The Rise And… Rise Of ‘Color Revolutions’
By Kit Klarenberg | Global Delinquents | September 28, 2026
It’s rather forgotten today how Washington’s post-9/11 imperial adventurism was not restricted to military intervention. A core component of the Bush administration’s “Freedom Agenda” – under the auspices of which calamitous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere were waged – was overt sponsorship of civil society-led coups throughout the former Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia. Citizens of these regions, and the world, live with this meddling’s destructive consequences to this day. The seemingly never-ending – and ever-escalating – Ukraine proxy war is a particularly visceral legacy.
The 1983 creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, a US state entity avowedly concerned with executing overtly what the CIA once did covertly, ushered in a new era of “spyless coups”. Working in close conjunction with USAID and George Soros’ Open Society Institute, NED ever after provided funding, training and material assistance to NGOs, ‘independent’ media outlets, opposition groups, and other initiatives in service of regime change, across every corner of the world.
Come 9/11, NED and its confederates had devised a supremely cunning, cost-effective template for toppling troublesome governments – be they left-wing, nationalist, or even former US puppets who’d stepped out of line. The previous October, longtime Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic was brought down in what the Washington Post bombastically dubbed “an extraordinary US effort to unseat a foreign head of state, not through covert action of the kind the CIA once employed in such places as Iran and Guatemala, but by modern election campaign techniques.”
At the anti-Milosevic effort’s forefront was Otpor! (Serbian: Resistance!), a rebellious NED-funded youth activist group. Through a mix of civil disobedience, non-violent resistance, rock concerts, street theatre, and graffiti, they fomented mass public opposition to the Yugoslav President. When election day came and official results pointed to Milosevic’s victory, an NED-funded “parallel vote tabulation” purported to expose major fraud, sending millions to the streets of Belgrade to peacefully demand the President’s resignation. Milosevic duly capitulated, in the face of seemingly overwhelming people power.
The supposedly heroic struggle of Otpor! and other US-supported anti-Milosevic groups was immortalised in a slick ‘documentary’, Bringing Down A Dictator. Milosevic’s fall provided a precise blueprint for future ‘color revolutions’ – so-called because frequently, the Empire-supported activists who led these mob putsches prominently adopted specific colours for their banners, branding and logos. Initially, US officials eagerly associated themselves publicly with this upheaval. Meanwhile, the mainstream media routinely published remarkably illuminating post-mortems of the revolts, extensively exposing Washington’s guiding hand and oft-enormous financial outlay.
Nonetheless, politicians, pundits and journalists alike universally framed colour revolutions as ultimately spontaneous uprisings by liberal, progressive elements with legitimate grievances, who yearned for democracy and freedom. In reality, they almost invariably produced corrupt, repressive governments that ruled via intimidation and brutality, including political assassinations. Post-colour revolution regimes also typically conducted sweeping privatisation and other ravaging ‘reforms’, destroying living standards for average citizens by prostrating their countries to the EU, IMF, NATO, World Trade Organization, and other mechanisms of Western economic, military, and political subjugation.
Slobodan Milosevic’s NED-orchestrated ouster is nicknamed the ‘Bulldozer Revolution’, due to iconic scenes during the upheaval of a wheel loader helping anti-government agitators occupy state buildings. However, its driver quickly turned against the “Revolution”. Subsequent “shock therapy” decimated Yugoslavia’s mixed market economy, causing his successful independent business to fail, and him to go bankrupt. He subsisted until his dying day on meagre state welfare payments. For most participants, subsequent colour revolutions were similarly an object lesson in being careful about what one wishes for.
‘External Shove’
In February 2005, President George W. Bush gave a swaggering address in Bratislava, Slovakia. He hailed how “in recent times, we have witnessed landmark events in the history of liberty.” This included Georgia’s November 2003 Rose Revolution, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution the next year, and Iraq’s Purple Revolution a month prior. “The advance of freedom is the concentrated work of generations,” Bush declared. He looked ahead to Moldova, and “inevitably” Belarus, “someday proudly [belonging] to the country of democracies [sic]”:
“Eventually, the call of liberty comes to every mind and every soul. And one day, freedom’s promise will reach every people and every nation.”
Moldova’s forced transformation into a staggeringly corrupt effective EU-US colony took many years. Belarus conversely remains stubbornly resistant to “freedom’s promise”, as defined by Brussels, London, Washington, and other centres of imperial power. Still, President Bush’s confidence was well-founded. Waves of insurrectionary unrest unleashed by his government’s “Freedom Agenda” had systematically swept away designated enemy governments one by one annually since he took office. Indeed, within weeks of Bush’s speech, Kyrgyzstan’s insufficiently pro-Western leader fell victim to yet another colour revolution.
He would not be the last. Prior colour revolutions had enthusiastically emphasised the importance of techniques of nonviolent resistance – many of which were crafted by Gene Sharp, who was intimately enmeshed within the US military and intelligence establishment for much of his life. However, Kyrgyzstan’s NED-created regime change army, KelKel – directly modelled on Otpor! – attacked police, torched government buildings and even carried out bombings. Their ferocity was actively encouraged and promoted by US-funded TV stations locally. Such belligerence subsequently became a colour revolution calling card.
Ukraine’s Orange Revolution
That colour revolutions represented a formal weapon of war in the Empire’s post-9/11 arsenal was enthusiastically spelled out by arch-neoconservative Max Boot in late December 2004. He gushed how Ukraine’s Orange Revolution days earlier, which brought a pro-Western government to power, was “one of the most inspiring events” of that year. Boot declared the “triumph” and “miracle” of the revolution “should dispel the quaint notion still prevalent in many Western universities and foreign ministries that democracy is a luxury good suitable for rich countries”:
“These revolutions reveal the hollowness of the cliché that ‘democracy can’t be imposed by outsiders’… sometimes, when dealing with an entrenched dictatorship, this requires military intervention of the kind that occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan. More brittle regimes can be brought down by their own people, but even they often need a little external shove… There was nothing nefarious about the US intervention in Ukraine.”
Boot boasted how Washington had “spent $58 million on democracy promotion in the last two years” in Ukraine. He proposed Kiev receive “expedited NATO and European Union membership,” to finish off the Orange Revolution. “In the meantime, we need to apply elsewhere the lessons of Ukraine” Boot demanded, suggesting “an obvious candidate for a similar transformation is Iran.” He explained, “it’s hard to think of a higher priority than the overthrow of the mullahs,” encouraging the Bush administration to prioritise “liberating Iran.”
‘USAID Help’
Such was the insurrectionary fervour of the time, in January 2006 USAID went to the extent of publishing a glossy magazine, Democracy Rising, revealing in detail Washington’s central role in fomenting “grassroots” rebellions as far afield as Afghanistan, Gaza and Lebanon. Dedicated sections on colour revolutions to date were replete with stunningly forthright passages. A section on Georgia’s November 2003 Rose Revolution described how NED had financed regime change training for local “lawyers, judges, journalists, members of parliament, NGOs, political party leaders, and others.”
The stated purpose of this investment was to give Georgians “a sense that they should regulate the government.” The Rose Revolution “was the climax of these efforts.” One recipient of US financial support remarked, “without foreign assistance, I’m not sure we would have been able to achieve what we did without bloodshed.” Meanwhile, several pages were dedicated to the Orange Revolution. It noted how thousands of Ukrainian journalists were given training in “investigative reporting”, bankrolled by NED and USAID.
An alumni told Democracy Rising this sponsorship “created a feeling that others stood with them ‘in the trenches’.” Concurrently, NED-affiliated Freedom House flooded the coffers of NGOs “that sponsored voter education, mobilized voters to get to the polls and observed elections.” These organisations “also held meetings, youth dances, rock concerts and karaoke to attract young voters,” and “ran public service ads on TV stations, informing people about their right to vote.” Meanwhile, “democracy trainers from Serbia, Slovakia, Russia and Croatia” were flown into the country.
