Decoding Trolls

Decoding Trolls
Decoding Trolls
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Decoding Trolls decodes the meanings inside memes. Decoding Trolls sees any emotion-moving activity of body, speech, or mind as trolling. Trolling others' emotions is what we do as sentient beings. The point is to control it, through getting how it works. www.decodingtrolls.net

  1. 1d ago

    Podcast | When History Becomes War: Transcending the History Provocation troll (Ep 2)

    My new Historical versus Real Russia lens has been tested before. In October 1925, at Locarno, Weimar Germany guaranteed its borders with France and Belgium. But Weimar Germany left its border with Poland open. The Weimar state spent years campaigning about the past. The history it told claimed the land, claimed Poland. Fourteen years later, its army crossed the open border. “…The limb is gone, but the feeling of the Historical Russia remains. AfD, MAGA, Brexit, Poland’s PiS, France’s National Front and a heap of other backward-looking, oligarch-run democracy-hacking projects engage in History Provocation tactics - nostalgia concealing a will-to-power whose goal is to destroy the post-WWII architecture…” The Federal Republic, the same core after a far greater defeat, kept a legal claim on the lost east for two further decades. But the Federal Republic renounced force. It acknowledged its crimes from 1951. In 1970, it signed treaties with Moscow and with Warsaw, accepting the post-war borders. After signing the first, that August, Willy Brandt told West Germans on television: “There’s nothing lost with this treaty which has not been squandered away a long time ago.” That is what the Real Germany sounds like in a core that has lost its empire. That is what we must hear in the Real Russia of the future. If we want to hear the leaders of the future Real Russia, then we must hear it from them now. We must be looking for that meaning in what we hear around us today. So, by the time the Russian state collapses and becomes Moscow and St Petersburg and a couple of counties around those areas, we will be equipped to help steer it, and to ensure that it remains inside the boundaries of the Real Russia. Whenever it lapses into the Historical Russia discourse, we can help correct it. The question to put to every voice in Future Russia is Locarno’s. Which borders do you call final? And do you call all of them final? For their own good, and within the law If Russia had the power to conquer Ukraine, it would. But it doesn’t. Ukraine will enforce its borders for the decades to come. So unless Future Russia learns what the Real Russia is, and how to evacuate its brain, its consciousness and its national consciousness of this Historical Russia fallacy, the Ukrainians will enforce it. They will be fully within their rights under the law. They will enforce it using tens of thousands of drones every time Russia strays over its borders, in search of revenge, or some historical Russian troll. What I’m prescribing today is a change in mind and understanding. It is metanoia, in Yakubova’s speech. It is for their own good. It is for the good of humanity, and the good of European peace and security. And it is all within the law. Respect your borders. Don’t invade other countries. Don’t fill your population with nonsense about the past. Especially when that nonsense will, in due course, end up persuading them to participate in unlawful invasions of other countries, and the deaths of millions of people, since February 2022. Why we need to start now The reason to learn the difference now, before Future Russia arrives, is that many Westerners are already hypnotised by the Data-Resistant Archetypes. The archetype of Russia as a great power is a phantom limb. It’s like when you lose a leg or an arm. For months afterwards, you try to move it. You try to pick something off the shelf, or you try to walk, and you can’t. It’s gone. That is the Historical Russia. The Historical Russia is still in our information space. As the Syrian regime began to collapse in the winter of 2024, the same IR (International Relations) experts who had not seen the end of Syria coming were urging Ukraine to concede territory to an unbeatable Russia. They still are. The limb is gone. The Historical Russia is dead. It’s in the grave. All that is left is an idea of the Historical Russia. That idea must be smited and replaced with the Real Russia idea. That is the purpose of this piece. The limb is gone, but the feeling of the Historical Russia remains. AfD, MAGA, Brexit, Poland’s PiS, France’s National Front and a heap of other backward-looking, oligarch-run democracy-hacking projects engage in History Provocation tactics - nostalgia concealing a will-to-power whose goal is to destroy the post-WWII architecture. The History Provocation Historical Russia knows how to work on that feeling. It’s like an AI agent coming to infect your minds, our minds, the minds of our countries, and our feelings of security. Then it comes over the borders and kills people, and does horrific things, all as an instrument of history. Its instrument is history, brainwashing. I call it the History Provocation. A state talks about the past, loudly and for years, until its target, and everyone watching, are arguing about the past too. Before you know it, we’re fighting over stuff which isn’t even true. Or if it is true, it doesn’t matter. What matters today is our future, and building and developing our human communities, educating our children, and building safe communities and a knowledge economy. It doesn’t matter if the history we’re arguing about is stolen, invented, or even perfectly true. What makes it a provocation is what it does to us and our minds. It sets the agenda. The History Provocation pulls attention away from the present. The History Provocation gives the state’s surrogates, the Historical Russia’s surrogates, a part to play. In October 2025, I put it bluntly: Putler’s “history stuff is just a way of establishing character for his surrogates and to hypnotise”. The record of the last History Provocation The record of the last History Provocation is in the European Union’s own database of Russian disinformation. “Ukraine is an artificial state created by the Russians”, 9 June 2016. “Ukraine has never existed as an independent country”, the next day. “Ukraine is not a real state because it has no real territory, no single language, single economy and single population”, September 2018. “Ukrainians and Russians are one people”, on the day Putler’s essay on the subject appeared, in July 2021. On 28 February 2022, four days into the invasion, “Russians and Ukrainians are one people” was offered as a reason to murder hundreds of thousands of native Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians. Supposedly, in order to protect them. Of course, the Historical Russia is nonsense, from start to finish, as a casus belli. Some in the West read the warning Some in the West read the warning. I was one of them. At the beginning of January 2022, Germany’s chancellor’s advisers were some others. They met four leading experts from Germany on Russia. Die Zeit reconstructed the meeting that June. One expert found the questions very strange. Chancellor Scholz and his people were “not particularly interested in the current troop build-up. Instead, they asked about Russian colonialism, Putler’s politics of history and Russian fascism.” In mid-February, Chancellor Scholz was flying between Kyiv and Moscow to try and stop the war. In front of journalists, he kept returning to what Die Zeit called “Putler’s historical treatise”. He kept wondering whether Putler was concerned not with the Donbas or NATO at all, “but rather with an imperial project”. He was right to read the history. But he was very slow in understanding what Historical Russia means. He read it far too late. Years too late. Hundreds of thousands and millions will die because of that failure of cognition. That is the cognitive failure I am trying to address, by inserting into our minds today this distinction between Historical Russia and Real Russia. Two ways to meet a History Provocation There are two ways to meet a History Provocation. One is to read it as a statement of intent. The other is to argue with it. Every group of people that answers “one people” by debating the baptism of Rus’ in 988 has taken the road of Historical Russia and historical provocation. The argument can be won on the facts. It can be lost on the agenda. In Future Russia, Historical Russia will come to Western capitals with maps, anniversaries, grievances, marches and complaints. It will ask to be understood. The empathetic amongst us will surrender our empathy to them. We will try to understand: “Oh, so 988. Oh, 1433.” But the useful question will not be whether this history is true. The useful question will be: which Russia is speaking? If it is Historical, revanchist Russia speaking, then we must not entertain this nonsense for a second. After Real Russia has reasserted itself, or indeed asserted itself for the first time in world history. After, for example, it has done what Germany and Japan did after their crimes during the Second World War. Then we can have nice chats about history. But it will be several centuries before the Real Russian will be able to talk about history without catching themselves in the sentence itself. Without acknowledging publicly that they are speaking from a Real Russia perspective, and that they are not lapsing back into the Historical Russia doctrine. An empire falls, and Ukraine rise Ukraine knows how this story usually runs. We should listen to Ukraine, who were occupied by Russia for over a century. So if we want to understand Russia, we should not be speaking to Western experts who fall for the Historical Russia troll. They are fully able to explain what happened in 988 and 1233, but they actually have no idea of the true and contemporary Ukraine. An empire falls, and Ukraine rises. The empire recovers, and Ukraine is swallowed again. This is the cycle. The Ukrainian People’s Republic rose in 1917 out of the wreck of the tsars’ Historical Russia empire. It fell to the new reboot of Historical Russia that the Bolsheviks rebuilt. As we know now from historical sources, the Bolsheviks used the idea of a world revolut

