A coalition catalogued 221 threats from an administration that did not yet exist. A year later it published its own scorecard.
Mel K is a writer, host, and producer focused on news, analysis & geopolitical forces shaping our world. She is the host of The Mel K Show, author of Americans Anonymous and her new book Infiltration Instead of Invasion, America Betrayed 1944-1954.
In November 2024, after the election and before the inauguration, a coalition of more than 280 legal, policy, academic, advocacy and faith organizations announced that it had already identified 221 high-priority threats from an administration that had not yet taken office.
The coalition called itself Democracy 2025. The list was called the Threat Matrix. Democracy Forward, which built and resourced the effort, described it in its own launch release as a multimillion-dollar effort to ensure swift legal challenges in the first days of the incoming administration, with a growing roster of 280-plus organizations and more than 800 individuals.
The order is the argument. The threats were catalogued before the acts. The working groups were assembled before the acts. The model pleadings were drafted before the acts. The only element still missing was the acts themselves.
What the public saw afterward was lawsuits, because lawsuits are where machinery becomes visible. A presidential action would be announced in Washington. A state attorney general would condemn it before the day was out. A national legal organization would locate a plaintiff. Former officials would sign a declaration. A university expert would supply the constitutional theory, a communications shop the language, a think tank the larger authoritarian framework. Donors would reassure the participating institutions that the money for the next fight had already been raised.
One filing at a time, this looked like ordinary opposition politics. Across years, institutions and funding streams, it looks like something else: a permanent operating system built to define political emergencies before they occur, prepare the responses before voters render a decision, and preserve those responses across administrations regardless of which party holds the constitutional branches.
That system did not appear in one manifesto and it is not housed in one organization. It grew through continuity of method, personnel and institutional design. Foundations financed capacity and accelerated election-year money. Fiscal sponsors housed projects that never needed corporate identities of their own. Universities supplied research, legal theory and technical tools. Former intelligence officers supplied threat language and access. Think tanks translated foreign experience into domestic doctrine. Platforms controlled the pipes. Litigation groups converted doctrine into cases. Conferences kept the relationships warm and the vocabulary shared.
Government agencies, foreign embassies, NATO bodies, EU officials and philanthropic networks each entered at a different point. Each performed one part of the work. Each can say, truthfully, that it did not control the whole.
None of this requires a hidden room. The organizations describe the architecture themselves. The money is in the grant databases. The conferences post agendas. The projects have staff pages. The legal coalitions advertise their size. The international institutions call the method “whole of society.”
What stayed hidden was not the system’s existence but its shape, because the parts are separated by legal form, professional vocabulary, and the habit of investigating philanthropy, academia, government, media, technology and litigation as if they were different worlds. The record becomes intelligible only when those worlds are set on one page.
The Legal Network That Prepared Before the Trigger
Democracy 2025 was never a signature drive. Democracy Forward’s own materials describe a standing legal resource system: more than twenty working groups, model pleadings, legal primers, practitioner tools, real-time visibility into the national litigation landscape, and a secure partner-facing hub. The function is to monitor policy, classify anticipated actions, prepare responses in advance, reduce duplication, and help participants decide when, where and how to intervene.
A year later, the coalition published the results. In its first-anniversary release, Democracy Forward reported that 516 legal cases challenging federal actions had been filed since the inauguration and tracked by Democracy 2025; that 263 of them — more than half — involved Democracy 2025 partners; that the effort had secured 405 litigation victories; and that 226 of those victories, 56 percent, belonged to partner organizations, alongside 70 won by state attorneys general.
That is not a coalition describing solidarity. That is a network keeping score on a national docket.
The roster kept growing. From 280 organizations at launch, Democracy 2025 reported more than 650 by its first anniversary. Its own About page now claims more than 700 partner organizations and calls the effort the largest coordinated legal operation in modern American history.
The public saw complaints filed in different courts, by different plaintiffs, represented by different lawyers. The participants saw one map. Coordination entered exactly where information, timing, research and templates can shape a battlefield without the noise — or the legal exposure — of a formal chain of command.
The annual Together for Democracy conference is the public face of the same system. Democracy Forward’s release on the third annual gathering, held in Washington in early 2026, described it as a strategic convening designed to connect partners and convert shared commitments into coordinated action, drawing participants from all fifty states around the themes of resilience, resistance and reimagining. Earlier meetings brought governors, attorneys general, former cabinet officials, pollsters, communications consultants, donor alliances, labor and faith leaders into the same rooms.
Democracy 2025 runs behind a secure hub. Together for Democracy supplies the meeting ground where the institutions recruit, train and renew the relationships that keep the hub alive. The closed-session agendas, breakout rosters, donor briefings and working-group assignments are the operational layer between the two — and they are the documents not yet in public view.
The Money Arrived Before the Election
None of this infrastructure arose from spontaneous volunteerism.
In early 2024, Democracy Fund — the foundation created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar — launched a campaign called All by April, urging foundations, donor networks, intermediaries and individual donors to move election-related money to the front of the cycle. The campaign drew 174 signers. Sixty percent were direct grantmakers; forty percent were advisors, intermediaries and funder affinity groups.
Forty-seven of those funders reported their January-through-April giving. They recorded $79 million in new 501(c)(3) election-related grants and $61 million in scheduled payments moved up so grantees would have the cash earlier. Democracy Fund publicly credits the campaign with mobilizing at least $155 million; the itemized reporting from respondents accounts for $140 million. Entities that never signed but said the campaign influenced them reported another $13.7 million.
Capacity is policy before policy is visible. A grant made in March finances attorneys hired in April, threat research finished in June, message testing in July, software in August, election-official training in September, and litigation filed in November. A donor need not draft a complaint to shape the field in which complaints become possible.
Democracy Fund says as much. Its own field-building language describes selecting strategically aligned organizations, convening peer funders, helping grantees scale, and seeking changes in institutions, incentives and public attitudes. That is not generosity. That is strategic philanthropy organized around timing, capacity, alignment and scale.
And it is running again right now. Democracy Fund has re-upped the campaign for the 2026 midterms, telling philanthropy to commit before spring — because by spring, in its president’s framing, effective giving is already too late.
The Donor Machinery Behind the Donors
Packard Foundation disclosures expose the layer that ordinary nonprofit searches miss.
Packard’s grantee page for Contina Impact — a Berkeley-based fiscal sponsor formerly named Policy Impact, and still filed at packard.org under the old slug — lists six grants totaling $2,985,000. The purpose lines are the tell:
A 2025 grant of $1,000,000 for core support of the Democracy Communications Collaborative, formerly the Democracy Communications Fund. A 2025 grant of $285,000 for the Democracy Funders Network and the Fund for Citizens’ Assemblies. A 2024 grant of $1,035,000 for the Democracy Funders Network’s Guardian Fund project and a Citizens Assembly Guide. A 2024 grant of $150,000 for Patriots & Pragmatists, described as a cross-ideological convening space for civic leaders. A 2023 grant of $500,000 for the Democracy Communications Fund. And a 2023 grant of $15,000 — a thirty-six-month Democracy Funders Network membership that, in Packard’s own words, includes participation in DFN’s Political Violence Working Group.
Read those together and a parallel infrastructure appears behind the public organizations: donors coordinating with donors, donors maintaining shared communications capacity, donors buying seats at a political-violence working group, donors using a fiscal sponsor to administer projects that never require separate public identities.
The Guardian Fund’s own description states its purpose plainly — legal, security, cybersecurity and crisis-communications support for individuals and organizations who came under threat for their work on behalf of American democracy. A private protective service for the field, funded by the field’s funders.
