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So USAID, the foreign aid agency, had a

democracy office.

Inside the agency, it was called DRG.

Officially, it did democracy assistance.

They'd go into a country they thought was sliding toward dictatorship, grade it,

then help the opposition get organized.

Train activists, fund election monitors, plan for what comes

after.

Critics call that playbook color revolutions.

The model is Serbia in two thousand, where trained student activists brought

down Milošević.

Those same activists then started a training group, Canvas,

and by its own count, it has since worked with activists from

more than fifty

countries.

Georgia in two thousand and three, Ukraine in two thousand and four,

Egypt in two thousand and eleven.

And USAID was still backing that playbook.

In twenty twenty-one, the White House launched a program to back

people-powered

movements abroad. And in twenty twenty-three,

the largest single

award that office had ever made went to a coalition built to fund

activists and grassroots movements.

Canvas was in it.

Then last year, USAID got shut down.

Its democracy people were out of work, but they didn't stop.

A group of them formed the Democracy Renewal Group.

Same initials, DRG.

Their first project was running their standard toolkit on the

one country they'd

never graded,

ours.

The assessment became a plan. Renew American Democracy,

RAD.

Four parts.

Block the administration.

Bridge and belong. Win people over.

And build, which is the big one.

Build means redesigning American government itself, and the

crisis is the opening.

We can take that breakdown moment and leverage it

for a big structural reform, you know,

refounding moment.

They don't run Block themselves.

Their own plan hands it to the UDA, the United Democracy Alliance.

One organizer calls it a huge galaxy.

The lawsuits, the street protests, the non-cooperation.

They list No Kings, Indivisible, Move On, Fifty-Five Oh

One.

Another organizer calls the UDA Erica Chenoweth's project.

She's the Harvard professor behind the three-and-a-half percent rule.

Get that share of a country into the streets, and historically, the

movement wins.

And the UDA has no website, no roster, no

filings.

Asked for its notes, they are not public.

Then come the red lines.

Things Washington could do, like using the Insurrection Act on

protesters, that would mean the federal government,

in their words,

crosses the threshold into illegitimacy.

Nobody voted on those lines. There was no public debate.

They were written in private working groups and in a paper addressed to

governors

and their staffs.

So that if there is a red line crossed in terms of a constitutional

crisis, like everybody's already pre-ordered.

And so Mike Smith actually said, he goes, oh, you guys have the day after

tomorrow plan.

For the gray areas, the paper has a panel picked in advance.

So the test for whether your government still counts is theirs.

Cross a line, and the paper's options include states

refusing to lend

Washington their resources and governors convening what it calls

a Third Continental Congress.

Running the UDA's Insurrection Act working group, National Security

Leaders for America.

About sixteen hundred retired officers, spies, and diplomats.

They're turning the red lines into indicators and setting up a situation room

for

the midterms.

Their lawyers even told them to stop recording meetings in case of

subpoenas.

Most of the network did record, though.

Hundreds of planning calls, called Renew to Thrive, left on

public links. They weren't meant for us.

But it's them on tape.

Most of these people believe they're saving democracy, and they insist

it stays nonviolent.

That's not the problem.

The problem is that people who spent their careers deciding when other countries'

governments had lost legitimacy wrote that test for ours,

in private, and planned what comes after.