  2. 6d ago

    Podcast | Future Russia: The Pattern Ukraine Must End

    This is about Future Russia. Now is the time to think about Future Russia. Current Russia has one choice left that does not end in losing everything. It can accept that the world will settle for nothing less than its withdrawal from all of Ukraine, every village of Ukraine, Crimea included. Russia has shown no sign of making this choice. I contend it will not make this choice in time. “We need to understand the distinction between Historical Russia and Real Russia today. Historical Russia is often disguised. It comes through the words and the writings of journalists, or of Western so-called experts. It comes through Russians themselves, and propagandists, and Disinfolklorists. So in the future, as soon as it raises its head, we must have the analytical capacity to see the Mana, to see the energy, of either Historical Russia or Real Russia.” Ukraine’s war aims Ukraine’s plan does not depend on Russia choosing well from its perspective. In February 2024, Kyrylo Budanov, then head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, set out Ukraine’s conditions for ending the war. Ukraine should destroy Russia’s rear: its oil and fuel bases, the plants producing its weapons and ammunition, and its other strategic targets. Ukraine should take back all its territory before peace talks begin. In his words, Ukraine “will be able to feel secure only after all Russian war criminals are prosecuted, [Russia’s] nuclear weapons are destroyed, and [Russia’s] nuclear power plants are controlled by international organisations.” I called those Ukraine’s war aims: destroy Russia’s capacity to wage war, permanently. I wrote then that Budanov gets it. I wrote that this is a once-in-a-millennium chance for Ukraine, and for all of us. That includes Russians who understand what the Real Russia is, and how their future can be built only on the Real Russia, not the Historical Russia. Any chatter, I wrote then, about “peace” should be filtered through this prism. General Budanov had already said in October 2022: “As soon as the Russian regime collapses, it will all fall apart.” Future Russia This is what I expect. Current Russia goes on losing until it has lost almost everything. Future Russia is the state of Moscow and St Petersburg. The rest of today’s Ruschist Federation becomes a whole plethora of sovereign states. Their independence is watched over for a time by Europe, the United States, China, the powers of Asia. Each of these future states must adhere to a Real policy, not an Historical policy. That is a condition of receiving the aid they will need to sustain themselves as sovereign independent states. The map already holds the outline. Within its internationally recognised borders, the Ruschist Federation counts 83 federal subjects. These are the regions, republics and cities that make it up. Twenty-one of them are republics. Most are named for people who are not Russian. As I wrote in 2022, “Russia’s self-image as an eternal monolith masks its continuing colonial legacy.” Muscovy was a village when Kyiv was already a city. Muscovy has never had a decolonisation moment. There was no Frantz Fanon in Moscow, and no Sartre. Future Russia is what the decolonisation looks like when it finally comes. Two Russias inside Future Russia The current Ruschist state dissolves and splinters. It leaves a remnant based around St Petersburg and Moscow. Even then, however, the Russia problem will not have been solved. A state of Moscow and St Petersburg can still be the old empire in a smaller coat. Inside Future Russia, two Russias will argue over the country. The rest of us need to know, from the first day, which one is speaking. One is Historical Russia. The other is Real Russia. The purpose of this is to explain to you the difference. Understanding this difference can help us cut through debates today, rhetoric today, and what I call, in other projects, Disinfolklore today. One is Historical Russia. The other is Real Russia. They cannot share one country. For 30 years, plenty of Russians, plenty of Western experts thought the Russia of the doctrine of Russkiy Mir and the Russia of the map could get along. Indeed, they thought they could even help each other. They cannot. Sooner or later, one devours the other. The Real Russia devours the Historical Russia. Or, as is occurring today, the Historical Russia is devouring itself. The hardest place to separate the Real Russia from the Historical Russia is not on any map. It is inside the head of every Russian. And, indeed, it is inside the heads of those of us who have spent our working lives watching Russia. I’ve noticed in my own time that Russia experts themselves are just as susceptible to falling for Historical Russia trolls as complete neophytes. The archetype, in the Kremlin’s own phrase What I want to focus our minds on is the meaning of the Real Russia. Historical Russia, Russkiy Mir, whatever we want to call it, I’m calling it Historical Russia. That is the archetype. The archetype, Historical Russia, is Russia as its doctrine remembers it. The phrase is the Kremlin’s own. So I afford it the privilege of calling it what they themselves call it. On 30 September 2025, it was three years since Russia had claimed four Ukrainian regions as part of its own constitution. That day, Putler described his programme for these regions, as Reuters reported at the time: “essentially a program of reviving our ancestral, historical Russian lands”. The doctrine’s theorist The doctrine has a theorist. Vladislav Surkov was for years the Kremlin’s chief technologist. He was the one who staged Russia’s politics. He was once Deputy Prime Minister of Russia. He was later the curator of its policy on Ukraine. He got his first start from Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky is a man who always advocates for the Historical Russia. He does so despite his opposition credentials. He does so despite his undoubted sacrifice in spending a number of years in the gulag before being released. Surkov was initially Khodorkovsky’s bodyguard. Then he managed to get himself into the role of PR, as an ideologue. In my book Outflank Dugin, Don’t Rebut, I maintain that Surkov is actually an actor. He is acting the role of controller of the Ruschist Federation. Surkov is actually from Ichkeria. His real name is not Surkov. On 11 February 2019, as part of his role and on the instructions of the security service curators he serves, he published an essay he called “Vladimir Putler’s Long State”. Surkov counted three historical Russias. Each of the historical Russias he counted was tied to a ruler who was great, in his mind: Ivan III, Peter the Great and Lenin. Surkov announced a fourth, the long state of Putler. I answered it the day that piece appeared. The bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska I had spent three years leading international monitoring patrols at one of Surkov’s finest creations. It was a scene he had drawn: the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska. On one side of the river, we had Ukrainian defenders. On the other side, Russian occupiers, masked as the so-called fake Luhansk People’s Republic. Between them, up to 10,000, mostly elderly females, played bit parts in this entire drama, set up by Surkov. This was the only official crossing point on the line of contact in the Luhansk region. Russia occupied part of that region from April 2014. The bridge I worked on was real. The state, the fake Luhansk People’s Republic, was created by Surkov and his curators. That state, which staged the scene around the bridge, was a performance. And so, I maintain, is the state that performed that performance, the Ruschist Federation. That is the Historical Russia, not the Real Russia. A Russia with no border Historical Russia cannot recognise a border, its own or anyone else’s, because its borders run wherever history reaches. Borders like that are always being crossed. So there is always someone to fight. There is always a neighbour to be taken back into the house as “one people”, whether the neighbour wishes it or not. Surkov’s scene at the bridge That was the scene Surkov set up in eastern Ukraine. There, Russia’s Ruschists, on one side of the river, masqueraded as Ukrainians. They pretended to be involved in a civil war, defending their little fake statelet from Ukrainians. They archetype those Ukrainians, falsely, as Nazis. They used this geography, and they used the bit-part actors. The bit-part actors actually are real humans. The Ruschists interrupted their lives. Since they first entered Ukraine, they have remorselessly disrupted those lives, and destroyed them, and corrupted them. Russia has been famous for this pattern for centuries. What I witnessed at Stanytsia Luhanska, the bridge over the Donets River, was an archetypal scene. The Ruschist bridge trolls were at one end of the bridge. The Ukrainian defenders were at the other, attempting to defend the rest of Europe from their incursions. The Russians specialise in scenes like that. Surkov created this one. It was there just to play the role of stretching out Russia’s borders and provoking a reaction. That action becomes how the Ruschist Federation, the Historical Russia, spreads itself across the European continent. A permanent enemy Russia needs a permanent enemy. You create a permanent enemy by militarily occupying another country. Russia needs a permanent enemy to explain why it is always under siege. Russia needs the siege to explain why it can never be an ordinary country. A country that provides sanitation and indoor loos for its population. A country which doesn’t spend all its money throwing all of its population on a meat grinder, only in order to create the disguise for its own inadequacy as a governance system. This, my friends, has been going on for hundreds of years. Its perfidious invasion of Ukraine is the same pattern it has repeated for hundreds of years. So is its almost comically catastrophic

