted this archetyping campaign would succeed, because it seems so counter-intuitive that you could persuade clever, educated people — even on the right, all across the world, and through their media, through the oligarch-owned media — that this is an appropriate campaign, an in-group-creating concept: anti-wokeness. In my view, this all arose from George Floyd’s murder. I always think of him and his little daughter, who’s probably around eleven now, when I see “woke” and “anti-woke.” I see people whom I like, who are good friends of mine and share many of my values, themselves campaigning against woke.

As previously advertised here, the dividing line for me is: if you’re committed to the post-World War II legal and social order — the Refugee Convention, anti-discrimination rules, laws, human rights protected as a matter of law universally for every human regardless of which group they’re in — then that is the dividing line. The anti-woke campaign, led by the oligarchs and the far right after George Floyd’s ruthless murder by a white supremacist, was their response. Their response was to archetype people alive to their rights, alive to the post-World War II legal and social order, as “woke” and therefore deserving of being denigrated.

Now we see a much more sinister movement. And I use the word “sinister” as opposed to “right.” Sinistrous in Latin means left. This is the underlying linguistic and psycholinguistic meaning of the far right — and sadly now many leading politicians — archetyping opposition as “left.” They don’t even need to say you’re sinister. They just say you’re left, you’re leftist.

In this executive order setting out the priority policy for US government agencies and departments to agree with the designation of Antifa as terrorists and as an organisation — and in line with this memorandum on national security, which again repeats the designation of Antifa as terrorism and sets out some of the characteristics of those who will be designated as, I’m paraphrasing here, enemies of the state and therefore subject to the full power of the US government’s enforcement mechanisms, many of which were developed during the War on Terror — included are people who are organising to violently suppress others’ rights. The entire document is an accusation in a mirror, in my humble opinion.

It archetypes as Antifa anyone who’s anti-Christian, anyone who’s anti-family values. It sets out all of the grounds to destroy the entire post-World War II legal and social order. But it does say that anyone who wants to abolish rights, to get rid of people’s rights, can be designated as terrorists.

That’s how I see George Floyd — to commemorate George Floyd and to think about all of that time, which seems like a lifetime ago. It was just five years ago. But his legacy does live on. Now we are seeing the same tricks being used with the concept of anti-fascism. “Anti-fascist” — that’s the term used in this national security memorandum just signed by Donald.

An agency has been set up in Virginia, a building where American citizens are being put on lists — as we speak, every day — because of someone’s interpretation that they are anti-Christian, or anti-family values, or out to get the right. I noted that this particular document includes pure Disinfolklore: this idea that the bullet casings which killed Kirk contained Antifa rhetoric, which we now know to be untrue. But this is now part of this justificatory memorandum, being used to compile lists of Americans and NGOs who are now persona non grata. Again, we can see where this is going. And it’s not very nice.

⚡️Why the Far Right Eat and Kill Dogs.

Poster on pro-English Northern Ireland bonfire demonstrates the ‘immigrants eating dogs’ trope is at least a decade old. Poster features my old boss the late great Anna Lo - the first ethnic Chinese legislator to be elected to a European legislature.

Mitt Romney’s presidential bid came unstuck after it was rumoured he attached his dog (and kennel) to the roof rack to go on holiday. Now every Republican candidate boasts about eating or killing dogs. What’s going on?

By modelling willingness to eat dogs, shoot horses, drone bomb or drown prospective immigrants far right politicians are staking a claim for rightful sovereignty.

It has long been held that, as Sylvia Perera wrote, a human who aspires to being monarch in Indo-European culture must be:

“conscious enough to face the ugly, pain filled reality of the Outer Realm… they must be strong as a warrior, productive as a farmer, and wise as a druid.””

In dealing with the Chef of Disinfolklore in later chapters we will return again and again to Indo-European culture’s tripartite conception of the qualities sovereigns need to qualify for leadership - killer / warrior (Security), farmer (Prosperity/ Fertility), druid (Sovereignty)…” disinfolklore.net/p/disinfolklor…

⚡️Trolls are energy (Mana) that only moves when we share them.

Then, we become the troll.

The informational unit (Troll) consumes us as it instrumentalises us to keep it in motion.

Like a virus hacking our mind, the troll uses us to keep their troll moving.

Ruschia’s Nordic troll monarch Putler is very successful at provoking us into doing his mental work.

We are the petrol fuelling the troll, even when we disagree with its content.

That’s the point of trolls like Nigel Porridge, in fact. Their oligarch backers pay to promote their trolls. Then, by reacting and perpetuating the trolls, we fuel and energise that which we think we’re opposing.

We become the Useful I***** of Useful I******.

One solution I’ve found if I must talk about Nigel Porridge or the Chef Wanger Nazi, the Chef of Disinfolklore, of the Chief Sorcerer Putler is to corrupt their monikers.

⚡️English Russia Report published - it’s a troll.

English Parliamentary report on Russian interference in English democracy has been published. In full. It’s rubbish. Seeks not to find anything.

Frames Brexit and Russia merely as Russia’s proven attempt to affect the information space. Whereas, we know the entire referendum was a part of a Russian Active Measure.

English Parliamentary anti-European headbangers were easy prey: they were compromised by their willingness to Brexit at any and all costs.

Johnson and Cummings then purposely delayed publication of Russia report to troll us into thinking there was anything of value in it. Many of us fell for that troll. Then we saw the report and understood: the report itself is a whitewash.

By comparison US Senate and House Intelligence Committees published substantive reports on Russia’s interference in American democracy in 2016. Thousands of pages. They did though miss the one salient fact about the Steele Dossier: Deripaska managed to launder Russian Disinfolklore into the Dossier. Thus, impugning the Dossier when, for example, it turned out Michael Cohen had never been to Prague.

Moral of this story? At least the truth is out there in America. Whereas, in England they still don’t understand they was trolled.

P.S. By branding a government report as “independent” English legislators engaged in putting Disinformation engaged in it:

https://isc.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/CCS207_CCS0221966010-001_Russia-Report-v02-Web_Accessible.pdf

⚡️On calling for another candidate.

Trump’s power (Mana) is 100% the 20 oligarchs whose channels amplify his nonsense.

Get rid of Biden, and Trump’s artificial Mana remains.

Projecting magical power (Mana) unto Trump is 100% within your control.

When you call for another candidate, you’re falling for the troll.

You’re perpetuating the power (Mana) of Trump your conscious mind seeks to neutralise.

Trolls move like this - liberate yourself from this mental enslavement by these oligarchs and their puppets Trump and Putler!

Ruschia’s Nordic troll monarch Putler, for example, or Trump, are very successful at provoking our minds with emotions, which often carelessly we communicate into others’ minds (thereby doing those demonic trolls’ mean work for them).

Such trolls, once inside our minds, commingle their energy (Mana) with our Mana through linguistic, visual, tonal, or audible means.

They fire their energy / emotions into our minds. Before we know it, we become the petrol fuelling the troll, whether we agree or we disagree with its content.

When Negative Trolls troll us into feeling and propagating their emotions, we risk becoming the Useful Idiots of Useful Idiots.