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 | 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. 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. 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. Of its weapons. Of its soldiers. Of its Mana. Of its fiscal rectitude, its reputation, its beauty, its truth, it

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. Feb 7

    Archetyping Bad Faith

    There’s a key core module in the disinfolklore analytical method which is what I call the Code of Positive Trolls. It has six elements. The second element is ethical discipline. The first element is generosity. When a generous person—or when M’ockers is telling a story, what I might call Infolklore, on Volya 4 Ukraine radio space on X Spaces or Spotify —this is ethically disciplined, in the sense that it’s true. They’re not misleading us. As we all know, those of us who listen to M’ockers, she’s very careful about what she believes and what she lets be said. It’s ethically disciplined. The standard is set by international law, ultimately, from my perspective. Territorial integrity is sacrosanct. Laws against discrimination on the grounds of certain protected characteristics, the Genocide Convention—one of the most agreed-to conventions in human culture—and a whole plethora of legal instruments which are the expressions of ethical standards. I use that standard, the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls, to distinguish between Infolklore and Disinfolklore. On the fly, when you’re in your real life and dealing with people—you’re doing a deal, you’re talking about drones, you’re trying to get components, you’re a teacher in school with students firing stuff at you and you’re just trying to work out what’s going on—is this person in good faith? The first element of the Code of Positive Trolls, which I find particularly useful, is generosity. If I’m picking up genuine real generosity in the other, then I know it’s probably not intentional misdirection. It’s probably infolklore, not disinfolklore. When you pick up a lack of generosity in, say, Donald or others, then you can brand it disinfolklore. Archetyping Bad Faith That’s the span between trying to decide in your immediate life whether this is true or not. The definitional disinfolklore is anything Donald says, anything MAGA says. Obviously, until you’ve archetyped them as bad, as not in good faith, you might be confused by little instances. Whereas now we know practically everything he says is bad, yet we still fall for the trolls. I was watching someone today who always talks about the Ukraine war and the battlefield. They justifiably go off on one and complain about this thing I’ve just spoken about—I skipped over it because I didn’t need to hear them say it as well—where Donald talks about the week and the ceasefire and all that stuff. Then the next story they’re talking about is Donald and the Indian oil deal. We have to try and maintain our consistency between these two manifestations of Donald. If you’ve archetyped him as bad and in bad faith and a con man, then when I find myself falling for one of his trolls—tomorrow he may say, oh, I’m thinking about sending the Tomahawks to Ukraine—we just have to resist falling for this. We know that everything he says basically is disinfolklore. We don’t know that with other people in our lives, and we’ve all probably experienced situations where you gradually discover someone you relied on and liked and thought was actually in good faith is really spinning lies or tricking you. Then you realise that everything they’ve said is probably what I would call disinfolklore, because it’s not ethically disciplined. It was untrue, it was falsities, it was manipulative—not manipulative in a positive way. Infolklore Versus Disinfolklore: The M’ockers Example As Bill Terrier says on Volya4Ukraine Radio, the stories which M.ockers is telling are manipulative—stories on multiple layers. The way she tells them, however, the way she frames them, transforms them into infolklore. When she’s telling a tale of woe of some Ruschist mil-blogger who has published a story on Telegram to manipulate people in Russia into sending him money, or like Gherkin forever trying to persuade Russia’s government to do a full mobilisation—that is definitive disinfolklore, and these are the kinds of stories she’s telling. We can talk about those stories in a conscious way that transforms them into infolklore. We’re certainly manipulating each other by telling these stories, yet we’re not doing it with mean intent. We’re doing it out of generosity—a bit of light relief in the midst of the pain. We’re also raising money. I noted Wendy’s matching in An Accidental Ukrainian, which I very much appreciate. Re-Archetyping and the Kennedy Center We are moving towards an answer to a question posed by Scouts and indeed raised by Ioana about what is the truth. What James alluded to is that the truth, in inverted commas, is at risk of being defined by Donald and Donald’s attempts to