Can you say Clinton Foundation? There's likely some overlap between that sort of "high minded" liberals and the folks who ran a color revolution in Ukraine during the Obama years, which hasn't been turning out so well, and the continuing Trump insurgency in the current presidential cycle might have some roots in those same Obama folks running the same sort of information operation against the Trump presidency for going on nine years now.Possibly. A year ago, Matija Šerić offered an explainer under the title "Color Revolutions: The Most Sophisticated Means Of Warfare." At first reading, his essay suggests those machinations might not qualify.
Color revolutions are political term used to describe turbulent political events: mass street protests and riots in order to achieve a revolutionary change of government. Some revolutionary upheavals are successful and some remain only attempts. However, so far they have taken place in a number of countries at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century.It's possible that there might have been the sort of "mass street protests and riots" in the United States. Victor Hanson goes so far as to suggest those went on with revolution in mind.
Color revolutions broke out in the countries of the former Soviet Union, in the Balkans, in the Middle East, and more recently in other places such as Iran and China. The most popular revolutions ares: the Pink Revolution in Georgia in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan in 2005, and the Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014. Some observers called the events a revolutionary wave whose beginnings can be traced back to 1986 and the Philippine Yellow Revolution.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 21, 2025
It might not meet Mr Šerić's criteria, as some of the street protests took place whilst Mr Obama was the president.
One of the most important is the colored revolution. Under the guise of a democratic uprising, the removal of an unskilled government or a coup d’etat is actually being carried out.On the other hand, perhaps the most malign feature of the Obama presidency was precisely its implementation within the United States itself.
Most often, external powers (without exception, the West) sponsor, plan, organize and implement “revolutions”. The role of external forces in colored revolutions is crucial and without them they cannot arise. These are revolutions mostly in name only. In fact, it is a sophisticated form of warfare, often an international conflict, although the legal profession does not (yet) recognize it as such.
In order for revolutions to be successful, the necessary conditions for their emergence must first be created. The first and basic condition is political instability in the country, which is accompanied by a crisis of the current authorities. Political instability can be created due to electoral fraud, poor economic conditions in the country, dissatisfaction of certain groups such as farmers or artisans, school workers or medical personnel, etc. If the political situation is stable, destabilization must be created in an artificial way."Hands up, don't shoot" anyone? There was, however, more than enough dissatisfaction ten years ago to go around. "When President Obama had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a compliant House and the tailwinds of historic goodwill and more than a little cheerleading from the legacy press and the best he could do was a health insurance reform passed on reconciliation and a stimulus that didn't stimulate, what else is at work?"
The characteristic features of revolutions are: political blackmail and the movement of young dissidents.
Perhaps the Democrats attempted to create destabilization. Jonathan Turley calls out Hillary Clinton. "The Clinton campaign lied to the media, spread false claims of Russian disinformation, and was accused of being a conduit for Russian intelligence." Those accusations were credible enough in 2016 that the first two years of the first Trump term were tied up in process claims. Then, as Tablet contributor David Samuels argued, the Democrats, meaning more specifically Team Obama, continued to run an information operation (he uses the term "permission structure") that might have included elements of a color revolution.business wilding and wokeness as usual.Less than a week after Israel exchanges live terrorists for dead babies, somebody shows up in a protest at Missouri Member of Congress Mark Alford with, you guessed it, a Palestine flag.
To my mind, the point of the story I was reporting, in addition to being an interesting exploration of how the tools of fiction writing could be applied to political messaging on social media as an element of statecraft, was twofold. First, it usefully warned of the potential distance between an underlying reality and an invented reality that could be successfully messaged and managed from the White House, which suggested a new potential for a large-scale disaster like the war in Iraq, which I—like Rhodes and Obama—had opposed from its beginning.That's a long excerpt from a long essay. During the first Trump presidency, the Obama Morale Conditioners ran the color revolution. After Joe Biden notionally became president, the Morale Conditioners continued to engage in, to borrow Mr Šerić's terminology, political blackmail and the movement of young dissidents.
