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 Spanish city on the African shore of the Strait of Gibraltar. It has been Spanish for centuries — longer than the United States has existed. About 83,000 people live there. On the land side it is bordered by Morocco, an ally of Russia, and the border is a double fence that runs down into the sea at a breakwater called the Tarajal.
On Thursday the 30th of July, the border effectively stopped existing. Spain’s government counted roughly 50,000 people entering in about a day. The president of the city said 60,000. Take the lower number: it is seven in ten of the city’s population arriving in 24 hours. At least 57 human beings died doing it — most drowned, some crushed in a stampede at the breakwater. They were mostly young Moroccan men, with Algerians among them, and a great many unaccompanied children. Footage from the Tarajal shows young men wading ashore chanting Viva España. Another chant was simpler: Bye Bye Morocco, Hello Spain.
Ten days earlier there was a trickle. Between 1,500 and 2,000 people had come across since early July, after Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that people who arrive by sea cannot be summarily pushed back. The ruling itself is a humane one — a court applying the post-World War II Refugee Convention, under which the right to seek asylum is sacrosanct. What was done with it was not humane. The Prime Minister says a self-serving interpretation of the ruling spread like wildfire through the smuggling networks. The gangs sold desperate people a rumour about an open door and marched them to the water. And 57 of them died in it. Whatever else turns out to be true about this week, that part alone convicts the people who organised the march. But it’s not the whole story. A rumour does not cross a militarised border by itself. Someone has to hold the gate open.
The Goats Are the Original Migrants
Longtime listeners know where I learned to read a crossing. Between 2015 and 2018 I was a peacekeeping diplomat on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska, then the only legal crossing point between Russia-occupied Luhansk and the rest of Ukraine. In the counter-Disinfolklore manuscript, I called the armed men on the occupied bank what they were: armed Ruschist bridge trolls. My job was negotiating with them.
The oldest troll story in our culture is Three Billy Goats Gruff. Three goats cross a bridge to reach new pasture, and under the bridge lives a troll who demands a toll. When I finally read that tale as an adult, standing where I stood, I saw what had been hiding in it all along. The goats are the original migrants — economic migrants. They just want a bit of extra food on the other side of the water. And the troll is the figure our stories have taught us to accept at every crossing since. He does not build the bridge. He does not own the river. He controls the one narrow place where you have to cross. And from that one place he controls the story of who you are when you cross it. Refugee or invader, returnee or criminal — you do not get to say; the one at the crossing says it.
In the manuscript I put the whole engine of Disinfolklore in one sentence, and I’ll read it to you as I wrote it: stories that embed an inner- and outer-realm division in our minds, with invaders from the outer realm said to be threatening the sovereignty, security, and the prosperity — fertility — of our inner realm. That is the machine. Stories. That is the whole machine. Every migration panic you have ever been fed is that machine running. And I wrote one more sentence you should keep in your pocket this week: it is a story structure that becomes a cognitive structure. The border on the map gets built in your head, and then someone else decides who stands on which side of it.
So when 50,000 people appear at a fence in a single day, the Disinfolklore analyst does not start by asking what the crossers wanted — 50,000 individual wants as old as our species: food, safety, a future. The analyst asks the bridge-troll questions. Who controls the crossing? Who opened it? And who profits from the queue?
The Receipts from the Gate
Start with who opened it, because there the record is rich. Spanish officers who stood at the fence say the Moroccan gendarmes opposite them stayed passive while tens of thousands walked past. The Spanish police unions went further — and I quote them as unions, rather than as the government, because the government says the opposite. JUPOL called it a window of opportunity inside a strategy of hybrid war. JUCIL called it an orchestrated invasion. Crossers told reporters they had been encouraged to go. Morocco’s ambassador to Spain says the whole thing unfolded against Morocco’s wishes — Morocco, which I remind you is an ally of Russia. And Madrid publicly praises Rabat’s loyal cooperation, while quietly returning people across the border at a reported 150 people a minute. By Friday evening, more than 48,000 of the 50,000 were back in Morocco. So the official story on both shores is that nobody opened anything.
