Episode Details

New Second Series and the Starting Point

I have been thinking about some of the archetypes and seeing their application. Frankly, I have been hearing more people say the method is useful for figuring out what is going on in the world. I am glad this is something that is catching on with some important people, the people I work with. It matters. It really is helpful to understand how Russia thinks and how we can use this against them.

My vision is that we will have two series going on together at the same time, one week on, one week off. The other series, which I started a few weeks ago, is looking at this well of data that I collected between 2015 and 2018 in Luhansk from the Russian occupier media, broken down into the various archetypes. I have been going through that.

This series I wanted to start was to look at trolling and the emotion-moving activity of body, speech, and mind. I have spoken about this before. I did a lot of work on this from the autumn, from the fall of 2019 onwards, and particularly from March 2020 onwards. I went through 60,000 or 70,000 entries under the terms trolling and trolls in the Dow Jones Factiva database of 33,000 sources. That is the largest media source database on planet Earth.

What I wanted to look at was how the terms trolling and trolls are used in the modern era, as evidenced by these 60,000 or 70,000 entries in the database. Recently, I have been able to analyse the results in a way that I had not had the space and the time to do before. In some ways, you have seen the results of it, which is Decoding Trolls and all of my work, the Code of Positive Trolls, and things I have talked about in Disinfolklore.

The Insight from Eastern Ukraine: Artillery and Emotions

I am going to start with the insight which I had in eastern Ukraine, which was the continuity between, for example, artillery strikes on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska — the continuity between that and the emotions you feel when you see them or feel them or hear them — and the emotions you feel when you read articles written about them.

I had this insight, this vision, that actually there is no real difference in terms of quality, the content of trolling through artillery strikes, for example, and using Twitter to troll. The same effect on people’s emotions comes from these two different examples.

I had started off on this journey because I wanted to understand how Donald Trump was able to use Twitter to provoke people’s emotions. That is essentially why trolling seemed to me important as a concept. It is my luck — I use that in a very classic sense — it is my luck that Donald was re-elected and we have seen his self-realisation move towards this apex.

The White House Meme Apparatus in the Iran War

My starting point really is the White House meme apparatus in the Iran war. Between the 28th of February 2026 and the launch of Operation so-called Epic Fury and the two-week Hormuz Strait ceasefire — or if it was a ceasefire, which has supposedly been extended today — the Trump White House ran the most aggressive presidential office social media war propaganda campaign in American history.

What had been in the first Trump term a hobbyist’s Twitter feed has been fully institutionalised. The White House X, TikTok, and Untruth Social accounts, together with the Rapid Response 47 feed, have posted over 100 short-form videos mashing up real Iran strike footage with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Mortal Kombat, Halo 2, Call of Duty, Wii Sports, Top Gun: Maverick, Gladiator, John Wick, Transformers, Deadpool, Star Wars, Iron Man, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Yu-Gi-Oh, and SpongeBob SquarePants.

This is clearly within my jurisdiction. This is all Disinfolklore. This is the use of contemporary folkloric tropes and memes to communicate national policy.

Six Archetypal Moves Inside the Iran Theatre