WORLD PREMIERE: Register for Bette’s Happy Hour with Stephen Douglas as He Debuts 12 Tools to Defeat Disinfolklore
Bette members: please register for Tuesday’s Happy Hour with cultural archeologist Stephen Douglas of Decoding Trolls, Disinfolklore and Power of Mana for a special world premiere — 10 am Pacific
***Bette members will find the registration link below the paywall. To join us, please upgrade to a paid membership here and help support independent investigative journalism during a time of grave peril.***
Another Bette World Premiere
Welcome to all the new members, Founding members, and gratitude to those who have been supporting me monthly and annually since the inception of Bette Dangerous. I am learning so much on my travels through Europe about the global infection of disinformation, and my words appear to be penetrating. I am reaching government leaders in the EU in ways I never imagined. Thank you again for making this work possible with your paid subscriptions.
This Tuesday, 5/20, we are bringing back cultural archeologist Stephen Douglas of Disinfolklore, Decoding Trolls, and Power of Mana. His work is so important to identifying and defeating Russia’s ability to hack our minds. As I wrote this week, dark fairytales are Russia’s number one export:
Douglas is graciously offering the Bette Dangerous community to be the first to hear his work-in-progress for an upcoming project:
Disinfolklore: Twelve Tools to Deploy, Detect and Defeat the Disinfolklore Universe Before it Destroys Civilization
Six Tools to Archetype Disinfolklore
Tool One – Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy
Tool Two – Incoming / Outgoing Troll Radars
Tool Three – Look for the Mana in the Meme!
Tool Four - Inner / Outer Realm immanences
Tool Five - Trigger, Experience, Reaction
Tool Six - The Code of Positive Trolls
Defeating Disinfolklore I – Six Tools to Adjudicate Disinfolklore: The Code of Positive Trolls
Tool Seven: Generosity ~ Is the Meaning in the Meme Generosity?
Tool Eight: Right ~ Is the Meme’s Mana Ethical Discipline?
Tool Nine: Mana ~ What are the Meme’s Implicit Archetypes?
Tool Ten: Is the Meme’s Mana Promoting Patience?
Tool Eleven: Mindfulness – Should I Potentially Allow this Meme into my Mind?
Tool Twelve: Insight/Wisdom.
As he walks us through his decoder tools, he invites feedback in the chat.
As an international lawyer and diplomat, Douglas 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, Douglas 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 help defeat it. I first learned of his work through the brilliant team at Byline Supplement:
He had a ringside seat while Russian Disinfolklore brainwashed some Ukrainians in Russia-occupied Ukraine into thinking, wrongly, their fellow Ukrainians wanted to kill them.
If you are not yet a Bette member, 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 paid membership, and I look forward to seeing many of you in the squares. And please don’t forget: this week we are meeting at 10 am PT, 1 pm Eastern, Tuesday, 5/20. Keep scrolling to bottom to register.
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