Disinfolklore

What I look at in Disinfolklore is particularly the system effects of specific memes.

I’m also interested in how they affect us—our motivations, intentions, and attitudes. The Disinfolklore universe is unique because it wraps the world in a narrative, much like how Russians wrap everyone in Eastern Ukraine. It’s an all-encompassing system, like being in love or grief, where memes aggregate to transform your mind.

This transformation is akin to being in a cult, where you start believing things like Greenland or Venezuela belonging to America, or Ukraine to Russia. It’s the resu...

I am keeping a grip on where we are. This is episode three of a series I started four weeks ago. As some of us might remember, there were technical issues in the second week. So, this is episode three, where I am going through the paper I delivered at the Pirate Party Security Conference at the time of the Munich Conference last February.

The words from the United States Vice President at that conference are continuing to resonate, with new policies being released all the time. Most recently, the attempt to sanction the European Union—specifically se...

Decoding Trolls returns for a deep dive into what he calls the “disinfolklore universe”—a constructed reality where propaganda, myth, archetypes, and emotional manipulation replace facts and reason.

Building on his Munich Security Conference intervention and years of lived experience in eastern Ukraine, Decoding unpacks how modern information warfare operates not just through lies, but through stories that feel true, emotionally charged archetypes, and psychological paradoxes designed to exhaust, demoralize, and ultimately re-engineer public consciousness.

The discussion explores how concepts like peace, security guarantees, and ceasefires are deliberately inverted—how capitulation is sold as peace, aggressi...

It’s exactly a year since I detected the system-wide effects of the aggregatation of MAGA and Russian Disinfolklore artifacts invading our minds, information space and reality. In February in Munich at the Pirate Party security conference I declared what by then I had archætyped as a “Disinfolklore Universe” to be operating inside all of our minds and cultures.

Today I want to begin a series of the five parts of the “Battling Archetypes” paper I conceived for the first time exactly a year ago and which I spoke about in embryonic form at the Munich meeting in...

Disinfolklore is Russia using First Person View Drones on human prey to train its drone pilots.

Then the Russian state publishes the footage of these murders, from the perspective of the First Person view drone pilots as they close in on their human prey.

This is archetypal Disinfolklore: create the event (in this case murder), then publicise it using different memes and means of storytelling. Russia’s only in Ukraine to create social media content, which it uses to troll its own population and America’s leaders into perpetuating Ukraine’s annihilation. Disinfolklore always has a purp...

Rearchetype “acts of war” as “hybrid warfare” or “Active Measures.” Then, get the most knowing people in your chosen enemies’ chains-of-command to take on that Archetyping.

While they earnestly, sincerely, confused and proudly model their knowingness (by explaining to others the intricacies of Russia’s own re-Archetyping of actual “War” with euphemisms) Russia continues its war by all means.

The delicious irony is that by subverting the signifier (War) that properly describes Russia’s attacks on our countries and implementing a new meaning (Hybrid War), Russia is proving that it is at war against us.

Concealing its wa...

I’m 100% comfortable with using the term ‘meme.’ I use the term ‘meme’ interchangeably with the term ‘informational unit’ and also with the term ‘troll,‘ where troll is describing the item of Disinfolklore or the item of information.

So ‘meme,’ for me, is more than simply the visual image that we have come to think about it as being. Obviously, when the term ‘meme’ was coined in whatever was 1976 by by that English philosopher Dawkins, it described ‘informational unit.’ What I call informational units (which are communicated in cultures in the same way that genes, or the genome are communicated biolog...

**I have updated the audio in yesterday’s Podcast as at around 50 mins this podcast was superimposed unto it! This podcast is also posted as part of my Power of Mana/Finding Manuland project - I just couldn’t decide where it belonged!**

As some of you might remember, I studied law. I worked as a property lawyer in London for a little while. One of the features in English law is this idea that sometimes, for whatever reason, commercial property is let at a peppercorn rent. Generally speaking, in this day and age, no peppercorn passes betw...

**Audio updated on 9 November due to editing error after 50mins in the original version**

I wanted to talk about the continuation of what we had spoken about before.