Fiscal sponsorship is lawful and common. It also fragments the record. A foundation database lists Contina Impact or New Venture Fund as the legal recipient while the operating project exists only inside a purpose line. The money stays visible — but only to a reader willing to follow the recipient into the project, the project into the staff, the staff into the conference, and the conference into the action that followed.
Ford and Packard both funded Protect Democracy directly, with multi-year general support rather than case-specific money. General support pays for the permanent capacities beneath discrete campaigns: attorneys, engineers, coalition managers, researchers, databases, leadership. The donor is choosing which institution will retain the ability to act repeatedly, across election cycles, with enough staff and memory to outlast one case, one administration and one news cycle.
That is how permanence is purchased. Not by writing the complaints, but by financing the machine that produces them.
From Foreign Democracy Assistance to Domestic Institutional Defense
The deeper lineage runs through the foreign-policy world.
The National Endowment for Democracy’s own institutional history concedes the origin: the United States covertly supported foreign parties, newspapers and civic organizations after the Second World War; revelations of CIA funding created a political crisis in the 1960s; American officials then sought an overt public-private mechanism that could continue political assistance without the liabilities of covert sponsorship. NED emerged as a congressionally financed but legally nongovernmental grantmaker.
Its founding principles explain the advantages of the design. Private form created flexibility with foreign partners. Government stayed informed. Embassies could be consulted. A nongovernmental board could carry programs across changes of administration and political priority.
That is the durable pattern: public funding, private administration, foreign partnership, and continuity beyond direct electoral control. Abroad, the structure was called democracy assistance. At home, the same logic reappears as democracy defense — build a durable network outside the constitutional branches, connect it to government and embassies, finance it across administrations, house the expertise in private bodies, and let the network continue when electoral authority changes hands.
Personnel carried the method home, and one career shows the whole route.
Hardy Merriman co-wrote Hold the Line: A Guide to Defending Democracy, published in September 2020 with Ankur Asthana, Marium Navid and Kifah Shah. He is credited as sole author of Part IV — the section that draws lessons from nonviolent civil-resistance movements abroad and applies them to the United States. The authors date the project’s origin precisely: June 1, 2020, and the clearing of demonstrators in Washington. They wrote it over several months and published it before the election, expressly to prepare Americans for scenarios between Election Day and Inauguration Day.
Merriman was not a bystander to the international field. He was President and CEO of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict from January 2015 to June 2021, and President again from September 2022 to April 2025. He is a co-author of the CANVAS Core Curriculum, the Belgrade-produced training guide for nonviolent struggle. With Peter Ackerman — then on the Atlantic Council’s board executive committee — he authored the 2019 ICNC report proposing a new international norm called the Right to Assist, a claimed right to support civil-resistance campaigns against non-democratic rule.
He had already contributed to an Atlantic Council volume in 2015. He returned as an Atlantic Council nonresident senior fellow from 2022 to 2024, in the Scowcroft Center, as principal investigator of Fostering a Fourth Democratic Wave — a joint Atlantic Council–ICNC project whose stated aims include advancing the Right to Assist norm and developing options to constrain authoritarian regimes. He was primary author of its 2023 playbook, launched ahead of the Biden administration’s second Summit for Democracy.
And from 2023 to 2025 he served as senior technical advisor to the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Powered by the People program.
That is the pipeline in one résumé: Belgrade training curriculum, international civil-resistance institute, an American election-crisis guide written in advance of the 2020 vote, an Atlantic Council fellowship advancing a doctrine of assisting opposition movements abroad, and a paid advisory role inside the federal foreign-assistance agency — overlapping in time.
Protect Democracy, the National Task Force on Election Crises, Democracy Forward and the later election-defense projects run the same anticipatory sequence: define the threat, create the vocabulary, train the participants, pre-stage the legal and communications response, and hold the network intact until the triggering event arrives. The doctrine did not need to be imported. It walked in with the people who had exported it.