re-archetype the Kennedy Center and indeed annihilate Kennedy, this hero of his youth that he wishes to destroy. It’s not enough to have RFK Jr. absolutely annihilate the Kennedys from the inside. I note all of the Kennedys’ letters and warnings to Congress not to allow their father, their uncle, their cousin, their brother to become health secretary. I’m a little bit more optimistic, however. It was a Ukrainian on the series of Ukrainian TV stations that I just recently discovered—and I know Lexicon has as well—broadcasting in English or AI English. There was a Ukrainian academic at an American university I saw this week. He was very certain, and it lodged a nice germ in my mind about how temporary all of this is. Of course, as James alluded to, it may not become temporary. This may be this attempt to re-archetype reality and turn the world upside down, to turn falsehood into truth for the usurper—the literal and metaphorical usurper Donald. January 6th, whatever happened in the 2016 and 2024 elections with Russian help—the usurper is attempting to turn the world upside down. The Reformation Parallel I’ve alluded to this before. I studied in great detail the early transmission of ideas in the early German Reformation, 1518 to 1530, and the world turned upside down. Sebastian Brant’s late fifteenth-century book, The Ship of Fools, played a really big part in the re-archetyping of the Pope as Antichrist and the use of memes and cartoons to re-archetype the church in a certain way, done by the leaders, the oligarchs. They succeeded in some ways, yet the Catholic Church is still around and there still is truth—there’s truth in all of our lives. I’m quite optimistic. At the moment we’re in the endgame. I do note the Kennedy Center and what’s going on there. For those who don’t know: he inexplicably tried to fire the board almost immediately upon getting into office. They resisted. In the end, like a steamroller, he got rid of them. Then he attempted unlawfully to rename it the Trump Kennedy Center. He got all his patsies in there—basically the spouses of all his Epstein-connected cabinet members and lawyers and various people are on the board. He controls the board and performers. This Kennedy Center, as I understand it—correct me if I’m wrong, Wendy or James—was established by an Act of Congress to memorialise and commemorate JFK. That’s its sole purpose. It washed its face and made a surplus of something like $40 million last year. Already Donald has tanked it, as he’s tanked absolutely everything he’s ever been involved in. I do believe underpinning all of this, along with RFK, and all his other motivations, is this idea of annihilating this golden boy of his youth that perhaps someone he hated in his life talked about. He just wants to annihilate all that is good. I don’t believe he’ll succeed. I don’t believe any of them will succeed at this in the end. The end is coming near. 6,000 Years of Indo-European Truth Part of my confidence in that actually is my perspective from 6,000 years of Indo-European history and the triumph of right and truth. It’s in our language, it’s in our words, in almost every sentence. The repeated attempts, as memorialised in stories about the devil or the snake or whatever, in every culture going back literally for 6,000 years that we have records for—it’s embedded in our language. The word in Hindi and early Indian languages for snake is nāgī. It means negative. This is what Donald and the devil and Satan and Putler and all of these horrific oligarchs, whom the Epstein system has given us a window into, are trying to do. They are the neg, they are the anti—yet I don’t believe they’ll triumph. We’ve got Ukraine, we’ve got President Zelensky, and we’ve got the truth on our side. We’ve got the disinfolklore analytical method and the disinfolklore perspective. Disinfolklore’s Building Blocks I was first going to go through just a couple of the tools—very easy snack bites—then go back to the Battling Archetypes aspect, these twelve tools, which is more longue durée work I’ve been doing for the last few weeks. Are You New to Disinfolklore? If you’re new to disinfolklore—actually, that’s a bit of a trick question, because if you live in an information-rich environment today, you’re already steeped in disinfolklore. You just couldn’t notice it until I coined the term to describe how strategically targeted memes affecting our attitudes, motivations, intentions, and moods pass through our incoming troll radars to transform our identities in unseen ways. Now I’ve named it disinfolklore—just as the writers in the Book of Genesis named things and have Adam and God naming things—you can get your eye in and begin to move forward. Be more mindful about how strategically we are being manipulated by disinfolklore masquerading as news, gossip, advice, both in your online and in your real-life lives. I see news as a province of folklore, as is disinfolklore. Disinfolklore describes stories, however delivered, that communicate meanness with a view to altering the moods, intentions, motivations, and attitudes of their consumers in ways which satisfy the strategic dema

