How To Start An Uprising

The U.S. government and its intelligence apparatus developed and actively employ a sophisticated and evolving 'color revolution' playbook to orchestrate bottom-up uprisings and regime change globally, often disguised as promoting democracy and using cultural influence.

• The U.S. has a documented, university-taught 'playbook' for orchestrating bottom-up uprisings, evolving from 1950s intelligence efforts.

• The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) acts as an overt, yet secretive, intelligence operation to fund political influence and destabilization globally.

• Cultural and media elements, like sponsoring rap music and art, are key 'soft power' tools used to mobilize populations and facilitate regime change.

A vast, government-funded field of 'democratization studies' or 'civil resistance' exists, detailing how to engineer street uprisings and political influence operations. This 'playbook,' continuously updated for new technologies and government counter-efforts, originated in the 1950s within the U.S. intelligence apparatus, with figures like Gene Sharp and Henry Kissinger playing pivotal roles. These operations leverage soft power, including cultural and media influence, and can even be applied domestically, as seen in the 2020 Transition Integrity Project.

The Uprising Playbook

• 00:00:07 The U.S. has developed an extensive 'playbook' for launching street uprisings, a field known as 'democratization studies' or 'civil resistance,' taught in major universities and constantly updated. This body of work, originating in the 1950s alongside the intelligence apparatus, moved beyond traditional military coups to focus on political influence, especially in cases where desired outcomes, like election wins, are not achieved. The aim is to create 'civil society resistance' that can seize power.

CIA's Soft Power Origins

• 00:03:04 Gene Sharp's foundational research for the uprising playbook was funded with $50 million from the Department of War's Psychological Operations Center at the Harvard Center for International Affairs (referred to as the 'Harvard CIA'), created by Henry Kissinger. This research focused on enabling U.S.-supported groups to instigate 'bottom-up' rather than 'top-down' revolutions, a shift from pre-WWII military coups. The strategy involves generating large enough 'paramilitary' crowds through media manipulation to accuse elected leaders of illegitimacy and corruption, often funded through entities like USAID or the State Department.

National Endowment for Democracy

• 00:10:04 The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), established in 1983 by the Reagan administration, serves as an overt, taxpayer-funded mechanism for political influence, created to circumvent restrictions on the CIA's domestic and foreign manipulations following the Church and Pike Committee hearings. Its founder, Carl Gershman, explicitly stated NED was created to fund groups where direct CIA subsidy would be scandalous. NED operates through four core branches (Republican, Democrat, private enterprise, unions) and a media arm, with all grants secretly shared with the CIA under a 'sensitivity blanket' that makes them even more opaque than classified CIA operations.

Cultural and Media Influence

• 00:15:02 The U.S. State Department and USAID use cultural and media initiatives to sow distrust and instigate protests, as demonstrated in the 2024 Bangladesh government overthrow. Funds were channeled through NED and its Republican branch (IRI) to sponsor transgender dance festivals, LGBT advocacy, and hip-hop groups, creating 'musical and hip-hop anthems' with lyrics designed to mobilize youth and disaffected populations into street protests. This strategy of cultural 'hearts and minds' influence, which also includes funding music festivals and training foreign musicians as activists, is a consistent tool for destabilizing societies and achieving regime change, seen in Ukraine's 2014 coup and other regions.