The Intelligence Vocabulary Crosses the Border
The intelligence question begins with the people and the language they carried across the institutional line.
The Steady State assembled veterans of CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA, State, DHS, the National Security Council and the congressional intelligence committees, and described its own work as applying intelligence-community analytic tradecraft to domestic authoritarianism and democratic decline. John Sipher connects former CIA service, The Steady State, the Atlantic Council, Lawfare and Just Security. Mary McCord connects the Justice Department’s National Security Division, Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, Atlantic Council programming and election-crisis planning. Norman Eisen moves among Brookings, Lawfare, Just Security, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for American Progress and operational legal organizations. Rachel Kleinfeld connects Carnegie’s international conflict research, the Democracy Funders Network and national election-crisis planning.
The revolving door carried more than biographies. It carried categories.
Intelligence institutions train practitioners to define threat environments, identify hostile influence, assess vulnerabilities, map networks, separate indicators from warnings, and construct whole-of-government responses. Inside private institutions, those methods were turned on domestic political conditions and given a new vocabulary: “resilience,” “insider threat,” “information operations,” “democratic backsliding,” “authoritarian consolidation,” “whole-of-society response.”
Vocabulary becomes architecture when institutions use the same words to classify the same citizens, anticipate the same emergencies, and justify the same interventions.
The credentialing followed. Protect Democracy mobilized former CIA and ODNI leadership in litigation, with former directors and senior officials filing as amici in support of its positions. Democracy Forward deployed former USAID mission directors, NSC lawyers, ambassadors and homeland-security officials in domestic cases. The Council on Foreign Relations seated Norman Eisen alongside the former head of ODNI’s Foreign Malign Influence Center to discuss election interference. The Atlantic Council placed Mary McCord inside a national-security program on extremism and domestic threats.
Official threat frameworks, former-official credibility and national-security method entered private legal and political systems on the authority of the people who had once wielded them inside government.
The Platform, the University and the Government Gap
The technology layer made the architecture operational.
In 2018 the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab announced an election-integrity partnership with Facebook, built to give the company’s security, policy and product teams real-time outside insight into suspected disinformation and platform abuse. Foundations including Democracy Fund, Omidyar Network and Hewlett underwrote academic access to platform data and research into social media’s effect on elections. The consortium model joined philanthropic money, proprietary corporate data, university researchers and policy organizations inside one project whose conclusions could shape platform rules and public policy.
The Election Integrity Partnership scaled the model in 2020. Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika and DFRLab built a real-time system for receiving and analyzing reports from election officials, government agencies, civil-society organizations, researchers and the platforms themselves. It ran on tickets. Narratives were classified, stakeholders notified, platform enforcement policies evaluated.
EIP stated the rationale in its own report: no federal agency held a clear mandate over domestic election misinformation, and the consortium presented itself as a whole-of-society answer to that gap.
Consider what that sentence concedes. Government lacked direct authority over domestic political speech. Researchers lacked enforcement power. Platforms remained private companies. The architecture distributed the functions that government could not lawfully hold in one hand — officials and civil-society groups transmitting concerns, private researchers classifying and routing, universities supplying legitimacy, platforms enforcing their own rules.
The final click belonged to a corporation. The pipeline joined state information, academic classification and private enforcement into a single operating process. No participant needed to possess the whole authority for the combined process to alter what Americans could read.
The Transatlantic Feedback Loop
The Atlantic Council became one of the most important convergence platforms because its donor and program structures put foreign governments, NATO institutions, embassies, technology companies, banks, defense contractors, foundations and former officials inside one policy environment.
Its published contributor lists include the United States government, foreign ministries, the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates, European states, NATO entities, major banks, cloud providers, artificial-intelligence firms, defense companies, and philanthropies including Ford, Hewlett, Rockefeller, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Open Society Foundations and New Venture Fund. Those donors do not direct every report. Their presence explains why the Council can put governments, private capital, technology and civil society around the same table on security and democracy.
