Decoding Trolls

My new Historical versus Real Russia lens has been tested before. In October 1925, at Locarno, Weimar Germany guaranteed its borders with France and Belgium. But Weimar Germany left its border with Poland open. The Weimar state spent years campaigning about the past. The history it told claimed the land, claimed Poland. Fourteen years later, its army crossed the open border. “…The limb is gone, bu...

This is about Future Russia . Now is the time to think about Future Russia. Current Russia has one choice left that does not end in losing everything. It can accept that the world will settle for nothing less than its withdrawal from all of Ukraine, every village of Ukraine, Crimea included. Russia has shown no sign of making this choice. I contend it will not make this choice in time. “We need to...

Today I want to talk about something older than writing. The writer today, and I do consider myself a writer, still holds that position and still keeps that practice. I want to add something to it as well. The human inside and outside the loop, in the age of mythos. Enheduanna Enheduanna is the answer to a question in the air just now. The oldest writer whose name we know was a woman. I have writt...

When Elon Musk told a conservative conference in 2025 “I am become meme”, he was not joking. He was telling you what he does for a living. The Russian state’s own dramaturg has said the same thing in plainer words. Dramaturg carries the T-R-. Vladislav Surkov, once deputy prime minister of the Ruschist Federation, was picked in 1999 to design Vladimir Putin’s political system, like an architect, a...

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 hero...

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...

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 Span...

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...

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...

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 Ana...

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 ha...

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...

The document dump. It reminds me of another aspect of my past, where I worked for this New York law firm called Fishbein Badillo Wagner Harding, which was closely associated with Giuliani and Herman Badillo, who was one of the first Hispanic council members in New York City. We also worked for Donald Trump. The case I was involved in — before I went to Cambridge to study law, so I was a paralegal...

In the Autumn of 2019, I was trying to understand of what Don’s power/Mana consisted. I wanted to understand in order to counter how Don Disinfolklore used Twitter to roil humanity’s minds into believing trolls like the Hunter Biden troll or Pizzagate Conspiracy. At the time I was a diplomat in eastern Ukraine- I could see how Donald’s trolling even then had real world effects on the battlefield....

Archetyping is a very important aspect of Disinfolklore as an analytical method. And archetypal Disinfolklore literacy is the first tool in the Disinfolklore Analytical Methods handbook. So you won’t be surprised to find that I’m starting today with MAGA archetyping Ukraine and Europe as weak. The US is trying to archetype Europe as weak, yet it’s led by a guy who can’t stop sleeping. We had this...

⚡️US declares war against European Values. United States’s newly published National Security Strategy is a declaration of war against those of us fighting to retain the post-World War Two legal and social orders. When America states that it wants to “restore Europe’s civilisational confidence” Donald’s apparatchiks mean: we want Hand Maid’s Tale Europe. We want the human rights architecture to be...

I’ve been occupied with the 28-point plan all week and this saga. A lot of what I’ve written is about that. Basically, the first intimation I had of the capitulation plan was on the 11th of November, when a journalist wrote in the *Kyiv Post* that the United States was attempting to remove the reference to territorial integrity from the annual UN resolution condemning Russia’s occupation, invasion...

Minsk is one of these characters I’ve been watching very closely. The Disinfolklore analytical method enables us to feel free. It prompts us to look for archetypal characters in the data — characters which aren’t typical. It’s not always Kellogg. Sometimes it’s Ukraine, the country itself. Ukraine archetypes as David or Goliath. Russia archetypes itself, switching between David and Goliath — on th...

Jeffrey Sachs was in my mind because he was this kind of devil from the early 1990s, when he was responsible for shock therapy or whatever. But I hadn’t encountered him in reference to Ukraine until I was on holiday on the Turkish Riviera in the summer of 2024. A really close friend of mine — who, like many people, has no sympathy for Ukraine and loads of sympathy for the plight of Palestinians —...

Yesterday was the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a white supremacist. In the wake of that murder, the movement from the right and the far right was to archetype those like George Floyd, but mainly those supporting George Floyd in the demonstrations afterwards — those who awoke to injustice and are awake to injustice. The far right and the right ran a coordinated, globally important, signi...

Some of us will have seen this Harvard-Harris poll during the week. I wrote a piece on it: “Why America Trusts Donald — Disinfolklore.” Facebook is one of America’s most trusted institutions, along with the army, the FBI, the CDC, and the police — broadcasting Disinfolklore chosen by the algorithm to suit our own particular minds, stories that convey meanness and delusions. Most Americans believe...

One of our first encounters with the internet today was to see Donald’s tweet — or untruth. And the experience all of us had when we saw that untruth is the experience that every MAGA cult member had the moment they became a member of the cult. They probably didn’t notice that time when they read something or heard something of Donald’s that they just agreed with a million percent. And that turned...

⚡️I argue below that the force that led to Mass Infection policy (which was generated in Silicon Valley a year before Covid vaccines were invented), now is in charge of public health in America. That force is now in control of the gatekeepers of health, well being and protection of the right to life in America: National Institutes of Health and Centers of Disease Control through PayPal Mafia-rela...

In this week’s podcast (available wherever you get your podcasts), let’s look at Eight aspects of this week’s White House visit which other experts have not focussed on. ⚡️Why is it good news Ukraine now can strike any target in Russia? Since late March 2025 America was preventing Ukraine from striking Russia’s fossil fuel infrastructure due to the ‘peace process’… So our topic is Disinfolklore a...

Hi there, I’m Decoding Trolls. I wanted to give you my quick take on the proposals Ukraine is going to bring to the so-called peace conference in Saudi Arabia next week. Obviously, my heart and many hearts sink at the prospect of Ukraine surrendering either to Russia or to America’s concern trolling about deaths in Ukraine — especially as credible reports have emerged from the battlefield in Kursk...