  6. Jan 26

    Podcast and Pensées 128:

    It pops up as a perennial troll: you’re in the countryside, something strange happens, and it’s attributed to a troll appearing and interceding. Trolls perform the same function as angels or leprechauns or banshees or Baba Yaga or rusalky. It’s all the same — every Indo-European culture has these substitutes for energy, to explain things. On Minsk: I’ve talked before about how my Disinfolklore Analytical Method allows us to look at any form. One takeaway from a lot of my work at the moment is to try not to treat these as organic or accidental emanations — just as seeing Elon in the White House archetyping himself with his son as the dark hero, Batman and Robin, is trying to affect our moods. Seeing these elements as part of a system might prevent us reacting to them as if they’re individual artefacts and moments in our lives. They’re very much part of what I would see as the coup or insurrection which, according to both the Georgia and federal indictments, began within the first moments that Donald Trump disputed the results of the 2020 election. The racketeering charge in the federal indictment tells us it’s a whole system, not just one moment. That perspective is essentially what I do in my work — selling perspectives on the quotidian, the daily elements, to help us understand ourselves, where we’re fitting in, how we’re affecting the culture. Our culture — which most of us have chosen to engage with on X — that’s our main entry point, our main power: to affect people’s timelines. We know how we’re affected by information we see. That’s why we’re part of this Volya community, because we think there’s power in communicating this understanding. What we can do is see this as part of the system and become Disinfolklore-literate: look for what I call Archetypal Disinfolklore, look for what they’re trying to archetype themselves as, how they’re trying to manipulate us, and then find ways of explaining and sharing this comprehension. I’d quickly reference the Tulsi Gabbard issue because it ties into what we talked about last week. I’m trying to give tools that help us discern the mana in the meme — the energy in the memes we encounter each day as we scroll, interact with our culture, and create our culture. Axios reported that Tulsi Gabbard is prepared to submit her resignation if Donald authorises entering the Israel–Iran war. There was also credible reporting that she was excluded from a meeting to discuss the impending war. From that, I deduced she is — as most of us know — recognised as being part of the Russian influence network, and they were trying to keep her out of that meeting. Her preparedness to resign over the Israel–Iran war complements my analysis of what is going on. What’s particularly interesting is that because of what we know about Russia’s economy — because we listen to Mokrushyna and Prints every day and Absurdistan — we almost uniquely as a community have a detailed idea of Russia’s economic state, its dependence on oil exports, and its dependence on Iran for weaponry since it was first reported in October 2022, when Iran was denying providing Russia with weapons and drones. Up until then, we didn’t know which way Iran would swing. I have this fixed flagpole in my mind: Russia does not want the United States to enter the war in Iran. Therefore, anyone who is suddenly out of character against this war — Tulsi Gabbard being one — we can use this as a good litmus test to know if they’re in Russia’s influence, whether paid or otherwise. It’s very particularly interesting to see which way Donald goes in the end. On one hand, he’s suddenly become like a Messiah to these patrician neocons who always thought of him as a clown, and now he’s offering them what they’ve dreamed about since 1979: bombing Iran back to the Stone Age. On the other hand, the MAGA element — Bannon and company, who’ve been leading the charge against Ukraine, which again is a litmus test for where these people’s loyalties lie. In this context, I look back at Gabbard’s video — the aesthetics, the Soviet-era aesthetics, the argument about World War III which we as a community understand. A highly educated, brilliant American friend contacted me and used this World War III meme. Whatever media she’s consuming is promoting it, and we’re very familiar with it from here. On the archetyping idea: this gave me the concept of re-archetyping World War III. I read a few pieces this week, which some of you will have seen, on what war looks like now — using what all of us have learned from watching how drone warfare has evolved, listening very carefully to Alan and Chuck Pfarrer and others. All of us have learned a lot about warfare, and because most of us didn’t know much beforehand, we’ve perhaps been more open to the new rules. I saw Trent Telenko’s post yesterday setting out the range of Shahed drones, which I don’t think any of us would be