Podcast | Mana-stripping through monikoring

AfD’s Don’t poke the bear troll - final part of Chapter Three of Outflank Dugin

In 2024 Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, at that point the second largest party in the Bundestag, gave a parliamentary speech. Germany’s continued military support for Ukraine, she said, was poking the bear. The bear, russia, had legitimate security interests in its near abroad. The West’s expansion of NATO since 1991 had been a provocation. Responsible German statecraft would consist of stepping back and acknowledging the bear’s domain.

“As ever, there’s multiple parts to this episode. Each is stand-alone - you don’t need to have tuned into the previous episodes of any of these series, to understand what I’m talking about. In case you do want to go back: Today, we’re completing chapter two of my monograph Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut (Episodes One, Two, and three of this series, an essential introduction to the ‘Outflank’ dimension of the Disinfolklore method are linked to here). Today is the second part of Principles of Infolklore series, episode four (the first part of episode four is here) - episodes One and Two of the Principles of Infolklore). And the second part of my comparison of Ukraine’s counter Disinformation system development experience with my experience developing Disinfolklore system, using the July 2026 Springer Press book as my spring board (the first part is here).

Recently I used the ‘Outflank’ method in another context:

Weidel’s speech is the third example in chapter two of Outflank Dugin, the book I started reading to you here about two months ago. This is the fourth episode of it, and the end of the chapter.

The line “don’t poke the bear” is the russian security apparatus’s signature. It is archetypal Disinfolklore. It is not Weidel’s coinage. It is not the AfD’s coinage. It is a line that has circulated in russian state-aligned Western European political discourse, in various translations, for at least two decades. It is the canonical Provocation Logic deployment at the geopolitical scale.

This is Part 5 of Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut. Continued from:

The outflanking response to Weidel’s speech was not to rebut her account of NATO expansion. The outflanking response was to name the deployment, as I have just done. Here is the “don’t poke the bear” signature. It surfaces in this speech. Its Mana, its energy, is immanent in this speech, in that report, in this podcast, in that op-ed. The signature is the same in every case. It is the russian security s