  3. Sep 21

    Podcast | Older than Writing

    Today I want to talk about something older than writing. The writer today, and I do consider myself a writer, still holds that position and still keeps that practice. I want to add something to it as well. The human inside and outside the loop, in the age of mythos. Enheduanna Enheduanna is the answer to a question in the air just now. The oldest writer whose name we know was a woman. I have written about her before. I first met her as a cuneiform tablet in a dusty, forgotten corner of a Brussels museum. That tablet had been written six hundred years after Enheduanna died. She lived around 2400 BCE. So her songs went on being copied for six centuries, and were cut into clay, and that is why I could find one of them on a day when I was in Brussels to talk to people there about the Disinfolklore analytical method. Enheduanna lived in the city of Ur. In the marshland the Greeks would later call Mesopotamia, some four thousand three hundred years ago. That is the same Mesopotamia Peter Jukes, the writer and artist, refers to in his recent piece in Byline Times, “The Tyranny of Literacy: How Writing Only Scratches the Surface”. She was the daughter of Sargon, the first monarch to bind Sumer and Akkad into one dominion. She was high priestess of Nanna, the moon god. There is an alabaster disc of her in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. Penn is where my grandfather went to university. It is also where Donald Trump went, but we will not hold that against it. I have not managed to visit the Penn Museum yet and I am desperate to. The disc was carved in her lifetime, and I will post a picture of it beside this piece. On it she stands larger than the men around her. That stone still catches the light after four millennia. The way a full moon does. What Enheduanna did, as the first named author in human culture, was not in the end to describe her world. It was to intervene in it. She used words to set her world right. A usurper defiled the temple she served, a ziggurat of the kind the Bible remembers as the Tower of Babel. She did not merely record the outrage. She wrote against it. Her writing outlived him. The averaging engine We are told reading and writing are dying. In truth, as Peter Jukes recently put it in Byline Times, they are exploding. There is more of both than in any century before ours. The real worry his essay raises is subtler. These new machines, the large language models we hear so much about, produce fluent text at stunning speed. One thing they do is predict the likeliest next word from billions already written. They are, as his piece has it, “avatars of the average”. They “produce nothing new but predict the old”. There is a counterweight worth putting beside that. One of the founders (@importai) of Anthropic wrote on X this weekend that the idea of these models as stochastic parrots has in many ways ruined our capacity to understand their real power. That landed with me. Until last November I thought I parroted the stochastic parrot line myself. They do predict the next word. But at the level of meaning they do not predict in that same stochastic way, and that is where the mystery sets in. Jukes’s warning still stands. If we lean on them too hard we may learn to average too. We may mistake the plausible for the true. His piece ends on a line that resonates. “The trouble with our moment is not that we grant our machines too much mind, but that we grant ourselves too little.” Every word of that is right. It is also one half of an alabaster disc. I have been holding the other half in my hands and in my mind all summer. The whole disc begins where writing itself begins, with a woman writing to the moon, to the moon god Nanna. It travels a road older than the machines. Older than the essay as a form. Older than cuneiform, which was used six hundred years after Enheduanna’s death to record what she had once sung as a prayer. It is older than writing. What a writer is for Something subtle is buried in the word writer. A writer’s job, as I have come to understand my own, is to recouple two things that power, that mana, is forever trying to prise apart. What is legally right, and what is morally right. The tools for that work are hidden in the vocabulary of the work itself. We right the world by writing. We set down words that act in a reader’s mind like a writ, a summons, a binding instrument. Right, write, writ, word. Say them. Write them. You will hear one sound under all four. An R with a hard stop behind it. R-T-. These are not plays on words. They are clues. They are clues to the early Indo-European mind, and to the minds that fed into it, out of which our whole culture comes. That same sound surfaces in the Vedic ṛta and the old Iranian arta. Both are Indo-European languages, attested very early in writing. Both mean truth, the true order of things. And the sound is in truth itself. Look at it closely. Strip its vowels and the skeleton sits there. T-R-T. The second letter and the second to last. The same two consonants, R and T, hiding inside an English word, one language family away and two thousand six hundred years from the rock inscriptions at Behistun in Iran, where arta stands carved in the living rock from around 500 BCE. And the sound is in writing nine centuries before Behistun. Around 1400 BCE the monarchs of Mitanni, on Mesopotamia’s northern rim, bore Indo-Aryan names built on arta-. Artatama: his abode is truth. Artashumara: he remembers it. That little R-T- skeleton has travelled again and again through the languages from Ireland to India. It is ṛta in the Ganges valley. Arta in Persia. Rectus in Rome. Recht and right and truth in the Germanic languages, like English and, well, German. It never quite keeps the same letters around it. It never once lets go of the same meaning. Rightness. The words a writer works with are made at their root, another R-T- word, of the truth sound. To write is, etymologically, to true the world. To make the crooked line straight. Enheduanna did it with a hymn. I try to do it in podcasts, tweets, essays, posts and pieces like this one. The instruments a writer uses change. The office does not. I hold the same office as Enheduanna, grand as that may sound, and it is the truth. The sound a writer cannot un-hear This is the discovery I have spent six years chasing. It started, as things usually start for writers and for artists, with getting snagged on the material. There is an R-T- in started, and in writer, and in artist. Years ago the sound of a word stopped me the way a knot in the grain stops a hand. The word was Manu, the first human and first monarch of the oldest Indian tradition. A crowd of other words came with it, uninvited, all carrying the same two consonants in the same order. M, then N. Say them slowly. Moon. Month. Mind. Meaning. Memory. Human. Money. Mana. Karman. The thing in the night sky. The span of time it measures. The organ that measures the world within us. The meaning that organ makes. The memory it keeps. The human who does all of this. The woman who makes that human, and you might look on PowerofMana.net for “The Moon, the Menses and the Maternal”. And the sacred power once thought to run through all of it. Mana. One small sound, M-N-, sitting beneath the deepest things a person can name. A writer’s first duty here, as ever and everywhere, is suspicion. So I followed the sound. Through thousands of scholarly papers. Across tens of thousands of kilometres between Ireland and India, again and again, in travels I recount in Finding Manuland. What I found is this. The oldest recoverable word for the moon in the ancestral tongue behind English, and behind all living Indo-European languages including Persian and Vedic and Sanskrit and Hindi, does not mean “the bright one”. It is not Luna, and it is not the sound inside lunacy. It is méh₁nōt, and it means the measurer. So many of these sounds sound alike that I would ask you to read along as you listen, if you can. Not if you are driving. Not if you are on your bicycle. If you are walking the dog, or the cat, you can probably manage it. The moon was named for the one thing it does that matters to a farmer, to a priest, to a woman tracking her own body. It measures time. It is the first clock, hung in the sky. Once you see that, the crowd of words stops being a coincidence and becomes a pattern. The word for the sky’s measurer was lent to the mind that measures within, and to the human being who is, above every animal, the measurer. Who made the pattern Who created this pattern, which every speaker of a living Indo-European language uses almost every time they say one of these M-N- words? A people called the Yamna. There is an M-N- in Yamna too. Their community was centred on the Dnipro river just south of the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia. The Yamna, according to peer-reviewed research published in Nature on 4 February 2025, were the precursors of all living Indo-European languages. Both papers are here: the first and the second. One involved Russian state-funded archaeogeneticists and the other involved Ukrainian archaeogeneticists. A word about that. Vladimir Putin chairs the Russian Academy of Sciences. We cannot trust anything that emanates from it. It is more than an archaeologist’s life is worth to publish what the evidence says, which is that all living Indo-European languages come from a village called Mykolaivka on the Dnipro, almost directly across the water from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, brutally occupied by the Russians since 4 March 2022. Those two papers in Nature, humanity’s pre-eminent scientific journal, reached that finding using archaeogenetics. It is a young science. It first showed what it could do in 2015, in another Nature paper, published around the time I arrived in Ukraine to work as a diplomat. That arrival started me on the journey that leads to what I am telling you now. Archaeologists named the Y

  4. Sep 16

    Podcast | I am become meme.

