Hey! Glad you made it. It’s Sunday, Oct. 25, 2026. Coffee’s on, and so is the frying pan with eggs, sausage, and the specialty of the house, Florack's home fries.
My calendar says it’s Greasy Foods Day (which explains the frying-pan breakfast). It's also I Care About You Day, International Artist Day, and World Pasta Day. So fry something unholy, pile it on a plate of home fries, and tell someone you care about them. But you'd better do that before calling in your cardiologist becomes a requirement.
Today in History:
1415: Henry V’s outnumbered English army routs the French at the Battle of Agincourt on St. Crispin’s Day. (Here's the most recent movie on the subject.)
1760: George III becomes king of Great Britain, the monarch the colonies would soon have plenty to say about.
1812: The frigate United States, under Capt. Stephen Decatur, captures the British frigate Macedonian off the Canary Islands.
1854: The Light Brigade charges into the valley at Balaclava during the Crimean War, giving Tennyson his famous poem.
1944: Japanese pilots launch the first organized kamikaze attacks of the war during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
1955: Tappan introduces the first microwave oven for home kitchens.
1960: Bulova unveils the Accutron, the first electronic wristwatch.
1971: The United Nations General Assembly votes to seat the People’s Republic of China and expel Taiwan.
1983: President Ronald Reagan sends troops into Grenada to rescue students and topple a Marxist junta.
1999: A plane carrying golfer Payne Stewart loses cabin pressure and crashes in South Dakota, killing all six aboard.
2001: Microsoft releases Windows XP, beginning a long run of IT departments refusing to let it die.
Birthdays Today include: Johann Strauss II, composer (“The Blue Danube”); Georges Bizet, composer (Carmen); Pablo Picasso, artist (Guernica, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon); Richard E. Byrd, polar explorer and naval aviator; Minnie Pearl, comedian (Grand Ole Opry, Hee Haw); Marion Ross, actress (Happy Days); Bobby Knight, basketball coach (Indiana Hoosiers); Anne Tyler, novelist (The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons); Helen Reddy, singer (“I Am Woman,” “Delta Dawn”); Nancy Cartwright, voice actress (The Simpsons); Pedro Martínez, Hall of Fame pitcher (Boston Red Sox); Craig Robinson, actor (The Office, Hot Tub Time Machine); Katy Perry, singer (“Roar,” “Firework”).
If today’s your birthday too, Minnie Pearl says, “How-DEE!”
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From Glenn Reynolds:
Via DataRepublican, we have learned that a group of Democratic governors, retired military and intelligence officers, and former USAID “color revolution” specialists, have for some time been plotting to pull off a color revolution in the United States. Or, to put it more precisely, they have been conspiring to overthrow the constitutionally elected government of the United States, and to replace the Constitution with something completely different.
There’s a lot of data, including videos, recordings, transcripts of Signal chats, etc., but the gist is this: If the Democrats take the House and Senate (and maybe if they don’t), various leftist groups will stage violent protests, intended to press Trump into invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in troops. Once he does, Democratic governors in blue states will denounce his acts as illegal (whether they are or not) and mount resistance on various levels. The goal is to destabilize things enough that they can seize power and replace the Constitution.
(Shaking my head.)
Mmmf. Look, it's not as if some of us haven't been warning about something like this for several years now.
The left has spent those same years screaming about its fear of exactly this scenario, just with the roles reversed. By its take, President Donald Trump sends in the troops, democracy dies, and so on. I forget where, but I've already written that the only way we'd ever get there would be another "Summer of Love" with burning cities, shot cops, and the whole bit. Turns out the deep state was writing the same script, but actually acting on it.
As usual with Democrats, it's not what caused the reaction from the right; it's the reaction itself that they label the problem.
The researcher known as DataRepublican says an insider handed her thousands of pages of documents and hundreds of recordings. By her account and others', somebody in the network had an AI note-taker recording and archiving calls going back to 2023, then left the archive sitting in a publicly accessible Google Drive. Color-revolution experts, ladies and gentlemen.
She has been releasing the material in chunks, and a few things in it are hard to wave away. In one of those recordings, a former USAID hand who co-founded a group called "Renew American Democracy" walks through three "crisis scenarios or democratic emergencies" people should prepare for: an election meltdown, "potential militarization, the Insurrection Act," and an "acute democratic crisis."
Another recording describes an options memo for governors on how they might respond if the federal government came to be regarded as illegitimate, including coordination among states and communication with foreign governments. A speaker in another call describes meetings with "Governors Safeguarding Democracy," a forum of Democratic governors. That group, in case you don't know, was started about a week after Donald Trump was elected. Its co-chairs at launch were Gov. JB Pritzker (D-Ill.) and Gov. Jared Polis (D-Colo.). As far as I've been able to find out, these are still at the head table.
