Thread by @DataRepublican

🚨 DECIPHERING NED DROP 4️⃣: WHY J6 IS AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT🏛️

Many have asked me to do a deep dive on @SenThomTillis , but before I do that, I think it is important to contextualize why the events of January 6, 2021 were such an existential threat to NED, Open Society Foundation, and like-minded organizations.

I always thought that J6 was mostly a Trump overreaction on the part of media and the J6 Committee. I was wrong.

The NED journals reveal the ideological underpinnings of why Open Society believers found J6 an alarming, existential threat to themselves.

🧵Thread Start... will be updating this live as I piece together the material.

@SenThomTillis We will be hitting on Larry Diamond's article published on January 2022 edition of the NED Journal of Democracy. If you don't know who Diamond is, he is one of the foremost "democracy" academics - his name appears all over the NED journals.

@SenThomTillis Notably, Diamond and Soros both have co-coached regional committees for NED conferences. His ideology is deeply aligned with Soros' Open Society model, like the rest of NED.

In the article, Diamond makes a very serious claim: "As the two master norms of mutual tolerance and political forbearance have begun disintegrating, democracy in the United States has begun to deconsolidate and is at serious risk of breaking down in the next presidential election."

In other words, Diamond is saying that if people and politicians stop playing fair and stop accepting losses, the whole system could collapse by the 2024 election. And that's what happened on J6 (in his view).

The simplest way to explain why J6 was so alarming is that - it proved elites are no longer in control. It proved that the public no longer blindly trusts the system. To Diamond, J6 meant that democracy crossed the point of no return and new, harsh measures have to be taken to remedy that.

On the surface, the following quote sounds like a plea to get along- but the phrase "democratic norms" is a weasel word for Open Society norms. In other words, J6 was a flashing red light that institutions irrevocably lost their monopoly on the narrative.

"Each side comes to view the other as an existential threat, straining and then rupturing respect for democratic norms and rules."

To the elites, J6 wasn't even really about the insurrection itself. They don't care about that.

Rather, the fact it happened at all represented a triumph of the populist narrative and a permanent fracture in institutional control.

Therefore, J6 had to be met with the harshest possible response: to reclaim their monopoly on the media narrative and stop the public from losing faith in elite authority.

@SenThomTillis This spawned a barrage of articles on how to crush such opposition. Rachel Kleinfeld in October 2001 advocated fast-tracked legal punishment.

They came up with all kinds of "data" proving that it was the populists doing all the terrorism. (Satanic forces? Really?)

This was a very misleading use of data - as, first, the Global Terrorism Database incidents are almost exclusively overseas. Second, the fact that BLM did not make it as "global terrorism" calls in question the utility of this data.

But it's good enough for NED to make the case to jail J6 perpetuators.

@SenThomTillis Censorship became a huge part of the equation to solve the problem of leaking institutional control. Deplatforming and misinformation became enormous levers.

@SenThomTillis One article, "Subversion Inc." by Ronald Deibert even goes as far to call the need for censorship as "existential."

Once again, Journal of Democracy is not just another academic journal. It’s published by NED, a taxpayer-funded, bipartisan organization with active members of Congress on its board. NED has long operated as a soft-power arm of U.S. foreign policy. In fact, its own founders openly described it as a front for the CIA.

So when we read their response to January 6, we're not just hearing from think-tank professors. We're seeing the worldview of the national security state and political establishment.

That's why the reaction to J6 was so harsh. It wasn’t about "protecting the Capitol." Left-wing activists have disrupted proceedings there for years without triggering a national emergency. No one declared democracy in crisis when protesters stormed the Kavanaugh hearings or occupied congressional offices.

What made J6 different was what it represented: a visible, irreversible collapse of public trust in the legitimacy of the system, especially after the 2020 election.

This is why Biden declared that "MAGA Republicans" are a threat to democracy. Not because of what they did to the Capitol, but because of what they no longer believe.

@SenThomTillis And MAGA Republicans are more not less of an active threat today. This is almost certainly the true reason why political violence is being normalized by even members of Congress, as @JackPosobiec captured on video with Congressman Raskin.

Keep your powder dry.