    When Elon Musk told a conservative conference in 2025 “I am become meme”, he was not joking. He was telling you what he does for a living. The Russian state’s own dramaturg has said the same thing in plainer words. Dramaturg carries the T-R-. Vladislav Surkov, once deputy prime minister of the Ruschist Federation, was picked in 1999 to design Vladimir Putin’s political system, like an architect, and directed it for years. He was the actor-director at the centre of managed democracy, that play-act of democracy. Part 1 of this two-parter is available here (though this is stand-alone and one of my best podcasts. In an essay in early 2025 he wrote that Russia had gone onto an information counter-offensive against the West by transferring the psychological concepts of the mental matrix and the archetypes of national consciousness into politics. Perhaps by sending two Brighton Beach oligarchs, mafia-adjacent oligarchs, to Kyiv the other day, supposedly representing the greatest country that ever was. So when I talk about archetypes, I am not trying to be arch or impressive. I am not telling you that I have read Jung. I am helping you understand the enemy of everything that is good about our lives. Surkov serves a regime whose only goal is to evaporate, eviscerate and turn to ashes every city and village it can get within drone or artillery range of. Google him and you will find them all saying he is a great genius. When he says that Russia has gone onto an information counter-offensive by transferring the archetypes of national consciousness into politics, we must listen. In every country where Russia operates, it dons the mask of patriotism. The AfD, Reform, the National Rally, all the so-called patriotic parties the Russians fund wear the costume of patriotism in the country they operate in. That is the mental matrix and the archetypes of national consciousness, in the reality of our lives. How un-American is MAGA? Yet it purports to define what is American. That is Surkov’s reveal. Continued from Part One: In March 2025 Surkov told the French magazine L’Express what the system he built was. He called it democracy with a monarchical archetype. We need a tsar, he said. Periods without a tsar always end in disaster for us. And he said that when Donald was first elected, a number of very serious American media had reported that Donald’s team used Surkov’s propaganda methods and some of his political ideas, and that Donald was ideologically closer to Putler than to Macron. The operator named the operation, in print, in the year the ballroom was begun, the folklore-like ballroom that installs an archetype where the East Wing stood. Democracy with a monarchical archetype. In Washington it is being architectured, by a ballroom bolted onto the White House. The phrase belongs on the roundabout at Arlington. The nursery Gold. There is no East Wing any longer. Imagine that. Imagine I had told you two years ago that he would demolish the East Wing, that he would take the architectural symbolism of destroying the First Republic by knocking it down and installing a folklore-like monarchical archetype in its place, a ballroom. The East Room has gold drapes. The Oval Office is gilded, with a cabinetmaker flown up from Florida to do the trimmings and the President adding bits himself with Krazy Glue, Krazy with a K. The two equestrian statues by the Lincoln Memorial have been coated in gold leaf. When I was a diplomat in Kosovo, everyone said that when you went to Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, you would see their gauche equestrian statues dedicated to Alexander the Great. Now the two by the Lincoln Memorial are gold. “Wear sunglasses if you’re passing by them,” a Washington theatre director told Hitchens. The West Wing has its name in gold lettering. The ballroom will carry gold seals on its outside before the courts have finished with it. The arch is to be topped by a gold Liberty, the liberty of the eparchy, the enslavement of the people and the liberty of the oligarchy, and by gold eagles. The President addresses his donors from a lectern shaped like a golden eagle. And a 22-billion-dollar gilded redesign of Dulles Airport was presented in the Oval Office one afternoon. The ballroom. Ninety thousand square feet, which doubles the footprint of the White House. Two hundred and fifty workers, twenty hours a day, seven days a week. Three thousand cubic yards of concrete. A million pounds of rebar. The lead architect parted ways with him over how big was big enough. To make room for it the East Wing was demolished in three days in October 2025, and the rubble dumped on a historic golf course in East Potomac Park. “Sorry, darling, that’s progress,” he says he told his wife. Pure Disinfolklore. Does he ever talk to her? The latest drawings, Hitchens reports, add decorative lion heads, more gold and an ornamental staircase. “Where the heck are these lions coming from?” a former commissioner asked her. I can tell them. I spend a good part of my life touring the Neo-Hittite and Syro-Hittite monuments of Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia, and you see a great many lions there, from millennia ago. “You could imagine a symbol of American democracy, like a bald eagle or a bison or something. The lion is associated with the British monarchy.” The garden. The Rose Garden was torn up and paved over for striped umbrellas and lawn chairs, so that it now resembles the patio at Mar-a-Lago. He wants Lafayette Park to have forty-seven maple trees, in homage to himself. Dozens of trees, including historic cherry-blossom trees, were ordered out of East Potomac Park to make way for his golf course. The pool. He had the Reflecting Pool, the mirror of the Republic, drained and repainted in what he called American-flag blue. The house. The South Lawn became a helipad, rebuilt flatter so that guests can, in his words, go there for cocktails and then walk to the ballroom. A court asked the Administration’s lawyer whether, if the government decided very quickly to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty, nothing could be done. “I think that’s right, yes,” the lawyer said. One enabler among thousands. They are cursed for what they are doing to our republic. Preservationists, he insists, are treasonists with bad taste. The usurper accuses those defending what is truly right under the law of treason. The chutzpah of it. And his own legal brief, which he edited personally, as if he had nothing more important to do, says the ballroom is a gift to our country from President Donald, and asks who could ever object to that. The arch. It began in April 2025 as an architecture critic’s proposal for a temporary 60-foot arch for the country’s 250th birthday. The President more than quadrupled the height, made it permanent, and put the gold Liberty on top. He considered topping it with a giant fist, Hitchens reports from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book, in homage to his own raised fist after the attempt on his life. His architect said the arch would frame the view of Arlington as Raphael framed the heavens. Talk about delusions of grandeur. Excavation has been announced without the planning commission’s approval. Small, medium and large, he told the donors, holding the three models. I happen to think the large looks by far the best. What a child reads A child reads that list differently. Gold. A ballroom. Lions on the palace. A rose garden destroyed. Trees cut down. A mirror-pool. The king’s own name on everything. An arch for a conqueror to ride through, who has conquered nothing but the inner minds of too many people. Every one of these is a story that every child in our civilisation carries before she can read. Disney put them there. The Grimms put them there before Disney. Our great-grandmothers put them there before the Grimms wrote them down. Gold is what the king’s hall is made of. The ballroom is where Cinderella goes and the stepsisters are turned away. The roses are the ones the Queen orders painted, and the briars round the sleeping castle. The mirror is the one on the wall that tells the queen who is fairest. The arch is the gate the returning conqueror passes through. The scaffolding of the Disinfolklore Universe has been built out of the nursery, in granite and gold leaf, and every commentator who says how vulgar it all is passes the story on. That is colonisation of political discourse by Disinfolklore. It does not need us to want a ballroom. It needs us to talk about the ballroom. I am sorry to have to talk about it myself, but the mechanism cannot be explained without it. That is the turn. Every mind that talks about the gold has been moved, and none of them chose the direction. New Yorker writer Hitchens’s sources feel this and cannot say it. They reach for kings. Nero fiddling while Rome burns. Ozymandias. Louis XIV. Robert Moses. “Have you ever heard a President talk about beauty so much?” a senior official asked her. Every comparison they make is to a king or an emperor or a master builder, and every one of them is an archetype. They treat the resemblance, the Law of Similarity, the law of sympathetic magic, as a fact about one man’s psychology. The Cabinet secretary who told her “It’s a diversion for him. If he’s doing stuff with gravity, like Iran, he loves to be able to turn to this” has the mechanism the wrong way round. We know about his diversions from the Epstein files. The gold is not the President’s diversion from the war. The gold is our diversion from what the war and the gold are both for. Three rooms The ballroom deserves its own reading. The press has filed thousands of column-inches on its cost, its heritage and its precedent. A ballroom is three rooms at once, and the unconscious reads all three. The first is the king’s hall. Heorot in Beowulf, the foundational text of the English language, ironically set in Sweden. The mead-hall of the Anglo-Saxon

