Battling Archetypes

This is the last episode of my mini-series on Larysa Yakubova’s The Beast from the Abyss. The first episode: For the past five episodes I’ve walked us all down into the dark where most of us live all day when we’re in Ukraine mode, and tonight, you’ll be happy to know, I’m going to walk you back up. This, of course, reflects the archetypal presence of the beast from the abyss that Larysa Yakubova...

It’s a reflecting pool. So we’re talking about accusation in a mirror which is Donald’s main tactic as well (just as we were talking about before) using an arch in the ceremonial axis of the Republic to install, archly, an archetype of right (which is in fact the opposite of right, an insurrection). So the structure of these - the magnetism of the - words reveal everything really. I marvel and fin...

We say ancient Greece and ancient Egypt without a flicker, and we call a Bronze Age culture in Kazakhstan the first Aryans — every one of them a modern name thrown back over a people who never bore it. The homeland of the whole Indo-European family is the Dnipro Valley. So, by the rule we already use for everyone else, there is an ancient Ukraine. To withhold the name is not scholarly caution. It...

I am going to continue today the series on The Beast from the Abyss, this brilliant book by a renowned Ukrainian historian. Last week, you may remember, I got to her chapter on the deep folk — which is the moniker that the Russist former deputy prime minister of Russia, Vladislav Surkov, used. He used this term, deep folk, to describe, highly ironically, the Russians, and Larysa is basically parsi...

The Sovereign Writes His Enemy a Letter This week, the President of Ukraine did something a head of state almost never does. He sat down and wrote his enemy a letter — an open letter to Vladimir Putin, published in English on the official website, for the whole world and, more to the point, for all of Russia to read. Here on Decoding Trolls — I’m Decoding Trolls, I work mainly online at disinfolkl...

I’ve called this the Reasonable Man. This is about Putler’s Astana press conference on the 29th of May 2026. I watched it, and I was amazed by Putler’s reasonableness. I noticed this faintly weary man who really only wants the facts established and the books balanced, who lends money rather than gifting it, who speaks openly and honestly, who keeps saying “I say this without irony.” I caught mysel...

Today I’m going to talk a bit about the Starobilsk incident, using the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, and I’m also going to talk about some examples from what I call the Luhansk Corpus, which I’ve been talking about for the last few weeks. We’re in the midst — not even one hundredth of a way through — what I have to talk about. This corpus is 10,000 propaganda items that I collected while I work...

What I’m trying to do is also communicate a form of literacy. I learned to see archetypes in data and in stories in 2016, in Russia-occupied eastern Ukraine, in a story I’ve told before. I’ve spent the last 10 years unpacking that insight into what I call the Disinfolklore Analytical Method, whose main exposition is on the disinfolklore.eu website, where we have the 12-tool way. For people who wan...

Zelensky’s Red Square Coordinates: Sovereign Trolling I was happy to see this week when President Zelensky posted the executive order, for want of a better term, talking about how the coordinates — the very accurate, I think it was eight-digit grid coordinates, or maybe even ten — of Red Square in Moscow would be safe from Ukrainian missiles. I noted with great pleasure how everyone recognised tha...

Some of you may remember that two weeks ago I started a new series, looking at trolling and trolls. I am interspersing each week: one week on archetypal analysis of what I call the Luhansk archive, and then I move into the trolling. Trolling as Emotion-Moving Activity Just to remind everyone how I conceive of trolling: it is an emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind. I arrived at that d...

A couple of weeks ago, I started a new series, and this is going to be the third episode of it, where I am going through what I call the Luhansk archive, the Luhansk corpus, which was the data set from which I generated the Disinfolklore analysis. I am going through the different archetypal identities in each of these stories. This is a core part of the analytical method: this idea I have of mobil...

New Second Series and the Starting Point I have been thinking about some of the archetypes and seeing their application. Frankly, I have been hearing more people say the method is useful for figuring out what is going on in the world. I am glad this is something that is catching on with some important people, the people I work with. It matters. It really is helpful to understand how Russia thinks...

The Archetype Series: Recap and Context Last week, we started a new series, which is on actual archetypes, because what I have been trying to do is go back to where all of this began for me, which was in eastern Ukraine, looking at the Russian occupiers’ media. I saved thousands — 10,000 articles from the Russian occupiers’ media from between 2014 and 2018. In them, I found some archetypes at the...

