By Douglas V. Gibbs
France is burning again, and this time nobody is pretending it is about an eighteenth century king, a fuel tax, or complaining students.
The pattern has moved past Paris. Rotterdam, Brussels, parts of Germany and Italy – the same choreography: a cost-of-living grievance, then the arrival of organized cadres who torch what the state will not defend, then a government that hesitates to apply force because force can be photographed and called repression. The French leadership has admitted the obvious: that police “lost control” in major cities despite enormous deployments. That admission is the whole story. The disorder is not a failure of the plan. The disorder is the plan.
And there is a documentary trail showing that the same people who exported the color-revolution model to Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine have now turned it inward – on us.
This is no longer speculation. DataRepublican’s “Democracy Files” drop, 312 gigabytes of leaked calls and internal documents from the network surrounding the shuttered USAID democracy office, lays out a sequenced strategy with a name. USAID’s Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance office (DRG) did not dissolve when DOGE shut the agency down. It reconstituted as the Democracy Renewal Group, kept the acronym, and set about applying its foreign playbook to the American republic.
Their plan is called Renew American Democracy. It runs on the “Four B’s.” Block: lawfare and street action to make governance impossible. Bridge and Belong: control the vocabulary, capture the institutions that define reality. And Build: the payoff. As DRG lead Danielle Reiff put it on tape, “We can take that breakdown moment and leverage it for a big structural reform, you know, refounding moment.”
The blocking operations are subcontracted to an outfit called the United Democracy Alliance (no website, no roster, no filings) described by one organizer as a “huge galaxy” of litigation, protest, and non-cooperation, with No Kings, Indivisible, MoveOn, and 50501 among its members. Another organizer calls UDA “Erica Chenoweth’s project,” after the Harvard professor whose “3.5 percent rule” holds that once that share of a population is in the street, the government falls. A retired rear admiral, Mike Smith of National Security Leaders of America, runs the working group on the Insurrection Act. NSL4A’s roughly 1,600 ex-officers, spies, and diplomats have built a situation room to monitor the midterms and whatever follows.
Then there are the “red lines.” A list of things the Trump administration might legitimately do that would, in their judgment, cause the federal government to “cross the threshold into illegitimacy.” They will say that nobody voted on those lines. They will say that there was no public debate. The enemy has prepared, planning to use any response against America; a response drafted in private working groups and handed to governors in a paper. According to their plan, if President Trump crosses just one red line, they will response… and the options include states withholding resources from federal officials and governors convening a “Third Continental Congress.” As a note, a “Third Continental Congress” (a play on language because what it would be is the collusion of leftist leaders to make it sound like an honest revolution) would be unconstitutional. Illegal. A violation of Article I, Section 10.
Stop and appreciate what the left says they are planning. A small room of people who spent their careers grading other countries’ democracies have written the grading rubric for our republic, and they wrote it so that they hold the pencil.
The Constitution answers the legitimacy question with unusual clarity. Legitimacy in America derives from ratification. Legitimacy is tied to the consent of the governed. From the “We the People” of 1787 who ordained and established a charter of enumerated powers, and from the amendment machinery of Article V that the charter itself supplies for its own correction. Article V is the only authorized procedure by which the fundamental law may be remade, and it is deliberately hard: two-thirds of both houses or a convention of states, then three-fourths ratification by the legislatures or by a state through convention. Difficulty is the feature. It forces broad consent.
Against that, the Democracy Renewal Group offers a rival constitution. Unwritten. Unpublished. Unratified. And, enforced by street count. Their “red lines” are a shadow Article V with none of the formalities. Their “Third Continental Congress” is an Article V convention in costume, convened without the applications, the delegates, or the ratification.
The runaway convention feared by many of my allies, operated and guided by the enemy for the purpose of destroying the American System.
Madison warned in Federalist 10 that the cure for faction is structural. Extend the sphere, multiply the interests, force compromise through institutions. In short, set them against each other. Operate in a manner so that even the minority voice has a voice, and checks and balances exist throughout the process.