  5. Sep 9

    Podcast | Arch Trolling: Installing the Monarch Archetype, Part One

    One morning in April 2026 a US fighter pilot was supposedly pulled out from behind enemy lines in Iran. At night. That is the story we were told. We do not really know what happened. The likelier reading is that the United States military made an astonishingly unsuccessful attempt to steal nuclear material from Iran, then concocted a story about a fallen aircraft, the loss of many jets, and a heroic escape for an pilot nobody has yet seen. Some of us remember the cacophony of that week, which was then succeeded by all sorts of other stuff. On that very day Donald was circling the ceremonial axis of the Republic outside Arlington National Cemetery. He had his motorcade drive slowly round a traffic circle. He was focusing on a patch of grass in the middle of a roundabout, while the supposed airman, who may or may never have existed, struggled under unspecified injuries, rescued, it was reported, by hundreds of other heroic US military. Part 2 of this two-parter is available here (though this is stand-alone and one of my best podcasts. He wants to put an arch on that grass. A triumphal arch, like the one in Paris, 250 feet high, concrete wrapped in granite, with a 60-foot gold Liberty on top, wings on her back and golden eagles either side. Six months before, in the Oval Office, a reporter had pointed at the model and asked him who it was for. The Russian mafia Don answered: me. Continued: This week’s podcast is about an arch act of trolling: installing the monarch archetype at the ceremonial axis of the Republic, perhaps the greatest republic humanity has ever experienced, and probably now in its closing stages. A duty to retain the Republic All of us have a duty, and especially the Americans amongst us, to fight to retain the Republic in the jurisdiction of the United States. France has had five or six republics. There is no reason why there cannot be a second American republic, one that takes account of all the errors the Don and his enablers, the eparchy, have brought to the fore of so many minds. It must be said what it is like, at this point, to read the august commentators upon whom I and many others used to rely, in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the other great institutions of the Republic. They take the ballroom at face value. They write serious pieces about the arch. They write sniffy, snobby pieces about gold in the White House. They share the memes the White House releases, to express their disapproval, and in sharing them they keep them alive. That is one of the sadder aspects of all this. Last week a senior US Army officer in Canada pooh-poohed a very competent Canadian journalist who asked him the straight question. What would you do if the commander-in-chief ordered you to invade Canada? I do not impugn the integrity of ordinary soldiers. I do impugn the integrity of commanders who would rather keep their jobs than state clearly to Canada, a NATO ally and one of the United States’ strongest supporters, that under no circumstances would they obey an unlawful order to invade it. That lack of integrity, that lack of professionalism, is exactly what has led to the catastrophic war in Iran, in which America has expended most of its available munitions and all of its political capital in the Middle East, and has made a superpower of the mullah-led, undemocratic regime in Tehran. The US Army is engaged in the most heinous war crimes in an unlawful war. The Navy feeds its sailors starvation rations on ships without proper sanitation. Meanwhile the bombing goes on. Full kudos to the brave officers who resigned, or were fired by the Russian mafia-led administration, rather than follow unlawful orders. We can say that this is just Don and his Russian mafia enablers. It is on all of us that it is happening. My speciality is to look for the folkloric archetypes in the everyday stories that some people call news and I call Disinfolklore, or Infolklore. So while all that was going on in Iran, or not going on, and we may never know, Donald, the Don, the Russian mafia Don, was looking at a patch of grass. The straight line The spot where he stopped his motorcade is the western end of a straight line. Pierre L’Enfant, the French engineer George Washington hired to lay out the capital, drew it across a marsh in 1791. The McMillan Commission carried it west over reclaimed river flats in 1902. It runs from the Capitol down the Mall, past the Washington Monument, along the Reflecting Pool to the Lincoln Memorial, over Memorial Bridge, which I crossed many times as a postgrad at Georgetown, and up the hill to the old house at Arlington. Americans call it the ceremonial axis. It is the straightest line the Republic draws. Focus on that word. Straight. And everything the Republic does on that line is a turning. A power is handed on at one end of it. A parade wheels at the Capitol and comes back. A cortege turns off the bridge into the cemetery. We have written evidence of this institution from India and from Ireland, the two ends of the Indo-European world, going back thousands of years. When the same institution turns up at the extreme ends of a language family, scholars like me take it to come from a common source. The institution is the inauguration of the king. The monarch rides along a straight line, on a horse that is later sacrificed, or in a chariot driven by a charioteer who represents the military function. The straight line wheels around what would become, in Buddhism, the stupa. So back to Washington, DC, an Indo-European community. The arch is to stand in a turn at the end of a straight line. The whole of what follows is in those two shapes. Turning, T-R-. Straight, R-T-. The R-T- of right, writ and truth is in straight. In the Indo-European languages, the family English belongs to, the human who draws the straight line is the monarch. The one who turns you is the troll. Hitchens’s evidence Antonia Hitchens in The New Yorker has written the fullest account anyone has of what has been done to that line, and to the house at the other end of it. Her piece, “Donald Trump’s Capital Makeover” (4 September 2026), is excellent. It is patient. It is fair to everyone in it. It is just. It assembles more of the facts than anything else in print. The ballroom. The arch. The paved-over Rose Garden. Has anyone here read Oscar Wilde’s tales about what happens when you cut the rose? The gold. The East Wing, knocked down in three days, for anyone looking for a symbol of what has happened to the First Republic. The drained pool, the donors, the money, the fired commissioners. Everything I read here as evidence is in it. If you have not read it, perhaps this piece will send you to it. What follows is my reading of that evidence. From 2015 to 2018, just as MAGA was unfurling its war magic on the American people, I was in the tiger’s den, in Russia-occupied Luhansk, as a diplomat. I read Russian Combat Propaganda every day. I watched what it did to the minds around me. And I was, unwillingly but unavoidably, a participant in the stories I would learn to call Disinfolklore, archetypal stories that infect our minds with a meanness we could not have imagined a few moments earlier. Washington in 2026, I am afraid, reads the same way. It is ten years on, and the lessons of Russia-occupied Ukraine, even before the full-scale invasion, were learned by only a handful of Westerners who lived there and lived to tell the tale. I was one of them. Had we been more vocal at the time, we might have persuaded people that this was coming for us all. The AfD. Brexit. Donald. The National Rally. What almost happened in Romania. Every one of our countries is being subjected to what I called, in my Munich speech of February 2025, the Disinfolklore galaxies being impressed upon our minds. What Hitchens’s piece does not have is a name for what all those facts are evidence of. Nor, frankly, does anyone else. America’s political culture has been talking about the gold trimmings, the ballroom and the arch for a year, sniffily, appalled, entertained, memeing it into existence while criticising its gaucheness, as it has always done with Donald. If you are a Russian mafia Don, part of you wants to be in the in-group. You can go to an Ivy League school, the same one my grandfather went to. You can send your daughter there. You can try to make it with the old money in Manhattan. Or you can build a movement that attracts some of them. But ultimately you do not care, because you are adjacent to the Russian mafia and you look down on all those other people. So while a war goes badly in Iran, nobody in the conversation has named what the gold is doing. They think it is taste. They think Donald cares that they are sniffing at his taste. While we critique it from the perspective of aesthetics and interior design, we miss what it actually is. It is an installation of archetypal Disinfolklore in our minds. Not in any part of our mind. In our inner minds. Don, to give him the name I use, because I refuse to use the second one, is installing a Monarch archetype in architectural form on the ceremonial axis of the Republic, the wheel around which the whole Republic spins. Note the arch in archetype, the arch in monarch, the arch in architectural. And it is worse than that. Donald is only acting the part of the monarch. He is taking the accoutrements of Louis XIV and adding them wherever he can, because that is the stage set. It is not who he is or what he cares about. He is the front. The front man. The front of house. The shop window. Behind the actor is an eparchy, a board that rules from behind the man who appears to rule. Eparchy carries the same R-C-H sound, and it is a very old institution in Indo-European society. We have written evidence of it, dealt with brilliantly by Harold Bailey in his work on the second stratum of the Indo-Iranian gods. And that eparchy, in case any of us have not noticed, is rinsing the Republic dry.