confident about defending against. We’ve seen how they’ve evolved and how Ukraine has countered almost every obstacle, but the Shahed drones are an absolute problem for the world. I found some of my early tweets on Shahed drones. In 2023, a drone attack was four Shaheds. Now we’ve got 400 a night, two nights of 400-plus. When you see that Iran has Shahed drones within range of Central Europe, according to Trent Telenko’s map, you become less gung-ho. If you’ve archetyped in your mind that the US Army is the biggest and best in the world, and you’ve been reading Telenko’s posts — he integrates these daily lessons and batters them against his existing archetypes about force power and defence. He’s constantly lobbying for hardened shelters for stealth bombers. But I’m also looking at what’s happening in Kherson. The Shahed drones and Iran aren’t really on the minds of most people in the normal world — they tune in to Ukraine every now and again. As far as I can see, they’re not really on the minds of the neocons pushing for war in Iran either. I’m waiting to see Dick Cheney visiting the White House after all Donald did to his daughter. That story is very interesting — they’ve been paying for this war for decades. Someone like Trent Telenko is re-archetyping his ideas of what’s necessary to defend, constantly updating according to the latest data. Others aren’t doing this — many pushing for war, and on the other side, people either paid or accidentally under Russian influence who want to stop the Iran war at all costs. I wrote about how we need to outline this. My tweets are proper interventions worthy of being printed in journals, because I don’t see responses from the so-called experts. It’s exactly what we saw with the Iraq war — it’s all right to bomb a place back to the Stone Age, but what happens on day two? Now, what happens on day two is pretty obvious to me. One scenario I’d be considering: many of us will remember when Kherson was liberated — those wonderful days, many of us were on Volya Radio that day — and we expected blowback, but it didn’t really come for another year. The UN Commission of Inquiry report we discussed in the first week of this show: that drone war starts in July 2023, after Kherson was liberated in September 2022. It took a while, then they started with one or two drones. Today we saw 30 people injured, hunted by drones. Drone warfare — drones launched almost every day from Enerhodar Nuclear Power Plant, which is my long-term litmus test for whether people really understand World War III as anything other than a mantra that provokes archetypal images of this 1980s view of ashes and the whole world turned to ashes. Tulsi Gabbard’s video depicted that — in words and images. Mokrushyna has talked very well about this, and I remember seeing videos on the BBC in the early 1980s about nuclear winters. When the World War III signifier is trotted out, the archetypal identity provoked in minds of people of a certain age is precisely what Gabbard was articulating. It was so clumsy with the Soviet imagery. That tells me, in light of this new data, even more strongly that the Russians are behind her, and that they don’t want this war. She obviously saw it coming and thought to put out this quite cryptic video at the potential cost of her job, according to her orders. But the idea of re-archetyping World War III — which this has all provoked in my mind — is precisely about drone warfare. The scenario we’ve seen in Kherson and other cities, now with fibre-optic drones: what happened with the pro-Palestine movement which grew up suddenly after October 7th on university campuses across the world — I foresee a so-called peace movement, an armed peace movement. The model would be the Vietnam War: an insurrection masquerading as a peace movement, injected into a society constantly divided by Chinese TikTok. The NRA and their guns would be nothing against drones. Today’s means of blowback are much more significant than with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The knowledge we have enables us to re-archetype our ideas of what blowback might look like if Donald enters the war. The only hope, ironically, that he won’t carpet-bomb Iran is Putin and the Russians — everything I see tells me they definitely don’t want this. They don’t want Iran bombed because of their dependence on Iran to get oil to market. Everything I’m seeing through Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson and Dugin — all these clans, paid or unpaid influencers, are suddenly coming out against war. All of them were probably pro-Iraq war. That’s where re-archetyping comes in. The other thing I wanted to talk about, connected to re-archetyping and Archetypal Disinfolklore — it’s the first tool in my Twelve Tools. Arsenal, Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy. Letters to Ukraine — the horror on all levels. I worked with mothers of missing soldiers

  7. Jan 16

    Podcast & Pensées 127: Russia’s Antisemitic Agitprop. Mental Hygiene and Visual Images.

