Ben Dickinson

Entrepreneur on the move. Seeking diverse cultural experiences. I love America, but living in other countries is amazing too

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

Don't hand over your mind and nerves to the political stress merchants. Nothing would delight them more. They know exactly what to do with basket cases -- empty them completely -- so please make sure not to be one.

[Natalie Winters @nataliegwinters]

🚨 Indivisible, a major left-wing organizing group, says its ambitions go FAR beyond removing Trump:

“Our goal is the transformation of American democracy.”

Impeachment is merely “a tactic within a strategy to get to a broader goal.”

[Palmer Luckey @PalmerLuckey]

Never, ever let them tell you it can't be done.

[Patrick Byrne @PatrickByrne]

NEWSFLASH: Dominion CTO Eric Coomer’s libel case against me for saying Dominion’s equipment rigs elections was just thrown out by the judge on summary judgment. Trial was supposed to start next Wednesday, but the judge read our evidence and realized I was correct. No libel.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

If, by the way, the same situation that just happened in Brazil had happened but with the parties switched -- if Bolsonaro had won last night's election and then a pro-Bolsonaro judge sent the Federal Police to seize Lula's passport and bar him from leaving the country -- every major western media outlet and liberal NGOs would be screaming about the authoritarian attack on Brazil's elections and the destruction of basic freedoms.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

One day after Lula was declared the winner of Brazil's elections, his opponent -- Sen. Flavio Bolsonaro -- just had had his passport seized by the Federal Police.

Theose police were sent by notorious tyrant Judge Alexandre de Moraes. What a lovely democratic image.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

Voters in Ohio this week can look to what happened since last year in Virginia and New Jersey. Both states elected Democrat women governors who talked a pretty good "moderate" game and went full-blast radical on their first days in office and ever since. It's a Dem trend.

[Shiestynurse @shiestynurse]

I can’t believe this but I gotta do it. I never wanna hear MAGA NURSES CAN’T BE NURSES. The shit I hear from liberal nurses is beyond unprofessional. I hope this nurse learns from this report I’m about to make on her. I’m just glad I stepped in and helped the patient who was attacked by 2 random people.

[Latrice Littleton @latricex]

Notice the move. Don’t answer the concern, just laugh at it. When a real worry gets turned into a punchline, the goal isn’t to inform you. It’s to make you feel silly for asking. Ridicule isn’t a rebuttal. Stay sharp, and don’t let anyone laugh you out of your own questions.

[Cam Higby 🇺🇸 @camhigby]

🚨🚨 Abdul El-Sayed supporters who tabled outside his event today said I should be KILLED for being a capitalist.

They called for a VIOLENT overthrow of our government, I caught them on hidden camera. This is SHOCKING.

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

Bill Maher admits Trump is a remarkable listener who never interrupts and values every opinion in the room.

MAHER: "Remember, we were going to have a live execution of the Fort Hood shooter? Somebody talked to him. He DOES LISTEN when he’s in that White House. He never interrupts. He never gets mad. He listens."

LEAVIT: "He does. And he surveys the room. Something that I find admirable about him is he’ll look around the room, and he’ll ask the opinions of everyone in it, whether it’s a low-level staffer or his chief of staff."

MAHER: "True."

LEAVITT: “He genuinely wants to know how people feel, what they think. He takes their counsel and advice, and then I think he makes the best decision that he believes is best for the country in that moment.”

[@jason @Jason]

Let me explain reality… if you have but sixty seconds:

They were targeting Elon

They were targeting him with fake charges because the socialist-industrial complex is terrified that he would expose their long grift.

They came after him for the Model 3 and Elon’s claims around its potential.

That potential was realized, and it became, along with the Model Y, the best-selling electric vehicle ever created.

These were fake charges to try to stop somebody from building the best category-defining product.

Let that sink in: that's how evil these motherfuckers are.

The loooooong grift has been exposed: socialist grifters are stealing our tax dollars to fund fringe lunacy, NGOs and government programs without oversight or audits.

They’re parasites incapable of creating any product or service that has to compete in the open market.

Elon creates a couple of cutting-edge products each year, and half of them succeed.

Some of them actually change the world. Some of them fail brutally.

It's called capitalism. It's called creation.

This is what moves the human condition forward: trying things.

Trying really hard things.

Socialists come for the people building valuable products and services — that’s the tell

Keep your eye out for the people who've created nothing and risked nothing, but who are attacking the people who risk everything to create Something.

That's the tell.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

🚨🚨 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?

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

It’s not every day you stumble across a recording in which U.S. citizens discuss plans to declare the federal government illegitimate.

Here’s one particularly alarming excerpt:

“If the federal government’s deemed to be illegitimate … then the governors become the leading governing authority under the current republic framework of our Constitution.”

And then there’s this one:

“I really want to emphasize this is not a concept for a secession. No one is talking about leaving the United States.”

Of course they’re not “talking about leaving the United States”; they’re talking about a planned transfer of governing authority outside the constitutional process—replacing the authority of the federal government with governors and outside networks.

I hope this turns out to be a deep fake or a bad practical joke—because if it’s real, it’s unbelievably frightening.

Either way, it’s a good reminder to vote carefully in November.

[Rob Schneider 🇺🇸 @RobSchneider]

France has FREE health care, paid parental leave, paid family leave, FREE child care, FREE preschool, 5 weeks paid vacation, a 35 hour work week, generous unemployment and housing benefits, and heavily subsidized higher education.

Everything the left says they want AND THEY'RE STILL PROTESTING AND BURNING SHIT DOWN.

[Nayib Bukele @nayibbukele]

J’ai entendu dire que la France était finie, qu’il était trop tard pour la sauver.

Mais la France est toujours aussi belle, enviable même. Sa grandeur n’a pas disparu, elle ne demande qu’à renaître.

Nous avons surmonté en un an un problème cent fois plus grave, sans avoir les moyens dont dispose la France.

La France pourrait y arriver en une semaine.

[Nick shirley @nickshirleyy]

🚨 Paris is on fire as rioters take over across France:
Over 500,000 people have taken to the streets across France. Protesters and rioters have set fire to historic buildings, destroyed famous statues, and looted thousands of stores.

Police have been seen driving away after being attacked and overwhelmed by the number of rioters as clashes broke out across every major city in France.

Let this be a warning sign for the rest of the West: Hundreds of years of work and preservation gone in one day.

[Xi Van Fleet @XVanFleet]

Why do riots like this happen in the West, but not in China?

Because in China, the Communists are in control.

In the West, the Communists are trying to take control.

[Ben Dickinson @remote_b]

@nataliegwinters Interesting that California and Oregon each have one single county, while Washington isn’t even on the list

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

The censors are demanding terrifying new powers. My full warning to the West.