Decoding Trolls

Archetyping Bad Faith

There’s a key core module in the disinfolklore analytical method which is what I call the Code of Positive Trolls. It has six elements. The second element is ethical discipline. The first element is generosity. When a generous person—or when M’ockers is telling a story, what I might call Infolklore, on Volya 4 Ukraine radio space on X Spaces or Spotify —this is ethically disciplined, in the sense that it’s true. They’re not misleading us. As we all know, those of us who listen to M’ockers, she’s very careful about what she believes and what she lets be said. It’s ethically disciplined. The standard is set by international law, ultimately, from my perspective. Territorial integrity is sacrosanct. Laws against discrimination on the grounds of certain protected characteristics, the Genocide Convention—one of the most agreed-to conventions in human culture—and a whole plethora of legal instruments which are the expressions of ethical standards. I use that standard, the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls, to distinguish between Infolklore and Disinfolklore. On the fly, when you’re in your real life and dealing with people—you’re doing a deal, you’re talking about drones, you’re trying to get components, you’re a teacher in school with students firing stuff at you and you’re just trying to work out what’s going on—is this person in good faith? The first element of the Code of Positive Trolls, which I find particularly useful, is generosity. If I’m picking up genuine real generosity in the other, then I know it’s probably not intentional misdirection. It’s probably infolklore, not disinfolklore. When you pick up a lack of generosity in, say, Donald or others, then you can brand it disinfolklore. Archetyping Bad Faith That’s the span between trying to decide in your immediate life whether this is true or not. The definitional disinfolklore is anything Donald says, anything MAGA says. Obviously, until you’ve archetyped them as bad, as not in good faith, you might be confused by little instances. Whereas now we know practically everything he says is bad, yet we still fall for the trolls. I was watching someone today who always talks about the Ukraine war and the battlefield. They justifiably go off on one and complain about this thing I’ve just spoken about—I skipped over it because I didn’t need to hear them say it as well—where Donald talks about the week and the ceasefire and all that stuff. Then the next story they’re talking about is Donald and the Indian oil deal. We have to try and maintain our consistency between these two manifestations of Donald. If you’ve archetyped him as bad and in bad faith and a con man, then when I find myself falling for one of his trolls—tomorrow he may say, oh, I’m thinking about sending the Tomahawks to Ukraine—we just have to resist falling for this. We know that everything he says basically is disinfolklore. We don’t know that with other people in our lives, and we’ve all probably experienced situations where you gradually discover someone you relied on and liked and thought was actually in good faith is really spinning lies or tricking you. Then you realise that everything they’ve said is probably what I would call disinfolklore, because it’s not ethically disciplined. It was untrue, it was falsities, it was manipulative—not manipulative in a positive way. Infolklore Versus Disinfolklore: The M’ockers Example As Bill Terrier says on Volya4Ukraine Radio, the stories which M.ockers is telling are manipulative—stories on multiple layers. The way she tells them, however, the way she frames them, transforms them into infolklore. When she’s telling a tale of woe of some Ruschist mil-blogger who has published a story on Telegram to manipulate people in Russia into sending him money, or like Gherkin forever trying to persuade Russia’s government to do a full mobilisation—that is definitive disinfolklore, and these are the kinds of stories she’s telling. We can talk about those stories in a conscious way that transforms them into infolklore. We’re certainly manipulating each other by telling these stories, yet we’re not doing it with mean intent. We’re doing it out of generosity—a bit of light relief in the midst of the pain. We’re also raising money. I noted Wendy’s matching in An Accidental Ukrainian, which I very much appreciate. Re-Archetyping and the Kennedy Center We are moving towards an answer to a question posed by Scouts and indeed raised by Ioana about what is the truth. What James alluded to is that the truth, in inverted commas, is at risk of being defined by Donald and Donald’s attempts to re-archetype the Kennedy Center and indeed annihilate Kennedy, this hero of his youth that he wishes to destroy. It’s not enough to have RFK Jr. absolutely annihilate the Kennedys from the inside. I note all of the Kennedys’ letters and warnings to Congress not to allow their father, their uncle, their cousin, their brother to become health secretary. I’m a little bit more optimistic, however. It was a Ukrainian on the series of Ukrainian TV stations that I just recently discovered—and I know Lexicon has as well—broadcasting in English or AI English. There was a Ukrainian academic at an American university I saw this week. He was very certain, and it lodged a nice germ in my mind about how temporary all of this is. Of course, as James alluded to, it may not become temporary. This may be this attempt to re-archetype reality and turn the world upside down, to turn falsehood into truth for the usurper—the literal and metaphorical usurper Donald. January 6th, whatever happened in the 2016 and 2024 elections with Russian help—the usurper is attempting to turn the world upside down. The Reformation Parallel I’ve alluded to this before. I studied in great detail the early transmission of ideas in the early German Reformation, 1518 to 1530, and the world turned upside down. Sebastian Brant’s late fifteenth-century book, The Ship of Fools, played a really big part in the re-archetyping of the Pope as Antichrist and the use of memes and cartoons to re-archetype the church in a certain way, done by the leaders, the oligarchs. They succeeded in some ways, yet the Catholic Church