Decoding Trolls

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 FaithThat’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 ExampleAs 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 CenterWe 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 ParallelI’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 TruthPart 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 BlocksI 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 TrollTake 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 DescriptiveWhen 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 SeeingThree: 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 MoreTraditional 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 MemeAs 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 RadarOnce 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 ControlThe 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 ShortcutThat’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-FormingI’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

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

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 AmbitionsI 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 ImagesVisual 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 DealsAnd 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 DisinfolkloreThen 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 AgitpropI 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 IntegrityInternational 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 SpeechI 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

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

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 Ukraineto 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 linguisticscomparative 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

In the Autumn of 2019, I was trying to understand of what Don’s power/Mana consisted. I wanted to understand in order to counter how Don Disinfolklore used Twitter to roil humanity’s minds into believing trolls like the Hunter Biden troll or Pizzagate Conspiracy.At the time I was a diplomat in eastern Ukraine- I could see how Donald’s trolling even then had real world effects on the battlefield.So of all the gateway concepts to Master/Magister, I chose “trolls and trolling.”Then, when I formed the hypothesis in the note below about Trolls, Trolling and energy exchange, I became @DecodingTrolls to test the hypothesis and to troll others into perceiving how we become part of the problem when, unthinkingly / unknowingly, we perpetuate others’ trolls, like, for example the idea that Europe and Ukraine are “weak,” in whichever guise such trolls are conveyed.As emptywheel notes below, trolling and Don’s motivated trolls are CENTRAL to his mana/power. And the key/core/dominant determining troll that yields/yielded Don’s power was about pedophilia (cf. PizzaGate troll that recruited many MAGA adherents to their Magus Donald due to the disgust it engendered, unjustifiably, about his main rival Hillary in the minds of those who fell for the PizzaGate troll).This is why the public cover up through ‘redaction’ of the Epstein files goes to the core of Don’s Mana/power.“The very trolls that Donald Trump has relied on since 2016, people like Jack Bysiobieck, people like Benny Johnson, people like Charlie Kirk while he was still alive….There’s this whole group of trolls and they have been instrumental to Donald Trump’s ability to grab attention and refocus it somewhere else…In other words, these people, so long as social media, so long as Twitter is viable, they have been able to swamp the public’s fear with Trump’s b******t and in the process drown out other things.‘A new report by Reuters uncovered that in the first half of this year alone, President Trump’s family has raked in more than $800 million from sales of crypto assets. This on top of potentially billions more in unrealized on paper gains.’Now, much of this cash has been coming in from foreign sources, which doesn’t come as a surprise when we factor in.So they are an instrumental tool to Donald Trump, to his ability to be able to be always the center of tension, but ensure that it’s the kind of, you know, ensure that he can direct the attention where he wants it to be.‘Mr. President, why wait for Congress to release the Epstein files? Why not just do it now?’Donald: ‘I think you are a terrible reporter. You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter.’Those trolls, that troll in the effort, is fundamentally tied to conspiracy theories about pedophilia.Fake worrying about pretend pedophiles is an easy way[…]…He relies on these trolls. These trolls rely on conspiracy theories about pedophilia. He installs these trolls as the FBI director and deputy director, and he’s stuffed.And then when he tries to make it go away in July, he can’t, those trolls at first, even the Psobe act…What happened is that he threatened those same trolls, the same trolls his power utterly lies on, and they stopped chasing Epstein. But by that point, it has this weight and salience throughout the MAGAbase…[Don’s chief of staff Wiles is] the same woman who’s telling us there’s no ‘there there’s inside the Epstein files, is also telling us it’s not central to Donald Trump’s power, which not only was it up to the moment in July when he tries to shut it all down, but if you look at what has happened since July, if you look at the way effectively Democrats plus Tom Massey plus Marjorie Taylor Greene have been able to take the speaker’s gavel away from Mike Johnson over and over and over again, it is fundamental to his power right now. “ [From Ball of Thread: Young Playboys Gone Wiles, 19 Dec 2025This material may be protected by copyright.]⚡️Trolls are energy (Mana) that only moves when we share them.Then, we become the troll.The informational unit (Troll) consumes us as it instrumentalises us to keep it in motion.Like a virus hacking our mind, the troll uses us to keep their troll moving.Ruschia’s Nordic troll monarch Putler is very successful at provoking us into doing his mental work.We are the petrol fuelling the troll, even when we disagree with its content.That’s the point of trolls like Nigel Porridge, in fact. Their oligarch backers pay to promote their trolls. Then, by reacting and perpetuating the trolls, we fuel and energise that which we think we’re opposing.We become the Useful I***** of Useful I******.One solution I’ve found if I must talk about Nigel Porridge or the Chef Wanger Nazi, the Chef of Disinfolklore, of the Chief Sorcerer Putler is to corrupt their monikers.⚡️Biden Resolved Perennial Plight of the Sorcerer - Can Starmer?Two aging Sorcerers: Deva Biden vs. Asura / Danava Dæmon Donald. Fighting for power (Mana) / Sovereignty over our world. Both Sorcerers know their mantic powers (Mana) fade further and further with every dawn. Both have apprentices. How can they know the right moment to empower their apprentice? How can they be certain that, once empowered with all their Magus Master Monarch’s Magic, the Apprentice won’t destroy their Master/Magister?How can the Magister/Master immunise themself against treachery by their Minister/Apprentice, should they stand down?The Plight of the Sorcerer from the first moment Indo-European patriarchal Monarchy began in eastern Ukraine.The complication is always some variation of: What if I convey my Mana to my Apprentice Magus, and then they use my own Mana against me? How do I immunise myself from my ambitious minister/apprentice?Sorcerer Donald tried to solve his plight, by hanging his Apprentice Magus Pence (out to dry) on Jan 6.“Pence’s former counsel, told the panel that Pence refused to get into the vehicle after being evacuated from the Capitol, raising concerns that the driver would have taken him to a secure location & thus prevent him from certifying the electoral results.” Then Sorcerer Donald was convinced by Sorcerer Thiel and Musk to take on their Apprentice Magus Vance, in return for immunity, and $1b+ - a true Devils’ bargain: Yet, of course, Donald doesn’t trust Vance. A dæmon recognises other dæmon’s and their apprentices from 1,000 paces. Donald, once again, like a folktale ingenue has made the same mistake: his apprentice, he’s sure, will betray him.By contrast, Sorcerer Biden chose his apprentice from good stock. Apprentice Magus Harris was as loyal as Magus Pence had been to Sorcerer Donald. Wise Sorcerer Biden, unlike Sorcerer Donald, knew the right time to pass on the Right to her. And it is done.Contrast too how Sorcerer Putler dealt with his Apprentice Magus the Chef of Disinfolklore Prighozin himself: England’s anti-mask pro-Covid Sovereign gave his mother Long Covid:She dies. He gets Sovereignty over all the English as a result.Shakespeare loved a good succession battle. Brown agreed a devil’s bargain with Blair, lost his soul over Iraq, then lost Mana (power) almost as soon as he managed to get rid of Blair. Ségolène Royal and Francois Hollande, similarly, destroyed each other. Starmer, current UK PM’s popularity’s in minus figures (manifestly unfairly in my humble opinion). Yet, Ed Miliband his predecessor’s popularity among party members is above 40%. Can Starmer effect a transfer of the crown, before his unpopularity leaves the way open for pro-Russia “Reform” party? This remains to be seen. Ireland’s former prime minister Leo Vradaker, similarly, was unpopular. He surrendered power / mana to one of his deputies, who then did well in the subsequent general election.On and on, back as far as Indo-European culture’s first empire the Hittites, we have seen issues with Magisters unwilling to surrender power/mana. After 500 years, around 1,200 BCE Hittite destroyed itself over how to pass on power (Mana).Resolving the Plight of the Sorcerer is THE trickiest magical trick any Indo-European sovereign faces. Doing so is, perhaps, President Biden’s greatest achievement. ⚡️State of Donald’s Mana - Post Kamala Update.Donald’s power / Mana depends 100% on his value to America’s top 20 oligarchs. Only value is Donald’s electability.Donald’s *x’aranah / Mana is a creation of our media space controlled as it is by 20 oligarchs.Once Donald’s chance of election affects these supporters, Donald falls to earth, as Ancient Iran’s Lord of Death Yima did.In Iran’s ancient Avesta it is said of the Lord of Death Yima (who corresponds to Odin in Germanic cultures - for whom our Wednesday is named - and Donn in pre-Christian Ancient Ireland): “For a long time Yima holds the ‘sovereign empire over all the lands,’ and his reign, of untold prosperity, is protected by the *x’aranah / Mana / fake polling data, those marks of divine election which guarantees and expresses the legitimacy of a king. But one day he commits a sin. According to the single passage that mentions it in the remaining Avesta, the sin is lying: Donald’s extraordinary prosperity, Yast 19,33 says emphatically, lasted until ‘he lied,’ until he ‘began to think the lying word, contrary to truth.’”Etymologically “truth” corresponds to what “is. That which exists, is positive and not illusory.”“Rtá” is opposed to “drúh” in the ancient Indian Vedic language. “Arta” is opposed to “druj” in the ancient Iranian Avestan language.The idea and form of the signifier “Art” as that which is created which reveals truth stems from this.In the language of Darius’s inscriptions, drauga, the “lie,” is essentially the attitude of rebels, of usurpers or potential usurpers who deceive the people by pretending to he “king” in place of Darius himself (Darius I (522–486 bce) founded the Achmenaid Empire that ruled Judea, Greece, and other lands for 300 years).No-one wants to back a loser, especially the billionaire anti-loser class.⚡️Tulsi’s Nuclear Disinfolklore TrollingTo remind myself why this relates to what we’re going to talk about today, which is Tulsi Gabbard’s meme. James, I’m 100% comfortable with you using the term meme. I use the term meme interchangeably with the term informational unit in my work, and also with the term troll — where troll describes the item of Disinfolklore, the item of information. Meme for me is more than simply a visual image, which is what we’ve come to think of it as. When the term was coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, it described informational units — what I call informational units — which are communicated in cultures in the same way that genes are communicated biologically. So I’m very comfortable with that.I discovered Disinfolklore as a narrative form in eastern Ukraine, where I gradually realised, while working in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, that what I was looking at — particular items of Disinfolklore, particular memes, particular units of information, the quotidian daily ebb and flow of news — there was a system behind it. I began to look more deeply and realised that in Russian military strategy, they have this idea of information confrontation, which has two elements: the means, which is the instances of information, and the information environment. That’s one path to what I now call a Disinfolklore galaxy — which is what Russia created inside Russia-occupied Ukraine, where every thought you have, every movement you make, every aspect of your reality, from where you work to how you get there, to the people you talk to, whether family or colleagues — every aspect is injected with Disinfolklore. Ideas meld with the actual texture of your life. Unless you profess certain memes, certain beliefs, certain informational units — if you get them wrong, you’ll lose your job. You’ll be like that ABC journalist who called Stephen Miller full of hate and lost his job. A perfect example of how the information environment impacts every aspect of your life.That’s eastern Ukraine, where I discovered what I now call the Disinfolklore galaxy. The Disinfolklore universe is made up of many different galaxies. The MAGA Disinfolklore galaxy has many continuities, many similarities with what I saw in Russia-occupied Ukraine. Then I had this vision in early November 2024, just after the election, that what had happened to those who are part of MAGA was going to happen to all of humanity and all of America first. This became the talk I made at the Pirate Party conference in Munich during the Munich Security Conference: “Welcome to Our Disinfolklore Universe.”Now we see this same melding of reality in everything to do with America’s relationship to Ukraine, which is primarily why we’re here — we’re interested in Ukraine and Ukraine winning. We’re hoping against hope, and I think most of us understand it’s never going to happen that America would tip the scales in favour of Ukraine. Now we’re just hoping it doesn’t tip them against Ukraine. Ukraine has been central to US politics since 2016 and the Republican National Convention in August 2016, when Paul Manafort — whose work led directly to this war in Ukraine, and who was imprisoned for operating as an unregistered agent for Ukraine’s former president — had the commitment to support Ukraine militarily taken out of the Republican National Convention’s platform.I’ve posted before about the exact moment when MAGA went pro-Russia. Now we’ve seen reported in the last couple of days — Reuters reported two days ago, and Hegseth actually said it in Congress yesterday — that there’s evidence the United States would not fund Ukraine militarily next year. We see this path from an extraordinary secret act, which caused a fuss when publicised, to now being mainstreamed and just one of thousands of different memes invading our information space. The totality of all of these makes up what I call the Disinfolklore galaxy.That’s my main teaching, for want of a less grand word: when we’re tuned into individual memes and informational units day to day, what is actually being arranged around us is a Disinfolklore galaxy, just as powerful as that which surrounds and embeds and encapsulates the people who went MAGA and the people in our own lives who we know went MAGA. It’s nothing about intelligence or education or learning. It’s a deliberate attempt to hack people’s brains and minds, to surround them in what the Russians call an information environment in which all of these different memes are operating all the time to ensure we do or don’t do what those creating it want us to do.I bring up Paul Manafort because he is the dark force behind much of the division in Ukraine between 2004 and 2014. The irony of the people he worked for and MAGA claiming that the Maidan was a US-engineered coup — when the very person who supported Yanukovych, who according to his daughters’ texts we saw publicly, arranged the massacre on the Maidan in February 2014. At the time, the current Polish foreign minister was in Kyiv trying to tell the demonstrators, along with Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, to pipe down and make a deal with Yanukovych. But Yanukovych fled. And Paul Manafort now works for Donald Trump. We don’t see him in the public light, but we did see him at the National Convention last time. What we see now with Tulsi Gabbard’s video about nuclear war has all the hallmarks of this same playbook.That’s the link between Ukraine and America — a multi-layered link. On the positive side, we have the one force in the world who can actually confront and defeat this: President Zelensky. That’s the overall conception of how my Disinfolklore perspective helps me understand what is currently going on in the United States — these demonstrations by the president, illegal orders trying to create Disinfolklore which affects the minds of ordinary citizens who don’t know which way to go. Tulsi Gabbard is throwing in with her nuclear speech a very potent weapon — a statement of intention, is how I read it — with her idea that elites don’t care about nuclear war because they’ve got shelters.I have the Disinfolklore universe — “Welcome to Our Disinfolklore Universe” — the speech I made in Munich at the Pirate Party conference. Note, the Pirate Party itself is an example of the unreal melding with the real. They always had an intuitive sense — just as Elon Musk dresses up in superhero costumes — pirates from literature, from art, became part of their moniker. The folk heroes of pirates. They were going to be the pirates. So it was appropriate that I made the speech there. Since then, I’ve worked carefully on detailing the whole idea: the Disinfolklore narrative form and Disinfolklore Analytical Method, many different things concerning the Disinfolklore universe.Today, when I saw Tulsi Gabbard’s Nuclear Ashes speech, I decided to apply the method — the Twelve-Tool method, an algorithm we can learn in our own minds to interpret any informational unit, any meme, whether it’s a photograph or a picture. We see them sometimes in the English information space, and we’re probably seeing them in Northern Ireland at the moment, where there are riots because two alleged immigrants have allegedly attempted rape. As a result, we see tumult and communal riots. This is a perennial theme in Disinfolklore and indeed in Indo-European thought: outsiders, immigrants, come into the inner realm and affect its fertility. It’s either the sovereignty, the security, or the fertility — always one of those three themes. These are the essential archetypes in Indo-European societies, according to the great theorists of Indo-European language, linguistics and religion. Since I realised this, we can use it as a tool for analysing whether it’s riots in Ballymena in Northern Ireland. I haven’t looked into it yet, but it won’t surprise me if Telegram is somehow involved in stirring this hatred.I decided to apply the method because it should be useful for us to understand what Tulsi Gabbard is doing. We see it — it comes up on our Twitter feed. This is what I’m trying to do. I’m not trying to write academic theses. I’m trying to understand what the people leading our communities are doing or trying to do, whether in Ukraine, whether it’s the Russians. The Russians show us where this leads, because they’ve created this nightmare inside Russia, as has the CCP and North Korea and Iran — communities deeply embedded in Disinfolklore, where they use these stories to hack the minds of their population.I applied the method to the Tulsi Gabbard video because it’s archetypal Disinfolklore, really what she’s doing there. The moment I saw the aesthetics, I thought of a video a Ukrainian friend from eastern Ukraine sent me about a year into the war — a really strange artefact. She was asking me what I made of it. She didn’t really understand it, but she felt attracted by it. It was a man in a very 1970s aesthetic, like we might remember from the news in the 1970s, but he was talking about ultra-hypermodern things — how war in Ukraine was going to lead to an environmental catastrophe, and really we should be focused on global warming. The aesthetics of Tulsi’s video reminded me of this, because it communicated this mood of darkness, like being in a forest, of just feeling off. It’s so cynically and carefully produced — even her hair.I haven’t paid much attention to her because I try to control what enters my mind. This is in fact the first time I’ve probably ever watched anything consciously by her. But to see this grey hair strand, reminiscent of Lily Munster from *The Munsters* — it’s deliberate archetyping as a witch. To put us in that space, our minds in this negative space. And then the imagery flashed up: the darkness of the background aesthetics, then the imagery of ashes. To someone like me who tries to control what goes into my mind, this came out of nowhere. I don’t understand what prompted it in terms of the news cycle. Is she responding to something? Or is this an artefact pumped into our space? Either way, it is a very deliberate announcement, in my interpretation, of what we see going on — the activation of the National Guard, the military parade in DC — that she is announcing that this coup, which they have been prosecuting since the 2020 election results were first disputed, they’re really going for it now. They’re not happy with how things are going.I applied the Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy tool — Tool 1 — and got to this idea of her deliberately archetyping herself as a witch-like figure, like Lily Munster, with the wisp of grey hair, and the archetypes of nuclear war, ashes, elites. It’s replete with archetypes.The Incoming/Outgoing Troll Radars — Tool 2 — should obviously always be switched on when you’re on Twitter, because everything there could be a troll designed to affect our emotions and hack our rational thought processes. The overall idea Gabbard’s video communicates is fear, a negative mood which has the power to overcome our radars, so that we allow this in — even just wondering, “Why is she talking about nuclear ashes?” It goes into our inner mind, and we start getting worried. This triggers different thought routines and traumas, deliberately provoked by the aesthetics, the mood, the words, her expression, the strangeness of this coming from the head of sixteen national intelligence agencies. This is as deep state as you get. And here she is archetyping herself as not part of the elite — who she says have nuclear bomb shelters and are therefore trying to spark a nuclear war. Which is itself nonsense, because just because you’ve got a shelter doesn’t mean you’re going to spark a war.Tool 3 is looking for the mana in the meme — trying to find the energy. The energy is communicated through the mood, the darkness, the messaging. But what is she actually saying? I heard several discussions today about what she was saying, and people have different interpretations. It works on so many levels. But for me, the ultimate energy is a statement. Mana for me is an energy in memes. You look for what the energy is — the different levels, negative or positive, what it’s saying, what it’s doing, what’s the intention. For me, the intention is to say: “We are going to protect you. If you surrender to us, we’ll protect you from this nuclear war which the elite, the outer-realm people, want to start.” And for those of us who don’t fall for that, the message is: “We’re so powerful that there’s nothing you can do. You’re powerless. We’ll arrest you. The army will shoot you.”Tool 4 is the inner-outer realm immanences. Every item of Disinfolklore — whether it’s a picture of a dark-skinned individual ogling a classic European female, a trope I see often in the English information space — is about inner realm and outer realm. Migrants coming in to take away the fertility of the inner realm, the daughter of the inner-realm people. That’s really what the anti-migration discourse is doing — taking away the sense of security in our communities. This inner-outer realm immanence was deeply embedded in Gabbard’s message. It was a minute and twenty seconds long. But the main message is: there is an elite who have nuclear bomb shelters, who will be protected, and they are the ones stirring nuclear war. She could easily have said this is Russia, this is the CCP. But she didn’t. She left it open to interpretation — which in itself, from my perspective, is a statement that she and the people she works for are all working together, whether it’s her boss, the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans. All nuclear powers. She could have said they were the ones threatening us — a Ronald Reagan-type stance, or an axis-of-evil framing. But she didn’t. She left it to the MAGA interpretation. This has been built on decades of this idea, especially in America, of cities as lawless lands, where the MAGA base lives in safe communities. The people I know, my relatives who’ve gone MAGA, are quite wealthy and safe, but even from a young age they’ve been going on about how unsafe the cities are. What’s happening in the information space about LA is built on decades of this outer-realm idea.Tool 5 is the idea I got from the Dalai Lama and the great psychologist Paul Ekman, who did this amazing work available online called the Atlas of Emotions. They have this system, which I adapt into the Disinfolklore Analytical Method: Trigger, Experience, Reaction. Any of the emotional journeys we go on each day — thousands, millions perhaps — whether scrolling down our timeline or in real life with work, spouses, children, pets, or walking down the street as stimuli bounce off us. All of us who are experts in filtering and responding to information — we may not understand how amazing we are at this now, simply from being on Twitter. We have so many algorithms in our mind to filter things out. But ultimately, we’re being taken on oodles of emotional journeys.In the Ekman–Dalai Lama model: there’s a trigger, we experience a feeling — disgust, sadness, one of the five emotions — and then we react. The message is that once you separate the experience from the reaction, you can avoid falling for the troll or sharing it. We talked last time about the conference in Moscow, where famous people have gone, and many of us shared pictures of them — which, from my perspective, is part of the purpose of the conference. We react to the experience by sharing it.With the Tulsi Gabbard video, the experience I had was curiosity. My reaction is this monologue. As soon as I saw it, I thought: let me apply the Disinfolklore Analytical Method.The other six tools — the Code of Positive Trolls — I won’t go through now. But the most important one for me here was Generosity. There was nothing generous in what she was saying. Nothing positive. It wasn’t even a cynical attempt to please us. It was a cynical attempt to put us at dis-ease. For that reason, it’s a perfect example of Disinfolklore — as indeed is what we see when Russia sends missiles into Ukraine and then broadcasts the footage, or conducts human safaris, which we talked about the other week when the UN reports came out, where they’re using Telegram to send FPV drone footage. They’re boasting about it. They’re creating Disinfolklore.This is the same thing I saw in eastern Ukraine, where reality — the pictures of burning cars in a tiny area of LA — is being used repeatedly by the mainstream media as a pretext to create what I call the Disinfolklore galaxy, to really depressing ends, unless more of us wake up to it.First in series:Previous episode: Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe

Archetyping is a very important aspect of Disinfolklore as an analytical method. And archetypal Disinfolklore literacy is the first tool in the Disinfolklore Analytical Methods handbook. So you won’t be surprised to find that I’m starting today with MAGA archetyping Ukraine and Europe as weak.The US is trying to archetype Europe as weak, yet it’s led by a guy who can’t stop sleeping. We had this fantastic photo of Rubio looking over at Donald and seeing that he was basically asleep at this press conference. Weak. MAGA followers like Donald archetype Ukraine as weak and Russia as strong. Meanwhile, Ukraine deals with 7,000 tactical Russian drones and 600 strategic Russian drones daily while attacking Russia with similar quantities in ways which America, NATO collectively, nor any NATO country individually, between 1945 and today, could ever do. Now America is trying to archetype Europe as weak — in the same way that Russia archetypes Ukraine and Europe as weak, in their view, as a woman.We remember Putler referring to this hard rock song from the Soviet era, by a band called Red Mould, on February 20th, 2022: “Sleeping Beauty in a coffin — I went up and effed her.” As the New Lines Institute noted in its first genocide report, this was evidence of genocidal intent because it was archetyping — they didn’t use the word archetype — Ukraine as a woman, as a corpse, and as the victim of necrophiliac rape. What America is now doing to Europe is what Russia has been doing to Europe and to Ukraine. They’re attempting this through the National Security Strategy, but also through figures like Jamie Dimon, a well-named chap, who referred to Europe as a weak continent. It’s this strongman-versus-weak dialectic, which Ruth Ben-Ghiat has been brilliant at helping us see through.The implication of this archetyping is that 27 individual EU states acting unilaterally would somehow be strong. Of course they don’t think that, because we’ve heard today the long version of the National Security Strategy in which several countries — Hungary, Italy, and a couple of others, and I don’t think Italy will be happy to be part of this — will be privileged by American attention, while all the other European countries will be consigned to the gulag, basically.The shame of allying with child-stealing Russia, which can’t even protect itself, and China run by another weakling. The stance of a jealous spouse who won’t let their wife speak to other males. Weak. How they’re archetyping Europe is that they don’t want individual European countries to talk to anyone else.Today we see reported in the *Washington Post* by David Ignatius, who I’ve never paid any attention to. I instantly archetyped him in my mind from seeing him. I have a subscription to the *Washington Post*, so I see him there all the time: “I’ll answer all your questions on Ukraine.” I’ve never been tempted for a second to dive in. And boy, was my intuition confirmed today when I see his breathless reporting, clearly from inside Donald’s gangster Russian-mafia circles, about their breathless chutzpah of a deal where they think for a second that Ukraine will surrender Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant to the Russians and let the Americans oversee it, as if that’s some sort of sweetener.After the thousands of people who have been murdered, raped, kidnapped by Russia using ZNPP and Enerhodar — and I was the environmental security focal point for the OSCE for Zaporizhzhia, I covered Enerhodar, I met Mayor Orlov — some of us might remember him pleading with the international community in early March as Enerhodar’s native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainian residents tried to stop the might of the Russian army by erecting roadblocks. I’ve felt the Enerhodar occupation quite personally — obviously not even a millionth as much as the people there, the Ukrainians. But just the idea that these criminals, these gangsters would come in and offer Russia ZNPP — it’s absolutely preposterous. It would only happen in another universe. And obviously, given my framing of Disinfolklore, where I talk about in my Munich speech last February — which is the second part of today’s episode — how my fear was that the United States and Donald and Russia would collude to project all of us into the kind of Disinfolklore universe that I saw Russia projecting Ukrainians into in Russia-occupied Luhansk, when I worked and lived and travelled there daily between 2015 and 2018. This is my overarching interpretation of what we see now going on with this ridiculous peace process.The Ignatius article today — apart from the chutzpah of thinking Ukraine is going to give up the largest nuclear power plant in Europe — they think the European Union is going to admit Ukraine next year because America says it, or that the European Union is going to give up this money so that Russia can reconstitute itself. A Marshall Plan for Russia.I first tweeted about this troll in November 2022, when so-called Russian liberals — the so-called Russian opposition — let it be known that they wanted a Marshall Plan for Russia. That was on the 23rd of November 2022. I often talk in Disinfolklore, and in the analytical method, about characters. So we have this character of a Marshall Plan for Russia. They obviously believe in this, and now Donald and his criminal gangster mafia cronies have taken this troll and are now trying to use it to troll Europe and Ukraine into paying Russia for its destruction.As I mentioned last week, the European Parliament’s recent very stiff resolution against Donald’s and Russia’s 28-point plan rightly calls upon Russia to repay all the material and immaterial harm and damage. These are legal terms: the material damage — the 500 billion in infrastructure damage and counting — but then the trillions, I calculate back of the envelope, in trauma and inconvenience and death. It’s called quantum in law. You look at when someone has suffered a tort, when an individual has suffered a wrong, and 42 million Ukrainians have suffered a tort, and each of them has an individual claim for compensation.Quite apart from anything else, what they are trying to do with this breathless reporting by this clown Ignatius — who clearly has no genuine expertise, who holds himself up as an expert on Ukraine but is now so seduced by his access to Donald’s entourage that he can breathlessly report this stuff as if it’s normal — when we have these laws and very fixed ideas of wrong, when we have the European Court of Human Rights judgment establishing Russia’s culpability, the Council of Europe chamber established to try Russia for the crime of aggression. We have the legal basis for Russia’s culpability and financial liability. And then we have Donald and his cronies trying to create this Disinfolklore universe where up is archetyped as down, where it’s a bit like the First World War — “right and wrong on both sides” — whereas of course this war is like the Second World War.I always remember going to my old Cambridge college, going into the chapel. We were shown the book commemorating all of the college members who died during the First War, as they refer to it. And there are German names there — the German aristocracy would send their children to be educated at Cambridge, even back in those days. Then the person showing me around showed me the condolences book for the Second War and pointed out that there are no German names in it. Not that there weren’t German college members who died, but they fought on the other side. As they said, the Second War was a different kind of war. As indeed is this one.What Donald and this entire saga we’ve been going through, quite apart from everything else, is an attempt to re-archetype this war as something akin to the First World War — right on both sides. And the chutzpah of them taking this call by the so-called Russian opposition — we can trace this meme from the 23rd of November 2022 when I first picked it up. We can trace it from there through into the Kremlin, because of course the so-called opposition are just surrogates and proxies to air preposterous ideas, like Russia gets its Marshall Plan. Which of course it got during the Second World War, and then again after 1991. And then it goes from the Kremlin straight into the Russian-mafia-adjacent coterie of people like Kushner. Who is this guy? It’s just preposterous that the greatest community of human beings ever assembled in the history of humanity — America — should be led by this group of ne’er-do-wells. But my job is to help elucidate what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.The Marshall Plan element is one character, but I also talk about trolls as characters — following them through stories and memes, tracing their trajectories, just as we would in a fairy tale or Netflix series or a great novel. We get to know these characters and their characteristics so that when they pop up again in a later scene or a later episode of Disinfolklore, we recognise them immediately. This is a skill we all have from listening to Volya Radio — from listening to Mokrushyna’s stories. She has a fantastic memory for these characters which pop up again.The other perennial character in Russian Disinfolklore since the beginning of the war is trying to archetype its full-scale invasion as somehow akin to Korea. The Korea scenario has popped up again and again. I’ve written about it quite a few times. It initially appeared very early in the war when it became clear that what Russia was trying to do was divide Ukraine into two — it wanted the left bank of the Dnipro River. It didn’t really care about legal ownership of the right bank; it was quite happy to let it be. The story Russia was planting this aim through was by talking about what it called the Korea scenario.In March 2022, I wrote about it, where Budanov first revealed that the Korea scenario for Ukraine meant Russia would occupy all of left-bank Ukraine, including Odesa and the entire sea coast. Somehow normalised. Then it transmuted — in September 2022, the *Wall Street Journal*: “Ukraine war gives North Korea reasons to draw closer to Russia. Pyongyang plans to send labourers to eastern Ukraine.” Again, a very clever way of infringing on Ukraine’s sovereignty and sneaking it into the *Wall Street Journal* as if it’s normalised.We all laughed when we saw Russia was getting 40% of its ammo from North Korea. Then I discovered — I think it was Jay in Kyiv who revealed — that the GDP of North Korea is $18 billion. That same week, I read that Taylor Swift’s world tour had added $5 billion to the United States’ GDP. So basically, three North Koreas is a Taylor Swift tour. That was my way of counter-archetyping how ridiculous it was that Russia was relying on North Korea for its ammo. Then of course the Kursk invasion, 10,000 North Korean soldiers.Now we have this perennial troll popping up again in Ignatius’s breathless article. He’s straight reporting what’s in the peace plan — trying to normalise the division of a modern nation state into two parts along the lines of North Korea and South Korea, archetyping it as somehow tragic, unavoidable. Giving people a meme so they can just go, “Oh well, Ukraine should just give it up because it’s going to be like North and South Korea.” These villages and hromadas, these communities where I visited and was shown European-standard schools between 2018 and 2022 when I worked out of the Dnipro office of the OSCE — they’re just going to become some sort of no-person’s land. And somehow the Europeans will be like American mercenaries, as they were in Afghanistan, holding the Ukrainians back from regaining their land. The whole thing is preposterous.But the positive thing I take from it is how united and outspoken European powers are — all European countries. This is unconscious counter-archetyping by Europe, by the European Union, by Britain, France and Germany, when they saw the National Security Strategy. You think in your MAGA, America First Disinfolklore that Europe is weak, but you literally don’t have the power to get Ukraine into the European Union in 2027. Maybe there is a secret deal, but I suspect there isn’t, because there’s a process, and many of us are very frustrated how slow it’s taking. The idea that America and Russia can shoehorn Ukraine into the European Union so that then presumably Russia thinks it can take over Ukraine and cause more trouble — it’s absolutely preposterous.I wrote before about how this whole peace process is Donald selling skyscrapers he doesn’t own. Then a jokey thing about FIFA demanding Donald returns his peace prize because of war breaking out in Thailand and Cambodia. I felt slightly guilty about that because it’s no laughing matter, but he did say he had solved it — apparently Ukraine.We saw this perennial troll popping up again yesterday — America wanting President Zelensky to hold elections. President Zelensky said, okay, sure, we need a ceasefire and security guarantees. This has popped up since January 2018 and was very much in the air throughout 2017. I remember this vividly because a colleague — an ex-British Army colleague — and I, in occupied Luhansk City at the time where I was working, did the maths on how much it would cost to run free and fair elections according to OSCE standards in Russia-occupied Luhansk and Donetsk, over hundreds of polling stations. This is even apart from trying to get one and a half million Ukrainians who Russia had expelled, who were forcibly transferred, back into the occupied territory so they could vote. The cost in materiel and forces would have been about one and a half billion dollars. The idea of Western countries paying that amount was preposterous — there just wasn’t enough interest in Ukraine. Therefore you couldn’t have these elections, and that became the big sticking point in Paris in December 2019, when President Zelensky said no and made fun of Putler at their one and only meeting, when Zelensky was supposed to agree to the Steinmeier Formula — under which Ukraine would allow Russia to hold elections inside Russia-occupied Ukraine before Russia gave Ukraine back control of its borders. That deal failed.The elections troll has popped up again and again. All of us will remember three or four times since the full-scale invasion, including articles by Masha Gessen in *The New Yorker*, trying to archetype President Zelensky as the dictator — when of course Russia is the dictatorship that has never had free and fair elections, never in its history. It pops up again even yesterday. We can never really sleep when these things pop up perennially. And let’s not forget: these are January 6th insurrection supporters calling for illegal elections during wartime in Ukraine.One aspect of the National Security Strategy which tickled me was the use of the term “civilisational.” Some of you will be aware of my Power of Mana and Finding Manuland work, where I dig back into 6,000 years of discernible Indo-European history to interpret quotidian data. Huntington’s 1993 book *The Clash of Civilizations* interestingly mentions Crimea and quotes Zhirinovsky. I came across it when I was doing research in 2015–2016, looking at early warning signals of an invasion of Crimea by Russia, because I didn’t anticipate it. There are these little breadcrumbs, and one was in Huntington’s book.For those who don’t know, the clash of civilisations thesis posits that the choice for humanity is between Christianity and Islam — those are the two civilisations. But as I’ve demonstrated throughout my work in Power of Mana, Islam is an Indo-European religion whose content was generated mainly in Iran, an Indo-European culture. As indeed is Christianity, generated in a place under Roman occupation where the lingua franca was Greek, in Judea — an area which had had Indo-European rulers for 1,500 years at the time of Christ. We know this from the Amarna letters of 1400 BCE, which reference Indo-European-named rulers in Canaan and Judea. The idea of Christianity being somehow a distinct civilisation in itself, rather than just a new layer of an Indo-European tradition succeeded and complemented by others like Islam or Buddhism, gives us a means of seeing through these trolls.Whoever wrote the National Security Strategy read this book as an undergraduate and hasn’t really thought about it since. But for them, it’s their big idea. And of course this goes back to the culture war troll — the political strategy invented by Pat Buchanan in 1991. New wine in old bottles, because he was doing the “divide the Democrats” stuff in the early 1970s, which came out in Watergate. But the culture war troll, which he announced at the Republican National Convention in 1991: a cultural war between conservatives and mystical traditionalists on one side versus the transnational cosmopolitan elite on the other. Academics then spent fifteen years trying to discover whether this was a real thing, and they could find nothing apart from people who self-identified as culture warriors. He wasn’t describing a reality — he was creating one.Pat Buchanan wrote a piece very important for my intellectual development, on December 17th, 2013 — a few months before Russia invaded Crimea — called “Putin’s Paleo-Conservative Moment.” In it, he praises Putin’s vision, writing: “As the decisive struggle in the second half of the 20th century was vertical — East versus West — the 21st century struggle may be horizontal, with conservatives and traditionalists in every country arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.” This is the declaratory war which unites Putler and the people around Donald, the people around J.D. Vance. This is why they’re so obsessed with talking about civil war in Europe. They see the whole of Europe as militantly secular, multicultural, transnational elite — even though, ironically, J.D. Vance is married to someone of Indian heritage and Donald keeps marrying people from Europe. But the truth isn’t what matters here. It’s the organising fiction, the rhetorical fiction, and now it’s part of the National Security Strategy. So we see this troll popping up again.I call Donald “Druidy Don.” The Druids were the priestly class in Celtic religion, pre-Christian, akin to the Brahmin in India, and the Flamines — notice the M-N sound in both Brahmin and Flamines — in Roman society. It was out of that tradition that the idea of Christ and the self-sacrificing first king arose. We saw President Zelensky meeting the Pope in Rome the other day. I call him Druidy Don because he’s druidic in the sense of truthiness — he does connect with people’s minds and persuade them of things they otherwise wouldn’t have believed. He’s leading society, which is what the Brahmin in India, the Flamines in Rome, and the Druids in Ireland and Pretani did. Pretani was the ancient name for the island of Britain. The Romans sadly wiped out the Celts — apart from the Welsh, basically. The Celts in Scotland came from Irish Celtic immigrants, and the name Scotland comes from Scota, the original name for Ireland.Every news broadcast for the past week or two has been talking about peace talks. But all of us understand this is not about peace talks. I am, and I know many of us are, on the edge of our seats in some senses. But in other senses, we’ve seen this rodeo before and understand what’s going on. I have one of many different ways of interpreting data in real time. I call it the Disinfolklore Analytical Method. There’s a particular version of it which I worked on for six months before I revealed it in my Munich speech. I’ve never actually spoken the whole speech properly before, so I thought today I would do about half of it, then we can talk, and next week I’ll do the other half and move on to truth and sovereignty — core concepts with very deep origins in our psyche and language. They’re no longer abstract. As an international lawyer, I studied sovereignty in that sense, but here we hear Rubio talking about sovereignty — and what he really means is Ukraine can sacrifice its territorial integrity. We hear the Irish government and others using these three terms: sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity. We also hear Donald and Witkoff appealing to prosperity — Ukraine can lose its territorial integrity but be prosperous in ten years.And then we see America and Russia colluding in the most bizarre fashion, as if the European Union isn’t the largest trade bloc on the planet and the most powerful group of countries ever to assemble in a free alliance. They’re attempting to archetype Russia as somehow not on the hook for the 500 billion in material damage it owes — but also the trillions in psychological and traumatic damage.In municipal law — the law in America, Ireland, Ukraine — if you’re found liable for tort, for doing someone wrong, you run them over, you kill the breadmaker in the family, then you’re liable for damages. This applies just as much to Russia and the 42 million Ukrainians who have had their lives turned upside down. Every Ukrainian has a cause of action which can be determined. There will be formulas. It will take years. But they are all entitled to financial compensation for the stress and trauma that Russia has caused them.I note the European Parliament resolution — an extremely strong resolution, a real resolution compared to this so-called peace process — underlines the settled will of the European people, the 400 million people in Europe and their political representatives. Opposite this, you have a very small group of Americans — Donald’s son-in-law, no idea what this character is doing. Once we saw the Kushner character reappearing on stage, we knew something was up. In Disinfolklore Analytical Method, we follow characters. The way he is described in mainstream news broadcasts, it’s as if it’s the most natural thing in the world for the president’s son-in-law to be there. The very same people who drove us nuts over the Hunter Biden troll for eight years — over the alleged skewing of American policy, even though Hunter Biden had never been to Ukraine — seem to have no problem seeing Kushner suddenly appearing as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.On the one side, we have this bizarre soap opera which has taken over America — this Russian-mafia-adjacent group of people who have sadly taken over the United States and have the chutzpah to think they can also take over Ukraine, when Ukraine has the most powerful military in Europe. An extraordinary and laughable situation in many respects. On the other hand, you have real power: the European Parliament resolution and the European Commission.Let me talk about this story which came up last Friday — America’s recognition of Russia-occupied parts of Ukraine. I wrote a piece on this straight away because we may see this character popping up again, this perennial troll. I had three thoughts.First: good luck determining which areas Russia occupies. Good luck getting Putler to agree with Donald which parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Russia actually physically occupies — never mind the parts it doesn’t occupy but claims. The front line, as we all know, but which low-information people probably haven’t registered yet, is a grey zone of 30 to 50 kilometres with sparsely spread Ukrainian and Russian forces along an 1,800-kilometre-long frontier. Putler’s supreme general was recently shown briefing him with a map showing areas of Ukraine that Russia does not, has not, and never will occupy. Putler recently said Russia occupies a town in Ukraine which doesn’t exist — we saw that from Sergei Sternenko last week. And yesterday Putler was talking about towns which don’t exist that Russia occupies. He’s trying to archetype Russia as strong and Ukraine as weak. America is leaning into this; we’re not, and Europe isn’t. Six weeks ago, Putler said Russia controlled Pokrovsk and Kupiansk — yet Russia doesn’t occupy those towns.Interestingly, I went onto the Information Warfare Initiative on YouTube today on DuckDuckGo — a browser with no cookies, blank from my perspective. All the suggested shows after Information Warfare Initiative were pro-Russia, talking about Ukraine’s disaster in Pokrovsk and such. That was quite revealing because one of my other daily sources, Denys Davydov — who I’ve got back into, he’s no longer a doomer and his political analysis is more incisive now — his suggested shows are all Times Radio, Jason Jay Smart. A completely different universe. It gave me an idea of the Disinfolklore ecosystem trying to promote these trolls that Russia currently occupies Pokrovsk and Kupiansk. The fact is, they don’t. Whether or not Putler believes they do — I tend to think he probably does.So we’re not even at the stage where people — and I hear President Macron talking about stabilising the current front lines. This doesn’t really worry me because it’s so removed from the reality of the front line. The wording they’re using is the same wording they used when they established the OSCE monitoring: “relying mainly on technical means to monitor the ceasefire.” But I myself would certify violations of the ceasefire and did so thousands of times. We had this formal mechanism and those legal papers exist. Agreeing on what constitutes a violation is virtually incomprehensible — Russia will never agree to the proper definitions. Anytime Russia threatened any Ukrainian inside the occupation, for instance, that would be a violation. A gun going off. This is why I have never been truly worried about this peace process — I didn’t think it was going to happen. The idea in the 28-point plan that you stabilise the lines is so complicated as to be virtually impossible at this point.Second point: America has a lot of power, but forcing Ukraine and the EU to recognise Russia’s destruction of the post-World War II legal order is beyond America’s power. Donald would be impeached. It would be the end of him or the end of America, and Americans get to choose which. This isn’t just about Ukraine recognising Crimea as Russia — it’s literally the end of the post-World War II legal order and the end of America as it was. It’s painted on the news as a big thing, but its implications are enormous.Third: recognising parts of Ukraine which Russia claims to occupy as Russian will convulse America’s relations with every country — Israel, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan — a hundred countries with border issues. Sixty million people died during the Second World War for the idea that territorial integrity is non-negotiable. That’s what Russia disrupted when it moved into Crimea in February 2014. For the United States as a permanent UN Security Council member to approve this has implications for every one of those countries. The embarrassment would transform America from being the world’s only indispensable ally into the enemy of the international legal order. As the European Parliament’s resolution states: the US and Russia’s 28-point peace plan raises legitimate concerns regarding the United States’ commitment to international law and the security of Europe and Ukraine.I’m not predicting that these issues will stop Donald and the war criminals and mafiosi he is operating with from doing this in America’s name. But it would be a world-changing event.I wanted to put that in context, because I suspect it is going to happen — we see this moving forward. So that’s what I had to say on this week’s events. Now I want to move into our Disinfolklore universe, because what is going on here is the mere talking — the rhetoric — that is creating what I call the Disinfolklore universe.We look at individual news items and perhaps fact-check them or defeat them or put them out of our minds. Sometimes they disappear, like the Alaska talks. But they exert a permanent change in our culture, psychology, information space and world. When people — and many of us probably agree — say the whole 28-point plan is an information attack, as Ukrainians talk about because they’re wiser about this than many of us, what they really mean is it exists to transform the Disinfolklore universe, which is our culture.In Disinfolklore Analytical Method, I’ve tried to forge new words and terms to describe what I see and how I see it, because otherwise we get trapped inside the vocabulary of the Russians — “disinformation” — or MAGA, with Donald’s archetyping of “truth” or “post-truth” or “truthiness.” I want to get outside what they’re trying to do and give us the tools to interpret it in real time.⚡️FIFA demands Donald returns Peace Prize.Now that war has broken out between Thailand and Cambodia, Donald’s peace price is in jeopardy.President Zelenskyy offered Donald a portion of Ukraine’s spoils - part of Siberia - to cheer the old buffer up.Last month Qatar politely asked Donald to return the gold 747 after Donald trolled Hamas terrorists to visit Qatar only for Israel to use US fighter jets to kill them.⚡️Ignominious Ignatious breathlessly falls for the troll⚡️America trolled by Russia’s ever-changing ‘Korea Scenario’ troll normalising genocide in Ukraine.Wash Post reports breathlessly Donald wants Russia to keep Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. Which Russia has used as a base to murder, torture, r*pe, fire missiles, drones against thousands of people.“It’s a Korea Scenario,” says Donald.Russia said in March 2022: we will divide Ukraine Korea style. Then Russia said in 2022 “we will import North Koreans into eastern Ukraine.”Then when Ukraine invaded Russia. Russia used 10,000 North Korean soldiers. Donald won Kursk back for Russia by halting intelligence sharing suddenly.Now America is colluding with a Russian troll that ‘normalises’ division of a sovereign country by saying it’s ‘just like Korea.’ More evidence of USA’s capture by Russia’s Mental Wars.⚡️Russian asset confiscation a warning to those engaged in War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity and the Crime of Aggression.If a country is found liable by ECrtHR for violations of human rights on the scale of Russia’s violations since its occupation of Crimea began in Feb 2014, then ALL overseas assets (including those of its oligarchs) are liable for confiscation.⚡️Hands off ZNPP ☢️America, Ruschia! Enerhodar is Ukraine. You don’t get to steal a nuclear power plant after using it as a base to murder and terrorise and kidnap thousands of Ukrainians.This is America’s most shameful moment since slavery.⚡️MAGA Archetyping Ukraine and ‘Europe’ as weak.US is trying to Archetype “Europe” as “Weak.” Yet, it’s led by a guy who can’t stop sleeping.Weak MAGA followers, like Donald, archetypes Ukraine as ‘Weak’ and Russia as ‘Strong.’Meanwhile, Ukraine deals with 7,000 tactical Russian drones and 600 strategic Russian drones daily, while attacking Russia with similar quantities in ways America 1945-2025 was too weak to even contemplate.Now, America is trying to archetype “Europe” as “Weak.” Jamie Dimon and that Undersecretary of State think a united Europe is ‘Weak’ whereas 27 individual states acting unilaterally would be ‘Strong’?!Of course they don’t think that! They’re playing mind games. They’re revealing their fears, their weaknesses, and America’s shame. The shame of allying with childstealing Russia which can’t even protect itself and China (run by another weakling)!The stance of a jealous spouse who won’t let their wife speak to other males. Weak.⚡️When America states that it wants to “restore Europe’s civilisational confidence” Donald’s apparatchiks mean: we want Hand Maid’s Tale Europe. We want the human rights architecture to be disassembled. Our 1930’s archetype of Masculinity must be privileged over societies where discrimination against humans on certain protected grounds (sex, sexual preference, political views, national origins,…) is outlawed.The United States has decided to “reestablish” “strategic stability” with Russia, which seeks to kill millions of Europeans. Having murdered around 2m people since its full-scale invasion and forcibly transferred more than 700,000 Ukrainian children into Russia, the credibility of Russia’s threats against us is high. More sinister than that is the capture of US national security strategy by those inside America who wish to promote Russia’s political proxies inside Europe. Far Right and far left political forces in Europe operate with Russian funding and know-how. In Romania MAGA “data analytics” guy Brad Parscale boasted of helping Russia’s proxy to capture a NATO state, just before Romanian intelligence services published documents demonstrating Georgescu was cheating. That time the Romanian government and its Supreme Court cancelled the election. However, now America, in coalition with China (through its brainwashing TikTok) and Russia (together with its brainwashing Telegram Disinfolklore propagation App) are claiming, as a matter of National Security Strategy, the duty to “cultivate resistance” inside democratic European states to Europe’s priorities of maintaining and retaining the post-World War Two legal orders. The credibility of these threats by America is bolstered by information this week that US is lobbying bilaterally European states to oppose loaning Ukraine €100b so it can accelerate its destruction of the Ruschist Nazi state.Ultimately what this schizophrenic National Security Strategy is attempting to do is to embed, intensify and promote the troll that Europe is a basket case. It’s precisely the same immanence in Russian and Chinese anti-Western propaganda: archetype Europe and Ukraine as helpless. Sadly, many inside Europe adopt this archetype and promote it. The solution is for Europe to act in concert as it it did against the United Kingdom’s three-year campaign to separate Ireland from its EU allies during the UK’s Brexit saga. English ministers were dispatched by Cameron, May and Johnson governments to every EU member state repeatedly to importune them to abandon Ireland. The EU remained and remain united against such external enemies. Now as Joseph Borel, former EU high commissioner for Foreign Affairs recently opined “America is no longer our ally,” this situation must be more widely recognised.In some ways the United States now is simply continuing its policy of rescuing Russia from its own funks. Ukraine is the only obstacle. As it exhausts Russia’s army and continues, daily, to destroy every part of Russia’s manufacturing and fossil fuel infrastructure inside Russia, Ukraine has an opportunity to destroy the Russia state. It’s an opportunity which must not be missed. 5-6 sovereign states instead of the current so-called Russian Federation must be our endgame. America’s policy today - to save Russia- is an echo of Bush’s “chicken Kuiv” speech when he visited Kyiv to implore Ukraine to stay within the Soviet Union. Biden and Obama too did everything in their power to help Russia when it occupied Ukraine. For example Ukraine was about to kill thousands of the retreating Russian troops from Kherson in September 2022. According to Bob Woodward’s reporting Biden prevented this because he was afraid of “WWIII.⚡️His use of the term “civilisational” suggest to me that he read Huntington as an undergraduate, and never was able to see through Huntington’s troll that the choice for humanity is only between two (of many) Indo-European religions.⚡️Free elections in Ukraine: the cost.In 2018, in the OSCE, we did informal calculations as to how much it would cost to protect the electorate and polling stations in temporarily occupied Luhansk and Donetsk. To guarantee free and fair elections. In terms of staffing and materiel. Around EUR1.5b. Idea of West ponying up that then was ridiculously out of reach. To carry out elections all over Ukraine, today, so that they were free and fair would cost more than it would cost for the West to arm Ukraine properly. Sufficiently to expel Russia from 100% of Ukraine.⚡️Tough decision: an administration which wouldn’t defend NATO states OR European Union which defends Europeans from rapacious foreigners every day a billion times.⚡️America trolled by Russia’s ever-changing ‘Korea Scenario’ troll normalising genocide in Ukraine.Wash Post reports breathlessly Donald wants Russia to keep Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. Which Russia has used as a base to murder, torture, r*pe, fire missiles, drones against thousands of people.“It’s a Korea Scenario,” says Donald.Russia said in March 2022: we will divide Ukraine Korea style. Then Russia said in 2022 “we will import North Koreans into eastern Ukraine.”Then when Ukraine invaded Russia. Russia used 10,000 North Korean soldiers. Donald won Kursk back for Russia by halting intelligence sharing suddenly.Now America is colluding with a Russian troll that ‘normalises’ division of a sovereign country by saying it’s ‘just like Korea.’ More evidence of USA’s capture by Russia’s Mental Wars.⚡️Kellogg’s Marshall Plan troll.Russia’s oligarch-funded fake “opposition” has been calling for a Marshall Plan -for Russia.Now Kellogg prepares the ground for a Marshall Plan for Russia to benefit Russia’s oligarchs (for whom Donald is negotiating “peace”).Ukraine, as ever, is being instrumentalists by America’s rapacious rulers in bed with Russian oligarchs.Kellogg is probably well meaning (apart from his treat Ukraine like mule by starving it of the weapons America promised it). But he must understand his job is to bring peace between Russia’s warring oligarchs (who want to return to St Tropez) and Putler. Ukraine is just an instrument: sell out Ukraine so Putler has a fig leaf for halting his war so Russian oligarchs can return to the West without sanctions. This plan will never succeed but it’s all Russia has. Now that Russia has been found liable for patterns of violation of every main human right in Ukraine by humanity’s highest court Russia will never return to civilisation until it is defeated on the battlefield.⚡️Russian oligarch assets belong to Ukraine.Once Russia’s ‘legally’ Sovereign assets are confiscated and used by Ukraine to defeat Russia, we must move on to assets of the 1,000 richest Ruschist oligarchs. These are ‘equitably’ owned by the Ruschist State, and thus fair game for Ukraine. Ruschia’s debt to Ukraine includes €500b in material damage. And trillions in immaterial damage (trauma, lost bread winner, lost earnings, inconvenience,…). Every single Ukrainian has a cause of action against the Ruschist state. It’s nice of course as is happening here if Ruschist state confiscates its own assets back from its oligarchs. Makes recovery easier for Ukraine. Deripaska stated all his assets belong to Ruschia. Legal basis is already established by European Court of Human Rights 500page judgement holding Russia 100% accountability and responsible for the war in Ukraine.So it goes.⚡️MAGA Archetyping Ukraine and ‘Europe’ as weak.US is trying to Archetype “Europe” as “Weak.” Yet, it’s led by a guy who can’t stop sleeping.Weak MAGA followers, like Donald, archetypes Ukraine as ‘Weak’ and Russia as ‘Strong.’Meanwhile, Ukraine deals with 7,000 tactical Russian drones and 600 strategic Russian drones daily, while attacking Russia with similar quantities in ways America 1945-2025 was too weak to even contemplate.Now, America is trying to archetype “Europe” as “Weak.” Jamie Dimon and that Undersecretary of State think a united Europe is ‘Weak’ whereas 27 individual states acting unilaterally would be ‘Strong’?!Of course they don’t think that! They’re playing mind games. They’re revealing their fears, their weaknesses, and America’s shame. The shame of allying with childstealing Russia which can’t even protect itself and China (run by another weakling)!The stance of a jealous spouse who won’t let their wife speak to other males. Weak. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe

⚡️US declares war against European Values.United States’s newly published National Security Strategy is a declaration of war against those of us fighting to retain the post-World War Two legal and social orders.When America states that it wants to “restore Europe’s civilisational confidence” Donald’s apparatchiks mean: we want Hand Maid’s Tale Europe. We want the human rights architecture to be disassembled. Our 1930’s archetype of Masculinity must be privileged over societies where discrimination against humans on certain protected grounds (sex, sexual preference, political views, national origins,…) is outlawed.The United States has decided to “reestablish” “strategic stability” with Russia, which seeks to kill millions of Europeans. Having murdered around 2m people since its full-scale invasion and forcibly transferred more than 700,000 Ukrainian children into Russia, the credibility of Russia’s threats against us is high. More sinister than that is the capture of US national security strategy by those inside America who wish to promote Russia’s political proxies inside Europe. Far Right and far left political forces in Europe operate with Russian funding and know-how. In Romania MAGA “data analytics” guy Brad Parscale boasted of helping Russia’s proxy to capture a NATO state, just before Romanian intelligence services published documents demonstrating Georgescu was cheating. That time the Romanian government and its Supreme Court cancelled the election. However, now America, in coalition with China (through its brainwashing TikTok) and Russia (together with its brainwashing Telegram Disinfolklore propagation App) are claiming, as a matter of National Security Strategy, the duty to “cultivate resistance” inside democratic European states to Europe’s priorities of maintaining and retaining the post-World War Two legal orders. The credibility of these threats by America is bolstered by information this week that US is lobbying bilaterally European states to oppose loaning Ukraine €100b so it can accelerate its destruction of the Ruschist Nazi state.Ultimately what this schizophrenic National Security Strategy is attempting to do is to embed, intensify and promote the troll that Europe is a basket case. It’s precisely the same immanence in Russian and Chinese anti-Western propaganda: archetype Europe and Ukraine as helpless. Sadly, many inside Europe adopt this archetype and promote it. The solution is for Europe to act in concert as it it did against the United Kingdom’s three-year campaign to separate Ireland from its EU allies during the UK’s Brexit saga. English ministers were dispatched by Cameron, May and Johnson governments to every EU member state repeatedly to importune them to abandon Ireland. The EU remained and remain united against such external enemies. Now as Joseph Borel, former EU high commissioner for Foreign Affairs recently opined “America is no longer our ally,” this situation must be more widely recognised.In some ways the United States now is simply continuing its policy of rescuing Russia from its own funks. Ukraine is the only obstacle. As it exhausts Russia’s army and continues, daily, to destroy every part of Russia’s manufacturing and fossil fuel infrastructure inside Russia, Ukraine has an opportunity to destroy the Russia state. It’s an opportunity which must not be missed. 5-6 sovereign states instead of the current so-called Russian Federation must be our endgame. America’s policy today - to save Russia- is an echo of Bush’s “chicken Kyiv” speech when he visited Kyiv to implore Ukraine to stay within the Soviet Union. Biden and Obama too did everything in their power to help Russia when it occupied Ukraine. For example Ukraine was about to kill thousands of the retreating Russian troops from Kherson in September 2022. According to Bob Woodward’s reporting Biden prevented this because he was afraid of “WWIII.” Because of this weakness Russia was able to regroup and continue to kill thousands of innocent Ukrainians. So the new National Security Strategy is in some ways a continuation of US foreign policy. However today Ukraine and Europe has agency and capability. Both Europe and Ukraine must preserve our freedom so that when America wakes up from this MAGA nightmare, there is at least one island in our world free of the Hand Maid’s Tale world of perpetual war that Donald, China, Iran, Russia and the other Acis of Misogyny powers are trying to enmesh us in.⚡️“Russian mafia Russian and NYC chapters meet in Miami to cos-play Yalta.” No country is safe - Israel, America, Russia itself,… when ‘territorial integrity’ is no longer protected. Ukraine must take back the Kuban and China Inner Mongolian, Czechia, Lithuania, Germany and Poland can share Konigsberg, and deport its Russians to China.⚡️The Styx and idea of rivers being associated with the after life in Indo-European cultures originated on the shores of the Dnipro. In Mykailivka in Zaporizhzhia.The essence in all Indo-European religions of the passage into the afterlife has been deduced by distilling all known early Indo-European religious texts. Bruce Lincoln, an American specialist in Indo-European religion, achieved this remarkable feat and set it out:“The picture that emerges is as follows. On the way to the otherworld, souls of the dead had to cross a river, the waters of which washed away all of their memories. These memories were not destroyed, however, but were carried by the river’s water to a spring, where they bubbled up and were drunk by certain highly favored individuals, who became inspired and infused with supernatural wisdom as a result of the drink.”Given what we now know about how Indo-European language and religion originated in the area affected by the explosion of the dam by the Russians, it’s now possible to assert with a reasonable degree of certainty that an idea that later evolved into other Indo-European cultures’ descendant religions - Greek, Iran, India, for example - was first formulated by Sredni Stog-Yamna humans in this area of the Dniepr river.⚡️Russia-USA’s ridiculous offer to UkrainePutler: “If it costs me 2m Russian soldiers to occupy temporarily a few more villages in eastern Ukraine, I’ll do it.”USA: “Ukraine: don’t make Putler expend 2m Ruschists. Capitulate!”Ukraine: “Bring it on. 2m fewer Ruschists is a win.”⚡️What Ukraine victory looks like?Written extensively on this issue: How this war ends? From the perspective of one of the few foreigners to live inside Russia’s brutal, brain-hacking, murderous and mad occupation of Luhansk. I worked there as a diplomat 2015-2018. Even I did not anticipate Bucha.Besides, wars are won on the battlefield. Russia, having lost on the battlefield, as of early March 2022, has ONLY been playing since for people like @BorisJohnson and @nfergus to persuade Ukrainians to accept occupation in exchange for a mythical peace. 2014-2022 we had the Minsk Accords, which it was my job to monitor the implementation of: on the ground. Many nights I documented many thousands of murderous ceasefire violations by Russia in Stanitsia Luhanska. No-one cared in the international community to support Ukraine properly.So today Ukraine will end Russian economy and provoke the continuation of the 1990 collapse of the Russian empire. With strikes on oil refineries in remote republics Ukraine is initiating the carbon copy process that led to Belarus SSR, Ukraine SSR and Russian SSR dissolve the USSR - so as sovereigns they could enter into gas and oil deals to keep their people alive.TimothyDSnyder SPlokhy and HrytsakYaroslav explain patiently to nfergus why Findlandisation/sacrifice of Ukrainian lands will not yield peace:September 13, 2025, Victor Pinchuk Foundation and Yalta European Strategy (YES) held a discussion “What Will Historians Consider a Ukrainian Victory?”https://www.youtu.be/5JxKRAl6kJw⚡️ In the Fairy Tale, Trump and Ruschia always triumph.Notice the similarity in structure?That’s Disinfolklore. An illusion. Doesn’t correspond to reality. It’s promoted by Disinfolklore. Now, start reassessing ALL such “inevitabilities” (Ruschia always wins, Trump gets away with everything).Such “inevitabilities” are deliberate Disinfolklore injected through repetition into our minds by those wishing to hack our consent.⚡️Biden’s Counter Disinfolklore.Likens Donald’s campaign to a “Made Up novel.” @POTUS says Donald’s moniker for those convicted of Jam 6 crimes “hostages” is like “a Bad Færy Tale.” @JoeBiden intuitively gets what I teach in Disinfolklore.net Authoritarians use certain tropes to induce the emotion of fear into the minds of their traumatised and cowering supporters. Donald, like all authoritarians, is a master at Disinfolklore.Think of how the abused child grows up to abuse their spouse. They get caught up in a cycle of abuse. Stockholm Syndrome. Donald, emotionally abused as a child, through linguistic violence, delivered through Disinfolklore (stories that create in the minds of its consumers the emotion of fear), abuses his supporters. Constantly.They are aroused by the care Donald invests into making them tremble. Project 2025 and Donald’s Unified Reich are Disinfolklore, par excellence.Masquerading as dry policy, Donald enfears his abuse hungry supporters with their tales of what he will do to us all if he gets a chance.Their aim is to arouse submission in Donald’s abuse-hungry supporters. This is how MAGA works.@POTUS emphasises Donald’s rambling about a fictional horror figure Hannibal Lecter. Note how Donald’s Disinfolklore clumsily and purposefully mobilises fictional horror character to manifest his own self-portrayal as a pantomime villain. Donald’s fear of sharks is legion. And he mobilises the Jaws film image (eaten by a shark, while Donald a man-child playing a shark gets) to frighten his submission-eager supporters into an aroused state during.Every. Single. Speech. President Biden’s Counter Disinfolklore belittles Donald’s deepest fear (of sharps consuming him).Makes a joke of Donald’s rambles about being eaten by a shark.Disinfolklore is always about coercive control. Disinfolklore appeals to those who act out their own trauma by abusing women. The antidote to Disinfolklore is Counter Disinfolklore that belittles the Disinfolklorists. President Biden totally gets this.Donald “raped her” (judge’s words, not mine or President Biden).This is fair game for President Biden. Donald’s Disinfolklore involves visual images and speeches about his supposed sexual prowess. Yet, in fact, he is a serial abuser of women. Finally, the ultimate quality for Sovereigns in Indo-European communities since at least 2,500 BCE is Truthfulness. I’ve written, as have many others, about this extensively: powerofmana.net/p/trumpian-rig…President Biden, rightfully, is drawing attention to how Donald deliberately tries to turn The Lie into Truth (Donald’s Truths on his fake Russia-funded Twitter Truth Social are predominantly Lies).⚡️’Core Ukraine’ is ManulandWhat Haass, Dugin & Ruschist nationalists most fear: widespread realisation that ancient 🇺🇦 & ancient Ukrainian is THE founder culture of Indo-Europeans from India🇮🇳 to Ireland🇮🇪. I call the area of ancient 🇺🇦’s persisting linguistic & religious domination: Manuland.Finding Manuland VVIII: Archæogenetic and Isotopic Revolutions. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe

I’ve been occupied with the 28-point plan all week and this saga. A lot of what I’ve written is about that. Basically, the first intimation I had of the capitulation plan was on the 11th of November, when a journalist wrote in the *Kyiv Post* that the United States was attempting to remove the reference to territorial integrity from the annual UN resolution condemning Russia’s occupation, invasion and aggression against Ukraine. That was an ominous sign. The moment I saw this capitulation plan, I thought of that report.I first wrote about it on the 21st of November: “Russia’s Escalations in Europe — Scenarios and How Witkoff’s Capitulation Plan Will Backfire.” One: attempt by hitting Ukraine’s allies to intimidate them into even subtle changes of behaviour towards Ukraine. Two: desperately trying to goad a NATO country into attacking Russia back. Like a dead cat on a table, this could be Russia’s only forlorn hope to somehow get something positive out of its current predicament.I was wondering, as many of us have been, what Russia hopes to achieve by attacking NATO countries and sending drones in. I do have this sense that the unwillingness of Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and other countries to respond aggressively is partly a function of the lack of American support under both the former and current president for NATO. But I also have a strong intuition that they are allowing Russia to exhaust itself, to create these kinetic attacks — and that the purpose of this lack of response, which frustrates all of us and especially Ukrainians, is to allow Russia, in the way you might a toddler, to just play out its aggression. Meanwhile, the main game is arming Ukraine. I saw this week that Norway’s response to the 28-point capitulation plan was to front-load a billion euros in planned arms deliveries to Ukraine.I’m leaning towards this idea that desperately trying to goad a NATO country into attacking Russia back is what Russia is up to. Like a dead cat on the table, Russia wants to distract us — as it did after Crimea by occupying parts of Luhansk and Donetsk, trying to spur revolts around the rest of Ukraine, then escalating in Syria. We’ve seen this pattern again and again. When Russia hit that LNG carrier on the Danube, that was a big sign — and nothing really seemed to happen in response.I then wrote: “Donald’s Russian mafia controllers’ latest attempt to goad Ukraine into surrender, at a moment when there are 15 dead Russian soldiers for every Ukrainian casualty in Pokrovsk. Likely it will backfire. It will help bolster President Zelensky when he says no for the nth time since 2019 to Russia’s attempt to troll the West into forcing Ukraine’s capitulation. Meanwhile, the project to dissolve Russia into four to five sovereign states continues.”I noticed, as some of us might have, this kind of briefing against Umerov, the former defence minister and head of the security council. This journalist who wasn’t on my radar — a lot of people seem to rate her — Kathleen Dombos, extraordinary name. She was briefing about Umerov and Yermak. It struck me that just because we support Ukraine doesn’t mean every journalist covering it understands what’s happening. If one thing we’ve seen this week, it’s that a lot of journalists I’ve never heard of are part of the White House press room and are probably very esteemed in their professions, but that doesn’t mean they know anything about Ukraine or have any understanding of what all of us have been monitoring so closely since the 24th of February 2022 — and which many of us have been monitoring since February 2014, when Russia first invaded.This kind of breathless reporting of things which you and I, having followed this very closely and having listened to Mokrushyna or Will or Wendy or others each day, understand is just a new cycle of the same old stuff — that’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed. It seemed to me that someone, probably a faction within the American administration, was trying to weaken Ukraine by getting rid of Umerov and Yermak. Yermak in particular has been on this rodeo since November 2019 and is the best person for the role. Because of Rubio’s status as national security advisor, Yermak can meet him directly as his interlocutor, which is very helpful.I just noticed that undercurrent. I think all of us on Volya Radio do our best not to intervene in Ukrainian internal politics, because just because we support Ukraine 100% doesn’t mean we’ve earned the right to intervene in whatever’s happening internally. But I’ll be watching the campaign against Umerov and Yermak quite closely.Donald is at his weakest. He can still choose to go all in on Ukraine. He lost the Epstein files vote, with his own party turning against him for the first time this presidency. Then this month’s election defeats — the NYC mayor, Virginia, across the board wins for the Democrat Party, Pennsylvania school boards — mark the beginning of the end for a physically depleting Donald.Since then, we’ve seen him announce he was going to introduce a bill to restore parts of Obamacare. But Congress members, as soon as they heard, threatened mass resignation. The bill was pulled. The reason they threatened mass resignation — something we haven’t seen over the cutting of USAID or ICE or anything else — was because they hadn’t been consulted and they’re sick of being treated like slaves. The White House handling of Congress has weakened Donald considerably. Because of this weakness, he’s allowed Russia to come out with this ridiculousness of the 28-point plan.Then there’s the fact that Russia’s central bank printed 1.65% of Russia’s GDP equivalent in new rubles last week — the Bank of Russia is the source for that. To put it in context, the United States printed about 20% of GDP during COVID and an equivalent amount during the financial crisis. Russia is at 1.65% of GDP — and of course that GDP denominator is probably a lie from 2023, so the real figure is likely higher. We’ve got a little way to go, but the trajectory is clear. I think that’s what explains this haste with the plan.I was quite happy with this one: “Donald’s Thanksgiving Turkey.” Americans are mad at Donald for two and a half thousand appearances in the Epstein files. Ukraine needs to give Donald a Thanksgiving turkey. Crazy reasoning from Donald’s people. Thankfully, nothing is going to happen over Thanksgiving. This is the same pattern we’ve seen again and again.I thought Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation was a significant bellwether. Now these threats by Congress members en masse to resign their seats and give the Democrats a majority underpin my immediate reaction to her resignation: she is archetyping herself for a run for the presidency. She and Steve Bannon — who I believe is her controller, her puppeteer, the person who gives her her lines — he clearly sees her as a vehicle to propel him to the presidency. According to Michael Wolff, Epstein’s biographer, Steve Bannon sees himself as presidential material. Maybe he sees MTG as a better vehicle. But in any case, that was a harbinger for what we’ve subsequently seen with the other Congress members.All of this feeds into interpreting what Donald is up to. His chances of success in forcing Ukraine into surrender or withholding intelligence support are in proportion to his power fading.A lot of people are questioning what’s going on inside the administration. When I was studying intellectual history at Georgetown University as a postgraduate, I had this amazing teacher, Hisham Sharabi — one of the great Arab intellectuals, Palestinian intellectuals of the twentieth century. He ran the full gamut from helping the PLO in the armed struggle, to teaching Bill Clinton at Georgetown, to being celebrated at the time of the Oslo Accords and given credit for helping Clinton put that deal together. By the end of his life, Sharabi was against the Oslo Accords. He taught me intellectual history and was a great scholar and writer.The gender aspect — my ability to perceive that Russia conceives of Ukraine as a woman and to look for that language in Putler’s speeches — comes from Sharabi. When Putler used that phrase on the 20th of February 2022, citing this song “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin” by Red Mould, a Soviet-era hard rock band — “I did a horrid thing to her and she was dead, and I said to her: take it, my beauty” — international lawyers saw this as an expression of the intention to commit genocide against Ukraine and the perception of Ukraine as a dead woman, a corpse.My ability to see this comes from a great book Sharabi wrote called *A Theory of Neopatriarchy*, in which he tried to explain why the Arab world’s worship of the father was the reason it hadn’t developed along democratic lines. He introduced me to Frantz Fanon, the great intellectual who wrote *Black Skin, White Masks*. The idea is that we constantly get fooled by identities. Georgian Dream archetypes itself as nationalists, but in fact they’re Russians. Confused American commentators don’t understand what’s going on. Do they think Witkoff is stupid? No — he’s Russian mafia adjacent. You just have the Russian mafia negotiating with itself. All of these real-estate millionaires, now billionaires — Donald, Kushner, Witkoff — these are all Russian mafia adjacent people, and the Russian mafia situation is just an internal negotiation.Fanon’s masterpiece describes the strategy white-supremacist colonialists use: conceal the white-supremacist occupiers by coercing Black Africans to impose the settlers’ will. Similarly, Russia gets Americans to act as a veneer for its imperialist advances into the American mind. Russia’s Brighton Beach, New York real-estate mafia — Donald, Epstein, Kushner, Witkoff — running America. American foreign policy being directed by the Russian mafia. It’s that simple.Then we’ve seen these tapes today, which I think were probably leaked by the Russians, by Ushakov, mainly because he’s the one who appears on both of them. I also had this idea from Evelyn Waugh, the great English novelist and one of my favourite writers. He did this great parody of what Hollywood screenwriters are like: you start off with the script for Macbeth, and by the time everyone’s put their oar in three months later, you end up with Julius Caesar or something.I had this idea that Kvartal 95 — the part of Kryvyi Rih where President Zelensky grew up, which I visited many times — that this notion of rewriting scripts, which President Zelensky and his wife and all those around him are very professionally good at, applies here. You start off with a 28-point plan and then you turn it into something opposite. Ironically, it’s precisely Kvartal 95’s infinite script-rewriting experience that enables them to transform *The Tempest* into *Cymbeline*, one character at a time.I’ve been very curious about why Silicon Valley is so anti-Ukraine. By Silicon Valley, I really mean these four South African billionaires who were part of the PayPal mafia and made PayPal go public. The money they earned established the seed capital for Google, Facebook, LinkedIn — everything. The whole second wave. When I was at business school, we studied Silicon Valley and its institutional and cultural makeup that enables it to repeatedly resurrect itself and transform itself over the decades. A lot of the literature I read was from the 1990s, and it always struck me as amazing that Google and Facebook and all the companies that enabled the AI revolution weren’t even existing then.These four billionaires — Andreessen and David Sacks, whom I’d never heard of before the Ukraine war, and Elon Musk, who was kind of a late arrival, and Peter Thiel, who literally isn’t South African but spent his teenage years in a South African boarding school as his father was in mining — they brought capital from apartheid South Africa. That capital established PayPal, then colonised Silicon Valley, and now that money has colonised our minds. They own everything from Substack to you name it.It was always very curious to me why they’re so anti-Ukraine. I’ve previously written about how Putler’s money — whatever it is, a trillion dollars or euros that the Russian elite have — I suspect there’s a big missing chunk. If you look in venture capital funds, that money will be there. What could be precipitating this very fast acceleration? I suspect billions of Putler’s money is invested through surrogates in Silicon Valley venture capital funds. The VCs know whose money it is. Much of the so-called AI bubble is powered by illicit Russian cash going around Silicon Valley.What happens as Russia’s economy implodes, which we’ve all been watching for months? Russian mobsters and their proxies will start calling that money in. If you’re running a venture capital fund in Silicon Valley — Andreessen Horowitz or whoever — with maybe twenty-five funds at various stages involving billions, and Russian mobsters start calling that money in, it’s very complicated to unwind funds. The Russians have the FSB and state security forces behind them. It’s much simpler to get 42 million Ukrainians to pay the price. Save Russia at all costs to save the Palo Alto housing market. Now you know why David Sacks and other South African billionaires running Silicon Valley care about Ukraine’s capitulation.The Fourteenth Amendment — which meant that people who engaged in insurrection could not hold official office in the United States — had the political will been there, the case in the Colorado Supreme Court, which found that Donald Trump shouldn’t have been on the ballot, could have been dispositive. Had the Republican Party not planned for this eventuality by owning the Supreme Court, and had the obstruction of the federal January 6th case not led to the immunity decision, and had the Georgia case not been obstructed — I see that in Arizona they’ve just resurrected one of the January 6th fake electors cases. The mechanism was there: Donald Trump was ineligible. He engaged in insurrection. This was ruled on by the Colorado Supreme Court and in a variety of different cases. I read the federal indictments. It was an open and shut case.Because it’s such a multi-dimensional takeover of the government — from January 6th itself to the decades-long Federalist Society takeover of the Supreme Court to this kind of hypnotic stuff — the law wasn’t enforced. I have enormous respect for the founding fathers and anyone trying to come up with constitutions. I studied the English constitution in great depth at Cambridge as a law student.I had this debate with a great human rights law professor who was always more worried about America than I was, and I was always more worried about England. What happened around the prorogation — the unlawful suspension of Parliament to stop them voting — that same weakness has become commonplace. You can close down Congress for two months because you don’t want the Epstein files released.One of my other great teachers, John Collier at Trinity College, Cambridge, taught us — in reference to South Africa and apartheid — about how the parents of some people he’d been at Cambridge with were Supreme Court judges in South Africa in the 1930s. They tried to hold apartheid back, and eventually the Parliament just legislated to put more members in the upper house and rammed it through, and darkness returned. His teaching, which in 1999 was quite quaint but also very emotionally charged — I didn’t think that fifteen years later he’d be talking about exactly the same thing with the ERG and the absence of a deep state in England to protect us from the prorogation. Boris lying to the Queen, the head of state, trolling her into proroguing Parliament.He said: politicians and judges can only do so much. At a certain point, the politicians will come in and ram things through. Sometimes the judges can hold things up long enough for the heroes to ride to the rescue. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court held the line, but Johnson won that election in December 2019 and did his terrible things. We’ve seen the same structure in America.Let me finish with where I think we’re at. The chances of any peace plan working are zero. Ukraine are masters at ensuring there’s something in any proposal that the Russians will never accept. Failing all else, Ukraine would just drop the Kerch Bridge if peace requiring the abandonment of its people under occupation or territory was imminent.For example, Ukraine agreeing to a limit of an army of 800,000 souls may sound entirely reasonable to an American negotiator. However, to the Russian who supposedly invaded Ukraine to demilitarise it, it’s impossible to accept. Likewise, when President Macron says “we have a multinational force from 13 nations ready to enter Ukraine the moment peace is agreed,” I believe he’s subtly trolling the Russians. Not that it is any of the Russians’ business what Ukraine does on its land. But having falsely alleged that NATO moving closer to Russia was the reason it had to sacrifice almost one and a half million Russians to kill a few hundred thousand native Russian-speaking Ukrainians and eviscerate old cities, it would be impossible to sell any peace that involves a multinational force inside Ukraine.Russia will continue fighting until it destroys itself utterly. I think Ukraine will end up keeping Donald on board only to provide intelligence assistance, which, as we know, is all America is really providing now. As Will Thiel set out perhaps four months ago, Ukraine’s dominant strategy is to maintain that intelligence assistance but not hope for anything more.The leverage the European countries have is significant. Norway this week front-loaded a billion to buy American weapons. This gives tremendous leverage over Lockheed Martin and the other companies, who in turn will put pressure on Congress members and senators to pressure Donald to continue allowing Ukraine to buy these weapons systems. Germany, Portugal and others are paying for them. So Donald’s America has limited leverage — but is acting like Ukraine’s ultimate victory depends on America, which it doesn’t.The intelligence support is really helpful but not irreplaceable now, as Japan and other countries are helping Ukraine with satellite targeting. By respecting Donald so much — when really any normal human being would tell him to take a hike — President Zelensky is maximising the chances of retaining intelligence support and maintaining the strong support of important senators and the people around Donald. It’s an investment for the future. By not alienating Donald and handling it so well, this is a masterclass in diplomacy.The Epstein files vote, the threatening to resign en masse over Donald’s healthcare bill, and the universal characterisation of the 28-point plan as a “capitulation plan” are all significant. I went through the real capitulation plan in November 2019, when I was working in the Dnipro office, when Yermak had initialled the Steinmeier Formula. There were “No to Capitulation” rallies across Ukraine. Even the introduction of this term “capitulation” — the Ukrainians had it ready-made because we went through this whole process where tens of thousands of people rallied across Ukraine. I monitored many of these rallies for the OSCE. I was immediately convinced these were real — not tітушки, not fake paid protesters. These are true patriotic Ukrainians who have fought, and whose families have fought since 2014, and who will not capitulate.That point of view is now mainstream. We see in the polls released in the last couple of days that 76% of Ukrainians believe Ukraine can win, and about 75% believe that even if America withholds intelligence support, they should fight on. Even low-information people saw this as a capitulation plan. The Russians kind of overdid it.Then we see Budanov meeting Driscoll in the UAE to troll him with drone tech. Ukraine has something significant. Obviously there are dangers ahead, but I think Ukraine will get through this and continue exhausting and destroying Russia — which I have believed since I tweeted about it on the 1st of March 2022.Ukraine’s dominant strategy — what its leaders are actually doing, aside from what they have to say they’re doing — and what many of our countries’ leaders understand, whether it’s the Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway, Poland and others, is that Russia, just as Napoleon exhausted himself, will exhaust itself in Ukraine. It won’t accept any deal. But Ukraine has the capacity to tickle it whenever it’s getting close. I didn’t even think this latest plan was getting close, but Ukraine can always find a way to ensure the Russians refuse the deal and get archetyped — archetype themselves — as being a mess and not wanting peace. Obviously the whole thing is ridiculous, that Ukraine has to archetype someone’s peace. But that’s where I think we are at the moment.⚡️Donald’s Thanksgiving Turkey‘Americans are mad at Donald for 2,500+ appearances in Epstein Files. So Ukraine needs to give Donald a ‘thanks-giving’ Turkey.’ Crazy reasoning from Donald’s people.P.S. note the function of Donald’s signature on his Epstein card.⚡️American Skins, Masking Russians.Fanon’s masterpiece described the strategy white supremacist colonialists used: conceal white supremacist occupiers by coercing Black Africans to impose the settler’s will.Similarly, Russia gets Americans to act as a veneer for its imperialist advances into the American mind.American Russian mafia frontsRussia’s Brighton Beach New York real estate mafia-adjacent dons (Epstyn, Kushner, Trump, Witkoff,…) running America.“American” foreign policy being directed by the Russian mafia.It’s that simple.⚡️Evergreen “Trump admin plans Ukrainian coup” again tweet.Rubio claims “Ukrainian input” into capitulation plan. Ex-Party of the Regions (pro-Russia) Ukrainian MP @GoncharenkoUa supports it.Paul Manafort, Donald’s felon adviser, earned $30m from advising @GoncharenkoUa former party - 2004-2014.Before Party of the Regions’s attempt to divide Ukraine and hand it over to Russia failed.Today, treacherous Ukrainians in league with Donald, his Russian mafia fronts and others attempt to hand Ukrainian and Russian security over to Russia.They will fail.⚡️Bannon, for whom MTG works/acts, clearly sees Marjorie Taylor Greene as his vehicle to capture the US (vice presidency for himself) presidency for her. Her resignation is the canary in the coal mine and harbinger of doom for Don’s presidency (and so it goes).⚡️Ruschia’s Weimar Inflation ConsolationRuschia printed more than 1.64% of GDP in new money.Ruschia may have printed 1.64% of its GDP this week - but don’t worry: Weimar and Zimbabwe printed more than that in one day.Ruschia went full-on Nazi first. Now, Ruschia has gone full-on Weimar.According to Russia’s central bank (https://cbr.ru/eng/hd_base/repo/) Russia printed the equivalent of more than 1.64% of its GDP in new roubles this week.2,830,000 Million new Russian roubles were born this week. Russian banks then use these newly minted rubles to buy Russian government bonds.This is on top of massive Repo sales (quantitative easing) every week over the past eight months.In case you haven’t yet gotten the memo: Russia is dissolving.P.S. this 1.64% of GDP figure is overly generous. It’s based on Ruschia’s false gdp number for 2023.⚡️Donald is at his weakest.He can still choose to go All In on Ukraine.He lost the Epstein Files vote, with his own party turning against him for the first time this presidency.This month’s election defeats for Donald (NYC mayor, Virginia, Pennsylvania school boards,…) mark the beginning of the end for physically depleting Donald.Instead in his weakness he allowed Russia to come out with this ridiculousness.Last week Russian central bank printed 1.5% of Russia’s GDP in new roubles. The highest Repo printing yet. Its people are freezing. Internetless. It’s rumoured the defence minister is being lined up by the elite to replace Putler.Russia could just leave Crimea, pay its debts, say sorry.Instead it chooses every day atrocity after atrocity.There will be no peace in Europe until Russia is utterly defeated, denazified and turns into 5-6 new sovereigns.⚡️On Russia’s escalations in Europe - Scenarios, and how Witkoff capitulation plan will backfire.Why does Russia keep attacking European powers?1. Attempt by hitting Ukraine’s allies to intimidate them into even subtle changes of behaviour towards Ukraine.2. Desperately trying to goad a NATO country into attacking Russia back. Like a dead cat on a table, this could be Russia’s only forlorn hope to somehow get something positive out of its current predicament. I’m erring towards the 2nd view, mainly because of how unresponsive NATO states are being to these kinetic armed attacks: Russia hit a Turkish LNG carrier on Ukraine’s side of the Danube three days ago-Romania had to evacuate 200 people and all their animals from two villages on their side of the river, etc. Meanwhile, western countries are giving Ukraine hitherto unheard of weapons systems like the Gripen, Rafaele and US allowed Ukraine to use US ballistic ATTACMs cluster munitions on a Russian airfield well inside Russia, for the first time, the other day. Inside Russia: it’s fucked: steel-making down hugely (in the middle of a war!!), lots of industries (cars, steel) down to four day weeks, wired Internet suspended in 23 regions across Russia except for government services, many regions facing immediate financial bankruptcy, black outs, glut of Russian oil no one will buy on the high seas cos Ukraine keeps hitting oil terminals, infrastructure and storage, electricity substations out all over Russia due to strikes, 400 of Russia’s most elite nuclear researchers recorded a video to put in appealing for back wages (their employer state-owned Rosatom still has ~50% of global uranium market yet they can’t pay their scientists), and heaps of other such indicators. Donald’s Russian mafia controller’s latest attempt to goad Ukraine into surrender (at a moment when there’s 15 dead Russian soldiers for every Ukrainian casualty in Pokrovsk (a town Russia was supposed to have taken two years ago)).Likely, it will backfire: it will help bolster president Zelenskyy when he says ‘non’ for the Nth time since 2019 to Russia’s attempt to troll the West into forcing Ukraine’s capitulation.Meanwhile the project to dissolve Russian state into 4-5 sovereigns that can no longer pose a threat to Ukraine continues.⚡️Donald’s BBC America shake-down in collusion with far-right English pro-Brexit establishment English nationalists.Ambush of the BBC by the far right who, ironically, run the BBC (all Sunak, Johnson’s mates and the pro-“Reform” promoters). Highly suspicious that it was the far-right paleo-conservative pro-Brexit/pro-‘Farage-‘Reform’ Torygraph which exposed what appears to me to be a completely non-story: It’s clear from both the Federal Jan 6 indictment and the Georgia Jan 6 indictment (both approved by grand juries) that Donald was guilty of insurrection against the US. Donald planned Jan 6 as a means of seizing power. Amy documentary which does not communicate this truth is wilfully participating in Donald’s sinister campaign to erase the truth about Jan 6: cf. pardoning those convicted of sedition and insurrection, persecution and prosecutions of those who exposed it. Branding Jan 6 criminals as ‘hostages.’ Playing Kash Patel’s co-produced ‘Jan 6 anthem’ instead of the national anthem at election campaign events.Chances of Donald actually going to court against BBC are nil. It’s a shake-down and attempt to get the already obsequious BBC not to report any truth in relation to Donald in the US. BBC is one of the most trusted news sources in the US. It’s actually only in the UK where BBC news coverage seems to have a far right, paleo-conservative bias.Would be nice though if Labour would exploit this situation to get rid of all the far right Tory-appointed pro Brexit pro-Reform people in BBC including the board.⚡️ something macabre and comical about Russia’s megalomaniacal insistence on taking towns they’ve turned to ashes.All the while Ukraine eviscerates. Russia’s SOLE revenue earning industry (fossil fuel).I mean, Russia if you’re listening, can’t you understand that while Ukraine and your blood-lust is distracting you, you’re being bombed back into the Stone Age? All 1/6 of the world’s surface of you.Kvartal95’s greatest production.⚡️Russian ‘Hunter Biden’ troll author, Duma member Derkach suspected in Energy scheme.It’s indeed possible Mindich and co were merely well remunerated un/knowing Russian assets.“It is essential to understand that in Ukraine, corruption is often intertwined with state treason and with advancing Russian interests. In this case, the suspected money-laundering schemes connected to the energy sector lead back to the network of Andriy Derkach—an officially designated Russian agent. Though formerly a Ukrainian politician, he is now a member of the Russian parliament. Members of his team were employed inside Energoatom and participated in the corruption scheme.”⚡️Ruschian missile aimed at Kyiv’s main children’s hospital.The “successful” strike is yet more evidence of genocidal intent (Mens Rea).The actus reus of the crime of genocide is the hit itself.The aiming of the missile against the children’s hospital discloses the Mens Rea (Intention / Mental Element) of the crime.⚡️To naive letter writers about peace.Do you think Ruschia would welcome your naive letters about peace, if Ruschia had a chance of winning on the battlefield?Ruschia bombs children’s hospitals because in the past year it lost 250,000 soldiers to capture 750 sq.km of Ukraine.Ukraine de-occupied 1,500 sq.km from Ruschism in 2022!At this rate the f attrition Ruschia would need a further 200m Ruschists to capture all of Ukraine. Yet, of course not only does Ruschia no longer have an army (guys on electric mopeds don’t count as soldiers), Ukraine is manufacturing 120,000 armed drones a month.This war will be won on the battlefield- by Ukraine. Ruschia understands this - which is why it’s so desperate for a ceasefire. This is what you are being used by Ruschia to secure. A ceasefire, because Russia understand that within the next year Ukraine will be sending 50,000 armed drones to hit military targets across defenceless Ruschia. This will happen, whether you write letters or not. I spent 2015-2022 in eastern Ukraine, as a diplomat, monitoring Ruschia’s compliance with Minsk I and Minsk II. Ruschia broke its commitments every single day. In 2003, Putler himself signed a Treaty with Ukraine recognising Ukraine - Ruschia border. Ukraine is not stupid.Ukraine will press on until there is a 200km wide waste land inside Ruschia along side the border. A waste land without ANY humans. A sanctuary for wildlife and animals. A demilitarised zone.Ruschia’s only strategy is to withdraw from 100% of Ukraine, pay Ukraine £2t in compensation, and return the 700,000 stolen Ukrainian children and 2m stolen Ukrainian adults.Sooner it does that the better - for itself and for you letter writers.⚡️Why Ruschia Bombs Hospitals?To please International Relations (IR) Scholars.‘Escalate to deescalate’ is Ruschia’s governing Military Doctrine as communicated into the minds of Western security policy makers.Ruschia’s ‘Escalate to De-escalate’ Military Doctrine is a Troll.Ruschia uses self-declared military doctrine memos to troll International Relations (IR) into misinterpreting reality.Ruschia’s published military doctrine doesn’t include the Meat Wave Assailts that have killed 300,000 of its soldiers in Ukraine. Yet, IR hacks still believe Ruschia adheres to the doctrinal instruments it publishes about how it fights wars.IR educated souls in charge of our security (and who study in Ruschia-funded institutions like @BlavatnikSchool at my Alma mater @UniofOxford) read Ruschist doctrine, not as an example of hybrid warfare, but as a description of how Ruschia fights wars.So instead of interpreting Ruschia’s war of aggression as a means of killing and destroying EVERYTHING west of the Don River that Ruschia can get away with obliterating.@JakeSullivan46 and co see Ruschia’s ‘Escalations’ as a Good Thing. “Ruschia’s Signaling it Wants to De-Escalate.”Result? Ruschia escalates by occupying Crimea, then Luhansk and Donetsk, interfering in our political systems (Trump-Brexitism). Carpet-bombs Syria (Sept 2015-), … Full-Scale invasion of Ukraine…And instead of perceiving the reality of the situation (Ruschia won’t stop until it is stopped), IR professionals and amateur geopolitical strategists interpret these activities as: “Signs Ruschia Wants Peace.”In reality, Ruschia has brainwashed these lost souls, using IR Disinfolklore, into seeing Ruschist aggression as some kind of Faery Tale with a happy ending of peace. “Just surrender,” Ruschia’s Big Bad Wolf Disinfolklore brainwashes us, “We promise we won’t gobble up anything else. We just want to eat Crimea, we mean Luhansk, Donetsk, okay Kyiv too, maybe a bit of Poland… but by the time we get to Lisbon, okay just Oporto, and a smidgeon of Alaska…”As @ZelenskyyUa said ages ago: “Ruschia is the fatted calf who won’t stop eating.” Yet, IR educated ‘strategists’ think every time Ruschia blows up another dam, commits Ecocide, that’s just Ruschia escalating to de-escalate.Don’t fall for trolls, however disguised. Ruschia’s Disinfolklore troll “Don’t Poke the Bear” is the most successful means of deterring us from exercising our UN Charter Art 51 right to self-defence EVER. It feeds our hunger for passivity. Our desire for a happy ending. Our dream that Ruschia really just wants peace even though you don’t even need to wear a short skirt to provoke it into turning your body politic and your land into a crime scene.But “Escalate to De-escalate” is a close second. And ‘Putin is quietly signalling he wants peace’ while he murders dozens of Ukrainians, tortures thousands, and keeps millions captive daily, a close third. Look at the data, not what Ruschia says it’s doing.Arm Ukraine now.⚡️Russia’s Reverse Napoleon - Reversed. Then, Reversed again, before meeting its Waterloo.By invading Ukraine with insufficient supply lines even to take Kyiv, Russia, a victim of French Napoleonic imperialism, mirrored Napoleon’s error.This First “Reverse Napoleon” led to Russia’s defeat at Mostyn on 27 March 2022, and its retreat from Kyiv Region by 29 March 2022. The first signs that Ruschia’s army was rubbish emerged by early March - I called this a “Reverse Napoleon” invasion on 1st March 2022, as the Ruschist army couldn’t communicate, ran in easily destroyed convoys with chaps casually sitting atop tanks,… Errors, which still haven’t been rectified.“Reverse Napoleon 2” was when Russia decided to invade itself - the Chef’s March on Rostov was less Gates of Vienna, and more Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Having lost 75,000 souls failing to take a small Ukrainian city in nine months the Chef Wanger Nazi could have reached Moscow in less than 24 hours - So much for the second army in the world!The Third Napoleon: Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine itself is a Napoleonic scale tribute act of disaster piled on disaster that must have Ukraine, Germany, Sweden, China, Japan, and Finland (and maybe even Jupiter Macron) planning to retake their historical lands from Muscovy.Currently, Ukraine has gone from a few mouldy Javelin missile systems to being able to use US provided artillery inside a 100km zone of Ruschia itself. F-16s are imminent. And Ukraine is (currently) manufacturing 120,000 deadly drones a month - and it only takes one of these to detonate a massive missile storage facility inside Ruschia’s Voronhaz region. Pop.Now, the Pièce de La Resistance: Having put all their “hopes” in one madcap scheme after another (famine Africa, Republicans will win Senate, Ukraine will surrender,…), after Macron went All-In in France’s military support for Ukraine, Ruschia hoped for a victory of its client party. Instead, a pro-Ukraine coalition has won the balance of power.So now, that hope is reversed too. Meanwhile, since February 2024, Ruschia been sacrificing 1,200 Ruschists a day in Ukraine (RIP), its tanks have been replaced with electric scooters, its guns with sticks, and its PPE with wooden ‘armour plates.’Ruschia needs to send its midget Napoleon Putler to Elba, as soon China will reoccupy its ancient territories in the east.Ukraine is true reversal for the current Czar that cannot be reversed.⚡️Why Vance/Silicon Valley Want Ukraine’s Capitulation.Billions of Putler’s money is invested through surrogates in Silicon Valley Venture Capital funds. The VCs know whose money it is. Much of the so-called AI bubble is powered by illicit Russian cash.Now, what happens as Russia’s economy implodes?Russian mobsters and their proxies start calling that money in.Venture Capital funds will need to be unwound.Much simpler to get 42m Ukrainians to pay the price.Save Russia, at all costs, to save the Palo Alto housing market!Now you know why David Sacks and other South African billionaires running SV care about Ukraine’s capitulation.“According to a report by the Russian Okno Project, an increasing number of families across Russia are not being paid their 1 million ruble ($12,739) initial death benefits due to the growing budget crunch…“According to public information published by the Ministry of Finance, Moscow’s 2025 budget deficit has grown to $51.9 billion through October. Currently, the shortfall is 1.6% of GDP, but the Kremlin has admitted that by the end of the year, the deficit will grow to an estimated 2.6% of GDP. Almost 40 kopecks of every ruble is going to fund the military, military benefits, and internal state security. Another 16 kopecks is needed to service the national debt…According to the Moscow Times, 61 of 83Russian federal subjects are facing regional budget deficits. The Volgograd Oblast has a 24% shortfall, and the Irkutsk Oblast is facing a 35% budget deficit. Last month, the governor of the Kursk Oblast, Alexander Khinstein, sought a loan to bridge the region’s budget deficit. No Russian bank was willing to assist, forcing Khinstein to announce sweeping austerity measures.” (h/t @MalcontentmentT)“Izvestia: Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant has temporarily suspended production of the expedition version of its model, the UAZ SGR Expedition.”“Bloomberg: Russian oil offered India refineries $7 discount per barrel.”“Newsweek: Russia Has Run Out of Money to Pay Its Soldiers—Regional Finance Minister”“Russia’s oil and gas revenue may fall in November by 35%,Reuters calculations show.”“The Ministry of Finance has noted the creation of artificial sources of financing for budget deficits by regions.Moscow. October 8. INTERFAX.RU - The Ministry of Finance wants to put a stop to the practice of regions artificially creating sources to finance their budget deficits, which has been identified in several federal subjects, through amendments to the Budget Code.”“Despite Putin’s attempts to revitalize the arms export industry, no one wants Russian weapons anymore.2021 $12.5b 2023 - $3 billion2024 - $1 billion.@JamestownTweets”“Moscow Times: Dimitriev’s NWF held 405.7 tons of gold before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.The Finance Ministry has since sold 57%, or 232.6 tons, to cover budget shortfalls, leaving 173.1 tons as of Nov. 1.”“Deficits across the regions have exploded to $8.1B this year, after a surplus last year. More than eight regions have already slashed enlistment bonuses from the equivalent of $30-35k down to just $4.5k.” @KShevchenkoReal“MilitaryNewsUA@front_ukrainian - Nov 6Uralvagonzavod, Russia’s largest manufacturer of railway cars and the main supplier of tanks to tharmy, is launching a major wave of staff cuts, E1 reports. According to the publication, 10% of its workforce will be laid off by February 2026. The company will also stop…”“The body is not healthy.” The government has reported almost complete lack of economic growth for the second month in a row.”“Russia’s oil revenues are collapsing.Minus $25B in 2025, crude selling at half price. Sanctions + Ukrainian strikes are hitting hard — U24.Ukraine strikes Novorossiysk and refineries almost daily. Seaborne exports fall 130k bpd. 350M barrels sit in tankers with no use.” @Mylovanov ⚡️Russia is collapsing.“The total amount of problem loans of legal entities on bank balance sheets by the end of the third quarter reached 10.4 trillion rubles, the Central Bank of the Russian Federation said on Friday. Since the beginning of the year, debts for which companies and individual entrepreneurs could not pay off on time have increased by 1.9 trillion rubles, and in the third quarter - by 600 billion.”“@Beefeater_Fella Putin was informed about the collapse of raw material revenues and the increase in collections from RussiansOil and gas revenues of the Russian budget have decreased by 2 trillion rubles this year, Federal Tax Service head Daniil Egorov told Vladimir Putin at a meeting in the Kremlin.Despite the decline in raw material revenues and a deficit exceeding 4 trillion rubles, “the budget is stable,”Egorov assured.According to him, more taxes are being collected from the non-raw sector of the economy — plus 3 trillion rubles since the beginning of the year.”“@Jonpy99: One of the biggest MT-LB bases prewar, the 7004th is now all but empty. Even most trucks are gone, but what’s interesting, I can only spot 3 bad looking MT-LBs left here.”“Yakutia’s Minister of Finance Ivan Alekseev went on television to report that payments to participants in the war in Ukraine are suspended due to a shortage of budget funds.”“Russian AvtoVAZ just admitted: 2025 car sales crashed 25% to only ~370k units.Advertised by Putin Lada’s market share plunged from 25% → 20%.Even Putin’s “save Russian cars” scrap fees got delayed twice after public outrage.Russians panic-bought foreign cars while the Chinese quietly take over the market.The Lada era is dying.”“Russia’s Novatek, the country’s largest LNG producer, is now selling #LNG to China at !. 30-40%.! discounts — a direct consequence of U.S. #Sanctions pressure on the Arctic LNG-2 project. The company couldn’t sell a single cargo for 20 months.Exports only resumed after Novatek offered gas at $3-4 below the Asian benchmark and at $28-32M per shipment — far below the $44M+ market value. Such”“Russia’s largest coal mining firm Mechel continues to spiral into oblivion as part of general collapse in Russia’s natural resource sector, today posting catastrophic 3rd quarter earnings.Coal production down another 38% over 9 months, and TOTAL anthracite production stopped, zero production in the third quarter.From earnings report.” @JayinKyiv “kremlin no longer tries to hide behind excuses and openly admits: mobile internet shutdowns in russia are approved at the highest levelputin’s spokesperson dmitry peskov stated that the kremlin “fully supports” mobile internet restrictions allegedly introduced to counter drones”“AKORT noted that past experience with price fluctuations for buckwheat, sugar, eggs, and other products has shown that such fluctuations are difficult to predict. Attempts to regulate them result in products flowing into the“gray market,” where dealers sell them at reduced prices without official permission.”“Bank of Russia prints 1.65% of GDP to buy government bonds, just last week. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe

Minsk is one of these characters I’ve been watching very closely. The Disinfolklore analytical method enables us to feel free. It prompts us to look for archetypal characters in the data — characters which aren’t typical. It’s not always Kellogg. Sometimes it’s Ukraine, the country itself. Ukraine archetypes as David or Goliath. Russia archetypes itself, switching between David and Goliath — on the one hand, “everyone’s ganging up on us, let me into the G8”; on the other, “we’re the mighty second army.” The power of this as an analytical tool comes to the fore when we recognise, for instance, that Kellogg is going to Minsk.I bet you Kellogg doesn’t know what I’m talking about here. He doesn’t understand why he is going to Minsk. The reason he’s going to Minsk, I believe, using the Disinfolklore analytical method, is to push this perennial troll about Minsk into the information space again.For me, Minsk is a living character. A living being. I was in eastern Ukraine on the day Minsk II was signed in mid-February 2015, and my job immediately changed. Under Minsk II, Russia and Ukraine agreed to withdraw their weapons systems a sufficient distance from the line of contact, which in the area I was in ran along the middle of the Donets River in eastern Ukraine, in Luhansk Oblast. Artillery had to move more than 30 kilometres away on each side. Myself and my colleagues from the OSCE — our job was to monitor the withdrawal and then, over the coming years, to ensure it was maintained.For instance, Russian occupiers on the Luhansk side, the Russian-occupied side of the river, used to go home in their tanks for lunch. We went through this whole debate about whether this was a breach of Minsk. Then we found out they were just going home for their lunch in the tank. So it was less than 30 kilometres, but we let it go. When there were breaches of Minsk, I had to certify them in a legal sense. These were then reported. Sometimes I certified thousands of breaches of the ceasefire.Minsk for me is a living character. It’s the difference between knowing a famous person because you’ve seen all their films or read the character in a book, and actually living in the same house as that famous character. That’s why I particularly tune in to the dynamic meaning of Minsk in Russian Disinfolklore. That’s why I tuned in immediately when I saw Kellogg was going to Minsk.My working assumption — and no data has displaced this yet — is that what Russia really wants is Minsk III. I archetype Minsk III as actually the agreement which was then breached between Duncy Putler and the Chef of Disinfolklore himself, Prigozhin, brokered on the day of the coup — the agreement that Prigozhin gets to go to Belarus and disappear, and they’ll fake the aeroplane crash. So that’s Minsk III. I then wrote about Minsk IV. What I’m trying to do in my small way is re-archetype Minsk, because what Russia really wants is the contact line to be frozen as is, faking in the tiny advances they’ve made since February 2022.I heard today that Donald in Canada was again pushing for Crimea to be recognised as Russian. This is what they’re fixed on. This is why I call Duncy Putler the village idiot, the village dunce. They fix on these things and they want their Minsk. We even saw the head of the OSCE in Moscow a few months ago — I wrote about it at the time. Russia denied there would be OSCE monitors, which told me Russia actually wants them. But of course, in the era of drone warfare, the job I did would be absolutely impossible today.The 30-kilometre withdrawal zone either side of the contact line for artillery, tanks and different weapons systems according to their range — that’s a really quaint, old-fashioned way of maintaining a ceasefire or a peace. Now you have drones which no one can see, which radars can’t detect and can’t stop, as we see with the Shahed drones. Monitoring a ceasefire would be absolutely impossible. Someone flies a drone — that should be a breach of the ceasefire.But that doesn’t mean Russia isn’t still madly trying to push Minsk as a concept, as an idea. James, you mentioned someone in President Zelensky’s team said there will be no Minsk. I recall it from that meeting in Indonesia where Ukraine set out its 10-point peace plan. The first point is: there will be no Minsk III. Ukraine cannot say this enough. It has said it a thousand times. Thankfully, all of our leaders are now on board with this — apart from one, sadly, who is indulging the Russians. And that is the purpose of Kellogg going to Minsk.Publicly, Russia says it can press on and keep going forever. But what it really wants is to stabilise the front lines and rerun this whole Minsk III troll — where you had five years after the Minsk agreements, in December 2019, President Zelensky in Paris at that very memorable, important meeting with Macron, Merkel and Putin. Russia just wants to replay the same tune again and again.I don’t think Kellogg would understand this. Paul Manafort might — he is probably the liaison between the oligarchs, Putin and Donald’s team. He may understand why they’re pushing Minsk. But as far as Kellogg goes — he’s the one who said “we need to hit the mule to teach the lesson.” He’s just like a mule, a dumb mule, who is probably doing this without understanding it. He still thinks people are listening to what he is doing in the peace process.I didn’t pick up any vibes from Merz or Meloni or any of them suggesting otherwise. If we look at the body language from Meloni — some epic photographs from Canada. There’s no one pushing for Minsk III now. I think all of our leaders have been convinced of what I knew immediately: that after the full-scale invasion, you would never have another Minsk. This war goes on to the end, until Russia leaves the whole of Ukraine — if that’s in a hundred years or in a few weeks. All of us are working for it to be in a few weeks or a month or two. But there will be no Minsk III.It’s not technically possible. Belarus entered the war. We remember this. It is a party to this war. Ukraine remembers this. Ukraine would be fully within its rights — and may well do this — to take out all of the Russian matériel and troops supposedly assembling in Belarus. The idea of Lukashenko playing coy and innocent — he is very much party to this war and sanctioned as such. Ukraine is perfectly within its rights, as Will has pointed out, to strike sites in Belarus.That’s why I believe Kellogg is going to Minsk. It’s an embassy on behalf of Russia, and it’s mainly to feed the information space. We’re going to see Minsk for the next week or so. It’s supposed to provoke in people’s minds this halcyon moment where we had a ceasefire and people stopped dying — and Russia was able to get on with brainwashing the people in the areas it occupied, disassembling all the factories, licking its wounds.As an American, it astonishes me that the people around that great country — the greatest country there’s ever been — can be laid so low as to have Kellogg unknowingly going merely to serve as a prompt for a Disinfolklore character, “Minsk,” in our information space. That’s really what I want to talk about today.⚡️Russia’s Core Competency? Industrialisation of suicide-bomber creation.Sculpting Suicide Bombers out of ordinary humans used to be an artisan trade. Russia learned it from Assad’s father, who perfected the art.Every day since March 2023 1000+ Russian soldiers, knowing they will be killed, have executed assaults in Ukraine which are doomed to fail.How does Russia get ordinary humans to participate?We have seen thousands of videos of such assaults, ghosts crossing no-man’s land turned to dust by Ukrainian drones.We’ve read hundreds of first-hand accounts like this one: “A Russian soldier fighting in Chasiv Yar says that new recruits sent to the front die almost immediately, with his own unit taking over 90% casualties. The fields are strewn with rotting corpses. To avoid having to pay compensation to relatives, collecting IDs is banned…”Drugs, of course help. Yet, it’s the systems inside Russia’s army which have enabled Russia to turn artisan workshop-created suicide bombers of Isis, Hamas, and Al Quada into a mass production industry. At every point in the assembly line between recruitment and death on a hopeless meat assault in Ukraine Russia’s corruption system propels recruits forward towards their inevitable death.You go to buy eggs for your dinner in Russia. You wake up, still drunk, on a train to Ukraine. In a stupor you’ve signed a mobilisation contract.Multiple Russians have already pocketed segments of your sign-on bonus. At training you’ll die unless you bribe the Sargent. You’ll starve unless you bribe the cook. On the way to the front, you’ll freeze, unless you bribe someone else for a blanket. You’ll be put in the carriage with the ex-prisoner convicted of cannibalism. The list of iterations and market opportunities for Russia’s army of parasites is endless. Guilty of corruption? Pay your way out of jail with the corruption proceeds by spending the rest of the war in a boarding house in Berdyansk. At the position you’re tied to a tree as a sacrifice to a Baba Yaga drone until you hand over your money card to the commander… Eventually you end up in a video like this:Be warned though, this system is not an accident. It’s Russia’s core competency.⚡️How NATO can prepare for today’s wars.Probably the only way militaries will innovate commensurate with challenge facing them is if, as I still maintain might well yet happen, Ukraine, Poland, maybe Türkiye,Baltic, states, aided by Finland, Scandinavians and Nordics will eject Russia from 100% of Ukraine. Way things are going (currently) US may join in. Otherwise, our militaries appear to be wishing drone warfare will just disappear. Military leaders mostly retired I read a lot of these days (like General Mick Ryan) understand virtually everything from am institutional, procurement, structure of units, electronic warfare,… everything needs to be transformed within NATO armies. Naturally conservative armies don’t change unless they’re at war. Pictured here is the legendary “Magyar” head of Ukraine’s unmanned systems force (still the only army on earth that has a dedicated entity for UAVs). The era of the gamer / soldier is nigh. Last night Magyar’s birds took out one of Russia’s most important electricity substations and its main Black Sea port Tuapse for exporting oil. No other army in the world has that capability all the while eliminating hundreds of invading Russians across a 1,400km contact line every day with thousands of drones.80% of Russian casualties are caused by Ukrainian drones. Yearly budget for drones this year is €5b.⚡️Russians’ panic about their ‘ethnos’ disappearing - unfounded.Sure, as Russia disintegrates into 5 or 6 new sovereign states over the coming months (see below) Russians worry about disappearing.They ought to be reassured that China assimilated the Manchu so successfully that today it’s hard to find anyone in China who identifies as Manchu. Even though the Manchu/Qing dynasty ruled China from 1644-1912. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe

Jeffrey Sachs was in my mind because he was this kind of devil from the early 1990s, when he was responsible for shock therapy or whatever. But I hadn’t encountered him in reference to Ukraine until I was on holiday on the Turkish Riviera in the summer of 2024. A really close friend of mine — who, like many people, has no sympathy for Ukraine and loads of sympathy for the plight of Palestinians — and I said to him: “Look, you’re really lucky, because I’m one of the few people who has spoken to more local elected officials in Ukraine than almost any Westerner.” I spent four years of my life, every working day, going into the villages and the hromadas — the decentralised former Soviets — and speaking to people. That was my level as a very low-level diplomat and member of the international community. I discovered I could get meetings with these village heads who had been elected under this amazing decentralisation plan which Ukraine introduced on the 1st of April 2014. President Poroshenko did amazing work with it, and so did President Zelensky.Power was decentralised to these villages, former Soviets which had never had any power. They used to have to go to the district councils to get money to change a light bulb. All the elections were fixed. All these communities were designed around the communal farm. Until relatively recently, many of the people there didn’t have a passport — they couldn’t even leave their villages without permission. Suddenly this new process comes in, and you have these amazing leaders, male and female, in Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kirovohrad — that was my area of operation. In Dnipropetrovsk, half of the hromada leaders were women. I went to each of them and asked: what made you do this? It was a voluntary process. They would bring me around these amazing schools — European-standard schools funded by the European Union, the Ukrainian government and USAID.It’s an amazing story of decentralisation of power, of governance reform, which is virtually impossible in most of our countries because there are so many vested interests. Ireland, for instance, still has the same governance structure it had when it was ruled by England. It’s just impossible to change. So it really impressed me that in Ukraine, in the midst of a war, over the course of five years, they rammed through this really democratic process. This is probably why the left — and there are many people in the English left who full-throatedly support Ukraine and have been over there a lot — anyone who looks into Ukrainian governance will be really impressed by what they do. They keep 50% of their taxes.I’m saying to my friend: “This is my experience. I can tell you there are no Nazis in Ukraine. I can tell you they will fight to the last person. I can tell you these are the areas that are now occupied, and I met the leaders there. Some of them are dead now. Some of them are in jail. Others are just waiting, biding their time to come back. I think every day of the people I met in schools there, the older people who gave us gifts and bread, who are in these places the Russians have been brutally occupying.”And then he quotes Jeffrey Sachs to me. I said: “Who is Jeffrey Sachs? I don’t even know if he’s been to Ukraine. And somehow you believe him over me — your friend whom you’ve known for decades.” That has always stuck in my mind. Whenever I hear Jeffrey Sachs, I think about it. I think about what kind of algorithm is serving this stuff up to my friend — that he’s watching Jeffrey Sachs talking about things — and why is he believing Jeffrey Sachs over me, someone who has actually been there and talked to the people?I used to think, when I set out on this path in 2018 to try and understand Donald’s magic — how did he troll people so successfully? — that it was just a matter of getting the truth in there. I wrote my first things online in 2019. Up to that point, I was completely invisible. But now I realise it’s about amplification. It’s about bot networks. It’s about the financial motivations of these people. But in a way, it isn’t even about financial motivation — all of us spend most of every day on Ukraine, and none of us are earning any money from it. So it’s about amplification and bot networks. And someone like Sachs — he lost his soul a long time ago. Like Donald, he has no shame.The shame of being called out won’t make him skulk away, because he’s not in good faith. He’s not right. He’s not looking at the Code of Positive Trolls. He knows what he’s saying is a lie. He knows how much money he’s got from China, from the UAE or wherever else to do this. It’s part of this whole system. I think I saw he’s got seven bookings in twelve days. Who’s doing that? No one’s doing that for you, Wendy, or for me. There’s a whole network — a paid, financial network behind it, of Russians, of the oligarchs he helped enrich — whatever his motivation. I guess we’ll still see him popping up again and again. It’s always a bit annoying when people like Will Thiel and people like me, who know a lot more in a provincial, regional way about governance in Ukraine — why is no one platforming us? We just have to keep on trucking.It was great to see him exposed in that way, and I’m glad to see it. But I guess he’ll keep selling his wares. We see these people — like Putin, like the war itself — as a complete disaster repeating again and again. He’ll probably continue doing that.I’m always usually quite happy when I try — as gently, as astutely, as skilfully and as unemotionally as I can manage — to challenge people. I often think about this conversation I had in Turkey about Jeffrey Sachs. I’m glad I had it. I don’t know if I changed my friend’s mind, but I hope so. We need to challenge these things and find skilful ways — emotionally resonant ways, clever ways, different voices — not to go on about it, but to find skilful means to convince people. Definitely call out the lies. When we have knowledge that the person is lying, call it out. But the real lesson is that presenters aren’t doing it, and we see this in America a lot at the moment, which is terrible.Volume and frequency — that’s one of the key patterns. Take the Jeffrey Sachs thing. He’s not on my mind at all. When I look at YouTube, I clean all my cookies so I just get the default feed. But clearly my friend has probably got six years of vatnik stuff brainwashing him in his algorithm. With Jeffrey Sachs, I remember scanning my timeline and you suddenly see this thing in a positive sense — and you know that’s going to be the issue of the day. So you try to come up with a response.We see these repetitive patterns, which many of us are tuned into — particularly coming from Russia, because they just come up with the same lines again. It’s on a calendar, like an Outlook calendar. “Six months now, we have to go for peace negotiations again.” “Let’s accuse Zelensky of buying a castle in God knows where — should we say Italy or America this time?” The repetition, volume, frequency — then you see the same energy outward. It’ll always be Zelensky buying something. The energy is “corruption.” But it won’t always be a castle in Italy. Sometimes it’s California. I think he was buying a ranch today. Of course, that repetition also works — it convinces people it’s true. But for us who are deliberately trying to look out for it and not fall for trolls, when I see something repeated like that, I’m suspicious. It gets me to look closer.We no longer have to rely on some quaint Italian TV programme. We are making the news ourselves, trying to make it as engaging as possible by sharing interesting things, creating interesting things with different voices, different colours, humour. That’s a very positive thing which never existed before. We are fighting back. What Volya Radio does with Mokrushyna, with Will and all of you — Genesis Man, Midwest Fellow, yourself Wendy, Iona of course, Yeni, and everyone — is countering this in our own way. We’re creating spaces that never existed before, when we used to have to rely on people like Jeffrey Sachs or the talking head on the weekly current-affairs show in whichever village or country or town we lived in. That is quite wonderful. It’s also part of the problem, but at least we have a voice and we’re not just shouting at the TV.The things I’ve spoken about before are character. You see character in memes, in tropes — not just individuals but these tropes coming up again and again. The Victoria Nuland one and all of that. Part of the really annoying thing — when people like my friend start talking about this conspiracy, when you know the truth — is that Sikorski, who is now obviously a hero and has learned from the experience, had negotiated with Klitschko. He and Klitschko had persuaded the demonstrators to stand down and allow Yanukovych to continue. It was only that Yanukovych did a runner that the deal fell apart. The idea that the Americans and the American establishment wanted the demonstrators to take over — it just betrays a worrying lack of understanding of the character immanent in our governance structures and our leadership and our leaders. The last thing they wanted was a revolution.This idea of Victoria Nuland passing out these really cheap biscuits — anyone who’s been to Ukraine will know Yulia Tymoshenko’s supermarket chain. You buy the biscuits by the weight. That’s what Nuland was giving out. Anyone repeating this conspiracy betrays a worrying lack of understanding of the character of people in our political establishment. They did not want this to be happening. They’ve done everything they can since the time General Electric built the Zaporizhzhia Dam in the 1930s as part of Stalin’s five-year plan. They’ve done everything they can to give Russia respect and keep it alive. The idea that they would have done this coup thing is absurd.Of course, the people accusing the CIA and Victoria Nuland of doing what they in their conventional world would never have done are the very ones who were creating the coup — by hiring Paul Manafort, a Republican strategist who is now advising Donald. We may see Donald pursuing a coup in Ukraine again — every now and again he talks about President Zelensky’s legitimacy. Onwards.Frequency and repetition — we see these same things coming up again and again. On one level it’s maddening, on another it’s hilarious, on another it’s just really worrying that people who supposedly know something about geopolitics think the world works that way. They’ve just read too many of that guy from MIT’s stories about CIA coups, and not enough of Michael Weiss’s stuff on the GRU and Russian intelligence. They have a completely wrong understanding of the character of our very conservative governance structures. And it’s a bit annoying. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe

Yesterday was the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a white supremacist. In the wake of that murder, the movement from the right and the far right was to archetype those like George Floyd, but mainly those supporting George Floyd in the demonstrations afterwards — those who awoke to injustice and are awake to injustice. The far right and the right ran a coordinated, globally important, significant and successful campaign to archetype those of us who are woke, and proudly woke to our rights, as “woke” and somehow weak. The weak woke.I would never have predicted this archetyping campaign would succeed, because it seems so counter-intuitive that you could persuade clever, educated people — even on the right, all across the world, and through their media, through the oligarch-owned media — that this is an appropriate campaign, an in-group-creating concept: anti-wokeness. In my view, this all arose from George Floyd’s murder. I always think of him and his little daughter, who’s probably around eleven now, when I see “woke” and “anti-woke.” I see people whom I like, who are good friends of mine and share many of my values, themselves campaigning against woke.As previously advertised here, the dividing line for me is: if you’re committed to the post-World War II legal and social order — the Refugee Convention, anti-discrimination rules, laws, human rights protected as a matter of law universally for every human regardless of which group they’re in — then that is the dividing line. The anti-woke campaign, led by the oligarchs and the far right after George Floyd’s ruthless murder by a white supremacist, was their response. Their response was to archetype people alive to their rights, alive to the post-World War II legal and social order, as “woke” and therefore deserving of being denigrated.Now we see a much more sinister movement. And I use the word “sinister” as opposed to “right.” Sinistrous in Latin means left. This is the underlying linguistic and psycholinguistic meaning of the far right — and sadly now many leading politicians — archetyping opposition as “left.” They don’t even need to say you’re sinister. They just say you’re left, you’re leftist.In this executive order setting out the priority policy for US government agencies and departments to agree with the designation of Antifa as terrorists and as an organisation — and in line with this memorandum on national security, which again repeats the designation of Antifa as terrorism and sets out some of the characteristics of those who will be designated as, I’m paraphrasing here, enemies of the state and therefore subject to the full power of the US government’s enforcement mechanisms, many of which were developed during the War on Terror — included are people who are organising to violently suppress others’ rights. The entire document is an accusation in a mirror, in my humble opinion.It archetypes as Antifa anyone who’s anti-Christian, anyone who’s anti-family values. It sets out all of the grounds to destroy the entire post-World War II legal and social order. But it does say that anyone who wants to abolish rights, to get rid of people’s rights, can be designated as terrorists.That’s how I see George Floyd — to commemorate George Floyd and to think about all of that time, which seems like a lifetime ago. It was just five years ago. But his legacy does live on. Now we are seeing the same tricks being used with the concept of anti-fascism. “Anti-fascist” — that’s the term used in this national security memorandum just signed by Donald.An agency has been set up in Virginia, a building where American citizens are being put on lists — as we speak, every day — because of someone’s interpretation that they are anti-Christian, or anti-family values, or out to get the right. I noted that this particular document includes pure Disinfolklore: this idea that the bullet casings which killed Kirk contained Antifa rhetoric, which we now know to be untrue. But this is now part of this justificatory memorandum, being used to compile lists of Americans and NGOs who are now persona non grata. Again, we can see where this is going. And it’s not very nice.⚡️Why the Far Right Eat and Kill Dogs.Poster on pro-English Northern Ireland bonfire demonstrates the ‘immigrants eating dogs’ trope is at least a decade old. Poster features my old boss the late great Anna Lo - the first ethnic Chinese legislator to be elected to a European legislature.Mitt Romney’s presidential bid came unstuck after it was rumoured he attached his dog (and kennel) to the roof rack to go on holiday. Now every Republican candidate boasts about eating or killing dogs. What’s going on?By modelling willingness to eat dogs, shoot horses, drone bomb or drown prospective immigrants far right politicians are staking a claim for rightful sovereignty. It has long been held that, as Sylvia Perera wrote, a human who aspires to being monarch in Indo-European culture must be:“conscious enough to face the ugly, pain filled reality of the Outer Realm… they must be strong as a warrior, productive as a farmer, and wise as a druid.””In dealing with the Chef of Disinfolklore in later chapters we will return again and again to Indo-European culture’s tripartite conception of the qualities sovereigns need to qualify for leadership - killer / warrior (Security), farmer (Prosperity/ Fertility), druid (Sovereignty)…” disinfolklore.net/p/disinfolklor…⚡️Trolls are energy (Mana) that only moves when we share them.Then, we become the troll.The informational unit (Troll) consumes us as it instrumentalises us to keep it in motion.Like a virus hacking our mind, the troll uses us to keep their troll moving.Ruschia’s Nordic troll monarch Putler is very successful at provoking us into doing his mental work.We are the petrol fuelling the troll, even when we disagree with its content.That’s the point of trolls like Nigel Porridge, in fact. Their oligarch backers pay to promote their trolls. Then, by reacting and perpetuating the trolls, we fuel and energise that which we think we’re opposing.We become the Useful I***** of Useful I******.One solution I’ve found if I must talk about Nigel Porridge or the Chef Wanger Nazi, the Chef of Disinfolklore, of the Chief Sorcerer Putler is to corrupt their monikers.⚡️English Russia Report published - it’s a troll.English Parliamentary report on Russian interference in English democracy has been published. In full. It’s rubbish. Seeks not to find anything.Frames Brexit and Russia merely as Russia’s proven attempt to affect the information space. Whereas, we know the entire referendum was a part of a Russian Active Measure. English Parliamentary anti-European headbangers were easy prey: they were compromised by their willingness to Brexit at any and all costs. Johnson and Cummings then purposely delayed publication of Russia report to troll us into thinking there was anything of value in it. Many of us fell for that troll. Then we saw the report and understood: the report itself is a whitewash.By comparison US Senate and House Intelligence Committees published substantive reports on Russia’s interference in American democracy in 2016. Thousands of pages. They did though miss the one salient fact about the Steele Dossier: Deripaska managed to launder Russian Disinfolklore into the Dossier. Thus, impugning the Dossier when, for example, it turned out Michael Cohen had never been to Prague.Moral of this story? At least the truth is out there in America. Whereas, in England they still don’t understand they was trolled.P.S. By branding a government report as “independent” English legislators engaged in putting Disinformation engaged in it:https://isc.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/CCS207_CCS0221966010-001_Russia-Report-v02-Web_Accessible.pdf⚡️On calling for another candidate.Trump’s power (Mana) is 100% the 20 oligarchs whose channels amplify his nonsense.Get rid of Biden, and Trump’s artificial Mana remains.Projecting magical power (Mana) unto Trump is 100% within your control.When you call for another candidate, you’re falling for the troll.You’re perpetuating the power (Mana) of Trump your conscious mind seeks to neutralise.Trolls move like this - liberate yourself from this mental enslavement by these oligarchs and their puppets Trump and Putler!Ruschia’s Nordic troll monarch Putler, for example, or Trump, are very successful at provoking our minds with emotions, which often carelessly we communicate into others’ minds (thereby doing those demonic trolls’ mean work for them). Such trolls, once inside our minds, commingle their energy (Mana) with our Mana through linguistic, visual, tonal, or audible means. They fire their energy / emotions into our minds. Before we know it, we become the petrol fuelling the troll, whether we agree or we disagree with its content. When Negative Trolls troll us into feeling and propagating their emotions, we risk becoming the Useful Idiots of Useful Idiots. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe

Some of us will have seen this Harvard-Harris poll during the week. I wrote a piece on it: “Why America Trusts Donald — Disinfolklore.” Facebook is one of America’s most trusted institutions, along with the army, the FBI, the CDC, and the police — broadcasting Disinfolklore chosen by the algorithm to suit our own particular minds, stories that convey meanness and delusions. Most Americans believe America is on the right track, or at least not on the wrong track too badly. That’s a reference to how 40% of Americans believe America is on the right track.Some of you attentive listeners will know I write a lot about right and ṛg and its origins. Those 40% are probably authoritarian followers. They believe it — and the RT sound is also an authoritarian follower’s sound. Those 40%, or at least a good smattering of them — some estimates suggest 30% of any group will be higher on the right-wing authoritarian scale — they believe America is on the right track despite some of our conversations in previous episodes. This is the power of Disinfolklore, Facebook’s power to wrap America and all of us up into a Disinfolklore universe.However, Volodymyr Zelensky, despite all the anti-Ukraine Disinfolklore, is more trusted than anyone else alive in America — apart from the right-wing, far-right commentator Kirk’s widow, the ex-model whom Donald hugs quite a lot. Notice: Erica Kirk. You’ve got that RK sound twice in her name — Erica, Kirk. You have it once in Kirk, obviously, in Charlie Kirk’s surname. This demonstrates that Disinfolklore is not all-powerful, if Volodymyr Zelensky after this relentless Disinfolklore is on 13% positive.There are only four people in this Harris poll whose favourable and unfavourable ratings matched out in positive numbers. Drum roll. Fourth was RFK Jr. — God help us — on 2%. Kirk himself was on 14%. Volodymyr Zelensky was on 13%. And the late Kirk’s widow was on 16% — percent who thought they were favourable.So: “Why America Trusts Donald” — Disinfolklore and Facebook’s vision, its change in strategy, seems to be matched. If both sides, or all sides, now trust Facebook to properly brainwash them, then that’s a win if you’ve got shares in Facebook.Chanting “genocide” — the mantra “genocide” now performs the same role as “lock her up,” “Brexit,” “Russia, Russia, Russia,” “Hunter Biden.” It serves to close off discussion, hypnotise, signal the left’s right arm. Meanwhile, Russia forcibly transfers 20,000 Ukrainian children and the left is silent. Perfect Russian troll: distract and detract. If you only oppose one supposed genocide yet ignore an actual genocide on your own continent, you’ve been trolled, hypnotised by Russia’s useful idiot leftist elite. I’m sorry if that offends anyone. I’m an artist.MAGA will never run out of Epstein distractions. This riffs off what I mentioned two weeks ago — my idea that really we’re in the metaphor of that show *Lost*, which I experienced earlier and realised after a couple of seasons that you never get to some apex. You never get rewarded for your commitment. The plot always just keeps extending and extending.I think there’s an infinity of ways MAGA will find information alibis to support the idea that “Troll Epstein Russian Donald Mafia Don” doesn’t constitute enough to sink Donald. If we’re waiting, as many of us are, on the edge of our seat for that one final action which will tip it all over the edge and everything will return to how it was before this nightmare movie — sadly, the data doesn’t support this. The data supports the idea that there’s an infinity of stories to constantly roll, royal and troll us. That doesn’t mean I don’t foresee an end to MAGA and to this nightmare. It just means it’s not going to happen in the news space.I’ve written before about “Unified Reich.” In May 2024, it was very clear when Donald tweeted a meme with the words “Unified Reich” exactly what he was signalling, and some of us picked it up. I wrote about it at the time, and we are seeing the Unified Reich being created around us — with the executive order instructing all American governance institutions that Antifa is now verboten. Now we’ve seen this national security memo basically setting out that anyone who professes anti-Christian views — we’re open to question what that means — and various other viewpoints can be subjected to the full power of the American government. Even if they’re US citizens, the Internal Revenue Service will investigate them. It’s a version of the foreign agents law in Georgia, the country Georgia.I note this because what some of us write, what I try to write, is predictive. It’s not just looking at the past. I’m trying to give the tools to predict the future. Many of us here — James, I suspect you were tuned into it from the very beginning and you saw what was going to happen. And it is happening, very sadly. But we can use those tools to predict the future from here as well. I am doing that by saying: MAGA will never run out of Epstein distractions.Then that story today about US Republican Nazis relying on Telegram. The thing which grabbed me was that they’re relying on Telegram. There’s just no awareness among this far-right elite, these people trained and radicalised over the last few years since the first Donald presidency, that the Russian government owns, runs and controls Telegram. They have not only infected the smartphones of all of these unsmart US young Nazis — I don’t know how these documents were leaked. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were leaked by the Russians to put pressure on Donald while President Zelensky is there. Who knows? That’s what struck me about the US Republican Nazis’ reliance on Telegram.On a high note — although none of us are going to get excited because we know it could change around tomorrow — we saw Donald said yesterday: “Putin has lost about 1.5 million people in the war with Ukraine. It’s a terrible war. Putin doesn’t want to end the war. Russia’s economy could collapse. There are already long lines at gas stations. I wish them well, but he doesn’t want to stop. Ukraine has effectively stopped the Russian army. Who would have thought?”This is what I’ve been trying to do, and what many of us have been working towards: re-archetyping Ukraine as strong rather than weak. I’ve written before about how fake hillbilly Vance — because Vance is a completely artificial character, a construction from the suburbs of Cincinnati, classic Midkid, gets to Yale and then re-archetypes himself as a hillbilly according to the script of Peter Thiel — becomes the voice of this fake idea that Donald was tapping into some pre-existing sense of alienation in areas of former coal mining and depressed industry. Rather than the truth: that MAGA and Bannon and Thiel and others created this sense of alienation using the Disinfolklore apparatus. Vance, the character, the fake hillbilly, was and is used to bring the story forward. In February, he was archetyping Ukraine as weak inside the White House. But now Ukraine has re-archetyped its image as strong.That, for me, is the meta battle. That’s the battle of the titans. I spoke about it in my Munich speech in February. That’s where the war will be won and lost. Everything else is a tool to bring that about — the bombings of Russian fuel stations, the gas-line queues, the amazing work done along the 1,400-kilometre-long front line by brave Ukrainian soldiers, the political game, the diplomatic game which Volodymyr Zelensky is playing in DC tonight. The real battle is all about re-archetyping Ukraine as strong.Will Thiel has put it another way, which may or may not be happening right now. The signs are good, but I think we’ve all been through this episode of *Lost* before — we’re still only halfway through the second season of the Ukraine war, and it can turn on a dime. But the signs are looking good. I remember Will arguing that when it looked like Ukraine would win, everyone would want a piece of the win and they’d go all in. None of us know if this is going to happen right now. But at least after so many distressing episodes in this struggle since February 2022 — for us in a mood sense, as distinct from the upset Ukrainians feel by being under ongoing bombardment — our emotional rollercoaster is, at the moment, a good feeling. Long may it continue.I’ve written before about how fake hillbilly Vance. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe

One of our first encounters with the internet today was to see Donald’s tweet — or untruth. And the experience all of us had when we saw that untruth is the experience that every MAGA cult member had the moment they became a member of the cult. They probably didn’t notice that time when they read something or heard something of Donald’s that they just agreed with a million percent. And that turned them from a complete sceptic — and in many cases, many MAGAdians hated Donald, absolutely hated him, which is the case in most cults.All of us collectively this morning had that experience. But also, I hope all of us secretly smiled and thought of all the people we’ve been speaking to, preaching to, explaining to since March — certainly in my case, early March 2022. Everything Donald was saying was in the tea leaves, the data. This is what the data said within a week of the full-scale invasion. And it’s interesting — he referenced that a normal army, a serious army, would have disposed of this within a week. Everything else has unfurled from that experience.Many of us have spent many hours of our lives trying to not sound crazy and explain to normal civilians who live in the real world, who aren’t focused on oil refineries or land swaps and just pick up what they pick up from the news. And then to hear Donald speak like us — and here I speak for most people who listen to Volya Radio and have been watching and participating and experiencing this war through radio and doing what we can through the information space — to hear a US president, any US president, speak in these terms, we definitely deserve, and I’m sure many of us did have, a smile. No one overreacted. Everyone expects it to be rolled back in a day or two.We knew that America was out in terms of free arms deliveries. But this is what Ukraine has been playing for, for months. And Zelensky was perhaps one of the first people to see with complete clarity, from perhaps September 2024 onwards, that the very best we could hope for was that Donald would just sell arms to Ukraine. Thankfully, Germany is opening up the wallet, everyone is opening up their wallets, and everyone is sensing how Ukraine is going to be our security guarantor — and therefore we’d better keep it on side.Let’s just enjoy this moment for what it is. But I did want to make that observation: this is how you get inducted into a cult, and into what I call the Disinfolklore galaxy. When you suddenly start agreeing with the cult leader like this. On the other end, you could argue he’s joined our cult. He’s clearly been listening — or whoever wrote this was listening — has been listening to all your radio. They’re finally seeing what we’ve been seeing. We’ve been watching the refineries go up over the past couple of weeks. We’ve been watching what’s going on around Pokrovsk, up in Sumy, around Kupiansk. We’re watching the radars being taken out in Crimea — at a granularity that clearly the people advising Donald are looking at. All of that has contributed to this huge volte-face in his mind.Perhaps he is saying all of this because it is new in that world. It’s novel, and he loves that. He’s great at innovating and leading ideas and giving lines to people, which is essentially what his tweets do. They’re talking points and thinking points for the mainstream and for people. I think that is that for me. I’m very pleased about all of it. I’m not expecting anything else out of it.Quickly moving on to what matters. On the battlefield: absolutely nothing has changed. What I have been looking for since the beginning of March 2022 — and it’s taken a while to gather the vocabulary, and some of you have been along this journey — is the re-archetyping of the identity of Ukraine inside the minds of humanity.As previously discussed, for me this goes back — and I want people to understand from all of my work — the primary purpose goes back to 4,100 BCE, when the first Indo-European language speakers and their culture and religion, out of which emanate all of our languages, culture and Indo-European religions today, first emerged in Mykolaivka, in Zaporizhzhia. I previously said it was Kherson, but I’ve actually found the type site. Anyway, going all the way up to the present day — 6,000 years.In the context of the short durée of the war, all of my work, everything I’ve written — the millions of words — and all of the words I’ve spoken, their primary purpose has been to try and change the archetypal identity in people’s minds: that Ukraine is a superpower. I first tweeted about this around the 8th of March 2022, when it became clear to me what was going on on the battlefield.I’m not concerned with discharge petitions, Congress, money coming from America, what America can do. That isn’t where the focus of my work is. What is immanent today — the mana, the energy in that tweet — was all about Ukraine being a superpower. And that, for me, is the great victory, because it’s so far outside most normal people’s minds. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe

⚡️I argue below that the force that led to Mass Infection policy (which was generated in Silicon Valley a year before Covid vaccines were invented), now is in charge of public health in America.That force is now in control of the gatekeepers of health, well being and protection of the right to life in America: National Institutes of Health and Centers of Disease Control through PayPal Mafia-related lieges. Now they can continue in earnest what they began with Covid: Mass Depopulation policies.That that force was capable of persuading humanity that being repeatedly infected by a neuroinvasive virus that affects negatively over 200 bodily systems necessary for life is a Good Thing demonstrates its power. That force, I argue, is even more powerful than Russia, Donald or China: took two years but it even convinced China to go for Mass Infection.Those of us who are paying attention should be as scared today as the European aristocracy was in the 1780s. I’m Decoding Trolls. I’m here to give you some good news and some bad news. The good news is Russia is finally going to die. This week, the Russian state bombed the British Council and the European Union’s delegation headquarters in Kyiv.This is in a long line of attacks on the European Union and on Britain and the West. In some ways, although it will pass many people by, this is the beginning of the end for Russia. This kind of senseless violence cannot stand.We will remember the first protests broke out around the 21st of November 2013 in Kyiv, protests against the refusal by the then pro-Russia president of Ukraine to sign the European Union Association Agreement. Yanukovych, the then Ukrainian president, whose chief advisor was Paul Manafort — who was later jailed for tax fraud and acting as an unregistered foreign agent for the Ukrainian government. Manafort is back advising Trump now.When Russian propaganda talks about a CIA plot to capture Ukraine, that is kind of true, but not in the way the Russians mean. It was a plot by Paul Manafort, paid for by four pro-Russia oligarchs, to divide and ruin Ukraine from around 2004 or 2005 onwards, when he began to advise Yanukovych, until Yanukovych ran away in February 2014 after these protests.Paul Manafort’s own children, in leaked text messages from a year after the Heavenly Hundred were murdered on the Maidan by snipers acting under Russian provocation in Kyiv — it was Paul Manafort’s idea, according to his own children, that the protesters should be violently suppressed. This would create pressure from the European Union to pressure the demonstrators to accept the continuation of his boss Yanukovych’s presidency.The current Polish foreign minister, Sikorski, was also foreign minister at the time. He was in Kyiv and had negotiated a deal between the demonstrators and the Ukrainian authorities — that the demonstrators would stand down. But this deal was upended when Yanukovych ran away.We see many of the same players involved now, eleven years later. The European Union is one of them. Paul Manafort is still advising Donald Trump. Sikorski is still, or is now again, Polish foreign minister.The demonstrators on the Maidan are no longer a large subset of the Ukrainian population. They are the entire Ukrainian nation. And they are not just a raggle-taggle army of football supporters organising around Pravyi Sektor and the Azov Battalion in Kyiv to hold back the might of the second army of the world. Ukraine’s army is probably the preeminent army in the world at the moment, due to their integration of drone technology and tactics which have brought and are bringing Russia to its knees.When Russia this week bombed the European Union delegation in Kyiv, this is a message from Russia which is well received and understood by people such as me and others who have been following this conflict at close quarters since the very beginning. I spent seven years in eastern Ukraine working for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. What is going on in Ukraine informs all of my work.It is not just because it informs my work that I am interested in Ukraine. From very early on, it became clear to me — from the summer of 2016, when Paul Manafort had suddenly become Donald Trump’s campaign manager, and Tom Barrack, Donald Trump’s best friend, who was later also convicted of acting as a foreign agent and is now resurrected as the United States ambassador to Turkey — Tom Barrack and Paul Manafort arranged for the commitment in the Republican Party’s platform for the 2016 presidential election to remove the commitment to arm Ukraine.At the time, we were only talking about Javelin missile systems — anti-tank missile systems — which people like me, who didn’t know much about military things, thought would be enough to hold back the Russians. For the first week of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, having anti-tank missile systems, each costing around $200,000, was great. But it was a complement to the civil and military discipline, enthusiasm and innovation which drove the Russians back from Kyiv after the Russians lost the Battle of Moshchun on the 28th of March 2022.Russia then retreated and declared that phase one of the special military operation was over and that phase two would begin. At the time, the Russians were briefing that phase two would be concluded by so-called Victory Day, May 9th 2022. In order to reach that, the Russians killed 25,000 civilians in Mariupol by carpet-bombing the city. They also killed 10,000 civilians in Severodonetsk, a city where I lived for three years between 2015 and 2018. Yet on Victory Day 2022 — I’ll post the picture — rather than Putin declaring victory, he sat at the Victory Day parade with a blanket around his knees.Then it was briefed that by the end of June, Russia would have concluded phase two. Remember, at this time, phase two is publicly simply to occupy Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, which Russia had been trying to occupy since 2014 and had initially been held back by a raggle-taggle army focused around two football supporters’ groups that manifested as Pravyi Sektor (Right Sector) and the Azov Battalion, which today is a storied part of the Ukrainian army — another character in our story.By the end of June 2022, Russia still hadn’t captured all of Donetsk and Luhansk. So they concocted a plan to conquer Bakhmut, which they thought was a realisable goal. By the end of July, they sent their best forces there under the command of the chef of Disinfolklore, Prigozhin — who had got Donald Trump elected in 2016 through his disinformation operations, who got Brexit done in Britain also in 2016. Prigozhin’s Wagner military units were eviscerated in Bakhmut. As I record this today, it is being reported that their successors in Mali are being run out of Mali and run out of Africa as well. Ukraine did that. Ukraine destroyed Russia’s best elite army unit under the Nazi brand Wagner, founded by Utkin, a Russian soldier, first manifested in Ukraine when I was there in 2014–2015 in Luhansk.Wagner then became part of the Disinfolklore apparatus, seen as a fierce, formidable force involved in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Syria, which drove millions of refugees into Europe, which led to Orbán’s election, the Law and Justice Party’s election in Poland, and of course to Brexit. The carpet-bombing of Syria by the Russian army was part of their strategy to bring about political change in Europe. That carpet-bombing began in September 2015 — all to deliver Ukraine to Russia.Flash forward to 2022, and Russia is continually being eviscerated — not only on the battlefield in Ukraine, where it has lost a million soldiers. It took them ten months to take Bakhmut, which was supposed to fall by the end of July. Bakhmut was held by the Ukrainian army, and the conquest of Bakhmut was a strategic dead end. It led nowhere. It brought Russia no closer geographically or strategically to winning phase two, which was to conquer and occupy all of Luhansk and Donetsk by what was supposed to be the 1st of September.Very close to the 1st of September, Russia had to retreat from Kherson. We know from Bob Woodward’s reporting that the American president prevented Ukraine from eviscerating the 100,000 Russian troops retreating from Kherson because they were afraid of nuclear war. Instead of destroying the Russian army as it retreated — which is allowed in the laws of war — Ukraine had to let them go in order to keep the tepid American military support on board.Russia then legislated into their so-called constitution — a couple of days before this massive retreat — the areas of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk and Donetsk, which they had not fully occupied by military force. They have spent the past three years trying to persuade the world to pressure Ukraine into accepting their brutal occupations of these areas.Of late, they are trying to convince the bizarre people collected around Donald Trump that somehow Russia is making a concession by only claiming the areas of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts which, after ten years of war, it cannot fully occupy. Russia tries to persuade us it’s a concession by them not to occupy any more land in Ukraine. Even though they cannot occupy these lands by military means, if the West and Ukraine will just give Russia these lands in negotiations, Russia supposedly will not try to take any further lands.It is very clear now — when Russia is sending missiles to destroy the European Union delegation headquarters in Kyiv and the British Council in Kyiv — that Russia finally gets the message from Europe: Europe and Ukraine, Europe including Ukraine, will not concede any territory to Russia which it cannot win by military force. Ukraine will be helped until it destroys the Russian army, or the Russian army makes the decision it should have made after a week in March 2022 — which any sensible military would have made — to retreat immediately. Instead, Russia keeps doubling down. Now with the gloves off, Ukraine is eviscerating the oil industry.Donald publicly has been archetyping himself as a peacemaker under what I believe is a bogus aim of trying to win the Nobel Peace Prize. This is just a cover for the ultimate reason Donald is in the presidency and is taking these actions: to pay Russia back for the help it gave him in the 2016 elections and ever since. All Russia really wants from Donald is to deliver Ukraine. But unfortunately for Russia, and for Donald — because he’s got this monkey on his back which is Russia wanting Ukraine — Donald may be destroying America, and that may please Russia, but it doesn’t help Russia conquer Ukraine.We have seen, since that White House meeting in February 2025, that European powers — including Chancellor Merz, Prime Minister Meloni, Starmer, President Macron, and the Nordic, Scandinavian and Finnish powers, along with Belgium, the Netherlands, and others giving Ukraine incredible matériel help including F-16s — have rallied around Ukraine with a certain menacing determination. Perhaps Russia sending missiles to hit the European Union embassy in central Kyiv last week demonstrates the Russians have finally got the message. Yet their only strategy, because they cannot win on the battlefield, is to keep throwing everything they have into one last push.We’ve had endless deadlines. Fifty more days from Donald before secondary sanctions are introduced. Donald is convinced by the Russians: just fifty more days to take more land, to take Pokrovsk — which was a strategically important city in 2014 but is no longer. It’s a road to nowhere for the Russians, a minor city that doesn’t even guarantee the conquest of all of Donetsk. Yet they have spent hundreds of thousands of lives on it. In the past few days, all of their advances over the past six to eight weeks in Pokrovsk, or most of them, have been rolled back by the mighty Ukrainian army with their amazing tactics and world-class integration of drone technology, never before seen.The US Army boasted yesterday that it has done the first drone-on-drone kill — using a drone to shoot down an aircraft. Ukraine did that a year ago in battle. It shot down a Russian fighter jet. It shot down Russian helicopters. It destroyed a third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet in one operation using drones. The list goes on.We’ve gone from Ukraine being archetyped as dependent on the West for security guarantees — the idea that Western armies would come in to save the Ukrainian army — to the complete reversal: it is the Ukrainian army upon which the security of Europe depends. It is the pivot, the core. When we talk about foreign forces in Ukraine after the Russians withdraw from one hundred percent of Ukraine, the quid pro quo is that Ukraine will protect the rest of Europe from Russia. We now know America is no longer dependable, and NATO, which is constructed around American forces as its core, is no longer reliable for European forces.As Chancellor Merz stated in a Politico interview about a month before he was elected, he understood we need a new security architecture in Europe. There is only one military force in Europe around which we can build that. I’m convinced it is being built. I have no access to secret information, but it’s pretty clear from what is being said and stated by European leaders, especially since that meeting in the White House in February 2025, when President Trump and the Vice President made it very clear they were trying to force Ukraine into surrender. European leaders rallied around President Zelensky then and have done so ever since, including in that meeting two weeks ago in the White House.The very good news is all that I’ve described. It’s very sad news for Americans. Many Americans don’t yet understand that this is what has happened. The world has changed and it’s changed permanently. It’s gone. The idea of America as the saviour of the West, of American weapons systems being necessary — that’s dead.Ukraine is only playing for time at the moment. It wants to keep President Trump on board. It wants to keep the European powers on board. No one is ready yet for a concrete proposal for withdrawal from America. America still has a lot to give — it still has great weapons systems like the Patriot missile system, and Europe is willing to pay for these systems on behalf of Ukraine. Donald needs cover for what he’s really trying to do, which is stay in power and stay in control.Europe has persuaded Donald that America should sell weapons, which addresses the false idea that Ukraine was a supplicant and a parasite on American generosity. As we understand, it was America which persuaded Ukraine to give up its strategic bomber fleet, to give up its nuclear weapons, in exchange for what turned out to be false assurances that America would protect Ukraine. American weaponry under Biden was secondhand stuff, basically worthless in inventory. By having to replace it, American jobs were created.MAGA needed to archetype Ukraine as a parasite in order to help its Russian backers. This whole myth arose that Ukraine was a parasite on America, rather than Ukraine claiming its just right under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 when it gave up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security assurances. President Clinton didn’t say they were going to throw Ukraine to the wolves.As part of that whole game, Europe’s response is: we’ll pay for the weapons. Europe is one of America’s greatest customers for its weaponry, a big part of the military-industrial complex, and Europe has a lot of leverage there. By saying it will pay for these weapons, Europe has pulled the rug from under Donald and the people around him. They can hardly say no. We have seen announcements of weapons sales to Ukraine, advanced weapons systems which are very welcome. Many people like me will believe them when they’re actually delivered. But that whole game is going quite well from a European and Ukrainian perspective.Donald is pretending to seek peace. Donald is pretending to help Ukraine. Europe is pretending to accept that Donald is genuinely seeking peace, and Ukraine is doing the same. Away from this shadow game, away from the actual battlefield, Ukraine is eviscerating the Russian oil industry. Seventeen to twenty percent of refinery capacity gone in the past three weeks. Another two refineries gone last night. Nothing will stop Ukraine now from completely destroying the entire basis of the Russian economy.That’s why I say it’s great news that Russia is being deleted. We’ll talk again in the future about what’s going to succeed Russia. We’re talking maybe thirty or forty sovereign states, a lot of opportunities, a whole new way of helping states develop and evolve. The trillions in debts will reside in Muscovy, and the people in Muscovy will be contained using drone and missile technology which Ukraine has already developed. They may be able to repay their debts if they have any assets left.That’s a whole other story: reimagining Central Asia without the white-supremacist European Muscovite colonisers using terror, falsification, murder, genocide, mass population movements, starvation, economic starvation, and the most ridiculously inefficient governance system humankind has ever developed. Keeping this white-supremacist Muscovite horde confined to barracks, probably along the borders Muscovy had in 1492, or even 1792 before the Russian Empire was declared. The rest of Central Asia will be divided between Europe, China and America. A new great game is already emerging. We’ll focus on that in the future.That is the great news. Now, the bad news. The cost of all of this inside the American hierarchy has been that Russia, in order to conquer Ukraine, got to dominate the American presidency from the 2016 elections. In 2024, Donald had to make a pact with two devils. The first is Silicon Valley — which I’m using as a moniker — Stanford. His vice president, for instance, is a representative of Peter Thiel, one of the PayPal founders, who runs Palantir. If you understand Disinfolklore, it’s never far from any of our considerations. Palantir is named for the seeing stones in Tolkien.Disinfolklore, which I developed as an analytical method but also as a way of seeing and an empirical observation — that folklore is never far from the geopolitical, whether it’s “don’t poke the bear” or the kinds of stories which hack people’s minds, as I saw in eastern Ukraine, to such an extent that they lose their identities — Disinfolklore is not far from anywhere. I didn’t know about Palantir at that point, but it’s totally hooked in to what I’m going to talk about now, the bad news.If we look at the world as it existed around 1780 or 1790, around the time of the French Revolution, we are looking at this small entity which overthrows the monarch, executes them, and establishes a totally new form of democratic governance: liberty, equality, fraternity, solidarity. From the perspective of Britain or the rest of the world, there was a lot of shock and horror and concern from the existing ruling class. America itself, which got the energy and the matériel from the French Revolution to establish itself, was also seen with huge suspicion from the ancien régimes and the monarchies. America was a revolutionary republic.If we can imagine that perspective now: the American experiment succeeded. The French Revolution succeeded. There are monarchies throughout Europe and elsewhere — they survived — but we elect our governments. The sovereign, the identity of sovereign and subject, which is the best definition there is of democracy, is closer than it has ever been. In Britain, the sovereign is actually a person who is the monarch, but the people are sovereign in fact. Theory and constitutional reality differ from the actuality — we elect our governments in most of the so-called monarchies.If we now look at America and what is going on — which is invisible, I think, to a lot of people — one of the edges I have is that from very early on in the COVID pandemic, I recognised something extremely weird was going on. Out of Stanford and Silicon Valley came an attempt to create in the minds of Americans, of science, of universities, of Europeans and of the world, the idea that mass infection by a deadly virus which evolves and mutates was an acceptable means of dealing with that deadly virus — rather than what had happened in previous pandemics, where the virus was shut down very early.SARS-CoV-2 was particularly dangerous because it has something its predecessor, SARS-1, didn’t have: it cleaves to the ACE2 receptors. We’ve got them everywhere — in our brain, all over our body, in all of our cells, in all of our arteries. SARS-1 didn’t cleave to those particular access points to our cells. SARS-CoV-2 also has a superantigen-like insert on its spike, which means it tickles our immune system constantly, like strep. These are two massive, physical differences in this virus.Very early on we had an intuition that it was terrible. We had all these lockdowns and debates about lockdowns. But throughout all of this, there was this engine emanating from Stanford and the area around Silicon Valley that promoted the idea that mass infection by this mutating virus — for which you cannot gain lasting immunity, because the whole point is that as it mutates, it evades your immunity — was somehow acceptable.There was a moment, quite a long moment really, until Alpha — until they let it go, let COVID go in Britain. Alpha was brewed. Then we ended up with Delta. So many experts said Delta was the last throw of the dice. A famous Irish epidemiologist said this a week before Omicron emerged in late November 2021. Now we’re still on Omicron. As I speak to you, we have a new mutated version which, at least on paper, is the perfect mutating, immune-evasive version of Omicron and could be about to overtake the world.We’ve been through many different phases. Many people have been infected repeatedly. I haven’t been infected. I wear an FFP2 or FFP3 mask all the time indoors. I’m only one mistake away from being infected. But the perspective I have is on how weird it has been to watch people who, if you had said to them in January 2020, “This deadly virus is going to kill thirty million people in the short term, and then we’re going to let it mutate and mutate until it perfectly undermines the immune systems, the organs, the arteries, the brains — every aspect that gives us good health — and that’s our solution, because eventually the virus will kill and destroy all the organisms susceptible to it, and then we’ll be left with a few people who are immune” — if I had said that to you in January 2020, you would have said that was mad.There was a huge furore in England on the 13th of March 2020, when it was revealed that they were — in the terms of the then Prime Minister’s advisor, who was obsessed with Silicon Valley and tuned in to the people who are now in charge of the CDC and the National Institutes of Health in America, appointed by anti-vax RFK Jr., who spent years promoting Russian information-warfare vectors about Ukraine and now as Health Secretary is counselling against public health and vaccinations and promoting quack methods — if I had said to you in January 2020 this is what was going to happen, you, like me, would not have believed me.Yet there were people in Stanford, within a few miles of Stanford — including Peter Thiel, who has just had his man appointed to the head of the CDC and who is behind J.D. Vance, the other monkey on Donald Trump’s back — they did plan this out. They’ve had many setbacks, but ultimately they now have political control of America through the vice presidency, through control of the CDC and the NIH. They have all the data from Social Security — all that DOGE stuff, all working through Palantir systems. Everyone is going to be tuned, herded and conditioned by the behaviourists, by this behaviouralist ideology which rules their thinking.We have a virus which continues to mutate and kill large numbers of people. Meanwhile, most people think it’s gone, think it’s over. They’ve been convinced it’s over through the Disinfolklore. We have this situation — not mad, because it’s not abnormal, it’s literally normalised — and it’s all around us, all verifiable. Nothing I’m telling you is in any way revolutionary. It may sound mad, but I’ve got hundreds of peer-reviewed articles from Nature, from Science, from the preeminent journals pointing to all of the empirically grounded assertions about how COVID is really bad news for all of us.The people who brought us this idea of mass infection, who were able to conceive of it and then execute it — they got it mainstreamed into UK government policy over the course of a couple of months in early 2020, such that Alpha was brewed, such that Delta was then brewed. It became basically impossible to control COVID. It became normalised, so that people are constantly getting sick but don’t blame COVID — they blame something else. All their other illnesses are being activated, whether it’s cancer or Epstein-Barr or other viruses which COVID reactivates. Most of us aren’t even aware of it.This is the other monkey on Donald’s back. Donald, as an empty shell, is being to some extent controlled by the Russians. But the Russians, as I say — the good news is they’re dead. They have been outwitted and outsmarted by the Peter Thiels of this world. They were played. They were used to get Donald elected. Now Donald is elected. The CDC is in the control of the anti-vaxxers, the mass infectionists, the people whose whole philosophy is depopulation. This is the outcome and the aim and the effect of the policies being unfurled.We read the Disinfolklore day by day, the latest shocking thing. But the whole system — that’s what I’m giving you right now — the whole system of what is actually happening. This is why I’d like you to look at what is happening in America from the perspective of how most of Europe looked at France or America in the late 18th century. That’s really the most positive way I can put it.Peter Thiel and the people around him, the people running America now, controlling Donald — they don’t actually mind so much if Ukraine wins. If it looked like it was going to help them that Ukraine loses, or that Russia is their ally, they wouldn’t care to sacrifice Ukraine. But Palantir has helped Ukraine quite a lot. Ukraine has become so powerful and has asserted itself so strongly that from their perspective, Ukraine can win and it doesn’t matter to them. Ukraine can make an ally of this crew — the Stanford, the Silicon Valley, the Peter Thiel crew. That’s very positive for the world, for Ukraine supporters and for Ukraine.It’s very bad news for Russia, because they bet everything on crushing Ukraine and, by conquering America and getting their man into the White House, conquering Ukraine. But the bad news for the Russians is not only that Ukraine is eviscerating them, but that Peter Thiel and company have outsmarted them and are more powerful than them.In the public health element, we can see how powerful the people around J.D. Vance are. They managed to convince the world that mass infection was a proper way of dealing with this virus rather than eradication, which was what humanity for the past hundred years had tried to do. We remember how long it took China — even now China is more careful than Western countries, but it maintained lockdowns for about two years after COVID emerged, and eventually even China was swept aside. We remember Putler’s long table and how they dealt with it.It was the philosophy coming out of Stanford and Silicon Valley: the idea that we don’t need to lock down, that we’ll be able to convince people to offer themselves up for death, to sacrifice their granny on the altar of this false theory that mass infection by a mutating virus would lead to the eradication of that virus — that the more times you were infected, the better it was for your immune system. The only reason you need an immune system is to avoid being infected and harmed. The complete opposite — true to Disinfolklore — of what, if I had said to you in January 2020, would be the logical way of dealing with a virus.Through this Disinfolklore apparatus, which is more powerful than what the Russians have — the Russians latched onto it and promoted its trolls, as indeed have the Chinese — we have a lot of documentary evidence. I did a lot of work on COVID in Ukraine before the full-scale invasion, speaking to all of the elected leaders in areas now occupied by the Russians about how they were dealing with the pandemic. At the time, we had a lot of New Age spiritualists, Vedic people, who were basically Russian patsies in Ukraine, who suddenly switched to become anti-vax YouTubers. Then they started organising rallies against lockdowns. Russia was able to latch onto that, as were the Chinese, but they didn’t create it. It was created in California, where all these world-beating ideas were created — including the software I’m using here, the hardware I’m using here.That is the bad news. The good news is that Russia is being deleted. Watch with great enjoyment as this happens, because for hundreds of years Russia has killed millions of people every decade or so and done terrible things. It’s the worst of white European-ness, which managed to occupy the lands between the Baltic Sea and the Sea of Japan and held onto them for hundreds of years by doing the most horrific things. The final destruction of the Russian state and its splintering into many sovereign states offers great opportunities. Whatever the worst is to come, it cannot be as bad as what has already been done by Russia.The bad news is the other monkey on Donald’s back: the herd immunity advocates, the mass infectionists, the people now in control of America, who will try to turn us all into a Disinfolklore galaxy of their making — in which being infected by a deadly virus is a good thing, in which mass death of poor people is acceptable. It’s estimated around eighty million people have already died because Donald’s administration cancelled USAID — which is hated by Peter Thiel, who spent a long time in South Africa. The PayPal mafia, if you like. We’ve got the Russian mafia on one side — one monkey on Donald’s back — and the PayPal mafia on the other. The PayPal mafia have won. That’s bad news for Russia, but it’s not necessarily good news for us.The one thing I really want to communicate today is that the appointment this week of Jim O’Neill as head of the CDC, one of Peter Thiel’s lieutenants, is in many ways the end of the beginning. The first phase began in January 2020 with the idea that we would persuade the world to accept mass infection, mass death, as a proper way of dealing with a mutating, evolving virus that cleaves to our ACE2 receptors all over our body, that has a superantigen-like insert and so many tricks up its sleeve — as we can now see in weekly papers published by Nature, Science, Cell and other world-leading journals.Now this crew are triumphant. They’re in charge of public health in America and their ideas will roll out across the entire world. It’s not just their public health ideas — these are a means to an end. They want to create sovereign cities. Washington DC is probably about to be given to Peter Thiel. They’re trying to take over Greenland and create a sovereign state there, outside the current international legal system.This is a truly revolutionary movement, as different from the norms today as America and revolutionary France were from the norms of the late 18th century. That’s the message I want to leave with you today. I’m in no way saying it will be as good as America at its best, or France at its best. Tens of millions of people have already been killed — not just by COVID, but by the cancellation of USAID in just a few months. This is just the beginning. The diabolical ambition of this crew is off the scale, on a level with the Terror, the French Terror, or with the tactics the American revolutionaries used.My only message to you today: stock up on masks, compute the data through this perspective, and be careful out there. We’ll keep interpreting reality the best we can. Decoding Trolls, at your service. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe

In this week’s podcast (available wherever you get your podcasts), let’s look at Eight aspects of this week’s White House visit which other experts have not focussed on.⚡️Why is it good news Ukraine now can strike any target in Russia? Since late March 2025 America was preventing Ukraine from striking Russia’s fossil fuel infrastructure due to the ‘peace process’…So our topic is Disinfolklore and everything we've been seeing in our information space this week about Disinfolklore. Much of it has been focused on this White House meeting and the Alaska meeting, which we talked about a bit last week and the owner talked about last week. A great take on it. But also, disinfolklore is an analytical method to parse Russian MAGA and other forms of disinformation. So it's a set of lenses through which to perceive, appreciate, analyze and parse disinfolklore. So I wanted to quickly look at eight different aspects of the White House. Let's aggregate information. the entire system, the entire complex of stories, much of which is Disinfolklore, related to this week's antics as the White House visit. So first I wanted to Quickly, I think many of us understand this, perhaps people who don't, who aren't, who haven't been focused on the war on a daily basis since February 2022 won't really understand this, the people Randy would refer to as low information people.But this meeting was a turning point in the context, looking at it from the long durée, as many of us have been doing and as I have certainly since working in eastern Ukraine around the time of the first impeachment and all the events running up to the first impeachment, including the Perfect Phone Call.And if we remember the perfect phone call that led to Donald's first impeachment, the part of the quo, so the quid, was that President Zelensky announces an investigation into Hunter Biden, who had and has never even been to Ukraine. And the quo was twofold. One was that Donald would stop holding up, I think it was about $270 million in Javelin missile systems, and also would grant President Zelensky a White House visit. So that is what the entire impeachment was about, and it was about the deal to secure that White House visit. We all remember the, well, some of us might remember the December 2019 meeting in Paris, where basically Macron and Merkel and Putin put the squeeze on President Zelensky in the Elysee Palace. And Putin had been trolled into visiting Paris, believing that he would convince or that he would walk away from that meeting with the right to hold elections in Russia-occupied areas of Ukraine, specifically Luhansk and Donetsk.And there were documents circulated about three weeks, four or five weeks before that meeting, which had been signed by Andre Yermak. And this gives us some idea of the depth of their experience in dealing with all of these issues. And those documents... did suggest that some compromise was going to be made.And then there was the No to Capitulation movement in Ukraine. Many of the meetings I attended in my capacity as a diplomat monitoring the situation. I was very quickly convinced these were organic, Maiden-like protests. And they made it very clear to me that President Zelenskyy, whatever they were planning, he did not have the power to give Russia any... any capitulation. And that was before the full-scale invasion. So just the idea that now the Ukraine would capitulate, it's just, it's for the birds. But of course, low information people don't understand that or people who think they can use Disinfolklore to change reality don't understand that.So then we flash forward to the February 2025 visit, which most of us will remember the trauma and probably remember where we were - I was in an airport when I saw that and my heart sunk when I just saw the photographs coming out of that meeting.Here we are this week with President Zelensky at the White House carrying himself with customary equipoise, grace and arriving with the most powerful, some of the most powerful leaders on earth, basically, as his wing people. And so what we're seeing here is what many of us have been working hard towards in our own small ways, which is Ukraine being re-archetyped, not just as an afterthought. or not even an afterthought, as it was in December 19. Macron and Merkel, backed up by Obama and David Cameron in Britain, thought they could just force Ukraine to capitulate because they swallowed all of this Russian propaganda.Now we flash forward and we see today Ukraine has re-archetyped itself as the essential security guarantor in the world, which many of us understood early on, but now is reaching, this idea is reaching the mainstream. And that for me, seeing all those leaders there is a clear statement by them that Ukraine is the security guarantor for the Western world. That is why they all dropped everything and got on their airplanes. The second point I wanted to make about it was, and re-archetyping and archetyping, as many of you know, is central to my project now and to my work. The re-archetyping of the meaning of security guarantees has been very clearly helping us see that. Ukraine's best case scenario from the very beginning of the Donald presidency was obtaining and maintaining the right to buy US arms.That's essentially what they've been playing for. And there's a narrow path to doing that. And then all the rest, everything around this, about potentially giving up territory, about this or that, is all, I suspect, Will Thiel is 100% correct. I always did think he was right about this from a strategic point of view, but I suspect this is what Ukraine knows, because we see the FT, Financial Times, reporting yesterday, I think it was a Reuters story, they were reporting that the security guarantees, one of the four key elements in the security guarantees, is that Ukraine has the right, that Ukraine will commit to buying $100 billion in US arms. And this is such a clever re-archetyping of the meaning of security guarantees Obviously, my heart sunk as most of our hearts sunk when we were seeing a lot of Disinfolklore even today about security guarantees and Lavrov and all this. You know, it is just nonsense. It's in the category of nonsense. But what Ukraine is doing, and it seems backed up by the European leaders, is taking the concept of security guarantees and putting into them a new content. And this particular component, this particular module...That Ukraine will commit to buying 100 billion in US arms is a fantastic rhetorical way of persuading America that it's getting a great deal by letting Ukraine buy these Patriot missile systems, which no one else can make, and whatever else they can get out of Ukraine.So I just think that's a very clever way of re-archetyping the meaning of security guarantees. And then we see this is being done also by the leaders, it seems, in sync with Ukraine where they're talking about the best security guarantee is, you know, one million soldier army for Ukraine, basically.As we all know, and as these European leaders know, Ukraine is our security guarantee. America is not, sadly, anymore our security guarantee. A third point I wanted to make is that when President Zelensky says he's willing to talk about giving up territory along the lines where the battle lines are today, but only speaking directly to Putin, he is willing 99.9% sure he's trolling Putin on this because A, he doesn't have a mandate to give up any territory and B, he's provoking in Putin and all the people around Putin this disastrous meeting from their perspective in December 2019. It led to, there was reports that Yermak and Surkov, who was Russia's curator for Ukraine and the former deputy prime minister of Russia, and was with Putin from the very beginning. He created the Putin mythos, the Putin character, half Chechen. half-breed, as he himself writes about Russians being half-breeds. But he is, in fact, as a Chechen, he sold his paternal people down the river so that they could create this character of Putin, the mythical strongman Putin. So he was there at the beginning of Putin and he got the can after that Paris meeting and was replaced by a Ukrainian whose, whose name has recently popped up in, in, into our info space of late, uh, Dima, um, Kosac, who's, who's being, um, archetyped by the Russians as a more reasonable, uh, negotiator. So that is what President Zelensky is doing. He is in, he's saying this in public that most people just think he's just saying, oh, territorial concessions. Um, And I'll speak about them directly to Putin.That's what Donald Trump hears and some of the idiots around him hears. But what he's actually doing is provoking this traumatic memory of this neophyte comedian, as the Russians saw him making fun of the great man Putin in front of everyone in this press conference. He laughed at Putin when Putin suggested giving up territories.The fourth point I wanted to make is Ursula von der Leyen focusing on the children issue. And this children issue, the missing children, obviously, from all of our perspective, is the most horrific, the most horrific thing of the entire war. And it's almost equally horrifying. It hasn't really caught fire in the popular imagination, but it is now being used as it properly to... really undermine any efforts by Donald and his crew to negotiate a peace between the oligarchs and Putin at the cost of Ukraine. I don't know anything about where this letter from Melania came from.She is being dressed by a Ukrainian haute couture fashion designer's dress ex from Los Angeles. They're the ones responsible for her archetyping herself as Alphonse Capone's mole with the hat and all of that. So maybe in sittings or it's part of some play. I mean, some people say it was written by AI and it doesn't really mention the children very much. But anyway, Ursula von der Leyen and others in the rest of the world are really running with this morsel of a plot line, a subplot line, whatever its origins, whoever came up with it to introduce this character Melania into this plot.One minute she doesn't like Putin, the next she does. But Ursula von der Leyen, as probably one of the most powerful women on the planet, if not the most powerful woman on the planet, Trump doesn't like her or didn't like her, it is rumored. And now she goes to Washington with President Zelensky and she focuses laser focus on this because, of course, as we know, Donald would see her merely as a woman. And so it makes sense that she would be talking about children. And we had that beautiful exchange of tweets between Donald, who talks about the missing children. But Ursula von der Leyen, of course, is talking rightly about the abducted children.So I think that is, again, a brilliant response by Western leaders to the entire mess we see ourselves in. A fifth point I wanted to make is, overall, the Russian side believe they can control Donald. But a week like this is when they feel they can't control him anymore.And he even steps out of the meeting to phone Putler and to take his orders. And this enables Ukraine and the rest of us to inject doubt into the Russians' mind, because as we know, they may think they control Donald, but they're paranoid. And every time he's with Europeans, they get worried.And the metagame here for Donald is, as far as I see it, is to get the Russians off his back. They're like the monkey hanging off his back. He knows they hold the proof that they delivered the 2016, probably the 2024 election to Donald. And obviously a lot of it is in the open sphere, but some of it is still bubbling away there and emptywheel. an Irish-American journalist, is very clever and brilliant on this and how Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard's latest, they keep on lying about things which the Russians know are lies and could be easily... So this is the live issue.That's the Kompromat, I believe, which is basically a 2016 election. Donald just wants to get the Russians off his back. He thinks if he can deliver Ukraine to the Russians, then he will get... russia off his back the deal the quid pro quo will have been um extinguished and neutralized um but annoyingly for him and this is what the first impeachment was about ukraine just won't lie down and um and die. And now Ukraine, which it didn't have in the first impeachment, now Ukraine has Chancellor Merz, Maloney, and all of the crew we saw in the White House.So this is a nightmare of complexity for the Russians. And it's a very difficult situation for them. The sixth thing is obviously the battlefield issues. Russia's put everything it could It's taken Pokrovsk lately, and as we seem to see, that finger that they managed to get has been extinguished. We're watching all of the oil shortages.Let's see how that goes. We saw the Druzbha pipeline go up, and now mysteriously, the Hungarian, Hungary's foreign minister is able to say, well, the oil is flowing again, and Ukraine won't do this again. So I'm expecting to see the pressure to decouple Ukraine and Moldova from the EU accession process to, for some reason, mysterious reason, no one will know why. It's just going to dissipate because the Ukrainians are great negotiators. And that was their leverage over Hungary and Slovakia. I think it was Hungary who was mainly holding that up. So I think that's really interesting development. On the seventh point is about ceasefire. So we see the removal of the demand for the ceasefire. Personally, not that it really matters. I was always against the ceasefire because of Ukraine's capabilities. And the last thing we needed was them to hold back as they were with the oil refinery strikes from March.So Donald dropping the need for the ceasefire that may have originated from the Russians before we talk. But I see that as a great positive for Ukraine. We'll see if these strikes continue and if we see any vibrations from any secret deals done with the Americans. But it strikes me as obvious.Unlikely now that no one is talking about a ceasefire before talks begins, that hopefully Ukraine now has carte blanche tocontinue destroying the Russian state. And then the final point I just wanted to make on that is that... Yeah, I think the Nobel Peace Prize story, that just provides a motive, a public motive.It's a nice little Disinfolklore vector that provides an easy, easily understandable and communicated motive for what the main game is, which is Donald trying to get the Russians off his back. and trying to negotiate this ceasefire between the oligarchs and Putin's people. And the Nobel Peace Prize kind of turns it into this cartoonish kind of struggle for this egotistical man. And so I think the Nobel Peace Prize story is a prime example of dissent folklore and how it can be used to distract.⚡️Russia trolls towards its doom.Like @ZaluzhnyiUA, I never imagined Russia was dumb enough to continue its invasion past its first disastrous two weeks in March 2022.Nevertheless, Ukraine’s dominant strategy since the first few days has been to troll Russia further and further in.Remember: the goal here is the absolute destruction of the Russian state and permanent destruction of its white supremacist leaders capability to wage war.This is the best chance in three centuries to rid the world of Ruschism.So, though, Donald thinks he’s helping Russia, actually he is serving our strategic goal: Don sprinkles just enough hope inside Ruschist leadership that it will prevail. Meanwhile Ukraine builds irreversible capacity to utterly destroy the Ruschist state.European leaders now get this. Global security depends now on Ukraine. You’re either with Ukraine, against Ukraine or, as is the case with Donald, a mere instrument in Ukraine’s complex operation to troll Ruschia towards its complete annihilation as a State.Many thanks, as ever, to @Volya4UA radio on X and to this week’s guest presenter @ioanaV_, and regular weekly Decoding Disinfolklore show hosts @WendyNCALI and @healyjforUC on X. Show is broadcast live at 19:00 Kyiv time every Wednesday on X (formerly Twitter spaces) and afterwards available on Spotify.as well as to presenters Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe

Hi there, I’m Decoding Trolls. I wanted to give you my quick take on the proposals Ukraine is going to bring to the so-called peace conference in Saudi Arabia next week.Obviously, my heart and many hearts sink at the prospect of Ukraine surrendering either to Russia or to America’s concern trolling about deaths in Ukraine — especially as credible reports have emerged from the battlefield in Kursk which suggest that Russia’s targeting of Ukrainian forces in Kursk has suddenly improved exponentially. Suddenly improved at the same time that Druidy Don’s special envoy mentioned that what they are trying to do to Ukraine is what these people would do to a mule who was too stubborn — slap them until they moved.When we see this intentionality on the side of the American regime under Druidy Don, and then we hear reports from the battlefield in Kursk that suddenly Russia’s targeting of Ukrainian positions and the killing of Ukrainian soldiers has improved — we heard similar reports in Avdiivka last year under President Biden. Yet again, we see Russia relying on America to help it out of the hole it has dug for itself by invading a country which will continue to resist.The two proposals Ukraine says it will bring to the Saudi Arabia peace talks next week are: first, Ukraine will propose a ceasefire involving a moratorium on the use of long-range weaponry to hit parts of Russia — last night, there was a hit on a Russian oil refinery some 1,200 kilometres from the border with Ukraine. Second, a moratorium on attacks at sea, in the Black Sea.The team going to Saudi Arabia is very experienced with these kinds of negotiations. I was a diplomat in eastern Ukraine between the years 2015 and 2022. I’ve seen this rodeo before. I’ve been on this rodeo before, I think is the proper phrase.In the autumn of 2019 — which may be remembered or unnoticed by many people — Moscow, London, Paris, Berlin, and Washington were all ranged against Ukraine. They were colluding to pressure Ukraine into accepting what was named for the current president of Germany, the Steinmeier solution. Under the Steinmeier solution, Ukraine would agree to allow Russia to hold elections in Russia-occupied Luhansk — where I worked between 2015 and 2018 — and Russia-occupied Donetsk, before Russia gave Ukraine back control of its borders. Essentially, this was the international community colluding with Moscow to get Ukraine to accept the occupation, the brutal genocidal occupation and continued brainwashing of Ukrainians inside Russia-occupied Luhansk and Donetsk, by allowing them to hold elections.At the time, I and a colleague, a former British Army officer, were tasked with working out in rough general terms what it would mean to hold elections in Russia-occupied Luhansk and Donetsk — elections which, under the OSCE framework, would need to be proper, free, and fair.The first problem was to bring in the 1.5 million Ukrainians who had fled from Russia-occupied Luhansk and Donetsk and allow them to vote. The second problem: we worked out it would have cost the international community around 1.5 billion euros and involved armoured vehicles and army squadrons at every polling place in Donetsk and Luhansk, which obviously the Russians wouldn’t agree to. It was a non-starter.There was a meeting to be held in December 2019 in Paris with Duncy Putler and the comedian President Zelensky, hosted by Emmanuel Macron — Jupiter is his call sign. At this meeting, President Zelensky — who was then perceived by many in the international community as not up to the job, just a mere comedian rather than a great artist, a great business person, and a true Ukrainian patriot — some papers emerged in the weeks before this meeting where the signature of Andrii Yermak, who is still the chief of staff in the president’s office, was on documents that suggested Ukraine was going to allow these elections under the Steinmeier solution in Russia-occupied Ukraine.There was an immediate explosive movement across Ukraine called the No to Capitulation movement. Many people who concern-troll about Ukraine or try to pressure President Zelensky or Ukrainians to surrender to Russia just in the name of peace aren’t aware that President Zelensky doesn’t have the power to impose a peace on his people. He’s not an autocrat, even if he wanted to be. There’s no evidence he ever wanted to be.This No to Capitulation movement — I went to many of the demonstrations across Ukraine — involved thousands of people saying: we will not accept the Steinmeier solution, we will not allow Russia to hold elections in Russia-occupied Ukraine.Flash forward from 2019. It is now 2025. Russia has killed over a million people — its own people and Ukrainians — in the full-scale invasion. I detect and pick up no sign that Ukrainians are desperate to get peace like they were given under Minsk I and II, like they were pressured into accepting under Minsk I and II.Secondly, I do not actually detect any pressure, rightly, from the international community — except from Washington. What we see in Washington under Druidy Don and all these characters around him, including Paul Manafort, who himself — according to his daughters, his own daughters — sparked the murder of the 100 protesters on the Maidan in February 2014 as part of a plan.At the time, Paul Manafort was working for the soon-to-be-impeached Ukrainian President Yanukovych. Manafort’s plan was to spark this violence and these deaths, which would in turn troll European leaders into trolling Ukrainian protesters into surrendering to continued rule by Yanukovych. The Heavenly Hundred were martyred and killed on the Maidan. A year later, we saw in leaked texts from Paul Manafort’s daughters that they believed it was their father who had advised Yanukovych to follow this strategy, which almost worked — because European leaders at the time were pressuring Ukraine into allowing Yanukovych to continue if the protesters would stand down. But Yanukovych got scared and he ran away. The whole master plan fell apart.Flash forward to December 2019 in Paris. We have this great picture of Macron with President Zelensky, who’s looking extremely devilish and quite rightfully happy, because he said in no uncertain terms — he laughed when Putin at the press conference after this meeting suggested that Ukraine would allow Russia to hold elections. Putin looks very embarrassed and very upset.It’s the same team advising President Zelensky now on these so-called peace talks. This is not their first rodeo. They understand that Druidy Don has just surrendered — he has just capitulated himself and withheld sanctions against Mexico and Canada. It is still not impossible that America and Druidy Don will end up opening the floodgates of aid to Ukraine.It’s equally not impossible that Druidy Don has ordered American military assets to communicate to Russians the exact coordinates of Ukrainian positions so that Russians can then devastate them. If that is the case, then I would expect someone — as happened under Druidy Don’s first impeachment, when Vindman, who was on the National Security Council, made a confidential complaint which led to Druidy Don’s first impeachment on the grounds of withholding $270 million worth of Javelin missile systems until the comedian, President Zelensky, announced an investigation into President Biden. That was the basis of the complaint, and it was held true in the impeachment trial in the House of Congress.It is not impossible that if America is today aiding Russia to kill Ukrainians, someone who has taken an oath to the Constitution and to defend the Constitution of America — someone in the chain of command involved in leaking information, if it has been leaked — will themselves make a complaint, and this will lead to a second impeachment trial of Druidy Don.However, even if this eventuality does not happen, I do not expect the Ukrainian negotiators in Saudi Arabia next week to capitulate. I expect them to continue doing what they’re doing by asking for these two conditions — which is to re-archetype Ukraine in the minds of humanity as strong.What Russia and Druidy Don are colluding in doing is trying to portray Ukraine as weak, as a damsel in distress, when Ukrainians are having to manifest a desire for peace in order to service Druidy Don’s addiction to serving Russia’s interests. However, I do not detect or pick up any appetite for peace at any price in Ukraine.Ukrainians understand, in a way that many of us have only recently understood, that the use of the term, the moniker, the mantra “peace” itself has been repurposed to serve other meanings. When Druidy Don’s Disinfolklore is talking about “Ukraine must make peace” — “We must hit Ukraine like we would hit a mule until it wants to make peace” — what he is really saying is: we want Ukraine to capitulate and surrender.Ukraine has lost at least 20,000 of its children who are named and known. Duncy Putler and his children’s commissioner have warrants out for their arrest for the forcible transfer of these children, which is a breach of the laws of war.All of us who spend our days understanding what’s going on on the battle line and following it — we remember all the atrocities and the people murdered by the Russians. If I remember them as a foreigner: the Nova Kakhovka Dam, the killing of Lisa in Vinnytsia, the terrible revelations of the torture chambers when Russia ran away from Kherson, when it ran away from Kupiansk, from Kharkiv. All the awful atrocities, the destruction of the children’s hospital in Kyiv, the maiming of children.No one in the world wants peace more than Ukrainians. But equally, no one in the world understands what it will take to bring peace better than Ukrainians.I’m not too concerned that Ukraine will surrender to Druidy Don. I think he’s going to get a rude awakening. In his mind, he is still archetyping — and he gets this probably from the Russians — Ukraine as a weak damsel in distress and Russia as invincible. Whereas those of us who understand Russia’s weakness and see Russia using donkeys on the front line — talk about mules — it’s Russia which is using mules on the front line to transport its goods because it doesn’t have the vehicles. They’re more expendable than humans in the Russian mind. They’re poor animals. It’s Russia which is the mule.Druidy Don, the Disinfolklorist himself, will discover that just as America and Russia could not pacify Afghanistan or indeed Iraq, and Russia couldn’t pacify Syria and all these other countries — after three years of war, Ukraine’s capabilities are much greater than they were even in February 2022. Druidy Don will have a rude awakening when he finally understands that Ukraine will not surrender to his diktats about what constitutes peace. This concern trolling at a geopolitical level won’t wash. It doesn’t wash with any of the European leaders as far as I can see. They see through it, which is very different from 2019, very different from the situation of the Maidan in 2014.We see publicly — and I see no cracks or nothing emerging — European leaders like President Macron, who have been at this rodeo a few times before, supporting Ukraine. All of whom understand that if Russia is not stopped in Ukraine, and if it has a chance to rearm during a ceasefire in Ukraine, it will come for all of our children and move into Poland and Hungary and Bulgaria, et cetera. It’s already dominating our information space and the minds of humanity through Elon Musk and Druidy Don, who appear to be Russian agents by proxy. Just because they speak with American accents and appear to be American or South African oligarchs doesn’t mean they are not executing policies which have been on Russia’s wish list for a century or longer — in every dimension, from collapsing America’s force power to stopping America’s participation in NATO exercises, talking about withdrawing United States troops from Germany and sending them into Hungary.Frankly, all these terrible reports we are seeing of late — if I see them, then I’m sure the Ukrainian leadership sees them and understands who it’s negotiating with.My final summary conclusion on these peace talks: I’m not worried about them. I don’t think Ukraine is going to be forced into capitulating. It can argue about the size of the table for years. If Druidy Don gets impatient, then the more he tries to pressure Ukraine by, for instance, helping Russia with targeting, the more pressure will be on him inside America.Just as he learned or didn’t learn with the first impeachment, he will understand that tangling with Ukraine and not supporting Ukraine is a real fatal error. It really is.By contrast, supporting Ukraine and helping to smite Russia’s menace on our continent and in our minds — that is an easy win. We have this amazing country, these amazing people, fighting to the death to resist Rushism and to beat Rushism in Ukraine before it further invades our info space, our land, and takes up our mental space and our children in the endless wars.The easiest thing to do is for Druidy Don to turn his coat and support France, Germany, Britain, and Italy in supporting Ukraine until it finally exits Russia from 100% of Ukraine.Only that will end the war. Tens of thousands of drones a night, which Ukraine will be able to send across Russia if Russia breaches the ceasefire — which must include an armed element but also an information warfare element.Russia has voluntarily entered into legal obligations not to interfere in any country’s internal affairs. It’s part of its OSCE membership application. By interfering in elections in Romania, America, Ukraine, Britain, France, and other countries, Russia is breaching its own voluntarily entered obligations. The response to these must be both kinetic and informational.Ukraine, with a ceasefire after Russia leaves 100% of Ukraine, will have the power — through its world-class drone warfare capabilities — of imposing conditions on Russia every time it breaches the ceasefire, as it has done continually in the past. We cannot allow this to happen again.I look forward to hearing your views in the comments. Thanks very much. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe

⚡️Making ‘Peace’ in Ukraine stick - with a stick.2015-2018 as a diplomat on the ground between Russian occupiers and Ukrainian defenders I watched Russia’s adherence to Minsk I and II.Every day Russia breached the ceasefire many thousands of times. Meanwhile, Ruschia continued to brainwash Ukrainians inside its occupation in Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk - preparing Ukrainian males inside the occupation to die during meat assaults against the rest of Ukraine when the full-scale invasion began.Ruschia also continued its information warfare (Disinfolklore) attacks on America and Europe - yielding the Syrian migrant crisis, Brexit, Donald’s first election, Orban and Poland’s Law and Justice government.‘Peace’ for Ruschia is another means of war. ‘Peace’ is an opportunity for Ruschia to continue attacking our civilisation and to prepare our children to participate in meat assaults in Ruschia’s future kinetic wars against EU states.Result? Full-scale invasion and a US defence secretary who pretends not to know that during Donald’s first presidency Russia attacked Ukraine every single day.If Europe is going to provide peacekeeping troops know that every day Russia will test their resolve.Minsk III was breached when Prighozin’s aeroplane was destroyed.Minsk IV should be an attacking force of 100,000 troops guarding Ukraine west of the Dnipro River. Thereby, freeing up Ukrainian forces to expel Ruschia from Ukraine. Then once Ruschia’s back in Ruschia, an aggressive European ‘peacekeeping’ force will keep the peace via full economic blockade on Russia, information warfare (Counter Disinfolklore) attacks on Ruschia, and nightly drone attacks across Ruschia, until Ruschia actually is peaceful.⚡️Keep teasing Ruschia with hope of Ukraine’s capitulation via a ceasefire and peace agreement.Meanwhile arm Ukraine to continue destroying Ruschia’s force power.Ruschia keeps thinking it’s one meat assault from ‘victory’ in Ukraine. And with every new meat assault Ruschia gets weaker & weaker.Must never be another Minsk.My Munich speech:⚡️Ukraine Peace Offer: Taurus for Budanov?Ruschists’ leak German military generals’ conversations. Germany embarrassed by having zero counter intelligence capability. President Zelenskyy offers Ukraine’s military intelligence chief to Germany for 24 hours. Price? 1,000 Taurus missiles. Haggling continues.⚡️In Praise of Slow-Witted Being Come to SenseUkraine as the source for ALL Indo-European languages, cultures and religions has been at the centre of our civilisation since 2,500 BCE (👇🏾).Welcome @EmmanuelMacron to the club now of many who get that there is no good thing in our world we will touch again until Ukraine routs Ruschia. Routs.Utterly. A terrible beauty has been born.Budanov on Ukraine’s expanded war aims:“Ukraine should destroy its rear - oil and fuel bases, plants producing weapons and ammunition, and other strategic targets, he says. In order to start peace talks, Ukraine should take back all its territory.“Ukraine will be able to feel secure only after all Russian war criminal are prosecuted, its nuclear weapons are destroyed, and nuclear power plants are controlled by international organisations.”Some geopolitical dabblers have yet to get the message: Ukraine has been central to US, European and Ruschist politics for a decade. All roads to defeat of Ruschism from Ruschia’s border with Luhansk to the fields of Japan and the Bering Straits run through Ruschia’s utter defeat in Ukraine.⚡️Ruschia’s Aviator Meat Assaults: Ruschia failed to capture Ukraine using human-only meat assaults (Ruschists’ word not mine - they coined use of word ‘Meat’ to describe their way of war).Now, Ruschia’s throwing aeroplanes at Ukraine’s air defence, like so much aluminium meat.Ukraine has shot down fourteen Ruschist fighter jets in one eleven-day period.⚡️Cremations in Ruschia-occupied Melitopol concealed by meat-plant tyre burning?Residents of Occupied Melitopol question why acrid black smoke's emerging from meat plant furnace?Ruschists are disappearing used tyres from residents gardens and courtyards.⚡️It's what I saw too in occupied Luhansk 2015-2018. Hacking universities to create the Cannon Fodder we see fed into the Ruschist meat grinder (Ruschia outsources genocide of Ukrainians to Ukrainians it brainwashes.⚡️EVERTHING Ruschists do in Ukraine is for Ruschist TV audience, either directly or indirectly. Often stuff is done merely to shock The West®, who amplify it, & that serves as more fodder for Ruschist TV. Ukraine, Ukrainians, the rest of us are actors in this drama.UN Ruschist diplomat promotes an FSB "Lines To Take" troll about school textbooks for children in Mariupol. Everything Ruschia does in 🇺🇦 is to feed its own propaganda channels. Last year Ruschia imported $7b of television equipment. Ukrainians mere props in this diabolical show. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe

I’ve written before about Russia’s Stealth Genocide.This podcast and the evidence below is about the openly admitted violation of the Genocide Convention’s prohibition against transferring children across international borders in times of war.Many struggle to understand or to explain the aggregate of the billions of actions that constitute Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. The mass kidnapping of children is the point of the war. Russia wants repopulate its 1/6 of the world’s surface with white Europeans. This is the whole point of the war I argue in this podcast.See below for some of the documentary evidence I have collected and published about these Crimes Against Humanity, the Laws of War and the Genocide Convention:Hi there, I’m Decoding Trolls. I want to decode the actual rationale, the real substance of the meaning of the Ukraine-Russia war. I want to decode the motivations of those prosecuting this war and leading this war. One word sums up the entire basis for the whole war: demography.When you hear these stories about Russian language speakers in Ukraine, or NATO expansion, or “Ukraine was asking for it,” or “Ukraine is run by criminals and therefore Russia came in to liberate” — this whole system of stories which we constantly hear in our information space — I want in future you just to focus on this one word: demography.I worked in eastern Ukraine for seven years between 2015 and 2022. One abiding joyful memory I have of my time there was every now and again I would be invited as a foreign diplomat to speak to groups of school children. In one school, one day, in a now-occupied part of eastern Ukraine, as I arrived, the head teacher — as was always normally the case — met me and said: “You’re going to be delivering your talk and your lecture and answering questions from the final-year students. However, I have picked out all of the activist students from all the previous years. So there’ll be a few boys and girls from each school year, and they’ll also be asking you questions.”There was a look in her eye and a sense of pride as she presented this group of activist children to me. That really warmed my heart at the time. It really stayed with me. Here was a modern, European-outlooking teacher who had this concept of activist students, which I didn’t really understand until perhaps I met them. There was the girl with the spiky hair wearing black. There was the nerdy college kid who was doing political campaigning. There was somebody who talked to me about Greta Thunberg, and actually two students who wanted to do the school strike.We had a great chat and a really engaging time. After the de-occupation, maybe I can post pictures of this. But what breaks my heart today and every day I wake up, and what motivates my work to help us decode the trolls around Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — and in fact its invasion since 2014 — is the memory of these children in this school and how, almost as soon as the occupation began, Russia began forcibly transferring children from the occupied territories into Russia.As some of you might know, I was one of the main sources — acknowledged — and if you look at my pinned tweet, you’ll see the link to this report. I was a main source for the first intergovernmental report on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, published in early April 2022 by the OSCE Moscow Mechanism Mission. It was commissioned by 44 nation states. I worked with a group of legal scholars to outline the different crimes Russia was committing — not only in invading Ukraine, but the particular way in which it was invading Ukraine.One part of this was about the forcible transfer of Ukrainians and children, which is a specific breach of the Genocide Convention, signed by most states. It’s also a breach of the laws of war. Russia, from the very first days and moments of the invasion, was focusing an enormous amount of resources on corralling children and humans through what they call filtration centres and bringing them into Russia.For much of the first year of the war, I focused a lot of attention on this wonderful city called Melitopol in southern Zaporizhzhia, which was an area I covered as an OSCE diplomat looking after environmental security and political issues. I went to meet as many of the elected officials leading village, city, and town councils, particularly in this area, because I knew it would be subject — even as far back as 2015, I and many others anticipated the full-scale invasion. I did not anticipate the horrors, and I did not anticipate the forcible transfer of at least 700,000 children, which Russia itself boasts about.Putin, the so-called president of Russia — a warrant was issued for his arrest by the International Criminal Court in March 2023 for the specific crime of the forcible transfer of children from Ukraine into Russia. In order to have this warrant issued against a sitting head of state who enjoys the presumption of immunity, the collection of evidence — which I participated in collecting in the early part of the war, and which I and others have continued to collect, including the confession by Putin and his accomplice, who is ironically the head of the Children’s Commission — all of this has come together.There are many different strands to this war. Essentially, what I have come to propose as my hypothesis is that the entire war itself is a cover for the conscious and determined policy to transfer 700,000 and millions of white Ukrainians to populate the vast expanse of empty territory that Russia needs to populate.Russia, as we know, possesses one-sixth of the world’s surface, and much of that is empty of people. We know the history — the whole of communism, all the mass deportations of people from the Baltic states, all of the genocidal policies of the USSR. It’s also about this mad idea to fill up the space between Kyiv, Lviv, and Vladivostok — from central Europe all the way to the coast of Japan and North Korea and China — with white Europeans.I’ve talked before about the Russians I worked with in Ukraine, who were all from the security structures and were diplomats. In candid, unguarded moments, all of them always betrayed at some point this visceral fear that in the very depopulated parts of the Russian Federation which border China — China and Russia have thousands of kilometres of shared border — on the China side, in some places, there are massive cities of 10, 20 million people. On the Russia side, it’s just a handful of people with no resources or villages. I’ve never met a Russian who isn’t obsessed with the idea that the Chinese will come over this border and gobble up all of their land.I agree with Timothy Snyder that in many respects we can conceptualise Russia’s obsession with Ukraine, and murdering Ukrainians, and destroying Ukrainian culture, as stemming from their madness that Ukraine is an easy touch. This is a displacement of their real fear, their fundamental fear, which is of China coming over the border and lopping off vast tracts of its one-sixth of the world’s surface. When I heard Timothy Snyder talking about this, I agreed wholeheartedly because of the Russians I had met who betrayed an obsessive paranoia about how their land and people would become gobbled up.The plan is to populate this area between central Europe and Japan with white Westerners. This also explains the threats to conquer Lisbon, and the mass deportations which are a perennial factor and part of Soviet and Russian governance — under the guise of criminals, prison camps, or stopping nationalism, all this nonsense. Just as today we hear all these bogus history lessons, both from those actually leading this war — Putin and his criminal accomplices directing this criminal enterprise — but also from people in our information space and cultures who have fallen for the troll, who have fallen for all this nonsense about NATO expansion and “America provoked the war.”All of this is accusation in a mirror, a phenomenon common to all genocides. Accusation in the mirror is what we hear all the time from the Russian leadership: accusing Ukraine of biolabs, of discriminating against Russian language speakers, of killing Russian or Ukrainian children — accusing the other. Russia is accusing Ukraine always of the very crimes which Russia itself is contemplating and executing. The mere accusation in the mirror is then used as a pretext for Russia itself to act out these crimes.When you hear that phrase, “every accusation is a confession” — it actually has value in legal terms, in determining the level of intention on the part of the Russian state to genocide Ukrainians.Not all wars or invasions or wars of defence are genocides. But one is when the explicit aim of the war — as manifest in, for instance, the mass deportation of millions of Ukrainians into Russia — and the International Criminal Court warrant for Putin and his children’s commissioner’s arrest includes the names of 20,000 named Ukrainian children.Very recently, Yale School of Public Health has released a very comprehensive report detailing how aeroplanes which Russia’s presidential administration controls, and state adoption websites, and a whole system of transporting and trafficking these children — in many cases orphans whose parents Russia deliberately killed, in Mariupol and Melitopol and other places — were used to steal these children. In other cases, children’s parents in occupied areas were forced to send their children to summer camps, and they were then passed from summer camp to summer camp until they ended up in depopulated areas of Russia, where they are given Russian passports.I would conceptualise the entire war, and Putin himself, as the child snatcher. Apart from all the nonsense we hear about land for peace, that Ukraine is somehow going to swap land for peace, and they’re going to freeze the conflict lines just when Russia is at its weakest — its problems in Syria, it has lost vast tracts of territory, it’s about to lose its main naval base, which it uses not only to bomb and kill hundreds of thousands of Syrians since 2015 but also to execute policies in Africa, which currently in the Sudan region are leading to the mass starvation of almost a million people and the threatened starvation of millions more.What is making me increasingly convinced that demography and mass transportation is the actual reason for the war, and everything else is just a distraction, is this: the main reason the war is being prosecuted is to get not just Ukrainian children — obviously they are obsessed with Ukraine and with destroying Ukraine — but also all central and western Europeans.I’d like us to bear this in mind. In the communities in which we participate, when we hear people talking about “Ukraine should just surrender its land and there will be peace,” I want people to focus their minds on not just how morally diabolical and illegal and unlawful it is to snatch the children of any parent, but to do it on this scale — where potentially millions of children and humans, mostly women, are forcibly transferred into Russia.Russia is not going to stop doing this when it empties Ukraine of as many people as it can. It’s moving westwards. It wants to shell Lisbon. It wants to shell London. It wants to destroy Dublin. It wants to get to Paris. Why? Because it wants the people. It wants your children and my children and our children’s children — as it did to all of the Baltic, eastern European, Ukrainian, central European, and former Soviet socialist republics, under the guise of various population migration and criminal policies.The one constant in this governance unit we call Russia is mass deportation and trying to populate this vast area with white Europeans.At the beginning of the war, in March, as I was doing research for this report — the OSCE Moscow Mechanism Mission’s report — I was looking at the granular detail of what was going on in Melitopol, what the Russians were doing. It was really curious to me that Russia, which at the time was really not having a good battle or a good war, even while they were fighting for control of parts of a city, was also focusing on deporting and forcibly transferring children in a very organised way. That tempo has never stopped. There’s been no pause in it.It was very curious to me: why, if you were simply trying to take land, or capture natural resources, oil wells, or nuclear power plants, or pay the West back for humiliating you, or any of this nonsense — why are they investing so much in the forcible transfer of people and children?The answer, I now believe, is because the whole point of the invasion and occupation is to replace — at the moment — 700,000 dead or injured Russian soldiers, who have already been replaced by 700,000 clever, innovative, young Ukrainian children. Some of whom may well have been listening to my talk in southern Zaporizhzhia, who horrifically might be those activist children, boys and girls, who I met that day when I visited the school.I propose this as the dominant determining approach, and it should inform every conversation we have about trying to force Ukraine to sacrifice its children. Because there aren’t enough Ukrainian children to satisfy the bloodlust, or the need for the Muscovite European power — which has always been based and ruled around St Petersburg and Moscow — to rule one-sixth of the world’s surface with not enough people.Not only are Putin and Russia obsessed with demography, but I don’t think we’re thinking big enough when we look at people like Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or any of these people obsessed with Sulla and his depopulation policies of ancient Rome, and the depopulation of huge territories. At the same time, they’re also personally obsessed with controlling women’s reproductive systems and making women bear as many children as possible. It’s said that Musk has many children and wants to have thousands of children. These people, like Putin, are also obsessed with demography, as are the people around them, the oligarchs. Not only are they making a personal contribution to impregnating as many women as possible so that their own special genes and genome are promoted, but they also have this huge vision for our society and our community.I’m not saying the bromance between Elon Musk and Putler is because of this. I believe it’s because of two factors. One: the threat to destroy SpaceX’s satellite network in space, which Russia continues to speak about. Two: most of the Russian nomenklatura’s money, I believe, is in Silicon Valley. Santa Clara County, where a quarter of the world’s venture capital is invested and half of America’s venture capital is invested, is in Silicon Valley.What explains the opposition to Ukraine’s glorious fight against this genocidal invasion — and all of the 150,000 war crimes documented and continuing to be documented, the horrific events which happen all the time — I believe, is explained by these oligarchs’ fear of secondary sanctions, which would necessitate unwinding all of these venture capital funds from Silicon Valley which contain Russia and Putin’s billions and trillions, whatever amounts of money they have, all wrapped up in there. They want to avoid that.But there is also a meeting of minds. This conservative, neo-patriarchal, evangelical view: that women should have as many children as possible, that they don’t need to experience human rights or choice or control over their own reproductive powers. That we need a society of people with very little freedom who can work like little hamsters on the wheel and in the fields and replace the migrants.This is not my vision, but it is mainstream among this group of people who believe that the fundamental struggle in our time — and this is something Putin believes, he’s talked about it a lot — is between those who believe in the post-World War II legal order guaranteeing human rights, the right to participate in public life, which makes discriminating on certain protective grounds such as sex or political viewpoints or gender identity illegal, and the aspiration we have to a more equal society, where everyone — the activist children, the conformist children, all of us — have the same rights of access to education, healthcare, jobs, a future, to build or create from these amazing opportunities that many of us listening have had, to try and sculpt a life which has brought me to this point where I’m now able to speak to you through these amazing technologies.What they want is a Handmaid’s Tale, basically. This is what unites them all. These mass deportations, mass murder, mass deportations of people and children are very consistent with this. Their vision — the vision of these guys in Silicon Valley, these paleoconservatives in the West and in Russia and around Putin — is completely consistent with each other.I’d like to leave you with this idea: the invasion is all about this Eurasian, crazy idea of populating these areas with white Europeans. While the focus is on Ukrainians — and the Russians have destroyed their country permanently, on the basis of their hatred and their othering and their genocidal war against Ukrainians — Russia will not stop at Ukraine.Russia’s aim is to destroy our entire civilisation. Its aim is to capture all of our children and do to them what they are doing to Ukrainian children. The trajectory is clear.When I worked in eastern Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, in Russia-occupied Ukraine, I developed my understanding of Disinfolklore and how Russia uses information warfare to brainwash people. The success in Russia-occupied Luhansk and Donetsk could be seen in how Ukrainians, over the course of a number of years, were convinced that they weren’t Ukrainian, that they were Russian, and that other Ukrainians — their fellow Ukrainians — wanted to kill them, were trying to come across this river where I worked.I worked on this bridge, this river, in a place called Stanytsia Luhanska. The people in Russia-occupied Ukraine, on one side of the Donets River, were convinced through a vast Disinfolklore apparatus. Think of what MAGA has created — these systems of communications. They’re very similar systems, uncannily similar, but many of the same people who designed them also designed aspects of this war.People like Paul Manafort, who was one of Trump’s advisors and was also the advisor to Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine who fled in February 2014 in the face of protest. Paul Manafort was jailed for fraud and for working as a foreign agent without registering. His own daughters, in text messages we got access to a year after the Maidan in 2015, accused their own father of purposefully provoking the massacres and advising his then boss, the now-exiled, impeached president of Ukraine, to shoot at the protesters — because of this mad idea that if they shot at the protesters and killed some of them, the European powers would pressure Ukraine to capitulate.We’re still in this story again and again. Many of us will come across in our communities this idea that Ukraine should just sit down at the negotiation table and give away its land and give away its children. These are children just like yours and mine and our friends’ and the children we see playing in the park — the children I saw in these schools when I spoke about the West and about Europe. These are children who want to live in free democratic societies.Whenever anyone is trying to work out what this war is about, I’d like us to think that the dominant determinant of the war is Russia’s mad obsession with demography, white supremacy, peopling this vast tract of land where they have subdued and subverted and genocided — I think it’s 82 small-numbered peoples, that’s their official term — the indigenous people in these areas between Siberia and Ukraine, which itself has three different kinds of indigenous peoples: the Crimean Tatars and two other designated indigenous peoples.I’ll leave you with that. The war is about demography and the mass transfer of children. That should be foremost in our minds as we persuade our politicians and those who have influence to help arm Ukraine to resist this suppression and liberate the land. There’s no other word for it — it’s monstrous.Thank you for listening. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe

Decoding interviewed by Ronan Swift.Hello everybody, I'm Ronan Swifty and this morning I'm going to be talking to At Decoding Trolls. Hi, I'm Decoding Trolls. Great to be with you. Nice to meet you, Ronan. Thanks for stepping into my podcast arena. I want to get onto the name because I know it's a project of yours, Decoding Trolls.I can understand the decoding bit, I think. But the troll side of it for me that was always trolling was something that I just associate with people being nasty to other people online. What is it that you understand by troll and trolling and is there more to it than what I originally thought?I see trolling as it's about movement. And my definition of trolling is emotion, moving activity of body, speech, and mind. And most conceptions of trolling focus only on the medium like the internet. And so we focus on a particular form of communication in a particular arena. I researched many different aspects of trolling through academia, myself participating in groups online, and that led me to look into the linguistic root of trolling, which in fact led me into folklore, which is the origin of the metaphor of trolls. And eventually I realized that actually trolling on the internet is merely one form of communication.And if we are going to understand how trolling on the internet works, then it's a good idea to look at how we troll each other in real life as well. And so that led to me to this conception that trolling is any form of communication which moves the emotions of another person.And then I realized actually sometimes I'm trolling myself internally. And so this is partly how I arrived at the definition of trolling is any emotion moving activity of body speech and mind and so we can fit how our any sentient being trolls us our cat for instance wants some food and or they're running around our legs as we're coming in with lots of shopping and there's lots of children around and we we feel a bit annoyed or great joy, and that that feeling of emotion is what's essential to trolling, whether it's online or in real life. And it can be positive or negative. It doesn't have to be negative?Absolutely, yeah. So once you see trolling as any emotion-moving activity of body, speech and mind, then we need a way to determine the quality of the troll to ascertain, is it positive, neutral, and the clue there is in the trial, neutral, no movement, or negative.And so that led me on a hunt for a way of determining the quality of particular, I call them, I mean, informational units or memes, where meme can be isn't isn't a cartoon online it's any informational unit whether it's a sound or a word or a whole essay for instance well that's probably a bad example and so then once you see it as every form of communication you need you need a way of thinking okay because we get trolled positively all the time by our lover our romantic partner uh will um will have particular routines and we'll have particularly routine nice routines with our pets or our lovers or our wives or our husbands or our children which bring us great joy and what we're doing is purposefully moving their emotions and that that's positive And so I was hunting for a way of determining what's positive and negative and neutral. And that's how I arrived at what I call the code of positive trolls. I see.So you've got a code, a checklist of sorts to determine that positive or negative or neutral. And that's the decoding part of the title.Checklist is a great idea. And I actually hadn't made that link before. The code of positive trolls and decoding. Back in my past, I trained as a lawyer. So I was looking for a code. in terms of a law code criteria that that say judges use in cases to say to try and you know they often have these four limb tests to see whether you have the right to to do something without criminal liability for instance but I recognize that that now that the code is actually in the decoding as well that's really cool I got it from I was hunting around for this code and I found it actually in Tibetan Buddhism in and the Dalai Lama's form of Buddhism which is summed up into six by six criteria And if you perfect each of these six criteria, then in Buddhism, according to Buddhists, you will achieve enlightenment. Obviously, we're not looking for enlightenment when we're online or dealing with a really annoying situation and we're trying to resist making it worse by trolling the emotions of the person we're dealing with. But we are looking for codes which are proven, which have worked, and billions of Buddhists have run their life to a more successful or less successful extent according to these six criteria that I then rebranded as the code of positive trolls. And the idea is that you have this algorithm, these six criteria that you intuit, you learn them very quickly. And because billions of Buddhists have used this, what they call the six perfections, it's clear that humans can do this.And if you proof any communication that's emanating from you, according to these six criteria, then you should be, if not achieving enlightenment, you should avoid or you have a chance of avoiding. trolling others in negative ways, in ways which you don't want to do, but equally when you're receiving communications from people, if you can run the sensory inputs, so what I call, I talk about having a troll radar. So we have this idea that we're now proofing communications as they're moving into our minds according to these six criteria. And if they contravene any of these six criteria, then we run a new battery of tests.So that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to ensure that we don't get manipulated, our energy doesn't get manipulated negatively by others, and we're trying to avoid ourselves accidentally negatively manipulating others and so I use these six criteria to decode trolls my own trolls outgoing and incoming trolls as well and I've been using this for three years now I think the listeners are on tenterhooks as regardswhat this code of six is because it's been mentioned a lot so Is it helpful just to list them all?Totally. So, generosity, patience, ethical discipline, right, is the same as ethical discipline, patience, energy, manas, mana, what I call mana, energy, focus, and insight. So six of them. So generosity, so is the message you are communicating to someone else an act of generosity? equally is the message you're receiving from someone else.Say it's a post about migration and they're saying, you know, our house is full, we can't take any more migrants, they're stealing our jobs, they're eating our dogs. That is not generous. So sometimes trolls fail that. The second one is right, ethical. discipline. It's always wrong to breach the laws of the land, international law, and this set of ethics are, in the context say of migration, set by the Refugee Convention, which every most countries in humanity have signed which means that if you have a well-founded fear of persecution you have the right to seek asylum so this idea of illegal migrants illegal asylum seekers not only is that not generous but it's a breach of the law and it's not right in that sense patience you want to communicate that you are yourself patient and obviously Most of us fail on this front a million times a day. So it's an aspiration. But if you see in the message, some of us in work will have done these courses on how to avoid being trolled or phished online. And they'll always say one of the... one of the triggers for this is is someone putting you in a pressure cooker situation are they saying you have to use five seconds to press this button uh respond to this email immediately otherwise your bank accounts will be uh so that so this is where the patience element comes in that when you're receiving these trolls if they're putting you in a patient's thing So a political campaign like Donald's campaign will say, vote for me to save America. And you've got five days to save America.And sometimes, again, you will need to react quickly. So this is why I say it's just... if it contravenes, if the incoming troll or your outgoing troll contravenes this patient's criterion, then you should run another battery of tests to make sure, okay, is this, is someone trying to phish my email or my bank accounts?And what I mean by the The fourth criterion, which is energy or mana, or another way of putting it is joyous perseverance. But the mana is basically you're looking for the energy in the meme. So the energy that you are communicating to other people and that is in the meme that they're communicating to you, simply by looking for what's imminent in it, and trying to come to a decision about what it is. We've all been in herd situations, maybe at a football game or a concert, where we got lost in the crowd and we are receiving the emotions of others and we're transmitting them and we become panicked, for instance, in cases of where there's a fire or something like that. So by the fourth criterion, what I mean is look for the energy that you are communicating onward and make sure that you're consciously aware of what it is and that the energy that you're communicating is is how you want to communicate.I mean, a lot of people, a lot of us have a problem saying no. And sometimes we try to communicate this, we communicate this in a bad way. And so you're looking for the manner in the meme. You're looking for the manner that you're communicating outwards and which others are communicating to you.And if it's bad energy, then that will fail the code of positive trolls. The fifth criterion is focus. So in order to do this, you need to be focused. You need to be focused on your outgoing communications and your incoming communications. And insight. Is it insightful? So we all enjoy a joke and things which don't matter.But we should look into, like there's a certain form of humour. I'm thinking, for instance, Ricky Gervais and the UK office. where every joke is at the expense of someone. And a lot of us engage in this kind of humor, and it's not insightful. And so if we use these six criteria, we prove any outgoing communication, according to them and any incoming. And if it fails any of them, then we can run a new battery of tests. And obviously we need to do this instantaneously. So Rome wasn't built, and you as a classical scholar, Ronan will know this, Rome wasn't built in one day.So I'm setting out the six criteria in the Code of Positive Controls as a beginning for us to begin to learn how better to control Rome. what we communicate outwards and what we let into our mind.Yeah, because it does sound like a lot to process for every interaction that we might have. And in our daily lives, we have so many different interactions that we're receiving and broadcasting. But it becomes something that if we're alert to it, we do much more quickly and more naturally all the time.Yeah, I think the generosity... That's the hope. The generosity one is... That's why it's number one. Because many of us... All of us have a sense of what's generous and what isn't. When we're not being generous, we kind of know about it. And we made a decision not to be...Perhaps we've got to save money and we've got to look after ourselves and our family. But we know that we're not giving money to, for instance, the beggar on the street. We know we're not being generous to our friend who's clearly distraught and we just don't have time to talk to them. So it's an intuitive sense.So we often make that judgment in our interactions and in our conversations and in our conversations. daily life with our colleagues sometimes it's justified not to be generous and other times it isn't but it's a matter of if if the communication isn't generous either outgoing or incoming then then we need to check a bit more carefully what we're doing provided we want to care about yeah you alluded to Two different areas. I don't know if we've time to touch on them at all, but we'll try. I'm generous about my time. Let's go for it. Just at the very outset, you mentioned the folkloric element to where the word for this comes from, trolling. And how is folklore helpful to us in any way in understanding this? trolls that may come our way?So my own journey to look into trolling led me inevitably, obviously, into folklore because trolls, we know of trolls. The Billy Goats Gruff in Norway, is that right? Exactly, yeah. That was this troll tale that was published, first published in America in English translation around 1860.And three billy goats went across a bridge and there's a troll guarding the bridge and they go trip, trap, trap, trap, trap, trip, trip, trip, trip. So it's this great sound in it. And when this story was published, it immediately captured the imagination of people and became embedded into our culture.And the first billy goat crosses the bridge and comes to the troll and the troll says, I'm going to eat you. And he said, don't eat me. There's another billy goat coming along. He's much fatter than me. So why don't you eat him instead? And so that billy goat gets across. Then the second one comes. similar story and then um the third one uh comes so there's deception in there as well understand is internet trolling someone is it someone is not communicating a sincere emotion in order to provoke your emotions so there's the deception in that tale and then the third billy goat comes and he kills the troll to cut a long story short I'm sorry for rooting for you haven't read that story and that I started looking and I did this troll and troll mean search in American English so you will police forces will troll for criminals they'll look for criminals and that comes from this form of fishing which is different from trolling in English trolling where you drop the the bait on the water, on the top of the water, or inside the water, and you just move it around. So again, movement is in there, tra, transport, travel.This movement is very deeply embedded into our language in these three, this sound, tra, tra. And so the bait is moving around the water, and eventually a fish comes up and bites it. And that metaphor from fishing is deeply embedded in American English, not so in English English.But the troll tales are in English English through films, mainly from America. And when I looked into this and I looked at 75,000 appearances of the two words troll and trolling in this massive database of 64,000 different sources. when I started to research this, when I realized I didn't really know what trolling was.And most of the appearances of troll and trolling appeared in the context of either looking for, in the fishing, looking for criminals. And then after 2008, 2009, in internet, Facebook trolling and actually funeral trolling, which was one of the first online forms that went mega, really in Australia, believe it or not, where people would troll parents who had lost children. And there was various legal cases about that. And then going backwards in time, there was this every decade going back really a century almost, there would be a troll craze sparked mainly after the 1950s by movies, different troll movies.And some of us will remember a couple of these crazes and a couple of them are associated with troll dolls. And these dolls are made in a place called Oakland in California. which is part of Silicon Valley, it's part of Santa Clara County or it's adjacent to Santa Clara County.And so trolls and trolling became part of early computer culture. And this is where the folklore that we think of from the Brothers Grimm and the troll tales meet the folklore of the internet. And this idea that in any particular community of people, whether you're a football fan or you work in a school or in an office, you have a shared sense of memory, which is communicated and recorded in stories about your colleague doing this and the time you did that and the time you accidentally drank the wrong cup and everyone remembers. And that's your kind of folklore memory. on a scale, on a micro scale as it were, and in early computer culture trolls were very much a part of the words and the words which we're using. And so you bring all of these different strands together and you, Ronan, for instance, might For you, trolling is you read Tolkien and there's trolls in Tolkien.For me, I'm deeply embedded in Southern Californian computer culture from the 1980s. And trolls mean that for me. For our friend who's a policeman, for a Canadian or an American police person, trolling is about looking for criminals. For someone else, it's about fishing. And this...this is a quality in in often in terms which we use we all have a slightly different meaning for them and that helps them gain uh gain currency and now today for most people uh they encounter trolls and trolling on the internet But all of us think it comes from a different place.What is common to all these forms of trolling, which really helped me get to my definition of emotion, moving, activity, body, speech, and mind, is this TRA and this movement. And in early English, for instance, troll the bull means move the pipe. It's in Shakespeare. It's used in Shakespeare. And it goes back into... very deep into language.So it's just, it's about movement is what I found the essential thing. And obviously, Emotion is the motion, this movement in emotion. And then there's moving, obviously is moving. Activity and activity is also moving. And these are the metaphors we use when we are going from one state of mind to another.We're suddenly afraid because of an external sensory input or we've made someone afraid. that so that's where the folklore and what I realize if I if I have another second because it's about the trolls in Norwegian particularly Norwegian folklore the trolls aren't we often think of trolls as always negative and this was again a great clue for me but the folklore scholars will we'll talk about how trolls aren't always negative even in Norwegian folklore. Sometimes there's good trolls, there's bad trolls, and then there's new trolls. And again, that TRA is a neutral, no movement. So that helps us remember it. And trolls appear in Norwegian folklore.You're walking through the countryside and just something, some energy appears and something happens to you. You get scared or joyful, but you're walking in a country lane at night. And then these phenomena were explained by reference to trolls. These appear in most of our cultures as fairies, as... Yeah, nymphs in ancient Greece. Exactly.And India has their own sprites, Valkyries, Ruselkis in Slavic culture. And for me, I realised that these are probably all the same... things and it's analogous to when you're on the internet you open your your ex or your Facebook and you're in a great mood and then the first post comes up about something and suddenly your mood is transformed and that is that's the moment when we realize we've just been trolled and now we have to decide What has just happened to us? How can we avoid this in the future if we don't want it that way? And the stimulus for that, I'll just finish on that.The stimulus for that is a modern form of folklore because you've opened up your Facebook and you're being told that your favorite hockey team has just lost. And this makes you really sad. And that itself is like a form of folklore in the community. You belong to the group that you belong to.And so the trolling is multidimensional in that sense. I gotcha.And the folkloric stories that possibly we know beyond just ones involving trolls bring me on to the next thing that you alluded to, I think, which is like the trolling and messages that we hear in our current affairs and our politics. And we're in a year of presidential elections in the USA, general election looming here in Ireland. and I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about elements of the trolling that may be happening on that wider political stage and whether or not it also feeds into stories that we all share from from the past, myths, legend, folklore, and if there are resonances there too.Absolutely. I set out on a journey in autumn of the fall of 2019 to try and understand Donald Trump's mode of communication. I couldn't understand how how much of an impact it had on people. And when I did this troll or this troll of this database, many of the examples of trolling, particularly after 2010, related to Donald Trump and then basically after Twitter was founded and I found actually the first time Trump and trolling were associated in this database and it's from about 1989 Trump trolling for a buyer for his yacht and there's that meaning of trolling looking and so Sometimes think so some of us might remember computers used to have this thing called Intel inside chip inside and they were trying to tell us that this actual the processor was the computer was designed around this particular chip and my conception of positive trolling and negative trolling and neutral trolling and the code of positive trolls was really designed to help interpret Trump trolling. And therefore it's quite helpful in today's world. There was this moment after President Biden won the 2020 election, where I remember thinking, this was in the first few days after it became clear, I was like, great, I had a good run of it.Trump is done and I've designed my computer system around an Intel chip, but now we've moved forward. We have a different type of computer system. I'll put this little chip in the museum. But then Jan 6th happened. And then the Jan 6th inquiry, which I listened to live at the time it happened.Some of us might remember it took about a year, a year and a half for enough. We had the impeachment. He was impeached, but he wasn't convicted because of the votes of two MPs. Senators who had renounced and denounced President Trump or non-President Trump in 2016, but then they wouldn't convict him.And then now here we are on the cusp of the 2024 election. And many of us are worried by the election and our worries are stoked, stoked by the news we hear all the time. And this reaches us everywhere. People who don't have any interest in American politics are fearful of the consequences.And this is like a folkloric, like a horror story where inside horror story where we're talking to our mother or our child and they're communicating to us fear about the outcome of the US election and I can't explain how Trump and those around him worked this out that they could tell stories which I call dissent folklore.They could tell stories that are often lies that communicate fear into other people's minds. That's very easy to do. We all do that accidentally or on purpose in various times of our lives. And it's not generous and it's not ethical if we do it purposefully. But anyway, we do it.But the genius of these people and the people around him around Trump was to know that you could communicate fear into people's minds and then they would support you. So they would, and this is something that, for instance, wife beaters, have discovered in this idea of coercive control where people are in these relationships controlling relationships which and it's now defined in English law as of a couple years ago that a coercive control relationship where you and I are in a relationship and it seems like we're free but actually you're exercising psychological warfare on my mind and I'm basically enslaved to you and when this gets to a certain level it becomes illegal and unlawful and you can go to prison for doing it and there's really good tests, legal tests, for how you determine this. And we are in a form of coercive control or those people who are wrapped by this negative Trump does it himself.So if you're signed up to one of his email lists, you'll be getting at this point in the election cycle, you'll be getting maybe 100 emails a day and some of them most of them will be communicating fear but then some of them will be saying i love you i love you uh you're great if you just pay this 15 euros in the next five minutes you can get a ride on my jet i love you all we're we're fine and and so it's this kind of uh love you hate you and that's the essence of coercive control and we have in this media environment at the moment We're all consuming this, not just from the radio, not just from the internet, but from our friends. We're in a coffee shop, we're chatting to people, we overhear people. Our mother might be worried. And out of this worry, they hope to create a sense of inevitability.that Trump will win, and as a function of this, that people will vote for him. Oh, I'll vote for him because he will win. But what's common to all of this, and trying to get back to your question, excuse me, for droning on, is all of this is emotion moving.And if we, at every moment, we feel our emotions moved, especially for fear, whenever you feel yourself afraid, it's harder than to rationally think, how can I avoid, how can I avoid being afraid? And so, and this is how they work. Basically, they trigger your emotions. So you experience fear and then they offer a bogus solution.However, if you vote for me, there's no need to be afraid anymore. I'll save America. So on the one hand, it's saying America is dead. It's, it's a garbage can. It's the worst country in the world. But if you vote for me, I'll make it good again. And this is how this works.So if we can just identify when we feel fear and obviously there's really important times we feel fear and we should run away straight away from the fear. But a lot of it, especially if it's in the media environment or the internet, you're in a great mood. You've just had a great moment with your lover.And you open up your Twitter and immediately you feel this fear. Once you feel that emotion, that's when you need to think, okay, what algorithm can I use? And if it fails, the message, the meme fails, the code of positive trails, you're like, forget about it. I'm not letting this into my mind.I'm not letting this affect my mood or my motivation. my attitude and and this this is how i would connect what's what we see going on in the information space today with um trolling and my idea of trying to go to positive troll well no a long answer is a good answer a comprehensive answer you've got given me lots of food for thought for the day i've got to have my radar and my focus up but always positive At Decoding Trolls, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you so much, Ronan. I really appreciate this.I think we've got more to talk about in the future. Great.And look for the mana in the meme. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe