🚨🚨 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.

🚨🚨 THE ILLEGITIMACY PLAYBOOK / THE DEMOCRACY FILES: A PRIMER 🚨 I will be using this thread to track all drops, so bookmark it. I spent most of yesterday backing everything (now 312 gigabytes) up in various sources and getting the materials out to others. I also produced an AI video (below) to explain the whole thing to others are not on 𝕏 - feel free to distribute. Here's the primer: USAID, the foreign aid agency, had a democracy office. Inside the agency, it was called DRG. Officially, DRG administered "democracy assistance." They'd go inside countries they thought were sliding into authoritarianism and help the opposition there. That assistance included election monitoring, judicary support, independent media, and civil society building. You may have heard the term "color revolution." The model comes from Serbia in 2000, where trained student activists brought down Milosevic with the help of Western governments, after sustained protests. With the help of USAID's democracy office, this model was implemented in many other countries to topple governments: Georgia's "Rose Revolution" in 2003, Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" in 2004, and many more. Then last year, DOGE shut down USAID. But the USAID democracy office didn't stop. They formed a group called the Democracy Renewal Group, the same initials as their office (USAID Democracy, Human Rights, Governance). Their goal: apply their own playbook to the United States itself. This goal became a plan, called Renew American Democracy (RAD). It invoked the "4 B's" framework. Block - use lawfare and protests to make life harder for the Trump administration. Bridge & Belong - control dialogue and win people over. The final and most important B is Build. Build means redesigning the American government itself, and the crisis is the opening. In their own words: "We can take that breakdown moment and leverage it for a big structural reform, you know, refounding moment." - Danielle Reiff, DRG lead. Calls show DRG working alongside DSA on ideas of creating a different government, one that does away with the Constitution itself. DRG does not run the Block operations. They hand it to UDA, the United Democracy Alliance. One organizer calls it a "huge galaxy": lawsuits, street protests, non-cooperation. They list No Kings, Indivisible, MoveOn, 50501, and many other mega-activist NGOs among their members. Another organizer calls UDA Erica Chenoweth's project. Chenoweth is the Harvard professor behind the three-and-half-percent rule of regime change: get that share of a country's populace onto the streets, and historically, the movement wins. The UDA is very "hush-hush." They have no website, no roster, no filings. Then come the red lines: things the Trump administration could do, such as calling the Insurrection Act on protesters, that would mean that the federal government, in their words, "crosses the threshold into illegitimacy." Nobody voted on those lines. There was no public debate. These red lines were developed within secretive working groups, and in a paper addressed to governors and staff. In the words of Reiff/DRG: "So that if there is a red line crossed in terms of a Constitutional crisis, like everyone's already pre-organized. And so Mike Smith actually said, he goes, oh, you guys have the day after tomorrow plan." Cross a line, and the paper's options include states refusing to lend their resources to federal officials, and governors convening what it calls a "Third Continential Congress." Running the UDA's Insurrection Act working group: Rear Admiral Mike Smith (RET) of National Security Leaders of America (NSL4A). NSL4A is also credited with operationalizing UDA, the blocking operations. NSL4A consists of about 1,600 ex-officers, spies, diplomats. They're turning red lines into indicators and running a situation room to monitor them throughout the midterms and beyond. The NSL4A's lawyers told them to stop recording meetings in case of subpoenas. But the rest of the network continued to record. DRG works in conjunction with Renew to Thrive (R2T), which ended up accidentally publishing 400+ calls and thousands of documents. These calls and documents were never meant for our eyes, but it's them, on tape. Thousands of NGOs and billions of dollars are involved in this endeavor. Most of them believe they're saving democracy. The problem is that people who spent their careers deciding when other countries' governments had lost their legitimacy wrote that test for ours, in private, and planned for what comes after. Who decides when your government is legitimate?