is still around and there still is truth—there’s truth in all of our lives. I’m quite optimistic. At the moment we’re in the endgame. I do note the Kennedy Center and what’s going on there. For those who don’t know: he inexplicably tried to fire the board almost immediately upon getting into office. They resisted. In the end, like a steamroller, he got rid of them. Then he attempted unlawfully to rename it the Trump Kennedy Center. He got all his patsies in there—basically the spouses of all his Epstein-connected cabinet members and lawyers and various people are on the board. He controls the board and performers. This Kennedy Center, as I understand it—correct me if I’m wrong, Wendy or James—was established by an Act of Congress to memorialise and commemorate JFK. That’s its sole purpose. It washed its face and made a surplus of something like $40 million last year. Already Donald has tanked it, as he’s tanked absolutely everything he’s ever been involved in. I do believe underpinning all of this, along with RFK, and all his other motivations, is this idea of annihilating this golden boy of his youth that perhaps someone he hated in his life talked about. He just wants to annihilate all that is good. I don’t believe he’ll succeed. I don’t believe any of them will succeed at this in the end. The end is coming near. 6,000 Years of Indo-European Truth Part of my confidence in that actually is my perspective from 6,000 years of Indo-European history and the triumph of right and truth. It’s in our language, it’s in our words, in almost every sentence. The repeated attempts, as memorialised in stories about the devil or the snake or whatever, in every culture going back literally for 6,000 years that we have records for—it’s embedded in our language. The word in Hindi and early Indian languages for snake is nāgī. It means negative. This is what Donald and the devil and Satan and Putler and all of these horrific oligarchs, whom the Epstein system has given us a window into, are trying to do. They are the neg, they are the anti—yet I don’t believe they’ll triumph. We’ve got Ukraine, we’ve got President Zelensky, and we’ve got the truth on our side. We’ve got the disinfolklore analytical method and the disinfolklore perspective. Disinfolklore’s Building Blocks I was first going to go through just a couple of the tools—very easy snack bites—then go back to the Battling Archetypes aspect, these twelve tools, which is more longue durée work I’ve been doing for the last few weeks. Are You New to Disinfolklore? If you’re new to disinfolklore—actually, that’s a bit of a trick question, because if you live in an information-rich environment today, you’re already steeped in disinfolklore. You just couldn’t notice it until I coined the term to describe how strategically targeted memes affecting our attitudes, motivations, intentions, and moods pass through our incoming troll radars to transform our identities in unseen ways. Now I’ve named it disinfolklore—just as the writers in the Book of Genesis named things and have Adam and God naming things—you can get your eye in and begin to move forward. Be more mindful about how strategically we are being manipulated by disinfolklore masquerading as news, gossip, advice, both in your online and in your real-life lives. I see news as a province of folklore, as is disinfolklore. Disinfolklore describes stories, however delivered, that communicate meanness with a view to altering the moods, intentions, motivations, and attitudes of their consumers in ways which satisfy the strategic demands of disinfolklorists. Donald’s Ceasefire Troll Take today’s Donald. It’s just so horrid what he said about this fake ceasefire. He was asked in the White House: you agreed with Putler on a ceasefire, yet yesterday was one of the worst attacks of the entire war by Putler on Ukraine—what do you say to that? Donald said, well, you know, he agreed a ceasefire from Sunday to Sunday, and yesterday’s Monday, so of course he had to do it. These two people have been fighting forever for the past few years. It’s a war that wouldn’t have happened, you know, and all that malarkey. That’s pure disinfolklore. It’s pure meanness. It’s both-sidesing Ukraine and Russia. It’s telling lies. It’s not ethically disciplined. It’s part of Russia’s information war against Ukraine. As we heard Donald Tusk refer to today—which many of us have come to over the past few weeks—the Epstein relationship with Russia, Donald’s relationship with Epstein and Russia, and this entire governance system in which the honey traps affecting the survivors and victims in awful ways were just part of this awful governance system. We get a great insight into it through this English fellow called Peter Mandelson, whom English listeners will know through all the disinfolklore going back to the days of New Labour. It turns out there’s evidence that while the world financial system was about to fall apart in 2007–2008, and Gordon Brown literally saved the world and rescued Mandelson and made him into a lord so he could be his minister, Mandelson was sharing private correspondence about the bailout with Epstein. These are all Brighton Beach mafia-adjacent people. They’re all Russian, despite their all-American looks. This is all a Russian mafia operation. He’s sharing papers which are then monetised by them and exchanged for influence and other things. That little vignette seems to illustrate how these people are trying to corrupt and usurp our world and usurp what is right. It’s up to us to ensure they don’t succeed, as we’re trying our best with the Ukraine example. I just don’t think it will succeed. Disinfolklore Is Empirical and Descriptive When Donald speaks like that, he is communicating meanness with a view to altering moods, intentions, motivations, and attitudes. He’s intending to depress Ukrainians. It’s just the most horrible thing. If there are sins—venal sins, the worst sins ever in the Catholic Church—that can be committed through words alone, then Donald commits them a thousand times a day. At a time when Ukrainians are freezing, he tempts them into going out in the street with this ceasefire troll. I’m sure very few of them believe in it, but it’s just horrible. If you