    First thing I wanted to talk about, which is something I noticed on my Twitter about five days ago. I first noticed I was getting a lot of pictures of David Bowie and the Rolling Stones. Never really liked the Rolling Stones. Really loved David Bowie from the age of about eight onwards. And that got me thinking, why am I getting this stuff on Twitter? And then I realized, ah, for some reason, I had cut off images. There was a setting in Twitter which I used as part of my incoming troll radar to block images. And so I would never see images on my Twitter feed, just text. And suddenly that disappeared. And then I looked for the setting and the setting had disappeared. And then I Googled it and I discovered two days before I worked this out, because I was wondering why am I, what is different about this experience? And what is different is I’m getting two channels of information and I’m used to only getting one channel of information on Twitter, which is just text. I would click sometimes on images to look at them if I wanted. But basically, it was my only way of controlling what was going into my mind, into my brain. And they got rid of the setting inside the app which is obviously very annoying because clearly there’s an intelligence behind this and what the intelligence behind this is trying to do is involuntarily feed us with visual memes which can have a greater impact on imprinting on our mind and printing archetypes on our mind. And so obviously that’s very annoying that I as the consumer who actually pay because it’s my main medium for initial writing. And the algorithm trolls me and I troll it and it inspires it. I’ve trained the algorithm so that it hits me with my for you feed is, every now and again there’s a bit of a change but it’s basically exactly how I, I’m pretty happy with it the way it is especially if I can cut out the images. And because of that, I pay for it. And it’s extremely annoying to have my experience determined in this way. That’s one thing, because I think of it as a violation of my right as a consumer or to have the experience that I want. And then I think also, what’s behind it? Why is the intelligence behind the algorithm trying to feed me images which I don’t want to see. It should be no skin off their nose. And it’s very annoying. So I worked out a solution for this, which I now have. I have quite a few different types of browsers on my phone, which I use for different applications. I use the DuckDuckGo browser now for YouTube stuff. It’s particularly well optimized for that and it doesn’t keep any of the cookies and I generally don’t have to sign in. And so, for instance, I was watching the great Chuck Pfarrer and Alan Brewer today on YouTube through DuckDuckGo. But now for Twitter, I am fighting my instinct, which is to always go for the app, but I now go for the, it’s on Firefox, and that cuts out the images. Unfortunately, it still has video, but it’s easy for me to scan through there. And I’ve been doing this now for about five days. So I just say that in the context of incoming troll radar, how do I control the information coming into my brain, coming into my mind, because we’re all dealing with so much of it. And the visual, the image element of it is something I can do without because I work in text mostly. I always add images to my writing and I consider myself mainly a writer, but I do use different forms of media. So I just suggest that if other people have found this lack of a setting, that’s my practical solution to it. And so far it’s working quite well. China and Russia: Territorial Ambitions I noticed a tweet by Jay and Keeve the other day where he, Jay was referring to this. We’re seeing this story appearing more and more about the China coming in to take a bite out of China, taking a bite out of Russia. And I think it was actually mentioned on Times Radio today, which generally I don’t listen to, but I have started. They were interviewing William Taylor, who was the US ambassador to Ukraine in the late 90s and then the charge d’affaires after an acting ambassador after Donald and Lev Parnas and co got rid of Maria Jovanovich who I met in Dnipro once and who was really amazing really engaged with the granular aspect of what was going on in Ukraine. And so I listened to that interview. And even on that, which is quite mainstream, they’re referring to this idea that China is now talking about taking parts of Russia. And I think maybe it was even Genesis Man raised it today on their show about how there’s a game, there’s actually a game now in China developed, which is, you know, which part of Russia do you want? So I can really get behind that. But Jay and Keeve made a point which I agreed with because when I first heard about this latest round of scary stories about China, not scary from our perspective, but scary for the Russians taking parts of Russia in this latest round. It was about two months ago by Constantine inside Russia. And as some of you will