In the second round of Ukraine’s presidential election, NED-financed NGOs claimed to have been inundated with tens of thousands of reports of fraud from voting stations all over the country, while exit polls they produced pointed to widespread rigging having denied pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko a landslide victory. Vast protests, combined with opposition-organised general strikes, widespread civil disobedience and occupations of government buildings forced a rerun. A US-funded think tank apparatchik asserted:
“USAID help for the poll was absolutely important – the poll results after the second round made people go to the street.”
For all the hype and self-assurance of Democracy Rising, its publication came at a time when colour revolutions were increasingly being viewed with hostility and suspicion at a state and public level throughout the Global South. In every case, the radical outcomes promised by colour revolution leaders and advocates failed to materialise, while US rhetoric about the commitment of resultant pro-Western regimes to democracy and freedom was a perverse fraud.
In Ukraine, US-installed Yushchenko implemented economic austerity, slashed regulations and social spending, bailed out criminal banks, broke open state industry and natural resources for foreign plunder, attacked the rights of Russian speakers, and began preparing the country for locally-feared NATO membership. Within just nine months of entering office, his coalition government – comprised of Orange Revolution activists – collapsed due to deeply corrupt battles with feuding Ukrainian oligarchs over control of key media and industrial assets.
Yushchenko was voted out in the January 2010 presidential election, finishing fifth in the first round with just 5.5% of the vote. As Empire house journal Foreign Policy lamented years later, the Bush administration’s much-vaunted colour revolutions all turned out to be “terribly disappointing.” Each and every time, “elite corruption still continued apace” and “promises of far-reaching change never really materialized.” Damningly, “maladies that typified the preceding regimes quickly came to describe” the governments created by colour revolutions themselves.
‘Revolution Business’
That’s quite some euphemism. In Georgia, longtime Soros acolyte Mikheil Saakashvili granted himself unilateral power in key policy areas, before brazenly exploiting his position to harass and jail business and political rivals. Saakashvili’s targets would be raped and/or tortured in prison, their ordeals filmed for primetime broadcast on local TV networks. Grave questions abound over his personal involvement in several suspicious deaths, including government ministers’. He was voted out in October 2012, despite NED’s best efforts.
Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 Tulip Revolution installed Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who proceeded to run the country as his personal fiefdom for five years. Bakiyev’s relatives profited exorbitantly from legally questionable privatisation of state industries. For example, his family signed a highly controversial $1.8 billion deal to supply fuel to a local US military base, close to Kyrgyzstan’s total GDP in 2003. Elsewhere, Bakiyev’s brother oversaw Bishkek’s security apparatus – arbitrary detentions, bogus convictions, torture, and murders of opposition activists, journalists, and politicians became commonplace.
Bakiyev was himself chased out of not only the presidential palace but Bishkek itself in April 2010, following a massacre of anti-corruption protesters in which up to 100 were killed and at least 450 wounded. Thereafter, Kyrgyzstan was plunged into economic and political chaos for a decade, with numerous governments collapsing along the way. The freest and most stable Central Asian state prior to the Tulip Revolution, it is only since 2020 – following another Anglo-American coup – the country has regained some semblance of stability.
A key player in that upheaval was British ambassador Charles Garrett. He arrived in Bishkek from Macedonia, where as this journalist has revealed from April 2016 he steered what was known as the “colorful revolution”. Illegally obtained, deceptively edited wiretaps seemingly implicating government officials in shocking crimes produced huge protests, featuring widespread arson attacks and brutal clashes between demonstrators and police. Garrett distributed cash to NGOs and activists involved in the unrest from his diplomatic pouch, encouraging them to cause mass havoc.
George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, NED, and USAID were also colorful revolution participants. Some protesters even proudly wore “Soros Army” shirts. Despite a huge public counter-revolutionary fightback, the tumult paralysed the Macedonian economy and state, leading to the installation of a doggedly pro-Western, dangerously dysfunctional administration that engaged in industrial scale graft, jailed political opponents on bogus charges, and changed the country’s name despite widespread opposition. Meanwhile, existing economic problems, including crippling brain drain, were gravely exacerbated.
The unfailingly disastrous results of colour revolutions surely contributed to White House officials abruptly and firmly distancing themselves from the entire enterprise, before the Bush administration’s second term was even over. The “Freedom Agenda” was quietly forgotten. The President – who in October 2004 openly mandated financial assistance to Belarusian opposition activists, and once publicly praised the Rose Revolution as an example to be followed throughout the Caucasus and Central Asia – went so far as to deny the US was in the “revolution business” at all.
‘Alternate Reality’
Colour revolutions have continued apace ever since, with the same strategies being recurrently applied the world over, to varying degrees of success. All along, non-Western governments – in particular China, Iran and Russia – have become increasingly vocal in their condemnation of and opposition to colour revolutions, in some cases passing legislation seeking to curtail the operations of foreign funded NGOs on their soil. Yet, the mainstream media long ago adopted a rigid Omertà on Washington’s culpability for civil society-driven destabilisation overseas.
In a striking example of this paradigm shift, in November 2004, before the Orange Revolution was over, The Guardian published a revealing report exposing the “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev.” The outlet stated unambiguously the revolt was “an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.” NED, the State Department and USAID were all fingered as culprits.
Fast forward to July 2015 however, and a Guardian article on Russia’s banning of NED under foreign agent laws quite amazingly relied on a brief quote pulled from the Endowment’s official website to describe its operations. In the intervening time, the Maidan Revolution overthrew Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, setting Kiev on the warpath with Moscow. Washington’s irrefutable involvement was strenuously denied at the time by the mainstream media, and has been ever since.
Following the Ukraine proxy war’s February 2022 eruption, The New York Times took vigorous aim at independent journalists for spreading the “conspiracy theory” Maidan was US-orchestrated, dubbing the proposition an “alternative reality” and “Russian disinformation”. This is despite every prominent Maidan actor – including the individuals who started the demonstrations – receiving NED or USAID funding, leaders of US-bankrolled organisations in the country advertising their intention to overthrow Yanukovych years prior, and the Endowment spending $20 million in the country in 2013 alone.
After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, NED removed its grant records on Ukraine, listing its investment in a panoply of initiatives in the country over many years – many of which ultimately targeted Russia, one way or another. In mid-2024, the Endowment undertook the unprecedented step of removing grant records for the entire world. Today, brief entries on different geographical regions describe in vague terms the Endowment’s specific aims locally, and overall sums being spent. The crucial questions of where, and on what, aren’t clarified.
NED going underground makes the task of tracking and exposing contemporary colour revolutions difficult, but not impossible. In September 2025, mass rioting ignited in Nepal. Major news outlets without exception reported the fiery agitation as an organic burst of dissent by the country’s disaffected “Gen Z”, motivated by corruption, unemployment, and state censorship of social media. Publications barely acknowledged demonstrators committed serious crimes, including torching Nepal’s parliament and the Prime Minister’s official residence, which sent occupants fleeing in helicopters.
Based on publicly available information, the clear insinuations of a colour revolution could be discerned. An NGO that organised the protests, Hami Nepal, had clear links to organisations known to be in receipt of NED funding. Subsequent leaks amply demonstrated the Endowment and USAID expended substantial sums over the years preceding the coup training young Nepalese citizens how to protest, founding NGOs and political parties, and “advocate concerns” on issues such as corruption. Evidently, the post-9/11 “Freedom Agenda” never actually ended.
Revealed: USAID, NED & Open Society Quietly Bankroll Cuba’s “Independent” Media In Push for Regime Change
By Alan MACLEOD | MintPress News | May 15, 2026
Amid escalating U.S. aggression towards the Cuban island through a maximum pressure campaign and the threat of military intervention, the United States government has been covertly funding a huge network of Cuban media outlets that claim to be independent in a push for regime change against the independent socialist government.
These outlets present themselves as unbiased investigative journalism, but are quietly being financed by Washington through USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Foundation in order to sow discontent across the Caribbean nation, softening it up for a potentially “imminent” invasion by the Trump administration.
Cuba faces some of its worst energy blackouts in its history, thanks to the U.S. blockade, which is attempting to strangle the island into submission. As a Communist state defying U.S. orders, Cuba has, since 1959, been in the crosshairs of Washington, who are attempting to overthrow the government. MintPress sheds light on this shady regime change nexus.