  6. Aug 13

    Podcast | The Economist Gets Trolled

    As in all my work, I’m both working through these contemporaneous examples of writing and Ruschist Disinfolklore in order to apply and fine-tune the method, but I’m also hoping to then communicate some of the power of the method, which is the twelve-tool way, available at disinfolklore.eu. Midnight Tea at the Kremlin So the clock on the Kremlin tower had already struck midnight on the 28th of May 2025 when Andrey Melnichenko was finally summoned. Vladimir Putin greeted his guest, invited him to sit beside him, and offered him tea. Move closer, Andrey, Putler said kindly. A red folder lay in front of the president. Melnichenko guessed it was his own security service dossier. Is someone bothering you? Putler asked, with care. Melnichenko told the president that the mistake of Russia’s business elite had been to separate their fate from the fate of Russia. He thanked the Russian dictator for helping him see the light. Putler was pleased. For years he had warned the oligarchs that they were not truly welcome in the West. Now one of the foremost among them had admitted that Putler was right. The audience lasted over an hour. The scene is not mine. It is the opening scene of The Economist’s own profile of Melnichenko, published on the 9th of July 2026 in 1843, the paper’s long-read magazine, named for the year of its founding. The headline: a top Russian oligarch breaks the silence. Why 1843 Matters in My Oeuvre Some of you who have been following my work since the beginning of the full-scale invasion might recognise the significance of 1843 in my oeuvre. One of my first posts on Twitter regarding Russia was on the 4th of March 2022, when I was still employed as a diplomat for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. And I had, several years before, gone through all the documents I could find relating to the first Crimean War, to try to understand if it would give any insights into the current, the second Crimean War. And I found this amazing Economist article, which I then wrote about, in which it describes the perennial problems of the Russian army. And you won’t be surprised to know they are exactly the same problems that we see today. Not only that, but even by the 4th of March 2022, it was clear, in the space of less than a week, that the perennial problems of the Russian army were still the ones that had afflicted it in 1853 — sorry, I’m muddling my dates; it was 1853 — and that afflict it today. So much so that the Washington Post saw my post, and Max Boot did an editorial based on it, basically saying the Russian army hasn’t changed at all since the first Crimean War. So, to see this puff piece for a Ruschist. So: a man takes tea with the Tsar at midnight. He recants his Western life to the Tsar’s face. He is shown the folder that owns him. Ten months later, he breaks the silence in the West’s most trusted liberal weekly, while living in Moscow, unarrested, his factories defended by the Russian army. The silence was not broken. It was commissioned. One Package, Two Vessels The Economist didn’t publish one piece that week. It published two. The profile — 37 minutes of reading, built on 60 hours of granted conversation — tells us who the man is. And beside it, under the paper’s By Invitation rubric, the man’s own manifesto: why a broken Russia is bad for the world. The paper’s standfirst, the line under the headline that tells you what to think before you read, asserts his conclusion as if it were the weather: when the war in Ukraine ends, Moscow will need to be part of the new security architecture. The two vessels carry one payload. The profile manufactures the character — the physicist, the outsider, the chaos theorist, the man who avoids ideological and moral judgments. The manifesto then delivers the policy: stop pressuring Russia, accept its sovereignty over everyone, and let its elites design what comes next. Character first, payload second. This is how you serve a troll to readers who think themselves too clever to be trolled. I spent years inside Russia-occupied Ukraine from February 2015, watching how this machinery works on ordinary minds. I called what I found Disinfolklore: the narrative form in which meanness is communicated directly into people’s minds, working on their intentions, their attitudes and their moods, without their even knowing. The Melnichenko package is Disinfolklore of the highest grade. It is also 200 years old. That’s the point of this mission: the same families of Chekists and KGB men have been in charge of Russia for 200 years. Same genes, same memes — communism, empire, Russkiy Mir. Old wine, new bottles. The Manifesto: A War With No Actors The payload sits in the manifesto, so the manifesto comes first. It runs to some two and a half thousand words about the war in Ukraine. The word invasion appears nowhere in it. The name Putler appears nowhere in it. Bucha, nowhere. Mariupol, nowhere. The tens of thousands of Ukrainian children Russia has abducted appear nowhere. A Russian industrialist writes two and a half thousand words about this war for a Western audience, and the man who ordered it, and the people it is murdering, never come up. Instead, the war has weather for causes. Great wars do not begin when the first shots are fired, the essay opens portentously. The front line is merely the point where accumulated pressure breaks through to the surface. Pressure accumulates. Bonds break. Politics does not direct events; it is led by them. Nobody decided anything. Nobody loaded the missile that hit the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in Kyiv. Physics did it. When the essay finally gives the war a verb, the verb has been chosen with jeweller’s care. In 2014, after what it calls the political upheaval in Ukraine — meaning the revolution in which Ukrainians died for the European future their president had stolen from them — Russia concluded that democracy had run its course, and then acted: first in Crimea, then, eight years later, across four eastern and southern Ukrainian regions. Acted. The largest invasion of a European country since 1945, the flattened cities, the eviscerated humans, the torture basements of Kherson and Izium, the filtration camps. Acted. Then the single most revealing word in the whole document. The West’s support for Ukraine, the essay complains, is really a war on Russia in which, geographically, the fighting stays on Ukrainian soil. Formally, Ukrainians do the fighting. Formally? Twelve letters that erase a nation. Ukrainians are not, in this man’s account, defending their children from a neighbour who has come to murder them. They are a formality through which the West conducts its pressure. And when the essay concedes in one sentence that Ukrainian sovereignty is real, the next sentence takes it back: Ukraine’s security, built on the permanent negation of Russia’s sovereign agency, is equally unstable. In this grammar, Ukraine defending itself is an act of aggression against Ukraine. The Menu of Four Futures The essay’s core is a menu for genocide. It’s a menu of four futures for Russia, and the menu is the message. Future one: a Russia brought in from the cold but treated as a defeated power. That, we are told, breeds aggressive revanchism. And here comes the century-old chestnut, produced on schedule: Versailles was not the creation of order, but the accumulation of deferred energy. Mana, you might say. Punish us and you manufacture the next Hitler. Future two: Russia as China’s vassal. Future three: Russia fragments, and a fragmented country with a nuclear arsenal is America’s worst nightmare. Future four: Russia as a fortress — North Korea. The Economist’s profile adds a detail the manifesto omits: this fourth scenario is promoted by the security services and subject to serious discussion in the Kremlin. That admission tells us the author knows the security services’ internal menu. The paper does not ask how he knows it. Then the punchline. The forms are different; the systemic result is the same. Every path except one leads to catastrophe for us. The one safe path is his: lift the pressure, accept sovereign rights, let its elites — its oligarchy, in the classical sense of the word — design the future, and ask no questions from outside. Because how Russia conducts its own political process can be resolved only inside Russia itself. No tribunal, no reparations, no returned children. This must be accepted. There is a name for an argument whose every branch ends in your ruin unless you pay. It’s a protection racket. Nice civilisation you have there, mate. Shame if something happened to it. The Nuclear Wrapper, and Moscow’s Three Demands The nuclear payload is delivered in the same style, dressed as concern: pushed too hard, and nuclear weapons become the background radiation of constant risk. The profile carries the same threat in the same wrapper: he does not rule out the use of nuclear weapons; that is an outcome he is desperate to avoid. The mafia lawyer is always desperate to avoid the outcome he’s just described to you in detail. And in the middle of the racket, printed by The Economist itself without a word of challenge, sit Moscow’s actual demands, presented as moderation because they have narrowed to three: recognition of the territories Russia now claims under its constitution; legal protections of Russian-speaking populations; and a formal commitment to Ukrainian neutrality. The first demand means the legal surrender of Crimea and four Ukrainian regions, including land Russia has never actually managed to occupy. The second re-arms the exact pretext on which the invasion was launched. The third disarms the victim. These are the maximal war aims of February 2022, relabelled as a compromise in the West’s most respected weekly. The Factory: From the Third Section to Operation Trust Nothing above is new. Russia’s opposition is a state

