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.

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