The Lulaverse: Munich put into practice

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 2025Here 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 2024On 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