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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. <a href="https://www.decodingtrolls.net?utm_medium=podcast">www.decodingtrolls.net</a>

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July 17, 2026

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 weekUkraine 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 showsTrukha’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 ManaUkraine 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 truthThere 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 beforeThis 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 sayingUkraine’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 defending.What I am saying is narrower. The data shows a dated, measurable break in one channel’s behaviour toward one man, beginning with a self-announced campaign trailer on 5 June 2026, immediately after a change of ownership that the channel will not explain, in a channel already carrying a documented history of relay choices that serve Moscow’s frames. Ukrainians noticed it themselves. Fedorov has called for journalists to investigate. The measurement simply confirms what the pattern-literate eye suspected, and puts a date and a number on it.Every galaxy has oneHere is why this matters far beyond one Ukrainian scandal.In my work I describe disinfolklore galaxies: the connected clusters of channels, outlets and accounts that share, relay and amplify each other’s memes across an information space. Every galaxy has a Trukha. Ours too. Somewhere in your feed, whatever your country, there is a high-volume, trusted, useful channel that earned its place honestly: alerts, sport, local news, the daily texture of life. That accumulated trust is an asset. Assets get bought. And when they are bought, nothing on the surface changes. The alerts keep coming. The football keeps coming. What changes is the plumbing underneath: whose name gets pinned to which anger, which real grievances get a trench dug toward which target.You cannot detect that by fact-checking, because the facts are mostly true. You detect it the way we detected it here. You get your eye in for the wrong note, the way Kosovo i Metohija reads wrong in a Ukrainian channel. You watch for the trailer voice, the “don’t switch,” the manufactured countdown. You ask of each emotive story not “is it true?” but “where is my reaction being sent?” And when you can, you count. A valence flip with a date on it is worth a thousand suspicions.Trukha’s three million readers are not fools. They are among the most propaganda-hardened publics on earth, and the channel caught a good number of them anyway, for a while. That is the measure of the form’s power, and the reason to learn its shape now, in the one information space where it has just been caught in the act.The trench is dug before the water arrives. Learn to see the trench.Stephen Douglas is a writer who publishes on Disinfolklore.eu, Disinfolklore.net, PowerofMana.net, and as Decoding Trolls on Substack and X. Get full access to Decoding Trolls at <a href="https://www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe</a>

February 7, 2026

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 FaithThat’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 ExampleAs 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 CenterWe 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 ParallelI’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 TruthPart 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 BlocksI 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 demands of disinfolklorists.Donald’s Ceasefire TrollTake today’s Donald. It’s just so horrid what he said about this fake ceasefire. He was asked in the White House: you agreed with Putler on a ceasefire, yet yesterday was one of the worst attacks of the entire war by Putler on Ukraine—what do you say to that? Donald said, well, you know, he agreed a ceasefire from Sunday to Sunday, and yesterday’s Monday, so of course he had to do it. These two people have been fighting forever for the past few years. It’s a war that wouldn’t have happened, you know, and all that malarkey.That’s pure disinfolklore. It’s pure meanness. It’s both-sidesing Ukraine and Russia. It’s telling lies. It’s not ethically disciplined. It’s part of Russia’s information war against Ukraine.As we heard Donald Tusk refer to today—which many of us have come to over the past few weeks—the Epstein relationship with Russia, Donald’s relationship with Epstein and Russia, and this entire governance system in which the honey traps affecting the survivors and victims in awful ways were just part of this awful governance system. We get a great insight into it through this English fellow called Peter Mandelson, whom English listeners will know through all the disinfolklore going back to the days of New Labour. It turns out there’s evidence that while the world financial system was about to fall apart in 2007–2008, and Gordon Brown literally saved the world and rescued Mandelson and made him into a lord so he could be his minister, Mandelson was