REGISTRATION + VIDEO: Bette’s Happy Hour with Disinfolklore Decoder Stephen Douglas
MEMBERS: Plz register for Tuesday’s Happy Hour with cultural archeologist Stephen Douglas of Decoding Trolls, Disinfolklore and Power of Mana. Note time: 10 am PT/1 pm ET + Video from last visit
***Bette members will find the registration link and video from our March meeting with Stephen Douglas below the paywall. To join us, please upgrade to a paid membership here.***
BETTE MEMBERS: Please register for this Tuesday’s Happy Hour at 10 am PT. We are bringing back cultural archeologist Stephen Douglas of Disinfolklore, Decoding Trolls, and Power of Mana.
You can learn more about his work by revisiting RadPod’s Ep87 Countering Disinfolklore:
And Bette members can access our previous special event with Stephen below the paywall, where you’ll learn how critical it is to protect your psyche from the information you take in and how we can each learn to use our online skills to do good in this world.
An international lawyer and diplomat, Stephen found himself on a bridge in Ukraine, ensuring safe passage of civilians from 2015 through 2018, while listening to narratives coming from the Russian side that sounded folkloric to him.
He would then find the same narratives planted in Facebook and the media, and he began to dive into the origins of what he calls disinfolklore. He discovered that what we are experiencing is a power grab by oligarchs trying to destroy the post-World War II human rights gains through narrative warfare — they’re trying to get rid of constraints on their power. That it led him to a Pat Buchanan column from a decade ago on Putin’s Paleoconservative moment is nothing more than jaw-dropping. He manages to connect the dots in his work to show how it’s all about coercive control through story-telling, where the trolls like Putin and Trump — in their telling — never lose. As he described in my Byline Supplement Witch Switch article, they smuggle their bad policies in through made-up culture wars, which is cover for their incompetence.
Of his time in Ukraine, Stephen said he was a witness to a stealth genocide and didn’t know it because of disinfolklore — he now is dedicating his time to exposing the techniques so we can protect ourselves and and our world. I first learned of his work through the brilliant team at Byline Supplement:
Those who attend our Happy Hour will learn how to fine-tune trolling radar, engage in countering disinfolklore, and learn how to troll for the side of good.
“Contemporary Rightist movements have been captured by masculinist authoritarians whose projected vision of Right and the Good Society is Handmaid’s Tale —thank you Margaret Atwood for seeing this decades ago,” wrote Stephen.
He also wrote this report defining Trump’s Unified Reich:
In today’s post in Disinfolklore, he wrote:
I had a ringside seat while Russian Disinfolklore brainwashed some Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Ukraine into thinking, wrongly, their fellow Ukrainians wanted to kill them.
There is a similar pattern of designed division we have seen with less deadly consequences (so far) rising elsewhere in the world.
And if we can pinpoint how powerful Disinfolklore created and embedded division inside eastern Ukrainian society, where none before had existed, then, we will have a better chance to recognize and defeat similar efforts elsewhere.
Those Ukrainians who remained behind in Russia-occupied Ukraine after the 2014 invasion were kept, by Russia, on subsistence diets.
In its classic victim-blaming way Russian Disinfolklore propagated myths that Ukraine was starving those under occupation.
In international law a military occupier is responsible for provisioning those living under occupation.
Russia then portrayed itself in its Disinfolklore as the Knight in Shining Armour when it sprinkled a few breadcrumbs inside a community that had had no problems accessing food or fresh drinking water before Russia invaded.
Russia destroyed private enterprise in the areas it occupied. Every family, unless they had an entitlement to a Ukrainian social welfare system payment, became dependent on the occupiers for their subsistence.
Russia was able to exile, torture, kill, or imprison anyone who expressed dissent inside Russia-occupied Ukraine.
Or Russia’s coercive control operated more subtly. People understood that if they spoke out, they would lose their Russian-state funded job. They and their family would have no means to live on. This was another manifestation of the Russian coercive control governance model.
As I reflected on the meetings from today, I am fully aware of just how big a threat Ukrainian resistance is to those trying to topple global democracies. Literally, the fight Ukraine is putting up is the most important stand against authoritarian aggression since WW2 and what happens in this war determines all our future.
You can learn more about Stephen’s work here:
DecodingTrolls - Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon
And follow his substacks at Disinfolklore, Decoding Trolls, and Power of Mana.
Our weekly Happy Hours are open to all levels of membership, and I look forward to seeing many of you in the squares. And don’t forget: this week we are meeting at 10 am PT, Tuesday, 6/25. Keep scrolling to bottom to register.
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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