Independent Journalism, Brought To You By The State Department
CubaNet is one of the most influential and well-established news outlets covering affairs on the Caribbean island. Founded by anti-government activists in 1994, the site has become the go-to source of information for corporate media, who regularly cite it, and present it as an objective and unbiased independent media (e.g., The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and The Los Angeles Times ). CubaNet reporters have written op-eds in major U.S. newspapers such as USA Today, calling for an immediate change in government on the island.
But CubaNet is not as independent as it seems. The outlet is bankrolled by the U.S. national security state. CubaNet has received millions of dollars in funding from USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as the Open Society Foundation.
One currently active $500,000 USAID grant, for instance, was awarded to CubaNet to “engage on-island young Cubans through objective and uncensored multimedia journalism.” While ostensibly a laudable goal, even the grant’s own one-sentence description hints that its purpose is to undermine and attack the Cuban government. It states that it will (emphasis added) “increase the free flow of information to and from Cuba in order to offset the regime’s disinformation campaigns.”
Another news organization receiving huge sums of money from Washington is ADN Cuba. Literally meaning “Cuba’s DNA,” the outlet has amassed a significant following online, boasting over 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, over 200,000 on Instagram, and over 1.3 million on Facebook. It describes itself as “an independent media outlet committed to freedom and democracy in Cuba.” Yet it is actually based in Spain. And it does not seem particularly committed to transparency about its funding.
What is clear, however, is that ADN Cuba has received millions of dollars from the U.S. national security state. In September 2024, USAID approved a $1.1 million grant to ADN Cuba – a gigantic amount of money for an organization that publishes barely one story per day on its website. This was on top of a $1.5 million allocation for the 2022-2024 period. Indeed, since 2020, ADN Cuba has received in excess of $3 million from USAID alone. This relationship is not disclosed to readers– even in stories directly covering USAID funding Cuban media– and is relegated to the footnotes of obscure U.S. government funding databases.
Diario de Cuba is another Spanish-based news outlet that publishes a wide variety of stories, all with one thing in common: a deep aversion to the Cuban government. The BBC describes it and CubaNet as key sources for impartial news, run by journalists who “report without censorship and to paint a broader picture on the country’s reality.”
And just like CubaNet, Diario de Cuba has received seven-figure funding from Washington. Between 2016 and 2020, Diario de Cuba received $1.3 million in USAID cash – almost as much as CubaNet over the same period. This generous funding has allowed it to reach a global audience, with over 600,000 followers on Facebook alone.
Regime Change Networks
The Central Intelligence Agency used to directly (and secretly) sponsor hundreds of media outlets across the world. However, after a series of scandals and more information about its nefarious activities came to public attention, Washington decided to outsource many of its most controversial foreign operations to organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA,” Carl Gershman, the NED’s longtime president, said, explaining the 1983 decision to create his organization. NED co-founder Allen Weinstein agreed: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” he told The Washington Post.
Under the guise of democracy promotion and human rights, the U.S. government channels money to political and social groups across the world in order to maximize its strategic goals, including regime change.
In recent years, the U.S. has used the twin organizations of the NED and USAID to bankroll anti-government protests in Hong Kong, to attempt a color revolution in Belarus, to overthrow the government of Ukraine in 2014, and to organize riots across Iran earlier this year.
In Cuba, the NED and USAID played a critical role in organizing a (failed) uprising against the government in 2021. USAID in particular spent millions of dollars funding, organizing and promoting the San Isidro Movement – a collective of musicians, artists, and journalists– to lead a counter-revolution on the island.
San Isidro members were at the forefront of a wave of nationwide protests that July. The demonstrations were immediately signal boosted by Western corporate media, top celebrities, and U.S. politicians, including President Biden. Netizens were flooded with the astroturfed “SOS Cuba” campaign, that trended across the Internet for days.
In the end, however, the coordinated efforts of the U.S. failed to convince ordinary Cubans to take to the streets, and the movement quickly petered out.
Esteban Rodríguez, a key member of the San Isidro movement, is a producer at ADN Cuba.
When U.S. Money Is Paused, “Independent” Media Immediately Collapse
The importance of U.S. government money to the survival and operations of these outlets was underlined early last year when the Trump administration chose to freeze funding to USAID and the NED. Announcing the decision, Elon Musk, then head of the Department of Government Efficiency, described USAID in particular as a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”
The effect on Cuban media was immediate. As soon as the money stopped flowing, dozens of organizations faced immediate liquidation. CubaNet published an emergency editorial asking readers to make up the shortfall. “We are facing an unexpected challenge: the suspension of key funding that sustained part of our work.” they wrote; “If you value our work and believe in keeping the truth alive, we ask for your support.” “Without [USAID] funds, it will be extremely difficult to continue,” CubaNet director Roberto Hechavarría Pilia added.
Diario de Cuba was in similarly dire straits. Its director, Pablo Díaz Espí, noted that “aid to independent journalism from the government of the United States has been suspended, which makes our work more difficult,” asking readers to donate.
Musk’s decision accidentally revealed a sprawling network of over 6,200 reporters and nearly 1,000 outlets worldwide that were quietly being trained, supported, and bankrolled by the CIA front, all under the banner of promoting “independent” media and freedom of information.
Another supposedly independent Cuban outlet plunged into crisis was El Toque (The Touch). Founded in 2014 and receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from the NED, El Toque publishes in Spanish and English, and attempts to manipulate the exchange rates in Cuba.
The funding cut hit them badly, with editors announcing that they would immediately have to lay off half their staff (15 people) and stop working with dozens of freelancers, while looking for alternative funding sources.
El Estornudo (The Sneeze), is also generously financed by NED. In 2021 alone, the endowment awarded the investigative journalism outlet $180,000. It also receives copious support from the Open Society Foundation, although it insists that none of this U.S. money comes with any strings attached or affects its output.
While Western media often portray the Cuban media landscape as a David-and-Goliath fight between plucky independent media facing repression, and a sprawling state-sponsored propaganda apparatus, the gigantic sums handed out to these “underdogs” make them by far and away the best funded outlets on the island. A 2023 Guardian article, for instance, profiled 24-year-old photojournalist Pedro Sosa, who worked for both El Toque and El Estornudo. It presented the pair as “offer[ing] real reporting over stodgy state media” and journalists as poor and vulnerable truth tellers standing up for “freedom,” and facing a “crackdown” from the state.
But it also let slip that working for U.S.-backed media is not as bad a career move as portrayed, and is, in fact, an extremely lucrative profession. It casually mentions that salaries at tiny El Toque are ten times that of even the most senior journalists working in Cuban state media. In reality, then, these oppressed free speech warriors are actually some of the richest individuals on the entire island, thanks to the power of the U.S. dollar, which pays them handsomely to produce a constant stream of anti-government news.
In the end, the U.S.-backed outlets need not have worried, and NED and USAID funding resumed after some restructuring.
Jobs For the Boys
All this, however, pales in comparison to the resources the U.S. has dedicated to Radio and TV Martí. Founded in 1985 by the Reagan administration, the Miami-based network boasts dozens of full-time employees and receives tens of millions of dollars from Washington annually.
Unlike the rest of the journalism industry, workers at Radio and TV Martí enjoy strong job security and six-figure wages, despite the fact that the Cuban government is able to jam and block many of their broadcasts from reaching Cuba, meaning precious few people consume its content.
Since its creation, Washington has spent at least $800 million on Radio and TV Martí.
The outlets profiled make up only a small portion of the network of anti-government media being funded by the United States. Most of the recipients of American money remain anonymous – a decision taken in part to hide their identities and preserve their credibility inside Cuba.
The National Endowment for Democracy considers Cuba a “long-standing priority,” and is currently officially funding 32 separate projects on the island.
Media related grants include one $80,000 project titled “Strengthening Access to Information,” which promises to:
“[E]nhance access to information and promote critical thinking, the organization will produce daily reporting and analysis across various formats, providing independent perspectives on issues affecting citizens’ daily lives, including freedom of expression, public safety, human rights, and other pressing social concerns.”
