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 out in Munich in February 2025. It is about who is running it against us, as they did in Romania, and who has now run it back in Brazil. And it is about what the machine has found this month inside Volya Radio. A community of volunteers there has run the method for the war every night for two years. They have no name for what they do.

One sentence first, so nobody mistakes the subject. Lula’s view of russia’s war on Ukraine is not mine, and it is not ours. Many of us have said so since 2023. Tonight is about method. The method works whoever holds it. That is the point.

Munich, February 2025

Here is what I said in Munich, to a Pirate Party audience at the Security Conference. The speech has since been viewed over a hundred thousand times. I repeat my own words because the case tonight rests on the dates.

I declared that we live in a Disinfolklore Universe. Disinfolklore is my word, coined on 13 February 2023, for disinformation that works the way folklore works. It carries archetypes, the old characters and story shapes we all learned before we could read. It uses them to move our moods, our motivations, our attitudes and our intentions. The energy a meme carries from those archetypes into your mind is what I call Mana. Look for the Mana in the meme. That was the mantra.

I said this was not a metaphor. The war for our attention is not like a war. It is the main battlespace of a war, and the kinetic battles in Kursk and Kherson feed it.

I said that the power to archetype belongs to all of us, and then I gave the catch. If you own the means of cultural production, the platforms through which memes are made, exchanged and distributed, then you can archetype at scale. You can re-encode minds at scale.

I said that community identity is wholly formed through story-telling. Herder asked the German tribes in 1777 to unite behind their folksongs. The Grimms, Wagner and Goethe answered. Ninety years later there was the first unified German state. russia knows this. MAGA knows this. They build community out of grievance, fear and memes.

And I said what was to be done. First, know that this is what is going on. Second, create your own archetypes and counter theirs with yours, in your own mind and in your own sphere of influence, however small, modest or humble. Engage in conscious memetic warfare according to rules of engagement, which I called the Code of Positive Trolls. Six tests. Generosity, Right, Patience, Mana, Focus, Insight. If your memes conform to those six tests, that is positive trolling. It is Infolklore. And then make a call. Don’t just stand there assaying, like everyone on Volya does a thousand times a day. We make a call. We adjudicate. We listen, we read the meme, we decide, and we respond accordingly.

That was the theory. Now the two elections.

One guy worked out the box: Romania, November 2024

On 24 November 2024 Romania voted in the first round of its presidential election. A man called Călin Georgescu came first with nearly 23 per cent. Three weeks earlier the polls had him under one per cent. He had no party, no structures in the country, and had declared zero campaign spending. He had been expelled from the far-right AUR in 2022 for calling the Iron Guard’s founder and the author of Romania’s Holocaust heroes. His content was a lost true Romania, before NATO and before the European Union. His biggest theme in the last two months was peace. Peace meant that Romania should stop supporting Ukraine so as not to be dragged into a war. Beside it ran the line that ninety per cent of Romania’s food is imported, which, he said, is a crime against the Romanian people.

On 26 November, two days after the vote and eight days before any document was declassified, I published how it was done. My sources were two Romanian newsrooms, a think tank, and the commentator Ioana, of this parish. Here is the mechanism, and I want you to hold it in your mind beside what happened in Brazil.

Georgescu did not rise through his own videos. He rose through other people’s. G4Media and Info Sud-Est found that his name had been planted, as a tag, in the comments under everything to do with the election. “Călin Georgescu.” “Călin Georgescu president.” “I vote for Călin Georgescu.” Under the posts of his rivals Elena Lasconi and Mircea Geoană. Sorry, Ioana, for murdering those names. Under the television stations’ posts about the polls. Under a PRO TV post about the candidates’ wealth. The same accounts turned up under all of them. And then the platform did the rest. On a Lasconi debate video with over 900,000 views, TikTok’s algorithm began offering the name “Călin Georgescu” in the search bar of the comment section. The video was not about him. On Lasconi’s own page, seventy comments carried his name and the search bar offered it again. On a video supporting her with two million views, TikTok’s “search related content” recommended him. The reporters explained why. TikTok’s algorithm associates a phrase with the search bar when it notices the phrase appearing a great many times in comments.

So anyone who opened TikTok’s search box in Romania that month found Georgescu, whoever they had gone looking for. Expert Forum counted the result. In September he had 31,000 followers. In November he had 154,000. The hashtag #calingeorgescu had generated 150 million views. Almost all of it ran through that one tag, which is not how real popularity behaves. Real traffic scatters across many tags, as George Simion’s did. His was obsessively generated around one. In the ten days before the vote he gained more visibility than Geoană had gained in eleven months. And Expert Forum drew the conclusion before the state did. “The winners of exploiting the viralisation algorithm,” they wrote, “are clearly the far-right candidates.”

On 4 December the president declassified the five documents the intelligence services had put before the defence council, and they confirmed it in detail. A network of 25,000 TikTok accounts went to full activity two weeks before the vote. Seven hundred and ninety-seven of them had been created in 2016. They sat at one per cent activity until 11 November 2024, when the whole network was switched on, like a light bulb. Every account had its own address, so that nobody could measure the network by the shared infrastructure that gives bot farms away. The coordination ran outside TikTok, on a Telegram channel created in June 2024. Its subscribers were given the predefined tags to post, #CG, #diaspora, #calingeorgescu. They were given strings of emoji to put beside the candidate’s name, chosen to exploit TikTok’s algorithm. They were told to screen-record videos and alter them so that the platform would read copies as original content. TikTok itself found 1,183 accounts using one tag in every clip. It found 83 accounts following the emoji-and-name pattern, which left 2,912 comments. Twenty-three per cent of those came from Georgescu’s own official account.

That was the first layer. The second layer was the one with a budget. More than a hundred influencers with eight million followers between them were paid to describe an ideal president without naming him. Then the comments under each of those videos did the naming. The influencers were fitted to the candidate afterwards, by the tag box. And TikTok, asked by the electoral authority to remove the unmarked material, blocked it in Romania for a day and then left it visible. It classified Georgescu’s political posts as entertainment and showed them without restriction. The other candidates’ content was filtered.

Two days before the second round, D…

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