wonder what disinfolklore is: anything Donald ever says—that is just disinfolklore. News reporting this disinfolklore or any other kind is the main means of creating the disinfolklore universe in which we are currently being enmeshed on an unprecedented scale. This is something I’m offering which many practitioners in disinformation don’t offer: the system-wide effects of not just this particular meme by Donald, but the systemic effects of zillions of them—including the missile strikes, Epstein, Putler, and just the whole mess, this forest of horribleness and meanness that all of us have chosen or been chosen to enmesh ourselves in each day. We are self-realising through it. We’re trying to help Ukraine, trying to stop the usurpers’ win, trying to help truth—meaning territorial integrity, borders sacrosanct, freedom from being missile-struck, freedom from being enslaved by the Russists and all of the terrible consequences that would arise if the purported annexation of Crimea and all that has happened as a result was allowed to stand. One: disinfolklore is empirical. This is not a theory. It is empirically based, grounded in data. We see it every day. As James pointed out, you can see a family resemblance between what Donald is trying to do to the Kennedy Center and archetyping, one of the weapons in our arsenal as disinfolklore analytical methodologists. Two: it’s descriptive. Disinfolklore is meant to depress spirits. It affects motivations in order to entrench in people the idea that it’s useless to resist. Donald himself is very descriptive—his tone, his storytelling technique, switching between third person and other perspectives really confusingly for people, is a really effective storytelling technique. He uses resonant verbal images and props, whether it’s a red cap or other devices. The purpose is clear: to depress spirits, whether it’s the spirits of his cynical followers, oligarchs who seek to benefit, or people like us who are appalled by everything that’s going on. Disinfolklore as a Way of Seeing Three: it’s a way of seeing. Once you get your eye in, you can use the disinfolklore lens as a way of perceiving certain kinds of patterns in data. Four: disinfolklore inculcates rules. It normalises certain mental routines. Don’t go to the forest. Don’t bother supporting Ukraine. You’re not Ukrainian. Cross the river and you’ll be forced to become LGBTIQ. There are all these rules, unknown to us, inculcated in our minds through the means of certain strategically designed, emotionally resonant stories. This is a feature of folklore going back forever. One of its great functions is to teach children: don’t go to that forest, don’t go to the island. Five: it’s also a description of my project. Disinfolklore is a necessary precursor to understanding what counter-disinfolklore consists of. All of this is about—and I try to remember this in my work—not just identifying or describing something terrible and going, oh, I can’t do anything about it. It’s about acting as well. That’s the counter-disinfolklore. All of us have chosen that path, all of us in this space. In the pro-Ukraine community, those who identify as part of NAFO and Volia Radio—we have chosen to counter disinfolklore, to act against it, not just to be consumers of it and throw our hands up and say, okay, I can’t do anything about it, so I’m not going to bother. We’ve chosen to engage in memetic warfare in lots of different ways. The Intention Problem: Why Effects Matter More Traditional definitions of disinformation distinguish it from mere misinformation on the grounds of intention to mislead. The problem here is that the same meme, when spoken by me, if I am being *méchant* and deliberately trying to mislead someone, would be disinformation. If Wendy accidentally believed it and just passed it on to James, it would be just misinformation. Its effect is the same if James then passes it on. It doesn’t matter if I’ve deliberately manipulated James and Wendy has accidentally manipulated James. If James then tells his sister or his daughter or his mother, his wife, a cousin, or says it on the radio—the same meme—it doesn’t matter whether it’s intentionally or unintentionally communicated. It’s still alive, it’s been passed on, and the energy inside that meme stays alive. If we’re truly most concerned about all of this because of its effects—we’re not just interested in disinformation or Ukraine to pass the time. It’s intrinsically interesting, of course, yet we’re also interested because of its impact on people, on their moods. We see what it does to people. We see how Donald has affected all American and practically everyone’s lives on the planet. The same with Putler’s invasion of Ukraine, whether it’s the price of oil or our depressed spirits or 14 million Ukrainian internally displaced people and 9 million who left Ukraine. These have great effects. It doesn’t matter in some ways about the intention. We can argue all day about Putler’s real intention, yet that doesn’t really matter. What really matters is the effects. That’s where what I try to provide comes in: look for the mana in the meme. That’s one of the main weapons, tools, and unique aspects of the disinfolklore analytical method. We take units of information and attempt to discern the quality of the mana inside them. Look for the Mana in the Meme As we get better at this—and the first step to getting better is just thinking about doing it—then whether James communicates this meme to me, passes it through the barrier into my brain, into my mind, to kind of tickle my mind, or Wendy does, it doesn’t matter whether James intentionally is manipulating me or Wendy is accidentally manipulating me. If we’ve got this skill of looking for the mana in the meme, looking for what the energy is inside it and how it is affecting my mood, my intention, my attitude—many of us, because we see the family resemblance between different kinds of memes, like the nuclear threats for instance. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from Medvedev or our friend who’s breathlessly repeating something they read in the *New York Post*. We see the energy in this, which is Russia’s attempt to coercively control humanity and get us to surrender to Russism. That’s a really powerful aspect of disinfolklore: looking for the mana inside the meme. Disgust as an Incoming Troll Radar Once we’re looking for it, we can create different tools for identifying the energy inside memes. One of the key tools is actually its impact on us. When I heard Donald say this about the ceasefire—and I hope I’m now passing this on to all of you, trying to wrap it so that it’s not just disinfolklore but more infolklore, it’s informing you, a story to inculcate an idea—my emotional visceral reaction was just disgust. Disgust is, of course, one of the tools that Donald and his ilk use. We’ve spoken about this before, especially in the context of contagion. There’s this work by cultural psychologists about how the emotion of disgust, so it is believed, began as a mechanism we use biologically not to drink the poisonous soup, to puke it out or vomit it out. Then it passes from that into culture, and we begin to project disgustingness or non-disgustingness onto different articles or objects. MAGA attempts to get us to think of Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton as disgusting—the whole Pizzagate thing. Food is intrinsically involved in all of this. When she’s associated with this dark cabal of child slavery, all located in this pizzeria in Washington, D.C., this gets entrenched in people’s minds through disinfolklore, through stories promoted by Fox and through a million different channels. Then you don’t even remember why she disgusts you, yet you sense or feel that disgust. The moment I felt that disgust with Donald, that reaction on behalf of 42 million Ukrainians and 350 million fellow Americans, my incoming troll radar was activated. I realised: I’m not going to go with this feeling. I’m not going to go with this disgust. I’m going to use it as an example tonight. I’m not going to allow Donald to impact my mood. I’m going to bank it, put it in a little capsule in my mind, then move on from it. Very little of what he does disgusts me in this visceral way, yet that really did because I’m reading about what Ukrainians are going through at the moment—it’s horrific—and just the idea he could explain it away as natural. He lies about the ceasefire, then says, well, you know, it was Sunday to Sunday, so it’s Monday, so obviously he’s going to send his missiles. It’s probably top three worst things a US president has ever and will ever say. The disgust I felt alerted me to a troll. Someone is trying to get into my mind and I’m going to protect myself from it. That was wrapped up inside his story about missiles and Putler. Incidentally, this was minutes before he took a dump in the Oval Office—yet again, a public defecation with people around, and they hurried everyone out. That’s good counter-disinfolklore. We cannot resist opportunities for toilet humour, especially when this is one of many times he has apparently done this in public. The Mana of Coercive Control The energy of Russia’s disinfolklore is coercive control. The mana energy from the macro to the micro—the words of individual Russist so-called mil-bloggers, Russian guys in the field who hang the Russian mobiks upside down on trees—that’s the epitome of coercive control. The way they treat women. The way Epstein and all of those people, all the people in Donald’s cabinet, treat women. The way Donald treats women and people he others. That coercive control mana energy is inside the memes, inside what they do, inside the stories, inside the way they treat the survivors, as we see with the latest docs dump. The mana of Russia’s disinfolklore is coercive control. You can back-propagate from that: if you spot coercive control—which is quite carefully defined in English law because it’s now illegal, and which we might know in different ways, having experienced it in our own lives with partners or girlfriends or boyfriends, husbands or wives—there’s a certain level of intensity of coercive control in relationships, usually male on female, that in English statute law is now outlawed. If you see coercive control in a meme or in a story—either someone trying to coercively control you, or Donald trying to coercively control Ukraine into surrender by withholding intelligence cooperation (forcing them to withdraw from Kursk and all of this), the “perfect phone call” in air quotes, where he was coercively controlling President Zelensky into announcing an investigation into the Hunter Biden troll in return for $280 million worth of Javelin missile systems which Congress had already appropriated specifically for Ukraine, plus a White House visit—that’s coercive control. The Budapest Memorandum specifically makes it a violation to exert economic coercion on Ukraine by any of the parties, whether England, the Russian Federation, or the United States. Yet we see this normalisation of economic coercion by Donald—tariffs are a form. His whole tariff troll is a form of coercive control, not just on other countries but also on the Americans who are paying the tariffs. Coercive control is immanent in almost every breath Donald takes as a case study. Once you can see it in him and what he does, you can see aspects of it in what other normal people do, in geopolitics, in what Putler does. Whenever you encounter that energy in memes, you know that’s probably disinfolklore. Someone is probably trying to affect your mood, your motivation, your attitude, and your intentions through a story whose immanence is coercive control. Coercive Control as a Shortcut That’s one very common immanence in disinfolklore. If you’re looking for the mana in the meme—the energy in a meme, whether it’s a story someone is telling you, a story you’re participating in with a friend, something on Twitter or X or Instagram Stories, or images, or something you think about—when you identify this aspect of coercive control, you have a shortcut. Often these judgements need to be made quickly in real life. I want the disinfolklore analytical method to be something we can use individually, as I do, in my daily life to get me through the day and to help me navigate very complicated realities. We’re looking for ways of cutting through the confusion. You’re looking for the mana of the meme, you spot