Part One:

This basically involves a few different ingredients into the analytical theory that I invented, which is called Disinfolklore. Disinfolklore is both an analytical theory.

Part Two:

It’s also a way of seeing. It’s a description of a new form of narrative. It also is a way of cutting through Russian disinformation and in particular in the context of t...

So my first interest in magic stemmed from reading this paper on the war magic, which was used by the fifth Dalai Lama who lived around 1560, around that time, and was a great esoteric practitioner and basically once and for all beat this other Tibetan Buddhist sect with the help of Mongols and after that ruled Tibet until now.

The idea of war magic, I mentioned it last week…

Great question. Yes. So my first interest in magic stemmed from reading this paper on the war magic, which was used by the fifth Dalai Lama wh...

Our mantra: “Look for the Mana in the Meme!”

1. Scan for the ‘Mana in the Meme.’

2. Identify, unlayer it.

3. Characterise the Mana’s Dimensions. 4. Evaluate them.

5. Make the Call: Positive, Negative or Neutral.

6. Intervene, Act appropriately.

I felt bad all week.

I left you on a bit of a downer in this Podcast:

That the mental war that Russia has launched against all of us in all of our countries, wherever we’re from, will continue after Ukraine’s victory.

I wanted to situ...

In 2021 Ilnitsky, adviser to the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation (2015-2024) stated that the purpose of Russia’s “mental wars” is to destroy self-awareness, change the mental, civilizational basis of the enemy’s society (I’m indebted to Tetiana Boryak of Vilnius University and to InformNapalm for drawing my attention to these quotes by Ilnitsky in https://informnapalm.org/ua/format-c/)

“It is possible to destroy the state and destroy the country by changing the self-awareness, worldview, goals, values and priorities of society. The mental war is aimed at changing the worldview. Moreover, if the Armed Forces...

The United States government has published an Executive Order and a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) (h/t Ken Klippenstein) that use Disinfolklore about an entirely fictional character called ‘Antifa’ to justify entirely un-American activities by the Federal government. Both documents are premised on entirely fictional (Disinfolklore) accounts of so-called Anti-Fascist plans for violence against the Right.

Only evidence we have about plans for violence is from messages from Young Republicans (aged 18-40 years-old) that demonstrate they’re planning to exterminate Americans using gas chambers. Accusation in a Mirror (accusing the future victims of the crimes you’re plann...

I note how 40% of Americans currently believe the US is currently on the “Right” track.

How does what is illusory become right in our minds?

Through story-borne illusory artefacts that troll our minds into misperceptions - Disinfolklore.

However:

Yet:

So basically what they’re doing is, and again, I’m going to use this term archetyping because it’s very important to me and it’s very important to what they are doing. And this is a very old phenomenon, which some of our earliest writing in ancient Iran comes from t...

One of the more interesting areas of my research these days is on what Cultural Psychology calls “the Laws of Sympathetic Magic.” These laws or mental routines are very relevant in my Finding Manuland project (particularly the Law of Contagion), as well as in Decoding Trolls. However , the ability of Disinfolklorists like MAGA or Russia to convince us, using Disinfolklore, of the complete opposite of what is true (MAGA will make America great; Ukraine, rather than Russia, is full of Nazis; vaccines not viruses harm us;…) is a phenomenon so common and so attractive, it calls for explanation.

In t...

Russia is attempting, accidentally on purpose, to blow-up Europe’s largest nuclear power plant: Enerhodar in Zaporizhzhia, which it has been violently occupying since 3 March 2022.

[full thread cataloguing in hundreds of Tweets Russia’s attempt to hold Europe hostage to nuclear blackmail: Provoke the Distress, then Purport to Salve It, which is part of Russia’s Provocation Logic: https://x.com/decodingtrolls/status/1760275518321021345?s=46].

Then yesterday Russia bombed an electricity substation that feeds power to Chornobyl’s reactor number 4 which Soviet Russia blew up in 1986.

This week I want to talk about Mental Routines...

