Episode Details

Two weeks ago, I ended at the point where I was talking about how what I was most concerned with in my Munich speech in February 2025 was that we would be wrapped up inside what I call a Disinfolklore universe, made up of different discrete galaxies all coalescing. Sadly, the attempt to re-engineer humanity through this is ongoing. We see it every day throughout this so-called peace process.

How it manifests in our minds and in our timelines is exactly what we’re experiencing at the moment: a constant battering of our senses and emotions — our emotions most importantly — with hope and with feelings that maybe, for instance, in the case of one of the main characters at the moment, the war in Ukraine, many people are commenting on it as if peace is going to arrive in a month or two, or is imminent.

I’m not going to go through why I don’t think this is true. I could go through each of the peace agreement’s elements and demonstrate it’s not true. But I probably will get to that later, in a few weeks, when I get to the point about my experience in eastern Ukraine.

US presidents could always archetype at scale. By archetyping, I mean something bigger than branding. It’s not a mere imprinting of ideas in our consciousness. It’s something akin to attaching something in the quotidian, in our timelines, to very deep structures within our cognitive frameworks — on an individual, but also on a micro and macro level.

When President Trump was talking about immigrants eating our dogs, that can be understood on a literal level: immigrants are eating our dogs. Many of us would have spent time fact-checking this. Lo and behold, we discover immigrants aren’t eating our dogs.

But when I heard that, it reminded me of one of my great supervisors, Anna Lo, who was a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Sadly she died about a year ago. She was the first ethnic Chinese member of a legislature in Europe. I worked for her in Northern Ireland when I was General Secretary of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, an anti-sectarian political party.

There is a tradition among those supposedly loyal to the British crown of lighting bonfires in July. Some of us might remember seeing lots of bonfires. And I remember seeing “Anna Lo ate my dog” on a sign on one of these bonfires, and wondering what they were talking about.

I thought of that immediately when Donald was talking about migrants eating our dogs. There is this element of an archetypal relationship between dogs and migrants — being eaten, eating our pets — somehow othering. That’s quite conventional in far-right circles. I happened to come across it once by accident in Northern Ireland, and then it popped up in Donald Trump’s speech, and suddenly everyone is going.

That’s also an archetypal structure. But it also sounds so bizarre to us as normal human beings who support Ukraine — it’s like a hidden code, an unhidden code. Somehow it connects with deep psychological fears of people in their inner minds and motivates them to hate migrants. Enough of a set of people that it was worth Donald airing this in his campaign. It was worth these so-called loyalists attaching a poster of Anna Lo to their bonfire and then burning it — the effigy and the sign: “Anna Lo ate my dogs.”

This is the kind of thing I’m talking about with archetypal Disinfolklore literacy. We don’t have to learn all of these tropes, because honestly I think we could end up being brainwashed.

But when we see the Wagner — the Wagner propagandist who was killed by one of the first HIMARS strikes in Popasna in July 2022 — some of us will remember that incident where he was visiting the front line as a tourist. It was in Popasna, a city I know well from when I lived in eastern Ukraine. He was photographed on arrival, it was put up online, there was a label on the building behind him, and HIMARS came to visit, and he was killed.

The person who took over the Grey Zone Tele