sharing private correspondence about the bailout with Epstein. These are all Brighton Beach mafia-adjacent people. They’re all Russian, despite their all-American looks. This is all a Russian mafia operation. He’s sharing papers which are then monetised by them and exchanged for influence and other things.That little vignette seems to illustrate how these people are trying to corrupt and usurp our world and usurp what is right. It’s up to us to ensure they don’t succeed, as we’re trying our best with the Ukraine example. I just don’t think it will succeed.Disinfolklore Is Empirical and DescriptiveWhen Donald speaks like that, he is communicating meanness with a view to altering moods, intentions, motivations, and attitudes. He’s intending to depress Ukrainians. It’s just the most horrible thing. If there are sins—venal sins, the worst sins ever in the Catholic Church—that can be committed through words alone, then Donald commits them a thousand times a day. At a time when Ukrainians are freezing, he tempts them into going out in the street with this ceasefire troll. I’m sure very few of them believe in it, but it’s just horrible.If you wonder what disinfolklore is: anything Donald ever says—that is just disinfolklore. News reporting this disinfolklore or any other kind is the main means of creating the disinfolklore universe in which we are currently being enmeshed on an unprecedented scale. This is something I’m offering which many practitioners in disinformation don’t offer: the system-wide effects of not just this particular meme by Donald, but the systemic effects of zillions of them—including the missile strikes, Epstein, Putler, and just the whole mess, this forest of horribleness and meanness that all of us have chosen or been chosen to enmesh ourselves in each day.We are self-realising through it. We’re trying to help Ukraine, trying to stop the usurpers’ win, trying to help truth—meaning territorial integrity, borders sacrosanct, freedom from being missile-struck, freedom from being enslaved by the Russists and all of the terrible consequences that would arise if the purported annexation of Crimea and all that has happened as a result was allowed to stand.One: disinfolklore is empirical. This is not a theory. It is empirically based, grounded in data. We see it every day. As James pointed out, you can see a family resemblance between what Donald is trying to do to the Kennedy Center and archetyping, one of the weapons in our arsenal as disinfolklore analytical methodologists.Two: it’s descriptive. Disinfolklore is meant to depress spirits. It affects motivations in order to entrench in people the idea that it’s useless to resist. Donald himself is very descriptive—his tone, his storytelling technique, switching between third person and other perspectives really confusingly for people, is a really effective storytelling technique. He uses resonant verbal images and props, whether it’s a red cap or other devices. The purpose is clear: to depress spirits, whether it’s the spirits of his cynical followers, oligarchs who seek to benefit, or people like us who are appalled by everything that’s going on.Disinfolklore as a Way of SeeingThree: it’s a way of seeing. Once you get your eye in, you can use the disinfolklore lens as a way of perceiving certain kinds of patterns in data.Four: disinfolklore inculcates rules. It normalises certain mental routines. Don’t go to the forest. Don’t bother supporting Ukraine. You’re not Ukrainian. Cross the river and you’ll be forced to become LGBTIQ. There are all these rules, unknown to us, inculcated in our minds through the means of certain strategically designed, emotionally resonant stories. This is a feature of folklore going back forever. One of its great functions is to teach children: don’t go to that forest, don’t go to the island.Five: it’s also a description of my project. Disinfolklore is a necessary precursor to understanding what counter-disinfolklore consists of. All of this is about—and I try to remember this in my work—not just identifying or describing something terrible and going, oh, I can’t do anything about it. It’s about acting as well. That’s the counter-disinfolklore. All of us have chosen that path, all of us in this space. In the pro-Ukraine community, those who identify as part of NAFO and Volia Radio—we have chosen to counter disinfolklore, to act against it, not just to be consumers of it and throw our hands up and say, okay, I can’t do anything about it, so I’m not going to bother. We’ve chosen to engage in memetic warfare in lots of different ways.The Intention Problem: Why Effects Matter MoreTraditional definitions of disinformation distinguish it from mere misinformation on the grounds of intention to mislead. The problem here is that the same meme, when spoken by me, if I am being *méchant* and deliberately trying to mislead someone, would be disinformation. If Wendy accidentally believed it and just passed it on to James, it would be just misinformation. Its effect is the same if James then passes it on. It doesn’t matter if I’ve deliberately manipulated James and Wendy has accidentally manipulated