The Data Republican Series, Installment 6: The Democracy Files, Part 9, published by DataRepublican (@DataRepublican on X).
An orchestra does not need a conductor if every musician is reading the same score.
That is the image DataRepublican chose for "Part 9: The Big Picture," which she posted at 11:04 p.m. Central on Sunday, October 25. Her opening line says Sunday is a day of rest, so she stepped back and asked the question people have put to her since the files came out: where is all this money coming from, and who is in charge? The roughly five-and-a-half-minute video, titled on screen "Drop 9: No Conductor," answers with tax filings, published papers and recorded calls. "The short answer," it says, is that "nobody is at the top. They don't need anyone there."
Chapter one: the money
Her team ranked private foundations by how many lanes of this ecosystem their IRS 990 grants paid for from 2016 through 2024: the movement groups, election response, election officials, state and local government, and global work. The chart shows Democracy Fund, started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, reaching all five. Ford, in her accounting, gives the most to the strategy groups in the middle.
The receipts are specific. The Democracy Fund 990-PF for tax year 2024, shown on screen, lists $720,000 through the New Venture Fund for Future Currents, $150,000 through the New Venture Fund for the Horizons Project, $350,000 through the Tides Center for the 22nd Century Initiative, and $500,000 through Global Impact for GovAct. She flags that 2025 and 2026 filings are not yet public, so the money she can show ends in 2024.
Then she says something an honest researcher says. "Funding isn't giving orders." Her point, offered as analysis, is narrower: the same few program officers read the reports coming in from every lane.
The plan was published
The strategy was never secret, the records show. It was printed.
A 2022 Harvard Kennedy School working paper by Erica Chenoweth and co-author Marks, commissioned by the group now called Future Currents, recommended "building a united front" with capacity for "scenario-planning, conflict resolution, and diplomacy." In December 2025, Joe Goldman of Democracy Fund, Laleh Ispahani of Open Society and Deepak Bhargava of Freedom Together wrote in the Chronicle of Philanthropy what every funder should do: lean on courts and on "the independent authority of state and local governments," pursue "delegitimization of executive overreach," refuse to cooperate and build a big tent. Nine months later, the documents in her video show, the RAD campaign's working paper, "The Constitutional Role of Governors in a Federal Legitimacy Crisis," turned the same idea toward governors.
Then comes the vocabulary. A "Hands Off Our Vote" messaging guide from strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio's firm, ASO Communications, tells allies to replace "election theft" with "election sabotage," "election deniers" with "election traitors," and "free and fair elections" with "free and democratic elections." Its roadmap scripts the calendar: "Count Every Vote" during election week, "Voters Decided" afterward. Her video shows Indivisible's October 2026 toolkit repeating the guide's lines.
She tested the politicians too, checking 33 Democratic leaders and their lawyers on X from June 1 through October 25. Only one used a guide term, and he had used it since 2024. Twelve still say "free and fair." Reporting a result that cuts against your own theory is what credible researchers do.
A few people in many rooms
The overlap she documents runs through people. The filings she put on screen show Marc Elias's firm serving as counsel for the Democratic Governors Association in 2026 federal suits. A 990 for State Democracy Defenders Action, the group where Norm Eisen is executive chair, shows a $592,365 legal payment to the Elias Law Group for the year ending June 2025. Eisen's group hosted the election response network known as ESRN, and MoveOn's executive director at the time sat on its board. On October 14, the Horizons Project's Julia Roig said ESRN "already has tables in place in many of if not all of these states."
The rehearsals are documented as well. Her timeline lists 2026 tabletop exercises on troops at polling places, emergency powers and a disputed count, including a late-May Democratic attorneys general exercise in Milwaukee and an August 6 war game NBC reported was convened by Hillary Clinton at Eric Holder's law offices.
Then the material moved downstream. A National Security Leaders for America "Toolkit for Elected Officials: Managing Potential Military Intervention in the Midterm Elections," developed under the Horizons Project, tells local officials to "speak with one voice." Her team found a byte-identical copy on the U.S. Conference of Mayors website, uploaded October 19, and a pre-release copy dated October 12 on the site of the State Innovation Exchange, which works with state legislators. And on an April 10 recorded call, RAD co-leader Paul Zeitz described meeting with Governors Safeguarding Democracy, "a forum that convenes Democratic Governors," while seeking people who "give political legitimacy to these kind of processes."