The Precedent: May 2021
Now the precedent. In May 2021, the same fence fell open the same way. Around 8,000 people crossed into Ceuta in 48 hours — over 1,000 of them children (the mother and the maiden archetype: children) — after Spain quietly gave hospital treatment to the leader of the Polisario Front, the movement that contests Morocco’s hold on Western Sahara. The Moroccan police — and I remind you, Morocco is an ally of Russia — showed what Spanish officers then called unusual passivity. Morocco, an ally of Russia, explained that its border guards were exhausted after Ramadan. Wow.
A month earlier, Morocco’s ambassador had said in public that there are acts that have consequences, and they have to be assumed. The European Parliament called that episode what it was: the use of migration, including children — the mother and the maiden archetype — as political pressure on a European state. Spain’s own defence minister used a plainer word: blackmail.
And here is why the precedent matters more than any denial: the lever worked. Within a year of those 8,000 crossings, Spain reversed half a century of policy on Western Sahara and backed Morocco’s plan. Algeria broke off relations with Madrid over it. Every state on that shore learned the lesson the same week we did: the queue moves Spanish policy.
One more dated fact, and then you can weigh it for yourself. On the 20th of July this year, Sánchez went to Algiers to repair relations with Algeria, which is Morocco’s adversary. Ten days later, on Throne Day, Morocco’s national holiday, the fence fell open. The same ambassador who said acts have consequences in 2021 was the one issuing the denial this week. The Spanish foreign ministry formally rejects any talk of retaliation. The denials are on the record. So is the calendar.
The Angriest Man in the World Has a Friend at the Gate
Now widen the lens, because the question this week is not about Morocco alone. Two great powers stood to gain from a broken fence at Ceuta, and I want to walk you through what each of them actually did — dated and quoted — before I tell you what I contend.
Let’s start with Donald. His war on Spain has run for over a year, and it’s all on camera. June 2025, at the NATO summit, after Spain alone refused the new five-percent military spending target — a troll which Donald uses to try and coerce Europe into acceding to his blackmail on all policy issues: “Spain wants a little bit of a free ride. We’re going to make them pay twice as much, and I’m actually serious about it.” October 2025: “Maybe you should throw them out of NATO, frankly.”
Then came a second war on Iran, launched in February of this year — the war Spain’s defence minister, Margarita Robles, called profoundly illegal and profoundly unjust. Spain refused him everything. No assistance of any kind, she said. Absolutely none. And Madrid meant it: every flight plan connected to the Iran operation was rejected — Spanish airspace, American aircraft turned back.
Donald’s answers came in real time. Spain is terrible. And let’s remember: Spain is adhering to the post-World War II legal order in this matter. The UN Charter, which the United States is a party to, determines that the only lawful use of force is either Article 51, in response to an invasion — which is why Ukraine can do anything it needs to do to defend itself under Article 51, within the constraints of European and international law and the laws of war — or where the Security Council so determines. And there is no such mandate from the UN Security Council for Donald’s unlawful war against Iran. So Spain is enforcing international law in this matter.
Now the other side of the same ledger: Morocco is washing in gifts. Donald recognised Morocco’s claim over Western Sahara back in 2020, as the price of Morocco joining the Abraham Accords. Last October, his administration sponsored a Security Council resolution that made Morocco’s plan the basis of everything. There are $8.5 billion of active American arms sales to Rabat — good luck with that, Morocco — and a 10-year defence roadmap signed this spring, and a military build-up that the Spanish press writes worries Spain. And in the very week of the crossings, Donald announced on his own network that Morocco is naming a 1,000-kilometre highway through Western Sahara after him.
The angriest man in the world spent a year promising to punish Spain, and the man who holds the gate to Spain’s African city spent the same year being paid. Then the fence fell. And within hours, Donald reached for the pictures. “It’s terrible,” he said. “Remember that picture. That’s going to be with us in three years if the wrong side gets in.” His White House blamed far-left globalist policies. His senators blamed the socialist prime minister of Spain. The midterm elections are in November.