DFRLab programs brought CISA, NATO, the United Kingdom, the U.S. Embassy in Paris, European officials and civil-society organizations into joint work on countering disinformation and protecting elections. Atlantic Council summits seated NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence beside U.S. diplomats, EU officials, foreign governments, media organizations and technology companies. The European Commission integrated DFRLab researchers with the European External Action Service, the East StratCom Task Force and the Hybrid Centre of Excellence in policy training. Open Society convened EU DisinfoLab, European parliamentary researchers, OSCE election specialists, Demos, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and EU strategic-communications personnel around election information operations. NATO’s StratCom Centre describes itself as a military, governmental, private and academic fusion structure producing doctrine, research and training for the Alliance.
The international method was never concealed. Governments, platforms, universities, NGOs, journalists and election authorities were expected to share a common picture of the information environment, align classifications, exchange threat information, and build resilience before elections.
Atlantic Council authors went further, proposing that Five Eyes liaison practice be adapted to the information space — real-time cooperation among the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with deeper participation by technology firms and civil society. Intelligence-cooperation logic was no longer confined to secure government channels. It was being redesigned, in public, as an election and information-governance system.
The loop runs both ways. American institutions exported civil-resistance training, election assistance, strategic communications and democracy programs through NED, USAID, the State Department, international broadcasters, think tanks and foundations. European democratic-backsliding metrics, NATO resilience doctrine, EU platform regulation and foreign case studies came back as instruments for reading American politics. Brookings Democracy Playbook projects translated Central and Eastern European experience into recommendations for the United States. Carnegie research imported international conflict and democratic-decline frameworks into domestic philanthropy and election-crisis planning.
The doctrine did not arrive by secret cable. It returned through fellowships, conferences, policy papers, grant programs, and the people whose careers move between foreign assistance and domestic institutional defense.
The Foundations That Bind the Field
Democracy Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation and Open Society Foundations occupy different positions inside one field.
Democracy Fund, incubated through Omidyar Network, supplies a domestic funding and coordination base organized around elections, media, institutional reform and movement capacity. Rockefeller funded the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, New Venture Fund rapid-response election projects, Media Democracy Fund’s Disinformation Defense League, and Bellagio convenings on the future of democratic institutions and technology. Open Society has publicly described support for election administration, election-worker protection, civic engagement and work against misinformation, while its European programs convened strategic-communications officials, election observers, policy institutes and civil-society monitors.
The names matter less than the functions. One foundation funded technology and international election networks. Another moved money early and coordinated donors. Another supported state election administration and information monitoring. Fiscal sponsors converted grants into project capacity. Universities produced the research. Think tanks produced the language. Former officials supplied the authority. Platforms held enforcement. Legal organizations converted the resulting threat framework into court action.
The pieces never needed to report to one board, because the architecture rewards compatibility. Each institution advances the portion of the system that matches its legal status, professional expertise and public legitimacy.
When the Files Opened
Then the government began opening its own.
On June 18, 2026 — her last day in office — Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released declassified communications, memos and whistleblower accounts from a yearlong ODNI declassification review of intelligence work on COVID-19 origins, a release required under a provision of the fiscal 2026 defense authorization act signed the previous December.
ODNI described what it called a circular reporting loop: Anthony Fauci supplied hand-picked, NIAID-funded scientific advisers to the Intelligence Community; their input shaped official assessments; those assessments returned to the public as institutional authority, and then as scientific consensus. Senior analysts, according to the release, regarded Fauci as an unbiased guide to coronavirus expertise.
The review also gathered testimony from multiple whistleblowers alleging retaliation. ODNI cited a contractor terminated after coming forward, managers indicating that promotion decisions could turn on an analyst’s position regarding COVID origins, and senior officials taking steps that reduced whistleblower anonymity. The released correspondence, ODNI said, contradicts Fauci’s 2024 congressional testimony denying discussions with intelligence agencies about viral research.