know, I have a slightly love-hate relationship with him because I am suspicious of him. Despite that I found I find him engaging some of the time and and and a good source of information and again going back to the incoming troll radar and one of the algorithm one of the parts of my algorithm which which I work on is if I find myself wondering about the authenticity of some account then the fact of me wondering about the authenticity, I now use as an indicator that probably I should be ultra careful with them. And so I’m very careful about Constantine in Russia, inside Russia. However, he, about two months ago, he featured as one of his news stories on his show about how the Chinese media was running these stories about China getting ready to take parts of Russia. And I thought to myself, because I am slightly suspicious for a number of reasons, and we can talk about that again. Because of that, I was wondering, why is he telling us this? And what is the perspective? And my hypothesis was, this is a Russian operation attempting to scare us with the idea that China’s going to come in and take a bite out of Russia. So this is Russia trying to put itself in the place of the West and basically say, you know, we’re protecting, we’re keeping parts of China inside the white supremacist European envelope. And we’re doing you all a service. And if you don’t give us what we want, then China’s going to come and take in a bite of Russia. Now, of course, and Jay and Keev, seem to come to this conclusion as well. Now, if it is true that there is this game which is approved in China, and any of us who know Russia very well and Russians very well understand they are, it is their primordial fear is of China, not of Europe. And so it’s completely plausible that China itself is generating some of these stories. But it’s equally plausible that Russia, in their madness, think that they’re going to somehow scare us into sacrificing Ukraine because we don’t want China to take Yakutia. And so I just wanted to raise, yeah, so I suppose I start from the, I want to avoid being automatically manipulated, having my manner pulated, moved up and down in such a way that I can’t control it. Mental Hygiene and Visual Images Visual images have such a powerful impact on our consciousness that there’s many things you can’t unsee. And so if anyone writes trigger warning or they say, oh, this is awful, and then they kind of show it to you, like if I scan in the text and I see that I never click, you know, click on it. I remember, for instance, when the Christchurch shooting, that shooter in Christchurch, I remember I was working in Dnipro and going to a meeting in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast with a colleague, a Turkish colleague, Turkish Canadian colleague, and all the way there, he was watching this first-person shooter video. And then I had another Kazakh colleague who, when we got back to the office, he said, oh, yeah, I was watching it as well. And then the next day, my Kazakh colleague said, I’m being haunted by this imagery of this thing, and I was watching it. And I was like, why did you watch it? And so obviously that’s a more extreme case than a lot of the stuff that’s coming across our feed. I don’t need to see it to understand that someone else has seen it, like Chuck Pfarrer, for instance. I’m pretty sure he watches a lot of this stuff. I know, for instance, Denys Davidof, who I find to be a good source. I go through stages with him. He watches all of the videos. And I trust his judgment on the granular, the tactical level. If he says to me, this group of Russians were unalived, as he nicely puts it, I don’t need to see this imagery myself. So it’s about mental hygiene and and it’s an intrinsic part of the Disinfolklore analytical method. And the code of positive trolls is this idea which I have to try and, if we’re operating in this space, as all of us are, we’ve made an active choice to remain with Twitter despite everything. And I’m sure not a week goes by when we don’t think, why am I doing this to myself? But since we have chosen to dance with the devil, that doesn’t mean that we have to take everything on board. And I just found cutting out the images didn’t affect my Twitter experience in any negative way. And it was a good shorthand way of modulating what was going into my mind and moderating what was going into my mind. And when I was googling it I saw that it was a big thing when this was brought in to get rid of media previews in 2013 and then somehow so it’s been there for like 12 years and now suddenly it just disappears, which is very very annoying. I just raise it here because, as I say, your incoming troll radar, whether it’s from your best friend sharing imagery from the Gaza Strip or Instagram or indeed from Ukraine, because obviously one of the reasons Russia does these horrific attacks is to create thi

  8. Jan 11

    Podcast & Pensées 126: Complicité between Disinfolklore and Staged Events