Another $115,000 grant, titled “Expanding Access to Uncensored Media” notes that it will:
“[P]romote independent information, the organization will provide narrative journalism on censored topics, conduct investigations, and produce in-depth articles, photo essays, and opinion pieces while strengthening the media’s operational capacity.”
Thirty-one of the thirty-two projects hide the recipient’s name and identification, meaning that those groups working with the CIA cutout organization are generally only ever identified if they advertise this relationship, or, like when U.S. money was temporarily halted in 2025, they call for help.
Anti-government media are only a small portion of the huge array of groups Washington secretly funds and supports. From musicians and academics, to civil society, educational, and religious groups, to think tanks, charities and NGOs, there exists a vast nexus of organizations receiving vast sums of money from the U.S. government.
Two of these bodies include The Observatorio Cubano de Derechos Humanos (Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, or OCDH) and lawyers’ group, Cubalex.
Both groups produce reports denouncing the Cuban government, and are regularly cited as impartial authorities on human rights on the island in Western outlets, such as The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post. But what readers are not told is that both organizations are bankrolled by the U.S. national security state.
Records show that USAID has given almost $1.5 million to the OCDH. NED support, meanwhile, was crucial to Cubalex’s inception in 2010, and Washington continues to pay its staff wages to this day. As the company’s executive director, Laritza Diversent said last year,
“Without the support of National Endowment for Democracy, Cubalex would not have existed; to do the work we do requires resources. For 14 years, NED has been supporting us. Last October, after trying a lot of times, we [also] achieved a state Department grant.”
Thus, there is barely a corner of the anti-government Cuban opposition that has not been reached by U.S. money, either through government organizations such as the NED or USAID, or through institutions such as the Ford Foundation and Open Societies Foundation, which have historically performed a similar role in promoting American interests abroad.
Many of these groups are headquartered in South Florida, where U.S. government money is helping to subsidize thousands of jobs for the Cuban-American community. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that a significant part of Miami economy is propped by taxpayer money funding counter-revolutionary forces. Ironic, considering that conservative Cubans often vehemently object to government welfare programs in both the U.S. and Cuba.
Digital Bombardment
In 2010, a new social media and messaging app, Zunzuneo, took Cuba by storm. From nowhere, it went viral, picking up tens of thousands of users – a very large number for the time on such an internet-sparse island.
None of its users, however, were aware that the platform had been secretly created by USAID in order to promote regime change. Their plan was to first provide an excellent service that would capture the market, then to slowly drip feed Cubans anti-government messaging, and finally to direct them to join “smart mobs”, aimed at triggering a color revolution.
In an effort to hide its ownership of the project, the U.S. government held a secret meeting with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, aimed at getting him to invest in the project. It is unclear to what extent, if any, Dorsey helped, as he has declined to speak on the matter.
Zunzuneo was abruptly shut down in 2012, perhaps because the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (which oversees TV and Radio Marti) had already created a new program called Piramideo.
Piramideo marketed itself as an app that allowed Cubans to receive world news for free, and without censorship. Almost immediately, however, locals reported being deluged with fake news about anti-government protests that never happened. Piramideo was shut down in 2015, after reporting on U.S. government meddling in Cuba caused a scandal and diplomatic embarrassment.
Today, however, with Cubans increasingly using American social media apps, this kind of subterfuge is largely unnecessary, as it can be done out in the open. During the 2021 San Isidro protests, apps such as Instagram and Twitter were openly participating in the attempt to overthrow the government, taking no action against a massive boom of clearly fake bot accounts parroting the exact same messages (down to the typos) and using the same astroturfed hashtag. Twitter’s editorial team even placed the protests – which drew barely a few thousand people into the streets nationwide – at the top of its “What’s Happening” for over 24 hours, meaning that every user worldwide would be notified. The failed putsch has come to be known as the “Bay of Tweets.”
Unending War on Cuba
In October, for the 33rd consecutive year, the United Nations voted overwhelmingly (165-7) to call for an end to the American blockade against Cuba. This economic war was established by the Eisenhower administration, in response to the Cuban Revolution of 1959, which overthrew the U.S.-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista.
These illegal unilateral coercive measures, which an internal U.S. government memo states are designed to “decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government,” cost Cuba billions every year, and severely impede its development.
The U.S. attempted to invade Cuba in 1961, and brought the world to the brink of annihilation during the subsequent Cuban missile crisis. It reportedly attempted to kill its leader Fidel Castro hundreds of times, and carried out waves of terror attacks against the country, including using biological weapons on the island.
Successive administrations continued the economic war against Cuba, which was ramped up after the fall of the Soviet Union. But the Trump State Department, run by Cuban-American Marco Rubio, has taken it to a new level, declaring the island to be one of its top priorities.
Trump himself has declared that Cuba is “next” on the list of countries being targeted for regime change. “We may stop by Cuba after we’re finished” with Iran he said last month.
In response, Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel said his country was ready to repel any U.S. invasion, as it did during the Bay of Pigs, stating:
“The moment is extremely challenging and calls upon us once again, as on April 16, 1961, to be ready to confront serious threats, including military aggression. We do not want it, but it is our duty to prepare to avoid it and, if it becomes inevitable, to defeat it.”
It is in this context that the U.S. government’s funding of a vast array of media outlets targeting Cuba should be seen; the media attack is just one facet of Washington’s multipronged approach to regime change.
Many of the organizations profiled here publish in English, and nearly all are used as supposedly credible sources of information on Cuba for Western corporate media, meaning that U.S. State Department narratives are laundered into the public consciousness through this network.
Many Cubans and Americans are completely unaware that their news about the island comes largely through a matrix of shady outlets quietly funded by the U.S. national security state via the NED and USAID. Their purpose is to keep up the flow of negative stories in order to soften the public up into accepting regime change on the island. After all, in war, truth is always the first casualty.
Battle for Hungary: How the Russiagate blueprint has been unleashed against Orban
RT | March 25, 2026
The shadow campaign to swing the Hungarian election against Viktor Orban has escalated with the wiretapping of Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto. The case offers a rare look into how bureaucrats, journalists, and spies run a regime-change operation in real time.
Three weeks out from the April 12 elections, the political opposition to Orban scored what seemed to be a win over the weekend, when Politico and the Washington Post ran articles alleging that Szijjarto had phoned Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with “live reports on what had been discussed” at multiple EU meetings. The reports cited anonymous “European security officials.”
Neither Orban nor Szijjarto make any secret of their desire to maintain cordial relations with Moscow, particularly on matters of energy security and the peace process in Ukraine. However, when bundled with more outlandish claims – that Russian “election fixers” are already embedded in Budapest, for example – the reports paint a picture of a government compromised by the Kremlin.
Orban’s leading opponent, Peter Magyar, has repeated these claims in his speeches. After the Szijjarto story broke, he accused the foreign minister of “betraying Hungarian and European interests,” and threatened him with “life imprisonment” for treason, should his Tisza party win the election.
All it took was one leaked audio file for the scheme to unravel.
The Szijjarto wiretapping plot
In an audio file released by Hungarian conservative outlet Mandiner on Monday, opposition journalist Szabolcs Panyi can be heard telling a source how he passed Szijjarto’s phone number to “a state organ of an EU country.” Once they had this number, he explained, agents of this country were able to extract “information about who that number spoke to, and they see who is calling that number or who that number is calling.”
In a Facebook post on Monday, Panyi confirmed that he was the person on the recording. He said that he was asking his source whether she knew of any alternate numbers used by Szijjarto or Lavrov, “so that I could compare them with information received from the national security service of a European country.”
Panyi’s confession explained how the “European security officials” were able to track Szijjarto’s phone conversations before feeding the information to Politico and the Washington Post.
Orban immediately announced an investigation into the wiretapping. “We are dealing with two serious issues,” the PM stated on Monday. “There is evidence that Hungary’s foreign minister was wiretapped, and we also have indications of who may be behind it.” Szijjarto explained that as the EU’s longest-serving foreign minister, he regularly speaks to Lavrov with messages from his colleagues in the EU. The real scandal, he said “is that a Hungarian journalist is colluding with foreign secret services in order to wiretap a member of the Hungarian government.”
