Decoding Trolls is a podcast about the meanings hidden inside memes and other emotion-moving content. Its host treats any activity of body, speech, or mind that moves other people's emotions as a form of trolling, and argues that this is simply what sentient beings do. The aim is not to eliminate trolling but to understand how it works so it can be controlled. Episodes explore the mechanics of online persuasion, manipulation and viral messaging, with more at decodingtrolls.net.
Episodes
The Lulaverse: Munich put into practice
Two years ago this month a man came from nowhere to win the first round of a presidential election in a NATO state. I worked out how it was done before the intelligence services published the proof, thanks to Ioana. On Sunday night a man in Brazil won a fourth term by doing the same thing the other way round. Tonight is about the method, the Disinfolklore analytical method, which is the one I set
Podcast | When History Becomes War: Transcending the History Provocation troll (Ep 2)
My new Historical versus Real russia lens has been tested before.In October 1925, at Locarno, Weimar Germany guaranteed its borders with France and Belgium. But Weimar Germany left its border with Poland open. The Weimar state spent years campaigning about the past. The history it told claimed the land, claimed Poland. Fourteen years later, its army crossed the open border.“…The limb is gone, but
Podcast | Future russia: The Pattern Ukraine Must End
This is about Future russia. Now is the time to think about Future russia.Current russia has one choice left that does not end in losing everything. It can accept that the world will settle for nothing less than its withdrawal from all of Ukraine, every village of Ukraine, Crimea included. russia has shown no sign of making this choice. I contend it will not make this choice in time.“We need to un
Podcast | Older than Writing
Today I want to talk about something older than writing. The writer today, and I do consider myself a writer, still holds that position and still keeps that practice. I want to add something to it as well. The human inside and outside the loop, in the age of mythos.EnheduannaEnheduanna is the answer to a question in the air just now.The oldest writer whose name we know was a woman. I have written
Podcast | I am become meme.
When Elon Musk told a conservative conference in 2025 “I am become meme”, he was not joking. He was telling you what he does for a living.The russian state’s own dramaturg has said the same thing in plainer words. Dramaturg carries the Tr-. Vladislav Surkov, once deputy prime minister of the Ruschist Federation, was picked in 1999 to design Vladimir Putin’s political system, like an architect, and
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 hero
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 KremlinSo the clock on the Kremlin tower had already struck midnight on the 28th of May 20
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 FenceCeuta is a Spanis
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 K
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 Mockers 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 th
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 Anal
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
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
Podcast & Pensées 125
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
Podcast | Pensées 124
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.So
Podcast | Pensées 123
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 f
Podcast | Pensées 122
⚡️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 di
Podcast | Pensées 121
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 a
Podcast | Pensées 120
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
Podcast | Curious Case of Pro-russia Disinfolklorist Jeffrey Sachs's 'Influence' on Discourse About Ukraine's War for Independence
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 —
Podcast | Pensées 119
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
Podcast | Pensées 118 - Weekly Writings
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
Podcast | Ukraine Re-archetypes as a Giant Inside Donald's Mind
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
Video | PayPal and russian Mafias’ Struggle for Donald was Won This Week
⚡️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-relate
Podcast | Why No Ceasefire's Great - for Ukraine
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’…An extract from this week's Decodi
Hot-take: Ukraine’s delegation to Saudi Arabia ‘Peace’ talks
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
Pensées (96): my Munich speech
⚡️Making ‘Peace’ in Ukraine stick - with a stick.2015-2018 as a diplomat on the ground between russian occupiers and Ukrainian defenders I watched russia’s adherence to Minsk I and II.Every day russia breached the ceasefire many thousands of times. Meanwhile, Ruschia continued to brainwash Ukrainians inside its occupation in Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk - preparing Ukrainian males inside the occupa
The Kidnapping War
I’ve written before about russia’s Stealth Genocide.This podcast and the evidence below is about the openly admitted violation of the Genocide Convention’s prohibition against transferring children across international borders in times of war.Many struggle to understand or to explain the aggregate of the billions of actions that constitute russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. The mass kidnapping
Swifty Decoding Interview
Decoding interviewed by Ronan Swift.The text of that interview, edited from the remastered recording for reading, with Ronan's words in italics.I'm Decoding Trolls. I write at Disinfolklore.eu, on X as Disinfolklore and DecodingTrolls, and at Disinfolklore.net, DecodingTrolls.net and PowerofMana.net.Hello everybody, I'm Ronan Swifty. This morning I'm going to be talking to Decoding Trolls.Hi, I'm
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