Where she draws the line
DataRepublican is careful about where the evidence stops. Her video says states suing Washington and governors deciding what their Guard does are "lawful federalism," and her team's test of 32 organization families found no hidden network of shared phone numbers, offices or bookkeepers, with a right-of-center control group overlapping just as much.
Her careful sourcing is why her work survives scrutiny. The attacks on her keep failing for the same reason: she shows the filing, the page and the recording, then tells you precisely where the evidence stops. On Sunday her following on X passed one million. People can tell receipts from rumor.
The color revolution playbook
Her receipts also fit a pattern documented overseas. A color revolution was never meant to look illegal. It runs through lawful channels until the day it doesn't need to.
Look at the record overseas. In Serbia in 2000, the student movement Otpor helped bring down Slobodan Milošević, and an official of the National Endowment for Democracy said Otpor received most of the $3 million NED spent in Serbia from September 1998 to October 2000, alongside support from USAID and the International Republican Institute. In Georgia in 2003, the Kmara youth movement that helped drive the Rose Revolution was trained by the Liberty Institute NGO and funded by George Soros's Open Society Institute. In Ukraine in 2004, The Guardian reported that the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the State Department, USAID, Freedom House and Soros's Open Society Institute were the main agencies behind the "grassroots" campaigns. The Pora youth movement grew out of Otpor's model, and about $14 million was reportedly spent in Ukraine.
The method was the same each time. Fund the civil-society groups. Train the lawyers and the election monitors. Script one message, such as Otpor's "Gotov je," or "He's finished." Line up local and regional officials. Then, at the moment of a disputed election, declare the national government illegitimate and move all at once.
Set that beside what DataRepublican documented: foundation grants flowing through the New Venture Fund, Tides and Global Impact; a published strategy calling for "delegitimization of executive overreach" and the "independent authority of state and local governments"; a working paper on governors in a "federal legitimacy crisis"; a scripted word list with a calendar for election week; tabletop rehearsals for a disputed count; and a toolkit telling mayors to "speak with one voice." This is how they are using our own legal system to set the conditions for a color revolution here. That is my assessment as a retired Air Force colonel who has studied how these campaigns work, not a claim that she makes.
The playbook does not need a hidden headquarters. It needs money, lawyers, a shared script and officials willing to call the result illegitimate. Her files show all four.
Her post also puts Part 9 in context. In her assessment, what makes 2026 different is that "it's the first time we know of that we found an operational, short-term plan to actually do a coup," and this drop "sets up the stage for later, much more consequential drops." Her partners on the Democracy Files, [@SKDoubleDub33](https://x.com/SKDoubleDub33) and [@IamLisaLogan](https://x.com/IamLisaLogan), share in the credit for this series. "The worst is still to come," she wrote late Sunday, naming SKDoubleDub33 and Cynical Publius among those who can attest to it.
Follow the score to the money
The Illegitimacy Playbook does not need a central command if the money, the strategy and the words all line up. That makes the funding the right place for Washington to start.
The House Oversight Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee should ask Democracy Fund, Ford, the New Venture Fund, the Tides Center and Global Impact for every grant agreement and report tied to the groups and projects in these files. The intermediaries that carried these grants should be the auditors' first stop.
Agencies should run their grant and contract rolls against the organizations named in the Democracy Files and publish what they find. If a taxpayer dollar is underwriting any part of the "federal legitimacy crisis" planning in these files, end that grant.
Following the money is the reason I signed on to Vice President Vance's anti-fraud pledge on October 16, and why I cheered State Auditor Shad White's nonprofit spending dashboard here in Mississippi. Taxpayers deserve to see who funds the organizations that want to reshape how they are governed, and they should never be the ones paying for it.
Watch the phrase "voters decided" after November 3, as her video advises, and watch who says it first. I will ask her about all of it when DataRepublican joins me on The Rob Maness Show this Tuesday, October 27.
Same sheet music. Now let's see who paid for the paper.