    I was going to start with reasons to be grateful, because as you know, one of the four aspects of the model in the Disinfolklore Analytical Method for noticing how information — what I call Disinfolklore, or Infolklore — affects us and changes us is through our moods. Moods, attitudes, intentions and motivations: these are the aspects of our consciousness, our identities, our beingness, which are impacted. A good piece of Disinfolklore will affect all four. Attitudes and moods are more long-duration elements — of course moods can be immediate as well, but in terms of feeling happy or sad over a six-month period, Disinfolklore and indeed Infolklore can affect us greatly. When I talk about Infolklore, I mean really what Mokrushyna, for instance, talks about. Mokrushyna and Genesis Man’s partnership, for me on a day like today, buoyed me up, transformed my mood, made me happy. I love the way Mokrushyna tells the stories. The same story which is Disinfolklore when published on Telegram by the Rashists can be Infolklore when told with Mokrushyna’s mocking tone, drawing attention to elements we all recognise because we’ve been on this journey since February 24th, 2022, and some of us for longer. Not all news is necessarily Infolklore or Disinfolklore. Part of my self-appointed job, my little contribution to helping us navigate the current age, is to characterise some of it as Disinfolklore, some as Infolklore, and to communicate how I do this in my head using evolving criteria. When news affects our mood and/or our attitude and/or our intentions and/or our motivations, then it’s definitely in the realm of folklore or Disinfolklore. Reasons to be grateful today, given everything going on. Ukraine is, technically speaking, handing Russia’s arse to them. If we imagine everything happening — Venezuela, Greenland, everything in America — and we think of having this ogre in the back of our minds with Wagner, this storied mythological force able to fly in anywhere and do anything, we think of Russia having its four million tanks, the entire output of the Soviet Union. And then we see that Ukraine is handing Russia’s arse to it. Whatever happens from this moment forth, so much of that mythos and materiel is gone that it’s laughable when Russia is put in the same category as China, the United States, or the European Union militarily. People’s algorithms, their data-resistant archetypes, their data-susceptible archetypes — if they are changing, they’re updating in real time according to these stories, which could be Disinfolklore or Infolklore. Whether it’s Kupiansk, where Putler announced it had been taken, and now it’s clear not only was it not taken but Ukraine retook it and cleared out most of the Rashists. Pokrovsk, obviously under pressure, but from what we can see it seems to be holding, and we see videos of Russia’s annihilation there. These elements of a story have a capacity, when amplified enough, to transform archetypal identities in people’s minds. Ukraine handing Russia’s arse to it every day is a wonderful thing. Russian Arctic incompetence — absolutely wonderful. Mokrushyna was talking about it today. We hear this idea of a deal between the United States, Russia and China to divide up the world, and Russia’s propagandists are promoting it. But really, the guys around Donald — they’re not charity people. They’re hard-nosed. If they sense weakness, they pounce. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you can hold your own and pretend you’re rich enough in the country club, in Mar-a-Lago, you can be one of the gang. But if your Arctic seaports are falling apart and you don’t have any ships and your piers are crumbling — even Donald, whatever tie he has with the Rashists, will look at that and think, “Well, I was going to divide the world up, but...” That pressure is going on. Good to see. None of us — particularly those who made the decision to speak out after February 24th, 2022 — are scared of Russia. There may come the knock on the door, but none of it is in any way as bad as what every single Ukrainian faces every night when they fall asleep, if they can fall asleep. We’re not scared of Russia anymore. A whole decade’s worth of popular culture promoted this idea of Russia as a giant, a massive bear that had to be feared and negotiated with in a quiet voice. But because of what we’ve seen since February 24th, 2022, we’re not scared anymore. When we hear Disinfolklore about Greenland, about NATO collapsing, we can be grateful this isn’t happening when we still feared Russia as somehow equal to us. We have Ukraine and its strength and power. We have the 800 billion euros, which went almost without a blink — agreed last weekend in Kyiv with the national security advisors. 