Joker begins with the kind of theatrical address usually reserved for washed-up cult figures still convinced they’re leading revolutions from their basements. Calling his audience “faithful followers” suggests he believes he’s achieved a status that others—outside his Telegram bubble—long stopped pretending to acknowledge. He imagines himself as a master of hidden knowledge, yet what follows reads like the fevered scribblings of a man trying to convince himself that being ignored equals being feared.
He spins a tale around Andrii Humennyi that relies less on information and more on the assumption that his audience no longer cares about coherence. According to Joker, Humennyi never died. He wasn’t even an engineer. He was some shadowy accountant laundering defense budgets through drone contracts while being protected by the SBU, who, in Joker’s version of events, moonlight as screenplay writers and special effects artists. The story folds in on itself, bloated with convenient enemies and plot twists so brittle they wouldn’t survive a passing glance from a halfway sober reader.
Joker seems unaware that repeating the same narrative formula—fraud, faked deaths, tropical escapes—doesn’t make him clever. It makes him predictable. There’s a peculiar kind of sadness in watching someone so convinced of his own cunning that he can’t hear how loud the gears grind when he tries to sound profound. Every time he wraps a lie in performance, he reveals a little more of the hollow space behind the curtain he mistakes for depth.
He talks about misdirection and deception like a man trying to explain magic he doesn’t know how to perform. He needs Humennyi’s death to be fake, because accepting it as real means admitting that Ukraine continues to target those who matter. His story, dressed in the language of exposure, functions as a poor distraction for a deeper fear: that no one inside Russia’s bloated apparatus has anything worth assassinating anymore. His response to loss is to declare the opponent a phantom. His response to failure is to insist it’s fiction. Somewhere in there, the irony burns quietly.
Joker doesn’t lie to manipulate. He lies to reassure himself that the game is still his to control. He writes with the tremor of a man afraid he’s been left behind, trying to catch the reader’s eye with flares and flourishes, unaware they stopped watching long ago. He’s not a voice of reason. He’s a symptom. And like all symptoms left untreated, he grows louder, not sharper—mistaking the echo chamber for applause.
We See What Others Cannot