Whatever subject enters that machine, the mechanism is the same: select the experts, narrow the acceptable frame, convert the frame into an official assessment, then use the assessment to police the boundaries of legitimate debate.
A second body of declassified material places the same mechanism inside the domestic-threat system. Under Gabbard, ODNI’s Director’s Initiatives Group — a task force drawing personnel from ODNI, CIA, FBI, DIA, NSA and the Defense Department — released Biden-era records, some following a Freedom of Information Act request by the outlet Public and Catherine Herridge Reports. They include a December 13, 2021 report by the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security treating opposition to vaccine and mask mandates as prominent narratives potentially connected to violent extremism, and a February 3, 2022 special analysis by the same three bodies on anger at government COVID responses as a driver of domestic violent extremism.
The DIG’s declassification docket now reaches the Biden administration’s domestic surveillance and censorship actions, Crossfire Hurricane, anomalous health incidents, and the intelligence handling of COVID origins.
These files turn the revolving door into a two-way mirror. The private democracy-defense network borrowed intelligence categories to classify domestic politics. Intelligence institutions, in turn, absorbed political and scientific gatekeepers into the production of official truth. The traffic moved in both directions, and the same vocabulary — extremism, threat, narrative, resilience — served on both sides of the line.
I want to stop here, because this is where the record stops being other people’s business.
For years the answer to every question was the same. You are not being censored, you are being corrected. There is no list. No one is watching. And the people telling you otherwise are themselves the danger.
Then the government published the list.
December 13, 2021: a report from the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, filing opposition to mandates among narratives potentially connected to violent extremism. February 3, 2022: a special analysis from the same three bodies, treating anger at the government’s pandemic response as a driver of domestic violent extremism. Not a rumor. Not an inference drawn by a reporter. A dated document carrying three federal seals.
I was on the receiving end of that vocabulary. So were millions of Americans whose only offense was asking a question out loud and declining to stop when they were told the question itself was dangerous. We thought we were arguing with a government agency. We were arguing with an architecture — foundations, universities, platforms, litigators and former officials who had already settled among themselves what our questions meant before we asked them.
That is what this machinery is built to do. Not to win the argument. To make the argument unavailable.
So I stopped asking who gave the order. That is the wrong question, and asking it is how you lose. I started asking a simpler one. What would this system look like if nobody ever had to give an order at all?
One Picture
It would look exactly like this.
Foundations need not command attorneys when they finance the permanent capacity that makes litigation possible. Think tanks need not order officials when they establish the categories through which officials understand a threat. Former intelligence officers need not remain government agents when their methods and authority travel with them. Universities need no coercive power when they produce the research, the experts and the data systems on which policy depends. Platforms need no legislation when they already own the infrastructure through which political information moves. Legal coalitions need no electoral authority when they hold plaintiffs, pleadings, shared intelligence and access to courts.
And each participant can describe its role, accurately, as limited. The donor did not file the complaint. The professor did not remove the post. The platform did not write the government assessment. The official did not decide the platform rule. The former intelligence officer no longer represented the agency.
The factual accuracy of each denial is what makes the combined effect so difficult to reach. Responsibility is distributed across the same network that coordinates the money, the expertise, the information and the action.
The modern world was not built through invasion. It was built through infiltration.
The constitutional question stands in plain view. Can a republic remain self-governing once an unelected institutional system acquires the practical ability to classify political outcomes as threats, finance anticipatory resistance, coordinate litigation, equip public officials, monitor information, influence platform enforcement, and preserve the resulting machinery across elections?
The architecture holds money, expertise, access, professional legitimacy and continuity. The citizen holds a vote, cast on one day.
All by April is running again. Democracy Fund has re-upped the campaign for the November 2026 midterms and is telling philanthropy that spring is already too late. The Threat Matrix has a successor. The working groups are staffed. The hub is live.
