Episode Details

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 archetypal identity this person is trying to entrench in my mind?

And so, for instance, today, Donald was trying to archetype himself as peacemaker. He attacked Iran in a breach of the US Constitution, a breach of international law. And then today, he tries to archetype himself very slyly as peacemaker between Israel and Iran when he is a protagonist in the war and he has brought the United States into a state of war.

So because I'm looking for the archetypal identities that the author of such tweets or pronouncements is making, I'm looking for that. And so I find that quite helpful.

And it's the first of 12 tools in this toolkit, which I've created for Disinfolklore. And I see...

Well, I believe I see exactly what President Trump is doing today. And as many of us who may have been online today will have seen, very many astute geopolitical analysts are dumbfounded by what President Trump is doing.

I believe what President Trump and those behind him are doing is extremely clever. And it's precisely what I witnessed the Russians do in eastern Ukraine, where I was between 2015 and 2018. And part of my job was to monitor about 180 ceasefires. And so what Russia was doing there was it was archetyping itself as adhering to ceasefires.

And then every morning I was gathering evidence from Russian occupiers and from Ukrainian soldiers about how the so-called ceasefire had been breached. And this is decoupling the idea of ceasefires from meaning. And what Donald is doing today, and now I look back at his attempts to have ceasefire in Ukraine with wider eyes because he's archetyping himself as peacemaker.

And he's decoupling the idea of ceasefire from an actual concrete absence of fire. And what he's really doing inside all of our minds is exactly what the Russians were doing in eastern Ukraine and elsewhere. And this is where I think he is.

I wrote or I spoke about this in Munich in February 2025, where my big fear or my yeah my fear was what donald did inside MAGA he would manage to do to the entire human race and what we see today is a manifestation of this ceasefire ceasefire Israel Iran and so what I'm looking for is the archetyping, what he's doing, and that's in any text we can see this.

People are archetyping themselves as particular people, with particular ideas, and that's a perfect example from today. So I'm looking for that in the data. What is he up to?

And we see people, a lot of very clever people today are dumbfounded by this. They don't understand what he's doing. They think he's mad. But I don't believe he is. I think this is a very conscious strategy I've seen at work before. And I think we ought to be very wary of it. Well, I think in Europe...

Ukraine is the key. So yourself, Joni, Dietmar, we're all engaged in the quotidian. We're watching the war unfurl, the 1200 kilometer contact line. We're reading Zarina's work in Kherson about first person view drones. We are looking and have been for the past two to three years at the Sha'id drones coming in and watching the nature of warfare change before our eyes in a very granular way. And when I then look at the conversation around the run-up to the attacks on Iran by the United States and chatter about blowback as if we are still in the 1990s where all Iran has and all Russia has and all China has are a few missiles. It does disappoint me because we have a lot of experts, people who get paid a lot of money and who have a lot of traction and a lot of clout, who don't seem to understand, because they are not focused on the granular detail of what is happening in Ukraine, and this is one of the great advantages we have by being enmeshed in this, is