James. If James then tells his sister or his daughter or his mother, his wife, a cousin, or says it on the radio—the same meme—it doesn’t matter whether it’s intentionally or unintentionally communicated. It’s still alive, it’s been passed on, and the energy inside that meme stays alive.If we’re truly most concerned about all of this because of its effects—we’re not just interested in disinformation or Ukraine to pass the time. It’s intrinsically interesting, of course, yet we’re also interested because of its impact on people, on their moods. We see what it does to people. We see how Donald has affected all American and practically everyone’s lives on the planet. The same with Putler’s invasion of Ukraine, whether it’s the price of oil or our depressed spirits or 14 million Ukrainian internally displaced people and 9 million who left Ukraine. These have great effects.It doesn’t matter in some ways about the intention. We can argue all day about Putler’s real intention, yet that doesn’t really matter. What really matters is the effects. That’s where what I try to provide comes in: look for the mana in the meme. That’s one of the main weapons, tools, and unique aspects of the disinfolklore analytical method. We take units of information and attempt to discern the quality of the mana inside them.Look for the Mana in the MemeAs we get better at this—and the first step to getting better is just thinking about doing it—then whether James communicates this meme to me, passes it through the barrier into my brain, into my mind, to kind of tickle my mind, or Wendy does, it doesn’t matter whether James intentionally is manipulating me or Wendy is accidentally manipulating me. If we’ve got this skill of looking for the mana in the meme, looking for what the energy is inside it and how it is affecting my mood, my intention, my attitude—many of us, because we see the family resemblance between different kinds of memes, like the nuclear threats for instance. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from Medvedev or our friend who’s breathlessly repeating something they read in the *New York Post*. We see the energy in this, which is Russia’s attempt to coercively control humanity and get us to surrender to Russism.That’s a really powerful aspect of disinfolklore: looking for the mana inside the meme.Disgust as an Incoming Troll RadarOnce we’re looking for it, we can create different tools for identifying the energy inside memes. One of the key tools is actually its impact on us. When I heard Donald say this about the ceasefire—and I hope I’m now passing this on to all of you, trying to wrap it so that it’s not just disinfolklore but more infolklore, it’s informing you, a story to inculcate an idea—my emotional visceral reaction was just disgust. Disgust is, of course, one of the tools that Donald and his ilk use. We’ve spoken about this before, especially in the context of contagion. There’s this work by cultural psychologists about how the emotion of disgust, so it is believed, began as a mechanism we use biologically not to drink the poisonous soup, to puke it out or vomit it out. Then it passes from that into culture, and we begin to project disgustingness or non-disgustingness onto different articles or objects.MAGA attempts to get us to think of Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton as disgusting—the whole Pizzagate thing. Food is intrinsically involved in all of this. When she’s associated with this dark cabal of child slavery, all located in this pizzeria in Washington, D.C., this gets entrenched in people’s minds through disinfolklore, through stories promoted by Fox and through a million different channels. Then you don’t even remember why she disgusts you, yet you sense or feel that disgust.The moment I felt that disgust with Donald, that reaction on behalf of 42 million Ukrainians and 350 million fellow Americans, my incoming troll radar was activated. I realised: I’m not going to go with this feeling. I’m not going to go with this disgust. I’m going to use it as an example tonight. I’m not going to allow Donald to impact my mood. I’m going to bank it, put it in a little capsule in my mind, then move on from it. Very little of what he does disgusts me in this visceral way, yet that really did because I’m reading about what Ukrainians are going through at the moment—it’s horrific—and just the idea he could explain it away as natural. He lies about the ceasefire, then says, well, you know, it was Sunday to Sunday, so it’s Monday, so obviously he’s going to send his missiles. It’s probably top three worst things a US president has ever and will ever say.The disgust I felt alerted me to a troll. Someone is trying to get into my mind and I’m going to protect myself from it. That was wrapped up inside his story about missiles and Putler. Incidentally, this was minutes before he took a dump in the Oval Office—yet again, a public defecation with people around, and they hurried everyone out. That’s good counter-disinfolklore. We cannot resist opportunities for toilet humour, especially when this is one of many times he has apparently done this in public.The