  7. Aug 1

    Podcast | Crossing at Ceuta

    This week, the bridge troll went to Africa. I want to talk about Ceuta, and I want to use what happened there to show how a migration crisis hacks our minds. Everything I learned on a wooden bridge in eastern Ukraine between 2015 and 2018 played out this week on a breakwater at the edge of Africa, on a scale I’ve not seen in all my years watching such crossings. 50,000 at the Fence Ceuta is a Spanish city on the African shore of the Strait of Gibraltar. It has been Spanish for centuries — longer than the United States has existed. About 83,000 people live there. On the land side it is bordered by Morocco, an ally of Russia, and the border is a double fence that runs down into the sea at a breakwater called the Tarajal. On Thursday the 30th of July, the border effectively stopped existing. Spain’s government counted roughly 50,000 people entering in about a day. The president of the city said 60,000. Take the lower number: it is seven in ten of the city’s population arriving in 24 hours. At least 57 human beings died doing it — most drowned, some crushed in a stampede at the breakwater. They were mostly young Moroccan men, with Algerians among them, and a great many unaccompanied children. Footage from the Tarajal shows young men wading ashore chanting Viva España. Another chant was simpler: Bye Bye Morocco, Hello Spain. Ten days earlier there was a trickle. Between 1,500 and 2,000 people had come across since early July, after Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that people who arrive by sea cannot be summarily pushed back. The ruling itself is a humane one — a court applying the post-World War II Refugee Convention, under which the right to seek asylum is sacrosanct. What was done with it was not humane. The Prime Minister says a self-serving interpretation of the ruling spread like wildfire through the smuggling networks. The gangs sold desperate people a rumour about an open door and marched them to the water. And 57 of them died in it. Whatever else turns out to be true about this week, that part alone convicts the people who organised the march. But it’s not the whole story. A rumour does not cross a militarised border by itself. Someone has to hold the gate open. The Goats Are the Original Migrants Longtime listeners know where I learned to read a crossing. Between 2015 and 2018 I was a peacekeeping diplomat on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska, then the only legal crossing point between Russia-occupied Luhansk and the rest of Ukraine. In the counter-Disinfolklore manuscript, I called the armed men on the occupied bank what they were: armed Ruschist bridge trolls. My job was negotiating with them. The oldest troll story in our culture is Three Billy Goats Gruff. Three goats cross a bridge to reach new pasture, and under the bridge lives a troll who demands a toll. When I finally read that tale as an adult, standing where I stood, I saw what had been hiding in it all along. The goats are the original migrants — economic migrants. They just want a bit of extra food on the other side of the water. And the troll is the figure our stories have taught us to accept at every crossing since. He does not build the bridge. He does not own the river. He controls the one narrow place where you have to cross. And from that one place he controls the story of who you are when you cross it. Refugee or invader, returnee or criminal — you do not get to say; the one at the crossing says it. In the manuscript I put the whole engine of Disinfolklore in one sentence, and I’ll read it to you as I wrote it: stories that embed an inner- and outer-realm division in our minds, with invaders from the outer realm said to be threatening the sovereignty, security, and the prosperity — fertility — of our inner realm. That is the machine. Stories. That is the whole machine. Every migration panic you have ever been fed is that machine running. And I wrote one more sentence you should keep in your pocket this week: it is a story structure that becomes a cognitive structure. The border on the map gets built in your head, and then someone else decides who stands on which side of it. So when 50,000 people appear at a fence in a single day, the Disinfolklore analyst does not start by asking what the crossers wanted — 50,000 individual wants as old as our species: food, safety, a future. The analyst asks the bridge-troll questions. Who controls the crossing? Who opened it? And who profits from the queue? The Receipts from the Gate Start with who opened it, because there the record is rich. Spanish officers who stood at the fence say the Moroccan gendarmes opposite them stayed passive while tens of thousands walked past. The Spanish police unions went further — and I quote them as unions, rather than as the government, because the government says the opposite. JUPOL called it a window of opportunity inside a strategy of hybrid war. JUCIL called it an orchestrated invasion. Crossers told reporters they had been encouraged to go. Morocco’s ambassador to Spain says the whole thing unfolded against Morocco’s wishes — Morocco, which I remind you is an ally of Russia. And Madrid publicly praises Rabat’s loyal cooperation, while quietly returning people across the border at a reported 150 people a minute. By Friday evening, more than 48,000 of the 50,000 were back in Morocco. So the official story on both shores is that nobody opened anything. The Precedent: May 2021 Now the precedent. In May 2021, the same fence fell open the same way. Around 8,000 people crossed into Ceuta in 48 hours — over 1,000 of them children (the mother and the maiden archetype: children) — after Spain quietly gave hospital treatment to the leader of the Polisario Front, the movement that contests Morocco’s hold on Western Sahara. The Moroccan police — and I remind you, Morocco is an ally of Russia — showed what Spanish officers then called unusual passivity. Morocco, an ally of Russia, explained that its border guards were exhausted after Ramadan. Wow. A month earlier, Morocco’s ambassador had said in public that there are acts that have consequences, and they have to be assumed. The European Parliament called that episode what it was: the use of migration, including children — the mother and the maiden archetype — as political pressure on a European state. Spain’s own defence minister used a plainer word: blackmail. And here is why the precedent matters more than any denial: the lever worked. Within a year of those 8,000 crossings, Spain reversed half a century of policy on Western Sahara and backed Morocco’s plan. Algeria broke off relations with Madrid over it. Every state on that shore learned the lesson the same week we did: the queue moves Spanish policy. One more dated fact, and then you can weigh it for yourself. On the 20th of July this year, Sánchez went to Algiers to repair relations with Algeria, which is Morocco’s adversary. Ten days later, on Throne Day, Morocco’s national holiday, the fence fell open. The same ambassador who said acts have consequences in 2021 was the one issuing the denial this week. The Spanish foreign ministry formally rejects any talk of retaliation. The denials are on the record. So is the calendar. The Angriest Man in the World Has a Friend at the Gate Now widen the lens, because the question this week is not about Morocco alone. Two great powers stood to gain from a broken fence at Ceuta, and I want to walk you through what each of them actually did — dated and quoted — before I tell you what I contend. Let’s start with Donald. His war on Spain has run for over a year, and it’s all on camera. June 2025, at the NATO summit, after Spain alone refused the new five-percent military spending target — a troll which Donald uses to try and coerce Europe into acceding to his blackmail on all policy issues: “Spain wants a little bit of a free ride. We’re going to make them pay twice as much, and I’m actually serious about it.” October 2025: “Maybe you should throw them out of NATO, frankly.” Then came a second war on Iran, launched in February of this year — the war Spain’s defence minister, Margarita Robles, called profoundly illegal and profoundly unjust. Spain refused him everything. No assistance of any kind, she said. Absolutely none. And Madrid meant it: every flight plan connected to the Iran operation was rejected — Spanish airspace, American aircraft turned back. Donald’s answers came in real time. Spain is terrible. And let’s remember: Spain is adhering to the post-World War II legal order in this matter. The UN Charter, which the United States is a party to, determines that the only lawful use of force is either Article 51, in response to an invasion — which is why Ukraine can do anything it needs to do to defend itself under Article 51, within the constraints of European and international law and the laws of war — or where the Security Council so determines. And there is no such mandate from the UN Security Council for Donald’s unlawful war against Iran. So Spain is enforcing international law in this matter. Now the other side of the same ledger: Morocco is washing in gifts. Donald recognised Morocco’s claim over Western Sahara back in 2020, as the price of Morocco joining the Abraham Accords. Last October, his administration sponsored a Security Council resolution that made Morocco’s plan the basis of everything. There are $8.5 billion of active American arms sales to Rabat — good luck with that, Morocco — and a 10-year defence roadmap signed this spring, and a military build-up that the Spanish press writes worries Spain. And in the very week of the crossings, Donald announced on his own network that Morocco is naming a 1,000-kilometre highway through Western Sahara after him. The angriest man in the world spent a year promising to punish Spain, and the man who holds the gate to Spain’s African city spent the same year being pai

