🚨🚨THE DEMOCRACY FILES / ILLEGITIMACY PLAYBOOK, PART 10: THE ROLE OF FOREIGN STATES🚨 (First post deleted for typo) How is an old government declared illegitimate and a new government declared the true successor? Months before the actual transition, the following are achieved in advance: • Civil society and activists get prepared for big uprisings. • Media narratives are pre-seeded. • Foreign officials provide cover. The last point is what this drop is all about. You saw it last night - as soon as Lula "won" the election, EU officials and Alex Soros immediately swept in with their congratulations. That is a deliberate strategy to grant Lula legitimacy, not an organic congratulations. The idea is to saturate the people with the idea that "this is the legitimate government, and you will accept it." In these files, we see the various NGOs strategize on how to reach out to governments in advance and prepare them for what is coming. We also revisit how USAID OTI, the regime change arm of USAID, allegedly re-organized themselves inside the country. We record one meeting taking place between Horizons Project and Catalonia officials. That we were able to document a meeting at all is unusual, because I'm told that these meetings are generally arranged at the highest levels and kept off the record (think Jake Sullivan, Norm Eisen level).

🚨🚨 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.