Mana of Coercive ControlThe energy of Russia’s disinfolklore is coercive control. The mana energy from the macro to the micro—the words of individual Russist so-called mil-bloggers, Russian guys in the field who hang the Russian mobiks upside down on trees—that’s the epitome of coercive control. The way they treat women. The way Epstein and all of those people, all the people in Donald’s cabinet, treat women. The way Donald treats women and people he others.That coercive control mana energy is inside the memes, inside what they do, inside the stories, inside the way they treat the survivors, as we see with the latest docs dump.The mana of Russia’s disinfolklore is coercive control. You can back-propagate from that: if you spot coercive control—which is quite carefully defined in English law because it’s now illegal, and which we might know in different ways, having experienced it in our own lives with partners or girlfriends or boyfriends, husbands or wives—there’s a certain level of intensity of coercive control in relationships, usually male on female, that in English statute law is now outlawed.If you see coercive control in a meme or in a story—either someone trying to coercively control you, or Donald trying to coercively control Ukraine into surrender by withholding intelligence cooperation (forcing them to withdraw from Kursk and all of this), the “perfect phone call” in air quotes, where he was coercively controlling President Zelensky into announcing an investigation into the Hunter Biden troll in return for $280 million worth of Javelin missile systems which Congress had already appropriated specifically for Ukraine, plus a White House visit—that’s coercive control.The Budapest Memorandum specifically makes it a violation to exert economic coercion on Ukraine by any of the parties, whether England, the Russian Federation, or the United States. Yet we see this normalisation of economic coercion by Donald—tariffs are a form. His whole tariff troll is a form of coercive control, not just on other countries but also on the Americans who are paying the tariffs.Coercive control is immanent in almost every breath Donald takes as a case study. Once you can see it in him and what he does, you can see aspects of it in what other normal people do, in geopolitics, in what Putler does. Whenever you encounter that energy in memes, you know that’s probably disinfolklore. Someone is probably trying to affect your mood, your motivation, your attitude, and your intentions through a story whose immanence is coercive control.Coercive Control as a ShortcutThat’s one very common immanence in disinfolklore. If you’re looking for the mana in the meme—the energy in a meme, whether it’s a story someone is telling you, a story you’re participating in with a friend, something on Twitter or X or Instagram Stories, or images, or something you think about—when you identify this aspect of coercive control, you have a shortcut. Often these judgements need to be made quickly in real life. I want the disinfolklore analytical method to be something we can use individually, as I do, in my daily life to get me through the day and to help me navigate very complicated realities.We’re looking for ways of cutting through the confusion. You’re looking for the mana of the meme, you spot coercive control, then you mount your defence or your counterattack—or you just get out of there. You don’t need to spend three days trying to work out what’s going on. You simply recognise: this is not a story I want to let affect my energy. I don’t want how I act to be changed by this, because someone is deliberately trying to coercively control me into behaviour which is against my identity.If I allow myself to be coercively controlled—and obviously there are circumstances in which we all have to surrender to it because we’re just not powerful enough to resist at that moment—that doesn’t mean we can’t try to recognise it. Epstein’s victims and Donald’s victims often understand they’re being coercively controlled, like we do, like I do now. We just can’t do anything about it for the time being. We have to wait till we get a bit bigger and find a lawyer or something else.We can keep our identity—help sustain our identity—by noticing what’s going on and by mentally resisting. If we do find the power to overcome it, that is an identity-preservation process. The opposite is what I’ve described before: the purpose of the disinfolklore universe inside MAGA or inside Russia-occupied Ukraine is to transform our identities through the medium of our moods, intentions, attitudes, and motivations by using stories to attack them and manipulate us—to pulate, to shake our mana, our own energy.After a time, we’ve acted in ways we would never have dreamed we would act. Take your average MAGA adherent and bring them in your time machine back to 1990 when they were a Reagan Republican. They would never have agreed with any of the nonsense they agree with now. Identities are transformed through these memes deliberately. Donald and Putler and those trying to change our world are trying to promote this spheres-of-influence nonsense from