The struggle begins when the permanent system decides the vote itself has produced an emergency.
Power leaves records. Follow them long enough and the operating system appears.
Primary Documents and Institutional Records
1. Democracy Forward / Democracy 2025. Launch release, November 2024 (280+ organizations, 800+ individuals, 221-item Threat Matrix); first-anniversary release (516 cases tracked, 263 involving partners, 405 victories, 226 by partners, 70 by state attorneys general, 650+ organizations); Democracy 2025 About page (700+ partners); partner-facing handout describing the secure hub, working groups and litigation tools; Together for Democracy 2024, 2025 and 2026 pages and the third-annual convening release.
2. Democracy Fund. All by April evaluation and retrospective (174 signers; 47 reporting funders; $79 million new grants; $61 million accelerated; $155 million total claimed; $13.7 million from non-signers); All by April 2.0 campaign materials for the 2026 midterms; joint-fund and Trusted Elections Fund descriptions; grantee-partner and funder-partner strategy pages.
3. Packard Foundation. Grantee page for Contina Impact (formerly Policy Impact), six grants totaling $2,985,000, including the Democracy Communications Collaborative/Fund, the Democracy Funders Network’s Guardian Fund project, Patriots & Pragmatists, and the DFN membership including the Political Violence Working Group; grant pages for Protect Democracy and States United.
4. Ford Foundation. Protect Democracy general-support grant records and democracy-program announcements.
5. National Endowment for Democracy. Institutional history, founding principles, annual reports, and descriptions of the public-private democracy-assistance model.
6. Protect Democracy and the National Task Force on Election Crises. Initiative descriptions, staff biographies, VoteShield materials, task-force mission and member biographies.
7. Hardy Merriman and the civil-resistance pipeline. Hold the Line: A Guide to Defending Democracy (September 2020, version 1.3); ICNC leadership and staff pages; Ackerman and Merriman, Preventing Mass Atrocities: From a Responsibility to Protect to a Right to Assist (ICNC Press, 2019); Atlantic Council expert page and the Fostering a Fourth Democratic Wave project page and 2023 playbook; USAID Powered by the People advisory role; CANVAS Core Curriculum.
8. The Steady State. Membership pages and public materials describing former intelligence and national-security personnel and the use of intelligence-community analytic tradecraft.
9. Atlantic Council and DFRLab. Contributor and honor-roll reports; 2018 Facebook election-integrity partnership announcement; Five Eyes information-environment report; 360/Open Summit materials; U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge; EU and NATO event records.
10. Election Integrity Partnership. Final report, platform-policy archive, and its own account of the ticket-based, whole-of-society system and the federal mandate gap.
11. European Union and NATO. European Commission Connect University records; EEAS East StratCom materials; European Democracy Action Plan; NATO Allied Command Transformation and StratCom Centre of Excellence pages.
12. Rockefeller Foundation. Grant records for the German Marshall Fund, New Venture Fund, Media Democracy Fund and election/disinformation projects; Bellagio democracy convening materials.
13. Open Society Foundations. U.S. elections and democracy funding pages; grantmaking descriptions; EU DisinfoLab and election-information event records.
14. Brookings, Lawfare, Just Security, CAP, CFR and Carnegie. Democracy Playbook reports and events; Eisen and Kleinfeld biographies; threat-tracker projects; rule-of-law and foreign-influence convenings.
15. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. News Release No. 11-26, June 18, 2026, and the accompanying COVID-19 document release and index; the yearlong declassification review; whistleblower testimony.
16. ODNI Director’s Initiatives Group. Declassified Biden-era materials, including the December 13, 2021 NCTC/FBI/DHS report and the February 3, 2022 special analysis; the DIG’s stated declassification docket.
Liberty. Transparency. Truth. Justice.
Any views expressed within the following article are solely those of the author and are not a direct reflection of any official stance of the organization, its publishers, or its affiliates.