The coalition is backed by the Governors Action Alliance (GovAct). GovAct’s advisory board includes former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and former governors from both parties, among them RINOs Arne Carlson of Minnesota and Bill Weld of Massachusetts, and Democrat Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. The group says philanthropic donations fund it, not Pritzker. (Yeah, I trust that one. Not.)
And according to the material, a retired rear admiral (Rear Adm. Michael Smith, I believe) who founded National Security Leaders for America runs an Insurrection Act working group that has been role-playing post-election scenarios. The intellectual scaffolding comes straight from Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan's Why Civil Resistance Works, the go-to academic text on how mass movements topple governments, including its finding that defections by security forces make those campaigns vastly more likely to succeed. That last part would seem to explain the push you will recall about "ignoring illegal orders from Trump." It should be noted, that despite the label applied of "nonPartisan," in September 2024 it endorsed Kamala Harris in a letter signed by more than 700 members, and it endorsed dozens of congressional candidates, nearly all of them Democrats.
Look that list over closely. These aren't basement-dwelling college kids with a can of spray paint. These are people who spent careers studying how to bring down foreign governments and are now gaming out what happens to ours.
Now, in fairness, and because the other side will throw this at us anyway, let's separate what the tapes show from what people are reading into them.
The groups involved say their purpose is protecting elections and peaceful protest. I don't believe it for a microsecond, but that's their claim. Chenoweth's published work is about nonviolence, not violence. Nothing released so far shows a sitting Democratic governor signing onto a plan to overthrow anything. Which, of course, explains Pritzker's being at the head of this sordid parade, right?
Even some of the folks amplifying the story concede the governors never had to sign on explicitly; the theory is that they'd simply refuse federal troops and let the activist networks handle the rest.
So I'd stop short of calling any particular Democratic governor a coup plotter on the strength of what we've seen. Not yet. That's the kind of overreach that lets the corporate press dismiss the whole thing as a right-wing fever dream and change the subject.
But here's the thing: you don't need a coup to have a problem. Or, as George Carlin noted on Bill Maher's show, "You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge.” Odd thing: Maher was needling him for being a "conspiracy theorist" when he said that.
The most damning part of all this isn't a plot. It's the paperwork.
These people have defined, in advance, a set of "red lines" past which the federal government "crosses the threshold into illegitimacy." Nobody voted on those lines. No court drew them. A collection of unelected former officials and activists drew them in working groups, then shopped them to governors.
Think about what that means. The Insurrection Act is a duly enacted federal law that presidents of both parties have used, from Eisenhower in Little Rock to George H.W. Bush in Los Angeles in 1992. If a president invokes it, the remedy is the courts, Congress, and the next election. Not a pre-written memo telling governors the federal government no longer counts.
When you decide ahead of time which lawful acts will make an elected government "illegitimate," you're not safeguarding democracy. You're building an off-ramp from it and opening a window for your own dreams of power.
And let's apply the standard these same people set for us.
For five years, we've been told that Republicans who game-planned alternate electors, contested certifications, or talked about refusing to accept an election result were plotting a coup, full stop. Memos were evidence. Phone calls were evidence. Working groups were evidence. People went to prison.
Fine. Then a working group of former national security officials drafting options for governors to treat the federal government as illegitimate gets the same scrutiny. Every bit of it. If it was sedition when a Trump lawyer wrote a memo, it doesn't become "civic preparedness" when a former USAID official does.
That's not a double standard. That's the single standard the left insisted on, applied evenly for once.
The midterms are 9 days out, or less by the time you read this. If the material is accurate, the people in these recordings see Election Day as the starting gun, not the finish line.
So watch for the pattern. Watch for "peaceful" protests that happen to arrive with fireworks, lasers, and preprinted signs. Watch for governors who suddenly start talking about which federal orders they will and won't recognize. And watch which outlets rush to tell you none of this is happening, while the people on the tapes explain, in their own words, exactly how it's supposed to happen.
A famous saying of questionable sourcing suggests that we should accuse our enemy of what we're doing so as to create confusion. The Rwandans used it to cover their genocide back in '94. Sigmund Freud called it "psychological projection," and that's about as close as it needs to be for a title.
They've told us what they're planning, however unintentionally that message was given. The least we can do is believe them, and make sure everyone else hears it too.
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Thought for the day: It's my observation that the war against AI was started by someone whose Roomba beat them to the M&M on the floor.
VIP Members: Time for you to speak up. Your voice matters. About the Deep State, not the M&M. Well, either will do, actually.
Have a great Sunday, gang. I'll see you here tomorrow.