their IR textbooks, rather than territorial integrity being sacrosanct according to the UN Charter and a variety of international legal instruments, as well as being the obvious means of maintaining stability in our world.The Cognitive Model: Information as In-FormingI’ve described a bit now the cognitive model of how disinfolklore affects our intentions and motivations, and therefore our activities, including our thoughts. This is a key part of the disinfolklore analytical method. As James pointed out, there are loads of other models out there. This is just the one I’ve come up with to match my experience of how my mind, my mana, my energy is impacted by meanness in stories.It’s also something I’ve developed which I hope is accessible to people. When we detect trolls coming in—detect this energy, say, of coercive control—or we have a sense that someone is trying to manipulate us, we mount our incoming troll radars, always looking for this. Mindfulness is another word for it, though that kind of puts people off. It’s this mindfulness where you’re a gatekeeper between the external and your mind, and you triage certain bits of information according to their risks of negatively impacting your mood or your attitude or your intentions. When you detect coercive control in any form, immediately you’re on guard, and you’re not going to let it affect your inner mind, your mana.When you feel your moods or attitudes or intentions being scraped or vibrated by these things, these data, these memes, that can also be a sign that it’s time to—metaphorically speaking—get out of there and just not let it in and avoid it.I think it’s important to have an accessible cognitive model when we’re talking about information. The clue is in the term itself: information. It’s about forming you. It’s forming the inside of you. This is one of the beautiful things about Indo-European languages. We have really true renderings of what is happening in the words we use every day, yet we don’t think of it that way. We think of “inform” as merely meaning somebody is telling us something we didn’t know. The clue, when you think about the term, is that it’s forming our inside.That’s what I mean by the energy, the being manipulated, where someone is pulating your mana, your energy, with information, shaking it up and down in such a way that it affects your moods and intentions in the negative way. The opposite works too. I’ve been noticing a lot how children react—for some reason it’s just been on my mind—the way they make each other laugh. I’ve got my eye in now and I see it a lot on the streets. That kind of friendship is really familiar to me, and I try to do that in my real life a lot.That’s positive trolling—definitional positive trolling—where two friends are just making each other laugh and smile. They’re practising generosity by doing that. Their intention is all good. I think that’s absolutely wonderful. That is great counter-disinfolklore. That’s positive information.I’ll come back to that again next week. Hopefully that was helpful. That was eight different tools. I’ve actually got 37 more.Continued from:First in Series: Get full access to Decoding Trolls at <a href="https://www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe</a>

January 26, 2026

Podcast and Pensées 128:

Pops up with a perennial troll where you're in the countryside, something strange happens, and it's attributed to a troll appearing and interceding, which perform the same function as angels or leprechauns or banshees or Baba Yaga or Rusalkis. It's all the same. Every Indo-European culture has these substitutes for energy and to explain things.I talked before about how my disinfolklore analytical method allows us to look in any form. There's one takeaway from a lot of my work at the moment is to try not, these are not organic or accidental emanations, just as seeing Elon in the White House archetyping himself with his son as the dark hero, Batman and Robin, just again trying to affect our moods. So seeing these elements as part of a system might prevent us reacting to them as if they're just individual artifacts and moments in our lives.They're very much part of what I would see as the coup or the insurrection which began when, according to the indictments, both the Georgia and the federal indictments, Jan 6th indictment began within the first moments that Donald Trump disputed the results of the 2020 election. And this is what we are seeing this as very much part of a whole criminal conspiracy where the racketeering was the charge Donald was brought against in the federal indictment. So it's a whole system. It's not just one moment in it.And so just that perspective, and that's essentially what I do in my work is I'm trying to sell perspectives on the quotidian, the daily elements. So that can help us in our own lives to understand ourselves, where we're fitting in, how we're affecting the culture. Our culture, which most of us have chosen to do on X, that's our main entry point. That's our main power we have is to affect people's timelines. And we know how we're affected by the timelines, by the information we see. And