coercive control, then you mount your defence or your counterattack—or you just get out of there. You don’t need to spend three days trying to work out what’s going on. You simply recognise: this is not a story I want to let affect my energy. I don’t want how I act to be changed by this, because someone is deliberately trying to coercively control me into behaviour which is against my identity. If I allow myself to be coercively controlled—and obviously there are circumstances in which we all have to surrender to it because we’re just not powerful enough to resist at that moment—that doesn’t mean we can’t try to recognise it. Epstein’s victims and Donald’s victims often understand they’re being coercively controlled, like we do, like I do now. We just can’t do anything about it for the time being. We have to wait till we get a bit bigger and find a lawyer or something else. We can keep our identity—help sustain our identity—by noticing what’s going on and by mentally resisting. If we do find the power to overcome it, that is an identity-preservation process. The opposite is what I’ve described before: the purpose of the disinfolklore universe inside MAGA or inside Russia-occupied Ukraine is to transform our identities through the medium of our moods, intentions, attitudes, and motivations by using stories to attack them and manipulate us—to pulate, to shake our mana, our own energy. After a time, we’ve acted in ways we would never have dreamed we would act. Take your average MAGA adherent and bring them in your time machine back to 1990 when they were a Reagan Republican. They would never have agreed with any of the nonsense they agree with now. Identities are transformed through these memes deliberately. Donald and Putler and those trying to change our world are trying to promote this spheres-of-influence nonsense from their IR textbooks, rather than territorial integrity being sacrosanct according to the UN Charter and a variety of international legal instruments, as well as being the obvious means of maintaining stability in our world. The Cognitive Model: Information as In-Forming I’ve described a bit now the cognitive model of how disinfolklore affects our intentions and motivations, and therefore our activities, including our thoughts. This is a key part of the disinfolklore analytical method. As James pointed out, there are loads of other models out there. This is just the one I’ve come up with to match my experience of how my mind, my mana, my energy is impacted by meanness in stories. It’s also something I’ve developed which I hope is accessible to people. When we detect trolls coming in—detect this energy, say, of coercive control—or we have a sense that someone is trying to manipulate us, we mount our incoming troll radars, always looking for this. Mindfulness is another word for it, though that kind of puts people off. It’s this mindfulness where you’re a gatekeeper between the external and your mind, and you triage certain bits of information according to their risks of negatively impacting your mood or your attitude or your intentions. When you detect coercive control in any form, immediately you’re on guard, and you’re not going to let it affect your inner mind, your mana. When you feel your moods or attitudes or intentions being scraped or vibrated by these things, these data, these memes, that can also be a sign that it’s time to—metaphorically speaking—get out of there and just not let it in and avoid it. I think it’s important to have an accessible cognitive model when we’re talking about information. The clue is in the term itself: information. It’s about forming you. It’s forming the inside of you. This is one of the beautiful things about Indo-European languages. We have really true renderings of what is happening in the words we use every day, yet we don’t think of it that way. We think of “inform” as merely meaning somebody is telling us something we didn’t know. The clue, when you think about the term, is that it’s forming our inside. That’s what I mean by the energy, the being manipulated, where someone is pulating your mana, your energy, with information, shaking it up and down in such a way that it affects your moods and intentions in the negative way. The opposite works too. I’ve been noticing a lot how children react—for some reason it’s just been on my mind—the way they make each other laugh. I’ve got my eye in now and I see it a lot on the streets. That kind of friendship is really familiar to me, and I try to do that in my real life a lot. That’s positive trolling—definitional positive trolling—where two friends are just making each other laugh and smile. They’re practising generosity by doing that. Their intention is all good. I think that’s absolutely wonderful. That is great counter-disinfolklore. That’s positive information. I’ll come back to that again next week. Hopefully that was helpful. That was eight different tools. I’ve actually got 37 more. Continued from: First in Series: Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe [https://www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Podcast and Pensées 128:

It pops up as a perennial troll: you’re in the countryside, something strange happens, and it’s attributed to a troll appearing and interceding. Trolls perform the same function as angels or leprechauns or banshees or Baba Yaga or rusalky. It’s all the same — every Indo-European culture has these substitutes for energy, to explain things. On Minsk: I’ve talked before about how my Disinfolklore Analytical Method allows us to look at any form. One takeaway from a lot of my work at the moment is to try not to treat these as organic or accidental emanations — just as seeing Elon in the White House archetyping himself with his son as the dark hero, Batman and Robin, is trying to affect our moods. Seeing these elements as part of a system might prevent us reacting to them as if they’re individual artefacts and moments in our lives. They’re very much part of what I would see as the coup or insurrection which, according to both the Georgia and federal indictments, began within the first moments that Donald Trump disputed the results of the 2020 election. The racketeering charge in the federal indictment