Second, I wanted to show how the new messaging machinery actually operated—my theory being that it was probably a bad idea to allow young White House aides with MFA degrees to create “public opinion” from their iPhones and laptops, and to then present the results of that process as something akin to the outcome of the familiar 20th-century processes of reporting and analysis that had been entrusted to the so-called “fourth estate,” a set of institutions that was in the process of becoming captive to political verticals, which were in turn largely controlled by corporate interests like large pharmaceutical companies and weapons-makers. Hillary Clinton would soon inherit the machinery that Obama and his aides had built along with the keys to the White House. What would she do with it?
What I did not imagine at the time was that Obama’s successor in the White House would not be Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump. Nor did I foresee that Trump would himself become the target of a messaging campaign that would make full use of the machine that Obama had built, along with elements of the American security state. Being physically inside the White House, it turned out, was a mere detail of power; even more substantial power lay in controlling the digital switchboard that Obama had built, and which it turned out he still controlled.
During the Trump years, Obama used the tools of the digital age to craft an entirely new type of power center for himself, one that revolved around his unique position as the titular, though pointedly never-named, head of a Democratic Party that he succeeded in refashioning in his own image—and which, after Hillary’s loss, had officially supplanted the “centrist” Clinton neoliberal machine of the 1990s. The Obama Democratic Party (ODP) was a kind of balancing mechanism between the power and money of the Silicon Valley oligarchs and their New York bankers; the interests of bureaucratic and professional elites who shuttled between the banks and tech companies and the work of bureaucratic oversight; the ODP’s own sectarian constituencies, which were divided into racial and ethnic categories like “POC,” “MENA,” and “Latinx,” whose bizarre bureaucratic nomenclature signaled their inherent existence as top-down containers for the party’s new-age spoils system; and the world of billionaire-funded NGOs that provided foot-soldiers and enforcers for the party’s efforts at social transformation.
It was the entirety of this apparatus, not just the ability to fashion clever or impactful tweets, that constituted the party’s new form of power. But control over digital platforms, and what appeared on those platforms, was a key element in signaling and exercising that power. The Hunter Biden laptop story, in which party operatives shanghaied 51 former high U.S. government intelligence and security officials to sign a letter that all but declared the laptop to be a fake, and part of a Russian disinformation plot—when most of those officials had very strong reasons to know or believe that the laptop and its contents were real—showed how the system worked. That letter was then used as the basis for restricting and banning factual reports about the laptop and its contents from digital platforms, with the implication that allowing readers to access those reports might be the basis for a future accusation of a crime. None of this censorship was official, of course: Trump was in the White House, not Obama or Biden. What that demonstrated was that the real power, including the power to control functions of the state, lay elsewhere.
The unspoken agreements that obscured the way this social messaging apparatus worked—including Obama’s role in directing the entire system from above—and how it came to supplant the normal relationships between public opinion and legislative process that generations of Americans had learned from their 20th-century poli-sci textbooks, made it easy to dismiss anyone who suggested that Joe Biden was visibly senile; that the American system of government, including its constitutional protections for individual liberties and its historical system of checks and balances, was going off the rails; that there was something visibly unhealthy about the merger of monopoly tech companies and national security agencies with the press that threatened the ability of Americans to speak and think freely; or that America’s large cultural systems, from education, to science and medicine, to the production of movies and books, were all visibly failing, as they fell under the control of this new apparatus. Millions of Americans began feeling increasingly exhausted by the effort involved in maintaining parallel thought-worlds in which they expressed degrees of fealty to the new order in the hope of keeping their jobs and avoiding being singled out for ostracism and punishment, while at the same time being privately baffled or aghast by the absence of any persuasive logic behind the changes they saw—from the breakdown of law and order in major cities, to the fentanyl epidemic, to the surge of perhaps 20 million unvetted illegal immigrants across the U.S. border, to widespread gender dysphoria among teenage girls, to sudden and shocking declines in public health, life expectancy, and birth rates.Mr Obama, though, was never the inspiring leader the faculty lounge thought he was. As Mr Samuels put it, "the fever broke."