that's why we're part of this volume of community, because we think there's power in communicating this understanding.So 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 are they trying to archetype themselves as, how are they trying to manipulate us, and then how can we find ways of explaining this and understanding and sharing this comprehension of this.I'd quickly reference the Tulsi Gabbard issue because we've had all of it, as you mentioned, the Middle East, and obviously we're going to stick to Ukraine, but it does tie into what we talked about last week, and I am trying to give the tools that will help us discern the manner in the means, the energy in the means that we encounter each day, all day long, as we scroll and try to interact with our culture and create our culture.And the Tulsi Gabbard thing, that story some of us might have noticed, Axios reported that she is prepared to submit her resignation if Donald authorizes entering the Israel-Iran war. And there was also reporting, credible reporting, that she was excluded from a meeting to discuss the impending war. From that I deduced she is not only recognized—most of us know—but she was recognized as being part of the Russian influence network and they were trying to keep her out of that meeting, and then to see her prepared to submit her resignation the Israel-Iran war struck me as it complements my analysis of what is going on.And what's particularly interesting about this issue is, as some of us will know, that because of what we know about Russia and Russia's economy, because we listen to Mockers and Prints every day and Absurdistan, we almost uniquely as a community have a very detailed idea of Russia's state of its economy and its dependence on its oil exports and its dependence on Iran for weaponry since it was first reported in October. I found the first report from October 2022 when it was first reported that Iran was denying providing Russia with weapons and drones. So up until that point, we didn't know which way Iran would swing.And so I have this fixed post, this fixed flagpole in my mind that Russia does not want the United States to enter the war in Iran. And therefore, anyone who is suddenly out of character against this war in Iran, and Tulsi Gabbard would be one of them, we can use this as a good litmus test, I believe, to know if they are in the influence, whether paid or otherwise, of Russia. And obviously, it's very particularly interesting to see which way Donald Trump goes in the end.On the one hand, he has suddenly become like a Messiah to these patrician neocons who always thought of him as a clown. And now suddenly out of nowhere, he's offering them what they've dreamed about since 1979, which is to bomb, to bomb Russia, or sorry, bomb Iran back to the stone age. And so he has that influence on him. And they're all looking for his ears.We obviously know Netanyahu is a very, oh, I used to live in the Upper East Side and I lived in a building which he visited once. Morgenthau, who was then the Attorney General from a very patrician New York state family, lived. And obviously we know his son, Donald Trump's son-in-law, used to play with Netanyahu's children. They're all really closely connected. So that's a very solid influence on Donald.Then you have the MAGA element, which Bannon and co, who have been leading the charge against Ukraine, which again is a litmus test for where these people's loyalties lie. And so in the context of all that, I look back at this video and the aesthetics, the Soviet-era aesthetics, the argument which, again, we as a community understand about World War III, and someone, an American friend, a highly educated, brilliant American friend, contacted me, and she used this World War III meme. So whatever she's consuming, I think she's Republican, whatever media she's consuming is promoting this World War III meme, which again, we're very familiar with from here.And on the archetyping idea, it gave me the idea that what I wrote about this week about re-archetyping, well, sorry, I haven't written yet. But I conceived writing about the re-archetyping of World War III. So I read a few pieces this week, and because of course, Iona, you're right to point out that President Zelensky is the comedian. He's literally a comedian. That's what he did. He's an actor, a comedian.And so when he's asked in the documentary, so you played a president on television. Has that helped prepare you to be president? And President Zelensky looks quizzically at the interviewer as if the interviewer is the stupidest person he has ever encountered. He's like, no, they're completely different things. In one, I'm playing the role.And of course, we know Donald Trump. He managed to re-archetype himself as a leader of humans through doing a television show where he was playing, he was acting as an entrepreneur. He was never an entrepreneur, but he was acting as one and playing a role, and they wanted that role. So there you have someone who's like Putin, exactly like Putin. They are shaman tricksters. They are brilliant at provoking emotions in other people, either revulsion or disgust or