[Lieutenant-General Budanov, chief of Ukraine’s main military intelligence directorate - HUR - nicknamed “The Owls”]

Elmo Robin and Druidey Don Batman dressed up in Marvel Universe costumes (through AI and In Real Life). Posting them them on their own Disinfolklore propagation network X. And compelling other oligarchs to do likewise of theirs. Were embedded in Disinfolklore - stories that purposefully affect our Moods/Intentions/Attitudes/ Motivations in ways that repurpose us to serve the Disinfolklorists memes/means to transform our world.

Druidey Don’s wife wore a meme chic costume for his inauguration. A Ukrainia...

Let’s look at how scanning informational units / memes for immanent characters might help us better interpret manipulation techniques, in real time. We look for the Mana in the Meme. So today, the character of the Mana we’re hunting out in the data entering our mindstreams is what I designate as a “character.”

In the Disinfolklore Analytical Method for parsing Disinformation, a ‘character’ can correspond to a real person, fictional beings, countries, fictional animals (Russia acrchetyping as a ‘bear’ is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and a perfect example of a perennial character in Disinfolklore), and in fact any ex...

In the Færy Tale, Donald 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.

Disinfolklore is an insight into how we perceive reality through concatenating levels of archetypes. Many picked up from Færy tales and folklore.

It’s obvious while we w...

Two Russian mafia dons meet in Alaska. As cover they chat about ceding territory, they don’t and never will control. Two Russian mafia dons trying to archetype themselves as Reagan / Gorbachev. Two Russian mafia dons meet in Alaska to condemn millions of humans in those territories to certain torture, starvation and death.

Two Russian mafia Dons meet in Alaska.

Druidey Donald Draumpf Disinfolklore rearchytyping reality by entertaining idea Sovereignty is malleable - Donald is trafficking in Ukraine’s Sovereignty without a mandate.

Druidey don Don Draumpf Disinfolklore is attempting to sell a prop...

So another so another busy week in the Disinfolklore Galaxy that we are currently being wrapped up inside.

I don’t use the term Disinfolklore Galaxy lightly.

It is a technical term. I can define it scientifically.

The easiest way to understand what’s happening to us, if you are not MAGA, then just look at MAGA and see how people were wrapped up inside MAGA. You think ‘gosh, that’s really odd. That would never happen to me.’

But now we as a participant in Ukrainian info space, we are now experi...

Here, Decoding Trolls speaks about hunting for patterns in data. Disinfolklore is one such pattern that recurs in multiple different voices in forms of geopolitically relevant discourse that we do not associate with folklore or child-like emotionally resonant story-telling.

Yeah, part of what helped me see this pattern, this is what I really do. I hunt for patterns in data. And I assimilate, as many of us do, who participate in X. And X, as we now know from the third report on foreign information manipulation and interference by the European Union, which was released recently.

President Zelenskyy's fluent in 21st century emotion-moving activities (trolling). He’s a master of what experts call the “magic-religious” aspect of the mysterious practice of leadership and sovereignty. He’s also an expert in the other aspect of the sovereign: the juridical.

Duncey Putin and Don Disinfolklore Trump, by contrast, are stuck in the twentieth century.

Let’s break them down into the constituent elements of the Sovereign Archetype which all three fit inside. Sovereignty has two functions, according to Dumézil (who discovered the tripartite structure immanent in Indo-European linguistics, cultures and communities): the Magico-reli...

It's 1942. You live by the railway. You see the trains travelling to Auschwitz.

Would you know you're witnessing genocide?

Between 2015 and 2018, working in eastern Ukraine as a diplomat, I witnessed a stealthily prepared and executed genocide. Even though I had studied the holocaust. Read much of its literature. It was not for several years after leaving that place, after the full-scale invasion, that I realised what I had seen and participated in.

Disinfolklore as a topic of study is my response to the attempt to understand how I missed what Russia was doing...

So I took the idea of archetypes from Tibetan Buddhism where the entire practice is about embedding archetypes in our minds and very scary images of the Lord of Death, Yama.

And what I noticed in Jung's work, which he takes it, he says he took the idea of archetypes from St. Augustine.