tells us it’s a whole system, not just one moment. That perspective is essentially what I do in my work — selling perspectives on the quotidian, the daily elements, to help us understand ourselves, where we’re fitting in, how we’re affecting the culture. Our culture — which most of us have chosen to engage with on X — that’s our main entry point, our main power: to affect people’s timelines. We know how we’re affected by information we see. That’s why we’re part of this Volya community, because we think there’s power in communicating this understanding. What we can do is see this as part of the system and become Disinfolklore-literate: look for what I call Archetypal Disinfolklore, look for what they’re trying to archetype themselves as, how they’re trying to manipulate us, and then find ways of explaining and sharing this comprehension. I’d quickly reference the Tulsi Gabbard issue because it ties into what we talked about last week. I’m trying to give tools that help us discern the mana in the meme — the energy in the memes we encounter each day as we scroll, interact with our culture, and create our culture. Axios reported that Tulsi Gabbard is prepared to submit her resignation if Donald authorises entering the Israel–Iran war. There was also credible reporting that she was excluded from a meeting to discuss the impending war. From that, I deduced she is — as most of us know — recognised as being part of the Russian influence network, and they were trying to keep her out of that meeting. Her preparedness to resign over the Israel–Iran war complements my analysis of what is going on. What’s particularly interesting is that because of what we know about Russia’s economy — because we listen to Mokrushyna and Prints every day and Absurdistan — we almost uniquely as a community have a detailed idea of Russia’s economic state, its dependence on oil exports, and its dependence on Iran for weaponry since it was first reported in October 2022, when Iran was denying providing Russia with weapons and drones. Up until then, we didn’t know which way Iran would swing. I have this fixed flagpole in my mind: Russia does not want the United States to enter the war in Iran. Therefore, anyone who is suddenly out of character against this war — Tulsi Gabbard being one — we can use this as a good litmus test to know if they’re in Russia’s influence, whether paid or otherwise. It’s very particularly interesting to see which way Donald goes in the end. On one hand, he’s suddenly become like a Messiah to these patrician neocons who always thought of him as a clown, and now he’s offering them what they’ve dreamed about since 1979: bombing Iran back to the Stone Age. On the other hand, the MAGA element — Bannon and company, who’ve been leading the charge against Ukraine, which again is a litmus test for where these people’s loyalties lie. In this context, I look back at Gabbard’s video — the aesthetics, the Soviet-era aesthetics, the argument about World War III which we as a community understand. A highly educated, brilliant American friend contacted me and used this World War III meme. Whatever media she’s consuming is promoting it, and we’re very familiar with it from here. On the archetyping idea: this gave me the concept of re-archetyping World War III. I read a few pieces this week, which some of you will have seen, on what war looks like now — using what all of us have learned from watching how drone warfare has evolved, listening very carefully to Alan and Chuck Pfarrer and others. All of us have learned a lot about warfare, and because most of us didn’t know much beforehand, we’ve perhaps been more open to the new rules. I saw Trent Telenko’s post yesterday setting out the range of Shahed drones, which I don’t think any of us would be confident about defending against. We’ve seen how they’ve evolved and how Ukraine has countered almost every obstacle, but the Shahed drones are an absolute problem for the world. I found some of my early tweets on Shahed drones. In 2023, a drone attack was four Shaheds. Now we’ve got 400 a night, two nights of 400-plus. When you see that Iran has Shahed drones within range of Central Europe, according to Trent Telenko’s map, you become less gung-ho. If you’ve archetyped in your mind that the US Army is the biggest and best in the world, and you’ve been reading Telenko’s posts — he integrates these daily lessons and batters them against his existing archetypes about force power and defence. He’s constantly lobbying for hardened shelters for stealth bombers. But I’m also looking at what’s happening in Kherson. The Shahed drones and Iran aren’t really on the minds of most people in the normal world — they tune in to Ukraine every now and again. As far as I can see, they’re not really on the minds of the neocons pushing for war in Iran either. I’m waiting to see Dick Cheney visiting the White House after all Donald did to his daughter. That story is very interesting — they’ve been paying for this war for decades. Someone like Trent Telenko is re-archetyping his ideas of what’s necessary to defend, constantly updating according to the latest data. Others aren’t doing this — many pushing for war, and on the other side, people either paid or accidentally under Russian influence who want to stop the Iran war at all costs. I wrote about how we need to outline this. My tweets are proper interventions worthy of being printed in journals, because I don’t see responses from the so-called experts. It’s exactly what we saw with the Iraq war — it’s all right to bomb a place back to the Stone Age, but what happens on day two? Now, what happens on day two is pretty obvious to me. One scenario I’d be considering: many of us will remember when Kherson was liberated — those wonderful days, many of us were on Volya Radio that day — and we expected blowback, but it didn’t really come for another year. The UN Commission of Inquiry report we discussed in the first week of this show: that drone war starts in July 2023, after Kherson was liberated in September 2022. It took a while, then they started with one or two drones. Today we saw 30 people injured, hunted by drones. Drone warfare — drones launched almost every day from Enerhodar Nuclear Power Plant, which is my long-term litmus test for whether people really understand World War III as anything other than a mantra that provokes archetypal images of this 1980s view of ashes and the whole world turned to ashes. Tulsi Gabbard’s video depicted that — in words and images. Mokrushyna has talked very well about this, and I remember seeing videos on the BBC in the early 1980s about nuclear winters. When the World War III signifier is trotted out, the archetypal identity provoked in minds of people of a certain age is precisely what Gabbard was articulating. It was so clumsy with the Soviet imagery. That tells me, in light of this new data, even more strongly that the Russians are behind her, and that they don’t want this war. She obviously saw it coming and thought to put out this quite cryptic video at the potential cost of her job, according to her orders. But the idea of re-archetyping World War III — which this has all provoked in my mind — is precisely about drone warfare. The scenario we’ve seen in Kherson and other cities, now with fibre-optic drones: what happened with the pro-Palestine movement which grew up suddenly after October 7th on university campuses across the world — I foresee a so-called peace movement, an armed peace movement. The model would be the Vietnam War: an insurrection masquerading as a peace movement, injected into a society constantly divided by Chinese TikTok. The NRA and their guns would be nothing against drones. Today’s means of blowback are much more significant than with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The knowledge we have enables us to re-archetype our ideas of what blowback might look like if Donald enters the war. The only hope, ironically, that he won’t carpet-bomb Iran is Putin and the Russians — everything I see tells me they definitely don’t want this. They don’t want Iran bombed because of their dependence on Iran to get oil to market. Everything I’m seeing through Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson and Dugin — all these clans, paid or unpaid influencers, are suddenly coming out against war. All of them were probably pro-Iraq war. That’s where re-archetyping comes in. The other thing I wanted to talk about, connected to re-archetyping and Archetypal Disinfolklore — it’s the first tool in my Twelve Tools. Arsenal, Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy. Letters to Ukraine — the horror on all levels. I worked with mothers of missing soldiers in eastern Ukraine for four years, almost every week. I met these mothers to talk about their missing sons. I hoped their bodies would be returned. There were always rumours they were enslaved by the Russians. This is Trigger, Experience, Reaction. There’s the trigger. Then we have the experience in our mind — sadness, disgust, hope, whatever particular emotion we feel — and then we react. Mokrushyna’s reaction today was: “I just can’t do the show today.” That saved all of us from just depressing each other over those hours as news came out of the child stuck under the soil. We all have to do what we have to do to protect our own minds. This is reflected even in the meaning of the days of the week — discovering this whole literature on archetypes in Indo-European culture, an insight that the French linguist and philosopher Georges Dumézil discovered in the 1930s. Underlying the structure of all Indo-European communities is a tripartite structure of archetypes, of functions. Most of us will be aware, for instance, of the caste system in India — a personification, a reflection of this structure: sovereignty, security, and fertility or prosperity. The monarch, the soldier, the woman or farmer. Once you get your eye in, this structure is everywhere. This is partly why I look so deeply into linguistics. The shaman trickster is memorialised in our days of the week by Woden. Woden — as in dies, sky, day, deity — the Germanic deity, Odin in its English manifestation, Woden in Germany. Odin self-sacrificed on the royal mound at Uppsala in Sweden, gave himself to himself, hung himself for nine days and nights. That story is very much reflected in Jesus Christ’s sacrifice. Donald Trump — once you get your eye in and read, as I’ve read, all of Dumézil’s amazing work, which is very important to my understanding of archetypes and their origins — and so it pleases me a lot when people try to think about which archetypes apply. The important thing to note is these are the three primary archetypes: the sovereign — and sovereignty has two aspects, the magical and the juridical. The juridical manifests as Tiwaz’s Day, Tuesday. The magical aspect — the priest-like aspect, the Brahmin, the Flamines, and again this M-N sound across different Indo-European cultures — is also reflected in the days of the week. Tuesday in English comes from the Germanic. The days of the week in English, rather than in French where they come from the Roman, show where the border lies. Then you have Friday — Freyja — who is a reflection of the pre-Indo-European aspect in our structure. It comes into everything. This discovery — that this structure actually exists — this was the person who inspired my entire work for the past six years: to try and work out what Donald Trump is doing. Then to realise that this is a perennial character who pops up not only in literature, folk tales and stories, but in the earliest written texts, in this structure. Everything Donald Trump does as the shaman, the archetypal shaman trickster, who has the magical rather than juridical aspect — and Putin is also playing this role — was quite a discovery. If you’re reading a folk tale about the shaman trickster, you’re in a completely different cognitive space than when you’re scrolling down Twitter or listening to Trump in Canada or wherever. Yet it is precisely the same phenomenon. This is so deeply embedded in the way we organise ourselves — more than half the world’s population today speak an Indo-European language as their native tongue — that we don’t understand our attraction to him, or our repulsion, or how he manifests. We see similarities between Modi, another shaman trickster, Boris Johnson in England, Nigel Farage. Of them all, Donald — because he’s managed to trick his way into executing the sovereignty function in the most powerful community of humans ever assembled. Or you could argue the Yamna in southeastern Ukraine, where between 4100 and 2500 BCE a small community of people had these archetypes of sovereign, security and fertility manifest as characters in mythology, which then ran into religions — whether Iranian, Indian, Germanic, Celtic or even Christianity. It was so concentrated there that we still think in these terms. This is about re-archetyping Ukraine. Its contribution to the way we think makes it the most important culture there is. The titanic struggle is between — because of course, Iona, you’re right to point out that President Zelensky is the comedian. He’s literally a comedian. That’s what he did — actor, comedian. When asked in the documentary, “You played a president on television — has that helped prepare you to be president?” President Zelensky looks quizzically at the interviewer as if he’s the stupidest person he’s ever encountered: “No, they’re completely different things. In one, I’m playing a role.” Donald Trump managed to re-archetype himself as a leader of humans through a television show where he was acting as an entrepreneur. He was never an entrepreneur, but he played one, and they wanted that role. Like Putin, exactly like Putin — they are shaman tricksters, brilliant at provoking emotions in other people, either revulsion, disgust, joy or following. They do it in this magical way that priests, advertising, religions and cults have done for millennia, but in a very cynical way, and it’s not ethically disciplined — which is the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls. Hopefully in coming weeks we’ll talk more about this, because it’s the most important insight I have to share: there’s an archetypal structure in our news, in our Disinfolklore, manifested through characters, through stories, which is perennial — at least since 4100 BCE, since the first Indo-European language was forged in Ukraine. That’s the miracle of the connection with Ukraine: all of this was born there. That’s partly why I’m confident President Zelensky — who was born 150–200 kilometres from the area where Indo-European languages began, around the borders of Mykolaiv and Kherson oblasts, the heartland of the Yamna community — you go through Kryvyi Rih, where Zelensky is from, and there are great stone circles there. In this titanic struggle, I’m 100% confident President Zelensky will win, because he’s against two dime-store shaman tricksters. Putin — once you get your eye in, you can see how he performs the tricks. Two bare-chested men with his rod, his bendy rod. These archetypal identities are replayed, and in people’s minds it’s just so basic. Whereas President Zelensky not only was a comedian, a shaman trickster who creates and provokes emotions in people’s minds for a living, built a business around it — he then transitioned with a really strong idea of what is real and what is fake. The others are caught up in their Disinfolklore galaxies and Disinfolklore universes. This is the struggle — the Titanic in Greek mythology, much of which was born in this area of Ukraine. We think of Greek as the beginning just because it was recorded first, but now we know better. You have these archetypal identities, these gods, which confuse people — the hero’s journey and all of that, which Jung and others in film scripts talk about. It’s quite confusing for those without a classical education. But what Dumézil’s genius was — and he spent the rest of his life working through it after his insight — is that this is immanent in a huge body of linguistics and literature, one of the main evidential trajectories before we had ancient DNA. If you found the same story with the same archetypes in India, Iran, Irish mythology, and Germanic mythology, you knew it must come from a common source. This was before ancient DNA demonstrated that the common source manifested as a particular community of humans in southern Ukraine. This is absolutely key because there are lots of second-tier archetypes — moving, dynamic archetypes like Russian Disinfolklore and propaganda, like Minsk as a character. And again, the M-N sound in Minsk, Yamna, Monarch, and the R-T sound in security, prosperity, sovereignty. You have these sounds, these archetypes, these meanings, this language personified by characters which are perennial. But then you also have characters created in stories — in Russian news and elsewhere — which are second- and third-tier. There is this fundamental structure, and it is there. It’s peer-reviewed. The moment I came across Dumézil’s work, as I was trying to research what Donald Trump is doing and the shaman trickster — to see that it’s there, that it’s a structure — I’d like to help people become aware of it. Because then we see there’s nothing new about him. It’s the same trick played at the fairground, the same thing we see on TV. We just invest it with something more serious because he’s occupying the sovereignty function of this community of American humans. And now we hear him archetyping himself as a soldier, as war. Those three archetypes are fundamental — in our cognition, in our culture, manifesting in every timeline, all over the place, all the time. It’s the same story for at least 6,000 years. I make no claims for non-Indo-European cultures. Continued from: First in series: Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe [https://www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Podcast & Pensées 127: Russia’s Antisemitic Agitprop. Mental Hygiene and Visual Images.

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. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe [https://www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Podcast & Pensées 126: Complicité between Disinfolklore and Staged Events

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. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe [https://www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Podcast & Pensées 125

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). Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe [https://www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]