So here is where the record actually stands, and the two piles must not be mixed. That the crisis was exploited within hours for American domestic power is not a contention — it’s on tape, in his own voice. Whether any American hand touched the gate is a different pile, and no reporter has put it there. What sits in the record is a year of published rage at Spain, a river of gifts to the gatekeeper, and a president holding up the drowning of 57 people as a campaign poster before the bodies were counted.
And so, what I contend: this queue was farmed. Morocco held the gate, and the two powers that profit most from a Europe at war with itself — the one that spent a year promising to punish Spain, and the one that announced from a stage that all its hope was in the famine — were harvesting the pictures within hours. Whether either power commissioned the opening of the gate is an open question. The levers, the payments, the calendar are on the record. In this podcast, we judge trolls by what they do. “Remember that picture.” He told us himself what the picture is for.
“All Our Hope Is in the Famine”
The other great power at this crossing needs no inference at all, because it published its strategy from a stage. In June 2022, at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russia’s showcase, Margarita Simonyan — the head of the propaganda broadcaster RT; in my writing, Maid Marian, dressed in her green — sat before the cameras and passed on what she said the folk back in Moscow were joking: all our hope is in the famine.
And she explained, just in case we were a bit slow — and I repeat it because we are a bit slow; we don’t get this; we don’t understand the depths and the scope of what Russia does — she explained on the stage, sitting beside President Putler, sitting beside him with his authority, his legs spread out like some sort of actor playing an alpha male, and beside them Tokayev looking extremely awkward. She explained: meaning, the famine — the famine that Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian grain was about to inflict on Africa. This is June 2022. The famine will start. The migrants will come. Europe will lift the sanctions.
I have written about that dressing. It is the manipulator’s oldest distancing move — Donald does it too — authoring a tale and pretending it rose organically from the folk. Disinfolklore. Real folklore rises from below. Disinfolklore, which I experienced for three years in Russia-occupied Ukraine — Disinfolklore is authored above, and wears the folk as a costume. And notice who gets to tell us what those joking folk in Moscow intended: she does. Little green woman. Starve Africa to flood Europe, to free Russia to finish a genocide. And I repeat: the president of the Ruschist Federation sat beside her at the dais as she said this. She said it beside her head of state, at this forum, smiling. I have been pointing at that sentence for four years, because it is the whole doctrine of weaponised migration, in eleven words, from inside.
The Doctrine Has a Service Record
And the doctrine has a service record. In 2015, Russia carpet-bombed Syrian cities, and a million human beings fled to Europe — and NATO’s own commander said out loud that Russia was weaponising migration. I was crossing the North Macedonian border almost weekly. I watched the wave arrive. Britain got Brexit out of it. Europe’s far right got its wind. In 2021, Belarus issued tourist visas by the planeload and bussed the holders to the Polish border. In 2023, Russia pushed asylum seekers at Finland until Finland closed its entire eastern border — and weaponised migration is the Finnish government’s own term for what was done to it. And across the Sahel today, Russia’s Afrika Korps — its genocidal Prigozhin-regime, Odin-worshipping crew — sits astride the routes, in countries whose wars now push people north, towards, among other places, Morocco, and the sea, and the Tarajal.
Russia supplies the migrants. Russia funds and feeds the parties that campaign against the migrants. I have called this what a business analyst would call it: a vertically integrated system — demand and supply.
So what did Russia do? Within a day of the crossings, Ukraine’s foreign minister reported an intensive Russian Ruschist propaganda campaign across Europe, using pictures from Ceuta to sow destabilisation. More than 1,500 articles.
Weeping for the Goats
On the bridge at Stanytsia, I watched the troll put on a Red Cross armband and grieve for the queue it was murdering — the queue it was farming. Same armband, better bridge. And Spain’s far right, in blue. The picture Russia amplifies is the same picture Donald tells his voters to remember. The two systems meet in your feed, and neither of them built the bridge, and neither of them owns the river.
