Okra

🚨🚨 DEMOCRACY FILES / THE ILLEGITIMACY PLAYBOOK, PART 13: THE NEW FOUNDING 🚨 The "democracy" ecosystem is mostly decentralized. There's competition sometimes (as this drop will show). But when a direction has been set by funders, actors converge towards a common goal. And that goal is: American government must be rewritten from scratch, and soon. RAD, the project of ex-USAID workers we've been tracing in the Democracy Files, represents one plan. PolicyLink represents another plan. What is PolicyLink? Towards the end of UNELECTED, I write about PolicyLink - a highly connected NGO which receives more than $50 million annually in funding. There, I describe its "soul work" - engineering the human soul to create a renewed democracy. That's not an exaggeration; that's how they describe it, in their own words. PolicyLink appears again in the Democracy Files. Here, you can see PolicyLink personnel use the same language we've seen in prior drops: founders, a new founding, redesigning the federal government. PolicyLink has over $100 million in assets and receives its funding from all the usual suspects - Rockefeller, Open Society, Ford, Gates, etc. It has worked closely with Democratic administrations in setting policy. RAD and PolicyLink compete for the same funders and the same space. But they say the same thing: a "new founding," drafted by people no one elected, ready "before the window opens." RAD is perhaps simply more honest about how that window will open.

🚨🚨 THE DEMOCRACY FILES / THE INSURRECTION PLAYBOOK, PART 12: IS NORM EISEN CALLING THE SHOTS? 🚨 First, sorry for the absence of drops; I had to go on a last minute trip to DC and back. @nataliegwinters has been releasing many drops adjacent to the Democracy Files, including materials on ESRN and Norm Eisen. The Democracy Files, while significant, are told through the lenses of a mid-to-high level operatives group of ex-USAID workers, a group called DRG (Democracy Renewal Group). DRG, in these videos, collaborate with other groups, receive briefings from others such as Rear Admiral Mike Smith (RET), participate in and host working groups, and so forth. But DRG are not the shot-callers. They explicitly do not decide when a mass protest has to happen. They do not have a final say in what has to occur before mass mobilization occurs. Erica Chenoweth isn't personally secretly running things. Mike Smith is a high level operational leader, not a shot-caller. So who calls the shots? Put together the Democracy Files and Winters' drops, and a larger hierarchical picture emerges: ESRN, Election Safeguards Response Network, which is mentioned in @nataliegwinters reporting. The Democracy Files heavily suggests that ESRN is who ultimately calls the shots when it is time to mobilize United Democracy Alliance (UDA). And that particular trail leads directly to none other than Norm Eisen. Now, this does not mean Eisen is the unilateral mastermind. Most likely, that belongs to yet another mysterious small coalition of elites - we can only speculate on who else is in that club; ESRN is financed under State Democracy Defenders Action, EIN 93-1524544. But Eisen's hands are on a great many levers, and we can reasonably infer he is one of the key decision-making figures.

🚨🚨 THE DEMOCRACY FILES / ILLEGITIMACY PLAYBOOK, PART 11: NOT-SO-INDEPENDENT SENATE CAMPAIGNS OF DAN OSBORN (NE) AND BRIAN BENGS (SD) 🚨 Two Senate candidates running as independents have ties to Renew American Democracy, the project ran by ex-USAID workers to restructure American governance. And one of them admits on video they've been "coordinating." According to the polls, "independent" Dan Osborn is in a toss-up race with Ricketts in Nebraska. Emerson has South Dakota "independent" Brian Bengs within single digits of Mike Rounds. The strategy is to elect enough independents to deny either party a governing majority—and use their votes as leverage for structural reforms. Osborn's 2024 field director, Austen Campbell, laid out the plan: "We have a goal for 2026 to run a slate of independents and deny both political parties the majority in the House of Representatives in hopes of getting an independent speaker." Bengs said echoed that on a September 2026 Renew to Thrive call: "We don't need to get 50 or 51 to change things. We just need a handful." In their words, this handful is to do "arm-twisting" to get the structural reforms they want. ➡️ Paul Zeitz's May 2026 Concept Note: open primaries, ranked-choice voting, and "independent" redistricting. ➡️ RAD's Constitution Emergency Response draft: an Article V convention with amendments on "campaign finance and voting rights restoration, healthcare, education, and economic security, and ecological rights and climate accountability." The draft calls that the MODERATE strategy. And the political objective extends beyond reforming elections. In 2023, Walt Roberts told the man who now runs the Independent National Convention that stopping the MAGA GOP was "job one." As for ending the two-party duopoly? "That's very secondary right now." Put those statements together. A plan to deny both parties a majority. Candidates running as independents. A small voting bloc positioned to extract concessions. A documented list of proposed constitutional and electoral changes. And a stated priority of stopping the MAGA GOP. The question for Nebraska and South Dakota voters is whether they know what these candidates' political allies have been planning... and whether Osborn and Bengs share those objectives.