“What makes this case even worse is that this Hungarian journalist is friends with the inner circles of the [opposition] Tisza party,” he added.
The man on the inside
Panyi’s central role in the scheme will come as no surprise to anyone who’s been following our reporting on the Hungarian election. An editor with Vsquare, Panyi leads the outlet’s Budapest office, and wrote an article in early March alleging that the Kremlin had dispatched “political technologists” from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, to Budapest to swing the election for Orban.
Panyi did not explain what this mysterious team of election meddlers was doing, or investigate whether they actually existed. Instead, he took the word of the anonymous “European national security sources,” who fed him the story at face value.
Vsquare is funded by grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an agency of the US State Department that helped foment the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine, USAID, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and two EU-backed journalism funds. Almost all of Vsquare’s published work – which includes investigations tying Orban’s government to Russian intelligence, as well as hit pieces on populist leaders Robert Fico in Slovakia and Andrej Babis in the Czech Republic – is based on information provided by European intelligence agencies, as well as interviews with pro-EU politicians and NGOs.
Panyi’s apparent role is to launder this information for public consumption. In the case of the GRU meddling story, he took the word of the intelligence agencies and presented it as original reporting before it was picked up and disseminated by multiple Western outlets, including the Financial Times. The EU then activated its online censorship mechanism in Hungary, citing the threat of “potential Russian online disinformation campaigns.” Originating with EU spies and spread by an EU-financed news outlet, the story helped legitimize the bloc’s censorship campaign ahead of a crucial election.
In the case of the Szijjarto-Lavrov story, Panyi went even further by helping the spies obtain their information in the first place. It is unclear which agency he collaborated with, but in a Facebook post, the Vsquare editor said that he spoke to officials from seven EU countries while working on the story. Among them was Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s former foreign minister who has referred to Russia as “the world’s cancer that must be removed.”
What’s the endgame for Panyi and the EU?
Panyi stands to personally gain if Orban is ousted in April. In the recording released by Mandiner, he tells his source that he is a “quasi-friend” of Anita Orban, a member of Magyar’s Tisza party, and Magyar’s pick to replace Szijjarto as foreign minister. Panyi suggests that he has close links to Tisza, and would be in a position to recommend “who should stay or be removed” if Magyar takes power.
More broadly, it is unclear whether Vsquare’s reporting will have any meaningful impact on Hungarian voters. However, smear campaigns and dirty tricks are part and parcel of any election, and with Orban vetoing the EU’s €90 billion loan package for Ukraine, Brussels and its allies have every incentive to try to tip the scales in their favor.
Yet even if Orban wins, the flood of Russia conspiracies from outlets like Vsquare, Politico, and the Washington Post serves another vital purpose: to delegitimize his victory and justify reprisals from Brussels.
Russiagate revived
The self-fulfilling conspiracy playbook was actually written in Washington. Back in 2016, fabricated claims of “Russian interference” and improper contacts between Donald Trump’s campaign and Moscow were used to justify the wiretapping of Trump’s campaign, and a years-long investigation that ultimately ended with zero proof of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
The parallels between ‘Russiagate’ and the information war playing out in Hungary are unmistakable. In the same way that Vsquare’s GRU report propped up the EU’s decision to impose its censorship regime on Hungary earlier this month, the FBI used the ‘Steele Dossier’ – a collection of unfounded rumors about Trump’s relationship with Moscow – to justify wiretapping the Trump campaign.
In 2017, Barack Obama’s intelligence chief, James Clapper, strong-armed the 17 US intelligence agencies into releasing a statement claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally “approved and directed” a cyber-warfare and influence operation against the Clinton campaign. In 2026, the EU’s spy agencies are using the press to smear Orban and Szijjarto as agents of the Kremlin.
‘Russiagate’ stymied Trump’s policy agenda for the entirety of his first term in office. Even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report exonerated Trump in 2019, the CIA leaked false reports of Russia paying the Taliban cash “bounties” for killing US soldiers to block the president’s planned withdrawal from Afghanistan, while Clinton and many of her supporters still maintain that Trump’s 2016 victory was fraudulent.
The EU has already blocked funds for Hungary equal to 3.5% of the country’s GDP, over Orban’s banning of LGBT propaganda and refusal to accept non-European migrants. Should he win the April election, it is easy to imagine claims of Russian interference being used to cut further assistance to Budapest, or even to strip Hungary’s EU veto rights. The latter idea has already been floated by Sweden, Lithuania, and a host of unnamed “EU diplomats” interviewed by Politico last week.
What’s the bottom line?
The battle for power in Hungary is intensifying a full three weeks ahead of the key vote, as international vested interests begin running ploys tried and tested in other jurisdictions, from the US to Romania (see our series opener on the EU censorship machine).
In Hungary, Panyi has claimed that “the connection between Szijjarto and Lavrov is just the tip of the iceberg.” Orban has vowed to “take retribution” for the wiretapping. Magyar has threatened Szijjarto with prison time. For everyone involved, the scandal has raised the stakes of the election to the point where nobody can afford to lose on April 12.
The Head Of A CIA Cutout Admits To Meddling In Iran To Fuel Unrest
The Dissident | February 24, 2026
At a recent House Appropriations Committee hearing, Damon Wilson, the current president of the National Endowment for Democracy, the notorious cutout of the CIA’s regime change arm, which has previously helped fund coups around the world, admitted to meddling in Iran and helping to fuel both the women’s life freedom protests in 2022 and the recent protests in Iran.
Wilson boasted that the U.S. government-funded organization helped spread the story of a woman being killed for not wearing a headscarf in Iran that sparked the women’s life freedom protests in 2022, even admitting that the story would not have spread across Iran without the NED.
Wilson admitted, in response to the question, “Are you doing anything in Iran and can you tell us what that is?”, “This has been a huge priority for the endowment. Iran has been- since I arrived at the endowment- our fastest growing program. It’s now one of our largest programs globally that involves both direct partners, Iranian groups as well as our core institutes. If you think about the impact of our work in Iran, the reason the women life freedom movement began with the the simple act of a young woman who didn’t fully cover her her head with a headscarf, that story … could have been lost in a regional as a regional story in Iran, but NED Partners helped cover that story, get it out to the world, and get it back into Iran.”
He also admitted in reference to the most recent protests in Iran, that the organization has helped smuggle Starlink terminals into Iran and spread propaganda that helped spark the pro-regime change protests.
Damon Wilson boasted, “the endowment has been making investments over years that have ensured that there have been secure communications, including Starlinks, other means, file casting that allowed information to go both in and out of the country at a time when the regime tried to hide its brutal crackdown” adding, “Part of what we see manifesting is a response that our partners have helped tell the Iranian people the story that the regime has squandered their own resources on supporting proxies throughout the Middle East to the point where they cannot manage their own water supplies for Tehran. And these stories have not just emerged, they are ones that have been covered, documented, and shared with the Iranian people consistently through our work.”
He added, “we’ve been investing in communication tools over the years that allow for information to be sent into Iran even when internet connectivity is blocked. We specifically began supporting the deployment, the operation of about 200 Starlinks early on.”
Damon Wilson boasted that the NED has spread stories that the Iranian government has “squandered their own resources” and “cannot manage their own water supplies for Tehran”, issues that have, in large part, been caused by U.S. sanctions.
Previously U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has boasted that U.S. sanctions helped spark the protests in Iran saying, “What we can do at treasury, and what we have done, is created a dollar shortage in the country, at a speech at the Economic club in New York in March I outlined the strategy, it came to a swift -and I would say grand- culmination in December when one of the largest banks in Iran went under, there was a run in the bank, the central bank had to print money, the Iranian currency went into freefall, inflation exploded and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.”
While Scott Bessent boasts that U.S. sanctions led to “Iranian people out on the street”, Damon Wilson is boasting that the NED has flooded Iran with anti-government messaging while people are suffering worsening conditions from the U.S. sanctions, in order to further destabilize Iran and further the ultimate goal of regime change.