800 billion euros up to 2030 is a lot of cash. Ireland back in the day was getting sort of 10–11 billion over the whole course of a budgetary cycle and built all its motorways for that. An amazing reason to be grateful. Russian air defence — it’s now mainstream that it’s absolutely rubbish, because of whatever went on in Venezuela and Caracas the other day. We have the Epstein Act of Congress, which came out of nowhere. A miracle. We have a lot of work to do on that front, but it’s there. Every redaction, every lack of publication is now a breach of the law. It’s not enough, but it’s there. No one anticipated it. Chuck Schumer’s finest moment. German, UK and French leadership, and many other leaders. We could have terrible leaders in those countries. We could still have Scholz, for instance. Imagine all the stuff we went through for the first two years of this nightmare with Scholz. Now we’ve got a proper German leader. Ukraine will soon have its Gripen, its Griffins. Information wars are devastating Russia — all that stuff about Putler’s palace has gone into the mainstream. Donald kind of making fun of them. Story after story going into the minds of people who are interested in geopolitics but don’t pay attention at our level. Russia can’t take advantage of any of this. We see this mental routine: “Putin must be really happy about this,” these Putin-understanders who articulate their mood through this rhetorical method. Perhaps he is — who knows, who cares. Think about how annoyed they must be that they don’t have any power left and everyone can see it, while Donald is doing all of this. That brings me enormous joy. If they had only waited for the full-scale invasion a year or two, had a bit of patience, they could have had everything. Now they’ve lost everything because they didn’t wait. When Russia could be at the moment of its greatest strength, had they not had their arses handed to them by Ukraine — there’s no real substantive advantage I can see. The Arctic ports are a perfect example. I wanted to start with that positive thing because I should be practising Infolklore as well, trying to positive-troll us using proper, truthful, genuine reasons, not deception, and being ethically disciplined. There are many reasons to be grateful. In 2018, when Russia seized two Ukrainian naval vessels off the coast of occupied Crimea, it caused a big crisis in the Sea of Azov. I was sent down to establish the OSCE’s monitoring model based in Berdiansk. Most Ukrainians of a certain age will remember this moment — another horrific humiliation. Whatever’s going on in the Atlantic right now — again, reasons to be cheerful. Medvedev, on the day of the raid, actually wrote that he wants the Americans to kidnap President Zelensky on Russia’s behalf. As Will characterises it, this is peak Absurdistan: the Russians justify their entire war based on a mythological coup which, if there was any coup, was executed by Paul Manafort, who’s still Donald’s adviser. And now Medvedev is admitting the Russians are so useless they can’t mount a raid and actually wants the Americans to do what they can’t. Peak Absurdistan. Let’s count our blessings. What I noticed in eastern Ukraine was that the Russians used stories to create community. On the south bank of the Donets River, in Russia-occupied Luhansk, through this othering process, they convinced Ukrainians that they are Russians. Then they convinced them that the other wants to cross the river and kill them, and that their only protector is Russia — who is in fact their captor. Classic coercive control. You can understand it on a micro level: most coercive control relationships with a violent element are male to female. When Putin speaks, when individual Russians speak — in their family where the man is beating the wife — that’s a coercive control relationship. From the micro to the macro, the entire system inside Russia-occupied Luhansk, which I watched from the inside out by crossing into there every day for three years, collecting and analysing the media — what I now call Disinfolklore — this idea of coercive control: “If I’m not beating you, someone else is going to beat you harder, so you better stick with me.” We saw that appalling headline yesterday in the *Washington Post* about Rubio saying America is going to use coercion in Venezuela, and in Greenland too. Coercive control, the use of fear, the use of ultraviolence to get their way. At the time, I didn’t know what they were up to. I could see something was really odd — the rhetoric in thousands of stories every day. But I didn’t know the objective. After the full-scale invasion, I realised: the game was to convince them they’re Russian, that they should fight for Russia, that they must participate in these meat assaults against their fellow Ukrainians. Today, Russia uses Telegram to create community. What I noticed was that community identity is wholly formed through storytelling. This is the method, the means they use in this fake state — Russia-occupied Luhansk People’s Republic, or the

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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

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