Episode Details

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 expertly designed and targeted emotionally resonant communicable trolls, we also act as perpetuators of Disinfolklore. We repeat these trolls to others. Often unknowingly, we become Servant Disinfolklorists of the Russian State, MAGA and CCP cultural revolutions. If we are to confront and solve the problems that Disinfolklore and its diabolical siblings - disinformation, misinformation and other forms of propaganda - are causing inside our communities, we must first acknowledge that we are part of the problem…

I work on the intersection of anthropology, archaeology, psychology, and various different other disciplines. All of them inform my work. I worked in Ukraine between 2015 and 2022. For three years of that time I worked on a bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska which divided Russia-occupied Luhansk from government-controlled Ukraine.

It was there I basically experienced what would become what I now understand as being a Disinfolklore Universe, a Disinfolklore Galaxy that Russia created inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. Now I fear, and I see the signs, the indications, that what Russia did there and inside Russia itself is now spreading across the entire world. It’s linking into the MAGA Disinfolklore Galaxy, and to a lesser extent for the time being, the Chinese Communist Party Disinfolklore Galaxy. So I see us being enmeshed in this entire system of basically trolling and trolls of untruth, of Disinfolklore, communicated through stories coming from the White House, coming from all of these voices we see. And that is what motivates my work: to try and help us see this Disinfolklore Universe, these Disinfolklore Galaxies that we are being enmeshed in. Ukraine is central, absolutely central to it, as everyone in this space understands.

Ukraine has been on the avant-garde of this war since 2015. And thankfully, now most people who have power understand this, and it’s a crucial battle space, the information space around Ukraine. And Volya Radio is doing a fantastic job every day, trying to bring to light the stories often containing Disinfolklore. So this afternoon, the UN Commission of Inquiry based in Vienna has issued a report on the human safaris in Kherson that all of us are aware of, which have been going on since July 2024, and it has established that these are crimes against humanity. And part of the indictment of Russia and those participating in the prosecution of these crimes against humanity — interesting to use the word prosecution there — is that the Russian state is sharing these videos of their human safaris, of the 140 people they’ve murdered using first-person-view drones. The Commission of Inquiry determines that because they are first-person-view drones, the operators of these drones are hunting individuals, chasing them and watching as they murder them, and then sharing these on what I call the Disinfolklore apparatus, which is Telegram, X, Facebook, Instagram. And now, sadly, the White House press room. And so these videos themselves are a perfect example of Disinfolklore.

They breach all ethical guidelines, which is the second — I have six criteria to determine whether or not a story constitutes Disinfolklore, the second of which is right or ethical discipline. Obviously, it’s morally wrong to engage in human safaris. There’s no law anywhere which allows