Truth as first casualty: Deconstructing disinformation campaign on Iran riots death toll
By Yousef Ramazani | Press TV | January 19, 2026
Amid the foreign-instigated riots and terrorism that struck Iran in recent weeks, a parallel narrative war also unfolded, centered on the deliberate propagation of wildly inflated and unverifiable casualty figures.
These figures were designed to manufacture global outrage and legitimize calls for American military intervention and yet another aggression against the Islamic Republic.
The discourse surrounding riot-related casualties in the past few weeks has been fundamentally shaped by a coordinated disinformation campaign originating from US-funded organizations operating entirely outside Iran. Central to this campaign was the circulation of sensational death tolls that bore little resemblance to verifiable facts on the ground.
The figure of 12,000 deaths was initially promoted by the New York–based Center for Human Rights in Iran, an organization financially linked to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US Congress–funded entity with a well-documented history of interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states.
This claim was presented without transparent methodology, primary data, or independent verification, raising eyebrows both inside and outside the country.
Despite this lack of evidence, the narrative was uncritically amplified by major Western media outlets and online influencers, creating a pervasive – but demonstrably false – impression of mass violence. Iranian officials consistently rejected these claims, presenting forensic evidence of manipulated datasets and instead reporting a death toll in the hundreds, the majority of whom were security personnel and civilians killed by armed rioters with foreign backing.
The subsequent escalation of these figures to even more implausible numbers – such as claims of 52,000 dead – underscores the persistence of a hybrid warfare strategy aimed at demonizing Iran while obscuring or outright excusing the violence committed by its adversaries.
Genesis of a false narrative: Center for Human Rights in Iran and its backers
The primary source of the sensational 12,000-fatality claim was neither an Iranian authority nor a verifiable international body, but the Center for Human Rights in Iran, an organization headquartered in New York. Despite its name, the group operates entirely outside Iran and has no physical presence or investigative capacity within the country.
An examination of its leadership and funding reveals a clear political orientation inconsistent with impartial human rights monitoring. The chair of its board is Minky Worden, an American activist with a documented history of spearheading anti-China advocacy campaigns, including efforts to politicize the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Financially, the organization relies heavily on grants from the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C. The NED is a privately managed but publicly funded institution that receives annual allocations from the US Congress through the State Department budget.
Historians, observers, and former intelligence officials have long characterized the NED as a transparent successor to activities once conducted covertly by the Central Intelligence Agency, particularly the funding of political opposition groups and media outlets under the banner of “democracy promotion.”
The NED’s record includes extensive involvement in “regime-change” efforts across Eastern Europe, Latin America, and West Asia – regions that have consistently featured in American foreign policy campaigns.
Amplification network: From NED grantees to global headlines
The unfounded casualty figure did not remain confined to a single organization. It was rapidly injected into the global media bloodstream through a tightly networked ecosystem of interconnected groups.
Other NED-funded entities, including the Human Rights Activists News Agency and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, echoed and cross-cited the same unsubstantiated statistics.
Operating largely from the US, these organizations function within a closed loop of mutual citation, manufacturing the illusion of multiple independent confirmations.
This echo chamber was then leveraged by major Western media outlets, including BBC Persian, Voice of America, The Washington Post, and ABC News, which incorporated the figures into their reporting.
Typically, these outlets attributed the numbers vaguely to “human rights groups” or “activists,” effectively laundering the information and granting it a veneer of credibility without conducting any independent verification. This failure is particularly striking given the well-documented funding sources and political objectives of the originating organizations.
Crucially, much of this coverage omitted the context that these groups are financially and ideologically aligned with the very governments actively seeking to pressure, isolate, and destabilize the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Iranian rebuttal and exposure of fabricated evidence
Iranian government officials and domestic media mounted a comprehensive, forensic rebuttal to the widespread disinformation campaign. The judiciary’s spokesperson and the head of the Supreme National Security Council categorically denounced the claim of 12,000 deaths as “psychological warfare” and a “complete fabrication.”
They publicly challenged the originators of the figure to provide a single verifiable name, death certificate, or precise locational detail to substantiate their alleged casualty lists, a challenge that was never answered.
Cyber units affiliated with Iranian media conducted technical analyses tracing the viral dissemination of the figures to known bot networks operating from locations in the United States, Israeli-occupied territories, and Albania.
Further investigations revealed that purported “martyr lists” were riddled with fraud: hundreds of duplicate entries, names of individuals who had died decades earlier during the Holy Defense war, and even names copied directly from public cemetery records in other countries.
The case of Saghar Etemadi became emblematic of the deception. Widely declared a “martyr” by external outlets, she was later confirmed by the Iranian judiciary and by her own family to be alive and receiving medical treatment for injuries sustained during a riot.
Iranian reports emphasized that the actual death toll, resulting from terrorist acts carried out by foreign-backed armed rioters, numbered in the hundreds. A significant proportion of the victims were police officers, Basij forces, and civilians deliberately targeted by violent saboteurs.
Escalation to absurdity and the weaponization of atrocity propaganda
The disinformation ecosystem demonstrated its capacity for rapid and unchecked escalation.
From the initial claim of 12,000 deaths, narratives soon proliferated across social media platforms and activist circles alleging 52,000 fatalities and more than 300,000 wounded.
These figures, divorced from any conceivable reality, serve a deliberate psychological and political function. They are designed to induce global emotional shock, overwhelm critical scrutiny, and portray the Iranian state as uniquely and exceptionally undemocratic
This narrative fulfills a dual geopolitical purpose, according to experts. First, it seeks to manufacture consent for foreign intervention, intensified sanctions, or diplomatic isolation by invoking a humanitarian pretext. Second, it functions as a tool of distraction and moral laundering.
By creating a false equivalence, or even attempting to eclipse, the documented casualties inflicted by the Israeli regime in Gaza, the campaign aims to redirect global outrage and obscure the horrendous crimes of Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s allies.
Influencers and online networks aligned with the Israeli regime aggressively promoted the fabricated Iranian casualty figures in an effort to undermine the global Palestine solidarity movement and digitally overwrite the extensive evidence of Israeli war crimes.
Underlying architecture: NED as a US “regime-change” instrument
The role of the National Endowment for Democracy is central to understanding the structural foundations of this disinformation campaign. Leaked documents and historical analyses reveal the NED as a key instrument of US foreign policy, operating as a conduit for government funds to support political movements aligned with American strategic interests abroad.
The organization was established following congressional scrutiny of CIA covert operations. One of its founders, Allen Weinstein, openly acknowledged that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
The NED’s activities extend far beyond Iran. It has been a principal funder and organizer of so-called “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and has been formally designated an “undesirable organization” by Russia for interference in domestic affairs. Its involvement in Hong Kong and Xinjiang has prompted sanctions from China.
In the Iranian context, the NED has for decades funded an array of exile media outlets, advocacy groups, and cultural figures, with the explicit aim of cultivating an alternative political leadership.
A leaked 2024 proposal revealed NED plans to funnel State Department resources into an “Iran Freedom Coalition” composed of US neoconservatives and selected exile figures, exposing the direct link between humanitarian narrative construction and overt regime-change ambitions.
A perennial pattern of narrative warfare
The manipulation of casualty figures during the 2025–2026 unrest is not an isolated episode, but part of a recurring tactic in the long-running hybrid war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The pattern is consistent and predictable: a US-funded NGO, operating safely from New York or Washington, releases an unverifiable and sensational claim. A network of affiliated organizations and social media assets amplifies it, after which mainstream Western media repackages it as credible reporting.
The objective is never truth, but the construction of a carefully engineered perceptual reality serving strategic interests. This reality is designed to demonize independent states, legitimize coercive policies, and erase or minimize the crimes of allied regimes.
The Iranian experience, from the myth of 12,000 deaths to the even more fantastical claim of 52,000, stands as a stark case study in the weaponization of information in the 21st century.
In this domain, the battlefield is not only the street, but global consciousness itself, and the most powerful weapons are often not missiles, but meticulously crafted falsehoods.
Every House Democrat Votes Against Defunding A Cutout Of The CIA
The Dissident | January 18, 2026
Recently, U.S. representative Eli Crane introduced a provision into the recent spending package that would cut funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a cutout of the CIA used to advance regime change abroad.