joy or following. And they do it in this magical way that priests and advertising and religions and cults have done for millennia, but they do do it in a very cynical way, and it's not ethically disciplined, which is the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls.And so, I mean, hopefully in the coming weeks we'll talk more about this, because this is the most important insight that I have to share about this, that there's this archetypal structure in our news, in our disinfolklore, which is manifested through these characters, through these stories, which is perennial, at least since 4100 BCE, at least since the first Indo-European language was forged in Ukraine.And that's, again, the miracle of the connection with Ukraine, that all of this was born there. And that's partly why I'm confident President Zelensky, who was born 150, 200 kilometers—if you're going from Dnipro to this place, to this area where Indo-European languages began around the borders of Nikolaev and Kherson Oblast, and the site of the Yamnaya community. You go through Kryvyi Rih, where President Zelensky is from, there's some great stone circles there.But he, in this titanic struggle, I'm 100% confident President Zelensky will win because he's against these two dime-shot shaman tricksters. Putin, once you get your eye in, you can see how he performs the tricks. The bare-chested man with his rod, his bendy rod. And these archetypal identities are replayed. And in people's minds, it's just so basic. Whereas President Zelensky not only was a comedian, a shaman trickster, he creates, provokes emotions in people's minds for a living, built a business around it, and then transmitted with a really strong idea of what is real and what is fake. Whereas the others are caught up in their disinfolklore galaxies and disinfolklore universes.And this is the struggle, the Titanic. In Greek mythology, which was also born, much of it was born in this area of Ukraine, and we think of Greek as the beginning of it just because it was recorded, and now we know about it, where you have these archetypal identities, you have all of these gods, which confuse people, people like the hero's journey and all of that stuff, which Jung and others in film scripts, they try, they talk about it. And it's quite confusing for people who don't have a classical education, but what it all, what Dumézil's genius was, and he spent the rest of his life after he had this insight working through it.And it's immanent in a huge body of linguistics and literature as one of the main evidential trajectories before we had ancient DNA. Because if you found the same story with the same archetypes in it as we did in India, Iran, Irish mythology, and in India, examples of Germanic mythology, you knew it must come from a common source. And this was before we had ancient DNA to demonstrate that the common source manifested as a particular community of humans in southern Ukraine.So this is absolutely key to it all because it's not like, so there's lots of second tier archetypes. There's these moving dynamic archetypes, which are Russian disinfolklore and Russian propaganda, like I was talking about Minsk. And again, there's the MN sound in Minsk, in Yamna, in Monarch, and the RtT, the Rts sound, and security, prosperity, and sovereignty. So you have these sounds, these archetypes, these meanings, this language personified by characters which are perennial. But then you also have in Russian they can create characters as we do when we write stories whether it's in the news and others which are kind of second third tier, but there is this fundamental structure which is there.And it is there and the moment I came across Dumézil's work—Dumézil's work as I was trying to research what is it about Don and the shaman trickster—and to see that it's there, it's peer-reviewed, it's a structure that I'd like to help people become aware of because then we see there's nothing new about him. He is this, it's the same trick which he plays in the fairground, which they play in the fairground or we see on TV. We just invest it with something more serious because he's occupying this office, the sovereignty function of this community of humans, of American humans.And now we hear him archetyping himself as a soldier at war, and yeah, anyway, so thank you, as ever, you know, inspire me. I hope some of that is of interest to people, but we'll talk about it again. It's fundamental. Those three archetypes are the fundamental archetypes in our cognition, in our culture. They manifest in every timeline, all over the place, all the time. It's the same story for at least 6,000 years. I make no claims for non-Indo-European cultures.Continued from:First in series: Get full access to Decoding Trolls at <a href="https://www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.decodingtrolls.net/subscribe</a>

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What is Decoding Trolls?: 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. <a href="https://www.decodingtrolls.net?utm_medium=podcast">www.decodingtrolls.net</a>
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