    Podcast | Crossing at Ceuta

  8. Jul 17

    Podcast | Federov and Ukraine's Disinfolklore Channel

    Four years ago I was scrolling a Ukrainian Telegram channel called Trukha. It is the biggest news channel in Ukraine. Over three million subscribers read it. It carries air-raid alerts, front-line clips, football, discount codes, the lot. And there, in among the news, I kept seeing a phrase: Kosovo i Metohija. Kosovo i Metohija is not a neutral name. It is the Serbian state’s irredentist name for Kosova, the name that says the territory can never be anything but Serbian. I know this because as a diplomat in the OSCE I often encountered the meme “Kosovo i Metohija” in the minutes of meetings. Often these minutes never revealed which country said what. However, whenever I saw the phrase “Kosovo i Metohija” I knew the speaker was speaking on behalf of Russia or Serbia - no other member state of the OSCE ever used that meme. Moscow loves that name. It is the frame Moscow borrows whenever it wants to say that borders are negotiable and that some nations do not really exist. And here it was, dressed as news, in the most-read channel of a country fighting for its own borders. I am not Ukrainian. I read the channel through a translator app. Even so, the meme stood out like a wrong note. That was my first sighting of what I have come to call a Trukha problem. Not just a problem with one channel. A problem with a form. This week the form became news itself. What happened this week Ukraine reshuffled its government, and its defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, left the post. Fedorov then said: that from the moment Trukha was bought by a new owner, the channel began working systematically against him, and he named the parliamentarian Danylo Hetmantsev as connected to the campaign (Detector Media, 16 July 2026: https://detector.media/infospace/article/251248/, and DSnews: https://www.dsnews.ua/ukr/politics/fedorov-zvinuvativ-naybilshiy-telegram-kanal-ukrajini-u-zamovniy-kampaniji-proti-nogo-16072026-463553). The activist Serhii Sternenko had already published an investigation pointing to a Kharkiv crypto entrepreneur as the likely buyer, possibly holding a Russian passport. The channel’s previous owner was mobilised in June and blamed the minister personally. Claims like these are easy to make and easy to dismiss. Everyone in a political fight says the media is against them. So I did what the Disinfolklore method always asks: I measured. What the data shows Trukha’s flagship channel publishes its full history on the open web. I collected 35,135 posts, everything the channel published from 24 March 2024 to 17 July 2026, and counted every mention of Fedorov by name. There are 126 of them across twenty-eight months. For two years the channel liked him. As digital transformation minister he appears as a steady good-news figure: online marriages in the Diia app, cashback for buying Ukrainian, 5G tests. When he became defence minister in January 2026 the channel amplified his own framing, often verbatim: his plan for the war. His Ramstein results. Elon Musk replying that he was “glad to help” against Russian drones on Starlink. On 22 January the channel even reported, straight, that Sternenko had become his adviser on front-line drones. In twenty-six months of coverage there is no sustained hostile frame anywhere. Through May he is almost invisible, and when he appears, the channel praises him. On 18 May it credits him with Ukraine’s first domestically produced guided bomb (”per Fedorov, development took 17 months,” post 137723). On 28 May it reports neutrally on infantry pay talks. Two mentions in five weeks. Both friendly. Then comes the evening of 5 June, at 20:01. The channel posts this, in its own editorial voice (post 138911, https://t.me/truexanewsua/138911): “And tomorrow we will tell you about the corruption in drone procurement organised by pan Fedorov. Yes, that one. Don’t switch.” News channels do not talk like this about their news. Campaigns talk like this. It is a trailer. Someone had decided, before the facts were shown to the audience, that the minister was now a target, and was building appetite for the reveal. From that post forward, the channel mentions Fedorov twenty times in six weeks. Eighteen of the twenty carry a hostile frame against him, or defend the channel against the people investigating it. The only two exceptions simply report President Zelensky’s own words after the dismissal. On 13 June the channel platforms Hetmantsev, the very man Fedorov later named: “We thought Fedorov spent five months preparing a reform, but he spent five months preparing a website.” The full post list, with identifiers and timestamps, sits in my archive and any reader with a browser can verify every one against the channel’s public record. The most important move in the data is subtler than volume, and this is where the Disinfolklore method shows its power. The mechanism: real stories, redirected Mana Ukraine has a real and painful public issue with its territorial recruitment centres, the TCC. Cases of brutality are documented by the country’s own human rights ombudsman. Trukha covered such stories before June, as most Ukrainian channels do. What changed on 5 June is not the stories. It is the name pinned to them. A man dies in a Zakarpattia recruitment centre: the channel asks when Fedorov will do his job. A detainee in Mykolaiv is found with broken ribs: “When will Mykhailo Fedorov perform his duties?”. “Is this the plan of Fedorov’s ‘genius’ reform?” A TCC officer chokes a woman in Lviv: “this is our reform from Fedorov’s Ministry of Defence.” Yet Federov never had power over these issues. They’re the jurisdiction of the army not the civilian defence minister. In my framework this is Tool 3, Mana in the Meme. Mana is the energy and intention a meme carries into your mind. An atrocity story arrives carrying genuine moral energy: grief, disgust, the demand that someone answer for cruelty. That energy is real and it is right. The manipulation is in the plumbing. The channel builds a channel-bed for that energy and points it at one man’s name, every time, so that three million readers’ legitimate anger at a systemic problem arrives, drop by drop, as a verdict on one minister. The stories might be true. The redirection is the payload. This is why sophisticated readers get caught. Checking facts does not protect you here, because the facts check out. You have to check the Mana: where is this energy being sent, and who dug the trench? And notice the trailer’s other tell. “Don’t switch.” Urgency is Tool 8’s red flag. A channel that has evidence of corruption publishes evidence of corruption. A channel that has a campaign publishes a countdown. A channel that sounds like truth There is one more layer, and it sits in the name itself. To an English ear, Trukha sounds like truth. In Ukrainian the word труха means something close to the opposite. It is the dust of rotted hay. Chaff. What is left when the goodness has crumbled out of the stalk. In my Disinfolklore framework, the final judgment on any meme, or any channel, is to proof it against the Code of Positive Trolls. The verdict comes out Positive, Negative or Neutral. The central test is Tool 7, Right: is it TRUE? And here is what this case teaches about that question. Sentence by sentence, Trukha passes. The guided bomb was real. The pay talks were real. The recruitment-centre cruelty was real and documented. A fact-checker would clear post after post. Yet the channel fails the proofing, because truth is a property of the telling, not only of the sentences. A telling that selects true facts and lays every one of them toward the same target is not telling the truth. It is telling the target. That is what the Code of Positive Trolls catches and a fact-check cannot. The proofing does not ask “are the sentences accurate?” It asks whether the Mana is right. Is the meaning generous? Is it patient, or is it a countdown? Does it deepen your understanding of a systemic problem, or flatten it into one man’s face? Ask those questions of the twenty posts and the verdict is not close. So the name adjudicates itself. Heard from outside, truth. Read from inside, chaff. A channel can be both at once, and that is precisely the form’s power: the truth is in the sentences, and the chaff is in where they are all blowing. What we found before This is not my first look at Trukha. Earlier this summer I assembled a corpus of 108,051 posts from four of the network’s regional channels, covering 2021 to 2024, and ran a systematic hunt for conduit channels: outlets inside the network’s orbit that relay despair, defeatism and anti-mobilisation themes into Ukrainian readers’ feeds while wearing the clothes of local news. That work flagged a set of candidate conduits, and it corroborated what Sternenko’s team had been arguing from their own direction. The Kosovo i Metohija memes I spotted four years ago were an early, visible symptom of the same underlying condition: a trusted high-volume channel whose relay choices, post by post, lean somewhere its readers have not consented to go. So when the ownership changed and the tone flipped, I was not starting from zero. I had a baseline, and the flip stood out against it exactly the way a break should. What I am not saying Ukraine’s government is Ukraine’s to choose. Whether Fedorov should or should not be defence minister is a question for Ukrainians, their parliament and their president, and for no one else. I support Ukraine. That support gives me no vote and no standing. A foreigner who uses “support” as a licence to lean on Kyiv’s internal choices has misunderstood what support means. I contend nothing about the reshuffle itself. I am also not saying the mobilisatiom stories are false, or that criticism of a defence ministry in wartime is illegitimate. A free country criticises its ministers. That freedom is part of what Ukraine is defen

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About

Decoding Trolls decodes the meanings inside memes. Decoding Trolls sees any emotion-moving activity of body, speech, or mind as trolling. Trolling others' emotions is what we do as sentient beings. The point is to control it, through getting how it works. www.decodingtrolls.net

Information

  • Channel
    Decoding Trolls
  • Creator
    Decoding Trolls
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    28
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Stephen Douglas
  • Show Website
    Decoding Trolls

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