So again, it's the similar idea of trying to embed these tropes.

I use the term, so for me, the fundamental metaphor is “Trolls”, fundamental “unit of information.” That's another term I use, units of information or “meme.”

So thos...

Troll, the clue is in the “trol” element of “control.” So again, it's going back to this idea of movement, which if we look in Shakespeare's English, “trole the bowl,” meaning “pass the bowl.”

This is the idea of the pipe being passed around, you troll the bowl. And so control and patrol, we were on patrols in eastern Ukraine. These aren't mere coincidences, I realised. And eventually, after a lot of work, I basically started in earnest around February 2020 looking into folklore, really, because all I knew about folklore was I recognised a family resemblance between what was going o...

Last night I spoke about Donald’s archetyping of America as mediator rather than participant in the Iran-attack and how we can better understand Iran-attack blowback on Bette Dangerous, alongside Jen Senko, Monique Camarra, Joni Askola, Dietmar Pichler and Dee Batiste. Many thanks to Heidi Cuda.

The idea I'm working most with at the moment is what I call archetypal disinfolklore. So what I'm looking for in any form of data, whether it's on my feed or in a tweet or in a pronouncement by the President of the United States, I'm looking for what is the ar...

Today, the fabric of every aspect of our lives – our values, our work, our health, whether we believe vaccines work, that Global Warming is happening or that it can be mitigated, even the bond market- is permeated with story-borne artefacts (Disinfolklore) of an attempt to support authoritarian cultures. What I call ‘Disinfolklore’ is being pumped constantly into our inner minds through the Make America Great Again (MAGA), Russian State and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus that includes X, Telegram, Fox News, TikTok and even, now, the White House press team. Once Disinfolklore has infected our minds with expert...

I first noticed the Disinfolklore Universe now spreading through our neural networks, like triffids rewilding the garden of Eden, when it was in a more primitive form. In 2016, I was a diplomat posted to eastern Ukraine. Russia’s army, cosplaying as Little Green Men, Polite Folk and Odin-worshipping soldiers from the Nazi inspired “Wagner” corps, had occupied part of Ukraine in 2014. My job was to establish the facts in relation to security incidents related to Russia’s Disinfolklore-justified military occupation of part of Ukraine.

One Saturday, my manager phoned me from inside the Russia-occupied and Russia-designated “Luhansk Folk’s Rep...

Although I have never self-identified as being on the political right, it falls to me to try to re-orientate the Right away from continuing its terrible identification with MAGA and Russian right-wing Disinfolklore. Let’s, then, use my concept of Archetyping-Through-Disinfolklore to understand how the (political) Right was hacked by usurpers who managed to identify “Right” with “Conservative” and policy positions, like Trumps, which are anything but Conservative or Right (see my “Battling Disinfolklore Archetypes” speech delivered during the Munich Security Conference in 2025 where I first explained how Druidey Don and Duncey Putin are using Archetyping to wrap us up inside a Di...

1 Introduction: Declaration of ‘Our Disinfolklore Universe’

2 Was Ist Disinfolklore —-> Mana in meme

3 Examples of mental models/archetypes in memes.

4 Archetypes:

Archetypal Archetypes: the Shaman-trickster is personified by All Father Germanic God of Runes Odin

Druidey Don

Duncey Putin

The Comedian

5 Consciously Disrupting Archytypal identities

1 Introduction: Declaration of ‘Our Disinfolklore Universe’

It’s appropriate to be speaking about our Disinfolklore Universe at a Pirate Party Munich Security conference event.

Those who founded the Pirate Party get what I am about t...

Welcome to the Disinfolklore podcast!

Hi there, my moniker is Decoding Trolls. This is the Disinfolklore podcast. This is the first Disinfolklore podcast, so thank you very much for being here. Today I want to look at the newest addition to the arsenal of the Disinfolklore analytical method for parsing Russian, MAGA,and in fact any form of disinformation which is communicated through stories.

So I invented disinfolklore and have elaborated upon disinfolklore since February, 2023. I marked its invention with a tweet.

I was trying to find a moniker to communicate all of...