What the network has built is the opposite: a faction that has decided in advance that the institutions are the obstacle and that the only legitimate output is the one it has already written.
And note the sequence. If the Left wins in November, the win becomes a mandate to “build.” A claim that they have the right to rewrite the structure while the breakdown is fresh. If the GOP holds, the loss becomes proof of illegitimacy and the justification for escalating the block. Either result lands on the same destination. This is not a strategy with two outcomes. It is a strategy with one outcome and two on-ramps.
The Federalist’s Chuck DeVore put the military question precisely: the planning treats the Insurrection Act as a trap that springs only if the president walks into it on their timetable.
The original understanding of that statute is worth recovering, because the modern argument has lost it. The 1792 Calling Forth Act and the 1807 Insurrection Act were not grants of domestic war power. They were supplements to state authority, premised on the constitutional reality that policing in America is overwhelmingly local and always has been. Washington marched against the Whiskey Rebels in 1794 at the head of state militias, with federalized authority riding alongside local legitimacy. The structure of Article I, Section 8, Clause 15 and Article IV, Section 4 assumes the states are the primary custodians of domestic order and the federal government the backstop.
In Los Angeles in 1992, that arrangement worked exactly as designed. Mayor Tom Bradley asked. Governor Pete Wilson activated. President Bush invoked. A National Guard captain named Chuck DeVore led patrols in Crenshaw with live ammunition and was thanked by residents. Visible force restored order with remarkably few rounds fired.
But the reality is, insurrection is bigger, and a federal issue.
Now compare. Today’s mayors and governors are far likelier to refuse federal help and then litigate the deployment, so that the troops become the story and the arson becomes the backdrop. The trap is elegant: intervene, and you are handed the “fascism” frame; stay out, and Democratic cities eat the visible consequences of their own governance and blame the federal government for non-intervention.
Both paths have real costs. The point is that the choice was designed by the other side, in advance, in a room, without you.
There is a longer fuse here, and Michael Hurd in Newsmax traced it. The campus radicalism of the 1960s became the political correctness of the 1990s, which became the administrative soft dictatorship of the Obama–Biden years, which crested in 2020–21. And if one looks carefully, we are being positioned to be on the dawn of a Maoist revolution. Struggle sessions have returned as public denunciation. The ritualized humiliation of the insufficiently compliant. The demand that the pop star, the professor, the CEO, and the neighbor declare their allegiance and adoration. Mao’s Cultural Revolution did not require a legislature. It required only that everyone know the price of silence.
Cultural Revolution is the correct model for what we are experiencing, and what is coming in an oncoming greater avalanche of madness – because it is what you get when a movement has captured every commanding institution. They have captured the schools, campuses, newsrooms, entertainment, corporate HR, and the permanent bureaucracy. But, their anger is becoming rage because they still cannot win consent at the ballot box consistently enough to feel secure. The answer is never persuasion. It is compliance. And they are attempting to position themselves to make that compliance mandatory.
But, when you control the culture, but not the constitutional structure, the structure becomes the enemy. Hence “refounding.” Cloward-Piven. The plan is to destroy it all, and then let their communist utopia rise like a phoenix from the rubble.
Then, we add another ingredient, because the communist/leftist/globalist conspirators have found their lackeys. Their useful idiots. The Red/Green Axis. An alliance of hard-core communist leftism and Islamism. And the addition of the second blade of the axis is being slipped into place before our very eyes.
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The Michigan Senate race is the live demonstration. Abdul El-Sayed’s documented ties run through his mother’s Muslim Brotherhood activism, his own 2012 letter backing Mohamed Morsi and calling for purges of the media and police, his MSA vice presidency at a chapter of a network researchers describe as a Muslim Brotherhood feeder, and a donor and family circle thick with Brotherhood-adjacent and Hamas-adjacent figures. He calls Hamas “evil” and the Israeli government “evil” in the same breath, and his own former staffer explains why he cannot do more: “he’s going to lose the people that brought him up in the first place.”
That is the Green half of the axis. Tom Gilbreath, drawing on Peter Hammond and Hal Lindsey, reminds us why the Green half is not merely a religious minority asking for space. Hammond’s formulation is blunt: “The primary aim of Islam is not spiritual but political.” Maududi said it plainly: Islam wishes to destroy all states and governments opposed to its program. The population thresholds are contested, but the European evidence is not. Immigration without assimilation, as Hal Lindsey put it, is invasion by another name.
Why do Red (communists) and Green (Islam) fuse so easily? Because both are totalizing. Both treat the constitutional order as provisional and subordinate – one to the dialectic, the other to the ummah. Neither can accept a charter of enumerated powers that leaves large areas of life outside the state’s jurisdiction, because both need the whole of life inside it. Red supplies the institutional capture and the street muscle. Green supplies the demographic arithmetic and the moral absolutism. Together they produce a coalition that can win elections locally and then refuse to be bound by the results nationally.
J.B. Shurk asked the question that ought to be embarrassing to the Left: with the EU, the BBC, the Times, the universities, Wall Street, the NGO archipelago, and the administrative state all in hand, why not simply build the paradise and leave the rest of us alone?
Because, as he argues, leftism does not build. It takes. Without an oppressor to name, it devours itself. And crucially, it cannot tolerate a functioning jurisdiction outside its control, because a prosperous free county next door is a standing indictment. The Soviets built the Wall to keep people in.
George Orwell gave us a warning, and apparently we’ve stopped listening.
This is the strongest argument for federalism ever made by accident. The Tenth Amendment and the reserved powers were designed for exactly this: so that the country could hold two civilizational models at once and let them compete. State Sovereignty is the great check against leftism, and The Left understands that better than most conservatives do. Which is why they’ve been dismantling the voice of the states through things like 1913’s Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments, and Reynolds v. Sims (1964), among other things. They need the states to be relegated to the status of provinces. Voiceless regions who do as they’re told, and operate as ordered. The Left’s “refounding” means centralization, and that is exactly why a Third Continental Congress would not be called to strengthen the states but to subordinate them.
As defenders of the American System, the United States Constitution, and our Natural Rights (Life, Liberty, Property, etc.) we have three orders of business.
First, insist on the text of the Constitution and the historical context behind that text. When someone tells you a red line makes the government illegitimate, ask by what clause. When someone proposes a “Third Continental Congress,” ask for the Article V applications and if they understand Article I, Section 10. When someone says the structure must be rebuilt, ask whether the rebuild will be ratified by three-fourths of the states or announced by the people who wrote the blueprint.
Second, understand that the Constitution is a counter-revolutionary document by design. It was written to slow things down and disallow the centralization of power. It is full of key mechanisms: A separation of powers, staggered terms, bicameralism, supermajorities, independent branches of government, and a Senate that answers to state legislatures in its original design. Every one of those features is an obstacle to a “breakdown moment” being converted into a refounding. They will come for the features first.
Third, prepare locally. It all begins in our communities. Policing is local. Election administration is local. The county and a constitutional sheriff is the unit of resilience. If the federal backstop becomes contested, the state and county that organized in advance will hold; the ones that waited for a phone call from Washington will not.
The midterms will resolve nothing. From a political power position, a win for the GOP is critical if the Republicans are willing to stand as opposition to tyranny. But the war is within that party, as well. The infiltrators are everywhere. This is not left versus right, or Democrat versus Republican as much as it is liberty versus tyranny. But, despite the election, in the end, whatever the count, the block continues. The war for our country is not suddenly over. France is the preview, the Democracy Files are the script, and the only open question is whether the people who wrote the red lines will be the ones who decide when the republic has failed, or whether the text will.
The Framers already answered that. It is in Article V., Amendment Ten, and Article I, Section 10. It is in the republic. It is in State Sovereignty. It is in the consent of the governed in a republic designed to stop this kind of onslaught. It has been there the whole time.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