How the Crossing Gets into Your Head
Now the part that matters most, because you and I cannot close the Strait of Gibraltar — but the last stretch of this operation runs through our own minds, and there we are sovereign. Migration stories work on us because they are preloaded. Our ancestors were migrants, and received migrants, times beyond counting. And I believe those traumas are imminent in our minds the way the migrations are imminent in our genes. This is why the trick works on good people. The Disinfolkloreist does not have to build the fear — only to trigger it. Spend years telling a culture that outer-realm invaders — outer-realm invaders from outside the monarch’s castle — threaten its sovereignty, its security, and its prosperity, and afterward one word, immigration, fires the whole circuit, like a tuning fork in our minds.
In the manuscript I wrote and published, I traced how the branded outsider is emotionally easy to target for inhumane behaviour. This is the move I named Othering in the manuscripts. It’s one of the four signatures of Ruschist Disinfolklore, alongside misogyny, coercive control, and ransom. It does not matter which brand is stamped on them. It is the fact of branding which creates the inner and outer group.
You watched this run in America two years ago. “They’re eating the dogs,” said Donald on the debate stage, of Haitian neighbours in Springfield, Ohio. And when a CNN anchor asked his running mate whether that was a story you created, Vance said yes — and then he explained that creating stories, what I call Disinfolklore, was how you get the media to pay attention. They confessed the method on camera, and the method works anyway. That’s how strong the circuit is.
Two months before that debate — and this is on the network, stamped by the network — two months before that debate where Donald says they’re eating the dogs, I had written that by modelling willingness to eat dogs, drone-bomb, or drown prospective immigrants, far-right politicians are staking a claim for rightful sovereignty. Because in the Indo-European scheme, the aspirant monarch must show himself as strong as a warrior at the boundary of the realm — on the bridge, the troll at the bridge, controlling through tolling at the bridge, controlling access from and to the inner realm and the outer realm. And I wrote that two months before Donald Trump talked about the migrants eating the dogs. The cruelty is not a slip. The cruelty is the audition.
And none of it is new. In Belfast, years ago, a bonfire poster accused a politician of eating dogs. That politician was Anna Lo, the first ethnic Chinese legislator elected anywhere in Western Europe, and my old boss — a kind, brilliant public servant, recast overnight as the outer-realm creature that eats what er, dogs. Which brings us to the law I keep restating, because it keeps being proved: the attempt to use migration as a political strategy always results in more migration. Always. Campaign on the migrant menace, and you will pay the provocateur in the only currency he accepts: your voters’ fear. And he will keep the supply coming — by bombing, by blockade, by opening a gate on Throne Day. The people chanting at the Tarajal were not the operation. They were the ammunition.
Who Profits from the Queue?
So run the test I brought home from Stanytsia Luhanska. Not what does the troll say — what does the troll do? Who profits from the queue? Donald got his campaign pictures, and said so out loud while the bodies were still coming ashore. Russia got 1,500 articles and a continent arguing. Morocco got its leverage refreshed and a highway named after a president. Spain’s far right got an invasion to sell. Within a single day, Italy was calling to suspend Schengen with Spain, and France had border checks back. Division is not a side effect of a migration crisis. Division is the product.
And the crossers got the Tarajal. 57 of them got to the bottom of it. RIP. They were the three billy goats of the oldest story we own, out looking for a bit of extra food, and every troll on the riverbank collected a toll on their crossing, without building a centimetre of the bridge for them.
What Can We Do?
What I always say, because it always holds: when any politician makes migration the centre of their politics, go on guard. That is the tell — reliable as a tuning fork. Ask the bridge-troll questions before you accept the bridge-troll’s story. Who controls this crossing? What did they do — not what did they say? Who is being branded, and who profits from the brand? Say plainly — say plainly that the people in the water are people, humans — because the entire operation depends on you and me forgetting it.
And remember what the long record says about the crossings. Every one of us descends from people who crossed. The English language itself came into the island of Britain. The troll collects the toll only for as long as we pay in the currency of belief. 57 people paid at the Tarajal in a harder currency, and the least we owe them is to stop paying in ours.
So that is the story of the crossing at Ceuta. Name it for yourself. Thank you for listening. I’m Decoding Trolls. I write at decodingtrolls.net, where you can subscribe to my work and to my podcasts, published on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast platforms. You can subscribe to my work at powerofmana.net. Thanks very much for listening.
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