The technique is the timing.

In the spring of 2018, Missouri was in the middle of one of the more consequential political crises in recent state history. Governor Eric Greitens — Republican, former Navy SEAL, elected on an anti-establishment outsider platform — was unraveling on two separate legal tracks simultaneously.

On February 22, a St. Louis grand jury had indicted him on invasion of privacy charges: a woman with whom he’d had an affair in 2015 alleged he had photographed her partially nude, without consent, in the basement of his home, and used the image to coerce her silence. On March 1, the Missouri House had voted unanimously — bipartisan — to authorize a Special Investigative Committee to look into it.

That committee released its first report on April 11. It was devastating. The woman’s sworn testimony described being restrained, blindfolded, partially undressed, and photographed without consent. Nine days later, on April 17, Attorney General Josh Hawley announced a separate investigation: evidence that Greitens had taken the donor list from his veterans’ charity, The Mission Continues, and used it for political fundraising — a felony. Hawley publicly called on Greitens to resign.

By mid-April 2018, Missouri House Democrats were in a position they hadn’t occupied in years. A Republican governor was facing criminal exposure on two tracks. A bipartisan House investigation had produced damning public testimony. A Republican attorney general was calling for his own governor to go. The political ground was unusually clear.

Then, on April 20 — the same day St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner charged Greitens with the charity donor list offense — recordings surfaced of Democratic State Representative Bob Burns calling into a radio show hosted by a man named Bob Romanik.

Bob Romanik ran AM stations in the St. Louis area for roughly a decade. His broadcasts were a reliable source of racist, misogynistic, and homophobic content. On February 9, 2018, he had used the N-word on air. This was not exceptional for his show; it was the pattern.

Burns, a Democrat representing a St. Louis County district, had called into Romanik’s KQQZ show multiple times in the weeks prior. The recordings, posted to a YouTube channel called “Romanik Watch” by then-State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal, captured Burns calling Romanik a truth-teller: “You preach truth, justice, and the American Way.” He told Romanik there was “a place in heaven for a guy like you.” He called him a friend. He praised his advocacy for veterans.

Burns had not used a slur. He had praised the man who did.

By April 21 — the day after the recordings surfaced — House Minority Leader Gail McCann Beatty had stripped Burns of his committee assignments, and a chorus of Democratic leaders including Senator Claire McCaskill and Auditor Nicole Galloway were calling for him to resign. By May, the full House Democratic Caucus had voted to expel him from its ranks. He refused to leave his seat.

The headline that spring, in the days when it mattered most, was not Republican governor faces impeachment but Democrats in disarray.

I was in the Missouri House when this happened. What I remember is how completely it worked — not in the sense that Burns faced any lasting accountability (he ran unopposed that November and won), but in the sense that the Democratic caucus spent its political energy on internal discipline at exactly the moment we needed it elsewhere. The tools available to the legislature for dealing with a member who has embarrassed the institution are, in practice, almost entirely social. And deploying those tools takes time, attention, and goodwill — all of which were in finite supply during a governor’s scandal that should have been a straightforward story about Republican misconduct.

I don’t know who ran the Romanik Watch YouTube channel. I don’t know how Chappelle-Nadal came to have the recordings, or whether she understood what releasing them at that moment would do to the caucus. These are questions worth asking, and I’m not in a position to answer them.

What I can say is that the effect was a textbook disruption operation: introduce a secondary crisis into the opposition at the moment the opposition has maximum leverage, force them to spend credibility on internal housekeeping, and muddy a clean narrative with complexity. Whether that effect was engineered or accidental is almost beside the point. The pattern is what matters.

This is how memetic warfare operates at the state level — and why it so rarely gets recognized as such. It doesn’t require fabricating anything. Burns really did make those calls. The recordings were real. No one put words in his mouth. What the operation required — if it was an operation — was only patience: the willingness to hold material until the moment its release would cause the most damage to the most people, none of whom were Bob Burns.

The target wasn’t Burns. The target was the House Democratic caucus’s ability to function as a coherent political force during the most significant accountability moment of the Greitens era.

Greitens resigned on June 1. By then, the Democrats had spent six weeks managing their own scandal instead of his. Greitens never faced impeachment. He was never exonerated, either. He left on his own terms, more or less, and the story of how Missouri’s House Democrats handled that moment is tangled enough that no one gets to claim it cleanly.

That’s what a good disruption operation does. It doesn’t have to win. It just has to make the other side lose the thread.

Sarah Unsicker served in the Missouri House of Representatives from 2017 to 2024.