This data set of 10,000 propaganda items, which I collected in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, is the basis of Disinfolklore. It is the basis of my insight about archetypes. I had not really systematically gone through it to take out all of the main archetypes and sub-archetypes from this corpus, as it were. I have done this now, and I have quite a number of individual papers on it,...

Munich Speech Forecast It’s a very interesting day, a very good day for Disinfolklore and for what I forecast on the basis of data back in February in my Munich speech, February 2025. I see what Donald is doing to all of us, to the markets, to the whole of humanity really, through the medium of all these various things which most of us have never really heard about, like helium and fertiliser and...

The Trito Myth Continued Trita is a herdsman whose cattle are stolen by the negation, by the snake. In Vedic India, the negation is called the Naga. Who wouldn’t argue that Druidy Don is today’s negation? Or Duncey Putler, the negation of the post–World War II legal order. Then with the help of Zeus Pater — Zeus Pater, Skyfather, Zeus in Greek, Jupiter in Rome — in Vedic India, or sometimes on his...

This is the “what can we do” part. I was concerned that we were going to be wrapped up in the same kind of Disinfolklore galaxy as I watched unfurl inside the minds of Ukrainians stuck in the occupation between 2015 and 2018, and that I have witnessed — and I’m sure many of us have witnessed — people we know who have gone MAGA unfurl inside their minds. What I was concerned about was that this wou...

The European Union today released its highly anticipated — well, highly anticipated by the likes of me — fourth report on threats on what it calls FIMI, which is a rather unwieldy phrase. It’s not unanalogous to Disinfolklore, but FIMI stands for Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference. The “foreign” in this context means the threat is coming from outside the European Union, which for go...

The Arc of a Word: Four Years of Re-Archetyping I wanted to reflect on the four years of war. So everything everyone’s been talking about for the last hour and a half or so, hopefully it will strike a chord with them. I want to go through the four years of the war, not merely as battles, though we’ll visit some, but as a journey through Disinfolklore, through the archetypes we project onto Ukraine...

From Prime Ministers to Primary Schools: My Vision for Disinfolklore Literacy My vision for the Disinfolklore Analytical Method took a giant leap forward towards realisation this week. My vision for Disinfolklore is to use its insights to teach universal communications literacy and to build up immunity to manipulating archetypal Disinfolklore. I visualise teams of teachers teaching in Prime Minist...

⚡️Nice journal reference here and citation to my work on Disinfolklore. Does two things of particular value to me as a writer: 1. Is a record that I created the Portmanteau ‘Disinfolklore.’ 2. Correctly categorises ‘Disinformation’ as a particular form of ‘Disinfolklore.’ Thus giving me the whole field (which I’d be too humble to have claimed too loudly) while confining all the work focussing on...

Introduction: Disinfolklore, AI, and the MAGA Cult People who are still part of the MAGA cult may find the exemplar of Dawn — Druidy Dawn, disinfolklore — a bit unappealing as one of the main examples I use to illustrate this. It occurred to me that maybe I could quickly talk about how the Code of Positive Trolls will work with AI algorithms, and help people manage this transition many of us are g...

Ukraine as a Character Why is disinfolklore an appropriate moniker? In disinfolklore, we look at characters in the stories we’re served up. Ukraine is a damsel in distress who must be rescued by Donald—this is how he’s trying to archetype Ukraine. We know it’s obviously false. Ukraine is a damsel in distress who must be rescued by Russia because of the coup and all of these trolls. Or Ukraine is a...

This is episode six of going through the battling archetypes and essential tools in the Disinfolklore analytical method. Some of you may remember last week I talked about Donald archetyping himself as mad, and my archetyping of my experience on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska as something folkloric, and that leading to an accidental insight which in turn led to my discovery of Disinfolklore. Toda...

The Soviet Union was so mysterious for many of us, as was eastern and central Europe. I was 17 when the Berlin Wall fell. Many people I’ve met since — I went as soon as I could. I spent time hitchhiking to Czechoslovakia and Poland and Hungary, went around those places several times, because I was fascinated by what it was like, how they lived. I always imagined it would be really interesting work...