Today, Donald Trump is victorious, and Obama is the loser. In fact, he looks physically awful—angry and gaunt, after a summer and fall spent lecturing Black men, and Americans in general, on their failure to vote enthusiastically enough for his chosen heir, Kamala Harris, the worst major party presidential candidate in modern American history. The totality of Obama’s failure left party donors feeling cheated. Even George Clooney now disavows him. Meanwhile, Trump and his party are in control of the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court.The New Neo extends the argument.
But reducing the question of what happened to Barack Obama’s new American system to the results of a single election is in fact to trivialize the startling nature and ambition of what he built, as well as the shocking suddenness with which it has all gone up in smoke. The master political strategist of his era didn’t simply back a losing horse. Rather, the entire structure he had erected over more than a decade, and which was to have been his legacy, for good or ill, has collapsed entirely. At home and abroad, Obama’s grand vision has been decisively rejected by the people whose lives it was intended to reorder. The mystery is how and why neither Obama nor his army of technocratic operatives and retainers understood the fatal flaw in the new system—until it was too late.
Obama didn’t enter into those things by convincing the public, whatever the media said and however the media helped. He accomplished them through Congressional machinations with the help of confederates such as Pelosi, and in the case of the Iran deal by ignoring any requirement that Congress approve it.The reckoning might only be in its early days.
Biden was simply not as adept at any of this, even if he’d been in full possession of his faculties (which he was not). And although Obama was pulling strings behind the scenes, it was no longer working. Much of the public had found in Trump a spokesperson who was remarkably plainspoken and in the position of being an adult who functioned much as the child in the Emperor’s New Clothes story: Trump said what he actually saw and for much of the public it was what they saw, too, and felt relief at finally hearing someone say it loud and clear and in a non-mealy-mouthed manner. Plus, by 2024, the public had seen the left in all its manipulative power-mad glory, and increasing numbers of the public didn’t like it.
The American people have gotten mugged by reality, and that’s a pretty powerful experience.
What the Democrats don’t realize is that they staged a French-style cultural, political, and economic revolution and tried to destroy their enemies by weaponizing government and the media—and they have now lost.Yes, and being undone by the unlikeliest of leaders.
This current counter-revolution is a return to centrist normalcy and just beginning. It is deemed wild only by feral Democrats, whose high crimes and misdemeanors, and various conspiracy theories over the years of their madcap rule are now being revealed every day.
Here's the lesson Obama never learned about America.But the people who served as rent-a-mobs for Mr Obama want to proceed with
He could corrupt our institutions and introduce trendy social nonsense, but he couldn't corrupt our vision of ourselves as a fundamentally fair and decent people. It seems strange, impossible even, that the fairness and decency counterrevolution is spearheaded by a fundamentally outrageous TV host/real estate developer — with a big assist from the world's richest man who wants to die on Mars. Yet here we are.
What a country.
We need, and can have, a giant rally—or several giant rallies, it’s a big country!—where speakers loudly and passionately make the case about the Trump administration attacking U.S. democracy and selling out regular working people to the whims of the rich. People will come! And they will learn that there are millions who are as angry as them, and ready to do something about it.The author of that manifesto might have been right about jumping the gun.
When should these happen? Personally, I think it best to wait a few weeks, since otherwise too many people might accept the Trumpers’ favorite refrain that opposition comes only from those who simply hate him and always want to oppose him. But we can’t wait long. We need giant mass rallies in defense of democracy by spring at the latest.
Who will organize this? Who has access to skilled and well-connected organizers? I don’t. But you’re out there. Let’s get this going!
BREAKING: Republican Rep. Mark Alford’s constituents are turning out in force to protest his support of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. This is incredible.
— Democratic Wins Media (@DemocraticWins) February 24, 2025
pic.twitter.com/Sbujc9eFIT
Normals are lucky in their choice of adversaries, but when the Democrats' so-called coalition of the ascendant deteriorates into an omnium-gatherum of freakazoids, the correlation of forces is favorable.
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