Episode Details

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-religious and the juridical.

Druidey Don Trump – Don Disinfolklore - is brilliant at forging a mythos that convinces people he has a superhuman ability to make the unexpected happen. Druidey Don – as I shall refer to him - may seem to have magical powers, yet what he does and what those around him amplify is in fact as I shall show a mechanical process that uses archetypes deeply embedded in our culture and in our minds in ways that are quite familiar to those of us who study Indo-European culture within the timeframe of the last 6,000 years

The Zelenskyy effect for the archetype of The Comedian: a much closer match between archetypes at various levels (the artist, the actor, and ordinary peoples’ emotional triggers, as evidenced by creating one of the post-Soviet space’s most successful entertainment companies)…I'm quite optimistic. So I still believe there will be a moment when America goes all in, Germany has gotten it all in. And I marked the moment, I think it was in April 2023. It was too late. I marked the moment in a tweet. I just saw it yesterday or next.

So I still believe America will go all in. Certainly President Biden went all in a few days ago in his Valley Forge speech in the context of fighting Trump and Trumpism. And in pointing out that the theatricalness of Trump's use of the Jan 6th insurrectionists now in his rallies is, and President Biden referred to it as a fairy tale, a bad fairy tale. And then he went on to say, if you were reading about an ex-US president saying these things, saying that he pardoned these insurrectionists, you'd think it was a bad novel. So President Biden gets this disinfolklore element that these are just kind of stories.

And I think what is going on with the Russian government, disinformation, as well as with what I call Trump Brexitism, which is a part of it, this Trump Brexit disinfo-clore as well, is they are, through this carnival, through this PT Barnum spectacle, they are turning us in from being mere voters, from electors, from participants in our own destiny. We have a human right of public participation and decision making. It's one of the core human rights. And what they're trying to do is using media to turn us from participants in this into watchers, into, you know, we just see the The theatricalness of it.

It's just over the top. Everything is over the top. And it's a dictum I came up with relatively recently, but it's basically the media is not mediating. The media is creating the reality. It is using, it is creating the reality, it is reporting the reality it is creating.

But in many cases, it only exists as a phenomena on that particular medium at that moment. It doesn't, so polling is used as this magical chrysanthem to say, oh, so what is completely made up only exists in the minds is said, oh, polls say this and polls say that. But what that is actually, we are thinking of that this is reporting reality, but actually is creating reality. And what also gives me optimism is that we have in President Zelensky a master, an absolute master of communication. So he, as we know, he was chief executive of the most significant privately held entertainment company in the post-Soviet space, arguably. He is an actor.

I, in my experience of Eastern Ukraine, I got to know the actual