Resistance, Pre‑Packaged

Sweater Girl is back with another lesson. This time she’s teaching Gene Sharp tactics. I really need to research her background. Yes, Trump leans into authoritarian theatrics, but the people amplifying these tactics aren’t fighting for socialism, and the funding streams behind them aren’t exactly grassroots. There’s an infrastructure here—front groups, donor networks, polished manuals—dressed up as spontaneous resistance. The aesthetics say “community,” but the playbook says something else entirely.

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If We’re Going to “Learn About Otpor,” Let’s Start With the Facts

The video opens with a provocation—What if we weren’t afraid to get arrested? It’s time to learn about OTPOR!—but skips over the basic context of the organization being invoked. Angela Baker’s recommendation fits a pattern I’ve seen before: presenting Otpor as a neutral protest model while leaving out the political landscape that shaped it. Blueprint for Revolution, the book she cites, was written by Srđa Popović, one of Otpor’s leaders. The group received support from the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, and pro‑democracy funding networks that included George Soros’ foundations, which Soros later acknowledged supporting during the 2000 uprising against Milošević. None of this automatically discredits the material, but it does mean the playbook isn’t organic or context‑free.

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Behind the DOJ’s Politicized Indictment of Maduro: A CIA-Created ‘Network’ and Coerced Star Witness +

The US Department of Justice indictment of Venezuela’s kidnapped leader, Nicolas Maduro, is a political rant that relies heavily on coerced testimony from an unreliable witness. Despite DOJ edits, it could expose more Americans to the CIA’s own history of drug trafficking.

Weaponizing the “narco-terror” hoax
The bulk of the case against Maduro rests on the accusation that the defendants “engaged in… drug trafficking, including in partnership with narco-terrorist groups.” According to the DOJ, Maduro conspired with TDA, as well as the Mexican Sinaloa and Los Zetas cartels to traffic drugs between 2003 and 2011. However, these cartels were not designated by the Trump administration as Foreign Terrorist Organizations until February 2025, a move obviously designed to justify Maduro’s kidnapping and juice up his indictment.

Behind the DOJ’s Politicized Indictment of Maduro: A CIA-Created ‘Network’ and Coerced Star Witness

Related (Los Zetas):

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Barack Obama’s Literature List for 2025 —Connecting the Dots

As senior OWI officials saw it, “Books do not have their impact upon the mass mind but upon the minds of those who mould the mass mind—upon leaders of thought and formulators of public opinion. The impact of a book may last six months or several decades. Books are the most enduring propaganda of all.

John B. Hench, Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 70

Barack Obama’s Literature List for 2025 —Connecting the Dots

Related:

Books differ from all other propaganda media, primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader’s attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium… this is, of course, not true of all books at all times and with all readers – but it is true significantly often enough to make books the most important weapon of strategic (long-range) propaganda.

Liberated Texts: The power of books as propaganda

How Good Books Can Change a Person

How Good Books Can Change You

CIA and the Cultural Cold War (Anti-Communism)