In response to his “amendment to defund NED” every House Democrat, including progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, and Ilhan Omar, voted against it, along with 81 Republicans, slapping down the amendment 291 to 127.
But what is the NED, the CIA cutout that the Washington uniparty rejected ending funding for?
The NED, which was officially created by Ronald Regan in 1984, was described in 1995 by CIA whistleblower Philip Agee as the CIA’s “sidekick” which functioned as “a mega conduit” for “the millions or the tens of millions that are set aside for the meddling in the internal affairs of other countries”.
Allen Weinstein, the head of the NED, boasted in a interview with the Washington Post in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”.
Indeed, the NED has been used for America’s “meddling in the internal affairs of other countries”, playing a role in U.S. coups and coup attempts in Venezuela (2002-2025), Haiti (2004), Ukraine (2014), Nicaragua (2018), Bolivia (2019), Belarus (2020), and Romania (2024).
In 2004, the NED provided funding and training for opposition activists who overthrew Haiti’s democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Mother Jones reported at the time when the coup took place, “several of the people who had attended IRI (International Republican Institute, a subsidiary of the NED) trainings were influential in the toppling of Aristide”.
Mother Jones noted, “In 2002 and 2003, IRI used funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to organize numerous political training sessions in the Dominican Republic and Miami for some 600 Haitian leaders. Though IRI’s work is supposed to be nonpartisan — it is official U.S. policy not to interfere in foreign elections — a former U.S. diplomat says organizers of the workshops selected only opponents of Aristide and attempted to mold them into a political force”.
Similarly, in 2002, the NED, through the IRI, helped support a U.S. backed military coup against Venezuela’s elected president, Hugo Chavez, with Mother Jones noting, “In April 2002, a group of military officers launched a coup against Chavez, and leaders of several parties trained by IRI joined the junta.”
In 2015, the NED gave $300,000 to another one of its subsidiaries the National Democratic Institute (NDI) to meddle in Venezuela’s National Assembly elections of 2015 and swing them to the U.S.-backed opposition through “mobilizing a voter database that identified and targeted swing voters through social media”.
As Jacobin Magazine noted , “indeed, in December 2015, the opposition won a majority in the Venezuelan National Assembly for the first time since Chávez came to power in 1999” adding, “the NDI claims credit for the opposition’s success, writing that this strategy ‘ultimately played an important role in their resounding victory in the 2015 election’ and that a ‘determining factor in the success of the coalition in the parliamentary elections of 2015 was a two-year effort prior to the election”.
Along with this, the NED funded opposition politicians such as Maria Corina Machado, who helped certify the 2002 coup, drove a failed referendum against Chavez in 2004, and “was also one of the political architects of La Salida, the 2014 opposition campaign that called for escalated protests, including guarimba tactics”, which- as journalist Michelle Ellner noted, “weren’t ‘peaceful protests’ as the foreign press claimed; they were organized barricades meant to paralyze the country and force the government’s fall. Streets were blocked with burning trash and barbed wire, buses carrying workers were torched, and people suspected of being Chavista were beaten or killed. Even ambulances and doctors were attacked. Some Cuban medical brigades were nearly burned alive. Public buildings, food trucks, and schools were destroyed. Entire neighborhoods were held hostage by fear while opposition leaders like Machado cheered from the sidelines and called it ‘resistance.’”
Similarly, the NED played a role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine against the country’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, which turned Ukraine into a U.S. proxy state.
As journalist Branko Marcetic reported, “Just two months before they (protests in Ukraine) broke out, the NED’s then president, pointing to Yanukovych’s European outreach, wrote that ‘the opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help.’ In practice, this meant funding groups like New Citizen, which the Financial Times reported ‘played a big role in getting the protest up and running,’ led by a pro-EU opposition figure. Journalist Mark Ames discovered the organization had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from US democracy promotion initiatives.”
The protests were eventually taken over by far-right paramilitary groups, who fired sniper shots at protestors in the Maidan square, a massacre that was falsely blamed on Yanukovych’s forces by the U.S. and used to justify supporting his removal and installing a puppet government.
The real motive behind the coup, as Ukrainian political scientist Konstantin Bondarenko put it was because “The West, however, did not want a Ukrainian president who pursued a multi-vector foreign policy; the West needed Ukraine to be anti-Russia, with clear opposition between Kyiv and Moscow. Yanukovych was open to broad cooperation with the West, but he was not willing to confront Russia and China. The West could not accept this ambivalence. The West needed a Ukraine charged for confrontation and even war against Russia, a Ukraine it could use as a tool in the fight against Russia” adding, “this was why Western politicians, diplomats, and civil society representatives actively supported the Euromaidan as a mechanism for overthrowing Yanukovych, even going as far as providing financial support for the ‘revolutionary’ process”
The NED tried and failed to foment another “Maidan” in Nicaragua from 2014-2018, in an attempt to remove the country’s leader, Daniel Ortega, the head of the Sandinista party, which fought the CIA-backed contras in the 1980s.
When riots broke out in the country in 2018, the outlet Global Americans reported that the NED, “laid the groundwork for insurrection” noting that, “Since 2014, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), … has spent $4.1 million on projects in Nicaragua” adding, “it’s becoming more and more clear that the U.S. support has helped play a role in nurturing the current uprisings.”
The uprising was not peaceful protests but a violent NED backed coup attempt. Journalist John Perry, who reported on the coup attempt from the ground noted , “Public buildings and the houses of government supporters were burnt down by protesters; shops were ransacked; most businesses and all banks and schools were closed. The main secondary school for 3,700 pupils was burnt out twice. The police station was under siege for 45 days, so no police were on patrol. No cars or taxis could use the streets; passing the barricades on foot involved being checked by youths with weapons and on occasion threatened. Dissent was met with violence (before the barricades went up, I took part in a ‘peace’ march which was pelted with stones). At first protesters had homemade mortars, but later many acquired more serious weapons such as AK-47s; paid troublemakers manned the barricades at night-time. A police official captured nearby was tortured and then killed, his body burnt at a barricade.”
Similarly, the NED played a role in the U.S. backed military coup against Bolivia’s elected leader, Evo Morales, in 2019.
The U.S. backed coup was sparked when the Organization of American States (OSA) falsely claimed that Evo Morales stole the 2019 election, which was used to justify a military coup and the installation of a military dictatorship led by U.S. puppet, Jeanine Añez.
As journalist Yanis Iqbal, reported the lie that Evo Morales stole the elected was heavily pushed by the NED writing that, “In 2019, NED ran programmes such as Countering Disinformation in the Political Process, Informing Citizens Via Digital Platforms, Monitoring the National Electoral Process, Promoting an Informed Electorate, Providing Independent Analysis and Information, Providing Independent Political News and Election Information and Stimulating an Informed National Debate” which pushed the lie used to justify the coup, adding, “These NED tactics conclusively point towards a scheme of carefully choreographed propaganda and electoral interventionism which contributed to the 2019 Bolivia coup.”
Similar to the Maidan coup in Ukraine, the NED continued to undermine governments in Eastern Europe, which were seen as too close to Russia.
When protests broke out against Belarus’ Russia-aligned president, Aleksandr Lukashenko in 2020, journalist Alan Macleod reported, “on a Zoom meeting infiltrated by activists and released to the public, the NED’s senior Europe Program officer, Nina Ognianova, boasted that the groups leading the nationwide demonstrations against Lukashenko … were trained by her organization. ‘We don’t think that this movement that is so impressive and so inspiring came out of nowhere — that it just happened overnight,’ she said, noting that the NED had made a ‘modest but significant contribution’ to the protests.”
He added, “On the same call, NED President Carl Gershman added that ‘we support many, many groups and we have a very, very active program throughout the country, and many of the groups obviously have their partners in exile.’ Gershman also boasted that the Belarusian government was powerless to intervene and stop them: ‘We’re not like Freedom House or NDI [the National Democratic Institute] and the IRI [International Republican Institute]; we don’t have offices. So if we’re not there, they can’t kick us out.’”
Similarly, the NED intervened in the 2024 election in Romania to back a judicial coup against the candidate Calin Georgescu, because he was opposed to funding the proxy war in Ukraine (which was in large part sparked by the NED backed coup in 2014).
Romania’s intelligence agencies released an evidence-free report which falsely claimed that a TikTok campaign backed by Russia was supporting his campaign.
As the New York Times noted, “The intelligence documents released publicly by Romania provided no evidence of a Russian role, only the observation that ‘Russia has a history of interfering in the electoral processes of other states’ and vague claims that what happened in Romania was ‘similar’ to well-documented Russian election interference in neighboring Moldova”.
Furthermore, the investigative outlet Snoop reported that the TikTok campaign cited in the intelligence report was actually paid for by the Romanian National Liberal Party, the party opposing Calin Georgescu.
Based on this fabricated report, Calin Georgescu was barred from running in the election, despite winning the first round of the vote.
His opponent, Elena Lascon, said at the time, “Today is the moment when the Romanian state trampled over democracy. God, the Romanian people, the truth and the law will prevail and will punish those who are guilty of destroying our democracy”.
This lawfare campaign was backed by the NED. Journalist Lee Fang uncovered that, “think tanks and civil society NGOs funded by the U.S. – via USAID foreign aid programs, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and the State Department – have served as the most vocal voices championing the judicial coup”.
The fact that every House Democrat and many House Republicans voted against defunding the ostensible NGO that has been used by the CIA to back coups around the world – including against democratically elected leaders – that do not bow down to Washington’s demands shows that both parties will continue to keep the deep state’s infrastructure running.
Deep-state forces from abroad instigated violence in Nepal – former foreign minister
RT | January 13, 2026
External deep-state forces were instrumental in instigating the September 2025 violence in Nepal that led to the ouster of the government, its former foreign minister has told RT India.
K.P. Sharma Oli resigned as Nepal’s prime minister after violent clashes – known as the Gen Z protests – killed 77 and injured more than 2,000. Pradeep Kumar Gyawali, a former foreign minister, has now backed Oli’s assertion that Gen Z protests that led to the ouster of the government were backed by external forces.
“Those elements who were actively engaged with the deep state, who used the cross-border misinformation and disinformation to instigate the violence, they were active,” he told RT India in an exclusive interview.
The remarks came after Oli told RT India about external influences in the uprising last year.
Gyawali said Kathmandu’s growing engagement with India and China and its aspiration of being a bridge for the economic development of Nepal between the two neighboring countries “was not a very good message to some powers.”
He added, “[They] wanted to use Nepal’s geostrategic location for their policy in their favor. So maybe our engagement with our neighboring countries may have some grievances to the big powers as well.”
The Grayzone has cited leaked documents to reveal that the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars tutoring Nepalese young people to stage the protests.
The Gen Z protests happened as the US sought to neutralize Chinese and Indian influence over Kathmandu, Grayzone investigations revealed.
The NED is officially a US State Department-funded nonprofit that provides grants to support ‘democratic initiatives’ worldwide.
The International Republican Institute (IRI), a NED division, has been accused of funding clandestine activities in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, apart from funneling tens of millions of dollars to Ukrainian political entities and anti-Russian interests.
Hungary: Major opposition news portal funded by USAID, NED as well as Soros foundation to spread disinformation
Remix News | November 21, 2025
Hungary’s Office for the Protection of Sovereignty has revealed new details regarding the Telex news portal and the funding it has received from the United States, including USAID.
Telex has claimed that it does not depend on foreign funding, but year after year, according to an analysis by the Office, it has received money from foreign governments, including the U.S., and Brussels, reports the Mandiner news portal.
Of note is that Telex received $10,000 through the Internews EPIC applications implemented within the framework of USAID’s activities in Hungary.
USAID and its activities have since been terminated by the Trump administration.
According to the office, headed by Tamás Lanczi, the president of the Office for the Protection of Sovereignty, Telex received the money from the machine controlled as a political weapon by the democratic American government through the “Independent Media Center.”
The Office for Sovereignty Protection has already identified the Internews Foundation in previous reports as a key player in the media manipulation machine that the American deep state has been operating for more than four decades.
Among the organization’s funders are: USAID, used by the Biden administration to fund political interventions around the world, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has been described in detail in the office’s previous reports.
NED, Mandiner notes, played a major role in the illegal foreign campaign financing of the opposition coalition in the 2022 parliamentary elections.
Internews provides media outlets not only with money, but also with technology and content suitable for spreading narratives, which must represent given values and messages and produce activity on designated topics.
The condition for the support, the Office emphasized, is the creation of narratives that allow the American progressive elite to put pressure on the governments and decision-makers of the given countries, and to influence the citizens of the given country.
The organization is highly active in the Central European region, primarily in Hungary and Poland. Its joint media development programs with USAID have played a role in the operation of certain Hungarian media outlets since 2010 in the form of tenders, professional training, and infrastructure support.
The Office’s investigations revealed that, in exchange for money, Internews expects the media outlets to make the topics it determines part of the public discourse, to frame narratives that are contrary to the interests of the client as disinformation, and to provide the funded editorial offices with mandatory content.
As Tamás Lánczi wrote previously, “Telex.hu journalists received almost HUF 200 million of U.S. government money.”
The president of the Office for the Protection of Sovereignty announced that documents reviewed by his organization show that the project called Telex Academy was also implemented with a grant of approximately $740,000 from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) of the United States Department of State.
The vast majority of the money was paid to Telex journalists.
Kyrgyzstan’s Forgotten Colour Revolution
By Kit Klarenberg | Global Delinquents | November 6, 2025
October 5th marked the 25th anniversary of the world’s first “colour revolution”, in Yugoslavia. A lavishly-funded, multi-pronged CIA, NED and USAID campaign exploited civil society actors, in particular youth groups, to dislodge President Slobodan Milosevic from power. Such was the effort’s success, US officials and media openly boasted about Washington’s central role. A slick ‘documentary’ on the unrest, Bringing Down A Dictator, was even produced. Milosevic’s fall also provided a blueprint for countless future ‘soft coups’, which continue to this day.
So it was, one by one in the early 2000s, insufficiently pro-Western governments throughout the former Soviet sphere were toppled using strategies and tactics identical to those deployed against Belgrade. A common ruse was for the US to fund, via local NGOs, a “parallel vote tabulation” to project an election’s outcome in advance, and publicise the data before results were officially announced. As in Yugoslavia, PVT figures differing from formal tallies were the spark that ignited Georgia’s 2003 ‘Rose Revolution’, and Ukraine’s 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’.
Over subsequent years, much has been written by academics, historians and independent journalists about those colour revolutions. Conversely, Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 ‘Tulip Revolution’ has gone almost entirely unremarked upon, and is largely forgotten now. Yet, its destructive consequences reverberate today. Hitherto the freest and most stable state in Central Asia, post-colour revolution Bishkek careened from crisis to crisis, with multiple governments collapsing along the way. It’s only in recent years – following another Anglo-American coup in 2020 – the country has regained its economic, political, and social balance.
Pre-2005, Kyrgyzstan was not an obvious colour revolution candidate. Upon its 1991 independence from the Soviet Union, the country quickly established itself not only as the most democratic and open in the region, but a dependable US ally. President Askar Akayev, a former scientist with zero political background, was organically popular, and moreover made clear his economic policies were informed by arch-capitalist Adam Smith, not Karl Marx. In other words, Bishkek was primed to do business with the West.
Akayev moreover allowed a relatively free media to develop, and welcomed widespread foreign civil society penetration. Thousands of European and US-funded non-governmental organisations duly opened up shop locally. At one stage, the President quipped, “if the Netherlands is a land of tulips, then Kyrgyzstan is a land of NGOs.” His comments proved bitterly ironic, given the title of the colour revolution that eventually unseated him. In another deeply sour twist, it was precisely Akayev’s welcoming of Western financial and societal infiltration that was his undoing.
A self-laudatory USAID factsheet on the President’s removal notes, from 1994 onwards $68 million was funnelled into Kyrgyzstan. This vast windfall was used to train NGOs “to lobby government,” finance “private newspapers” critical of Akayev, establish an “American University” locally, and much more besides. The Tulip Revolution stands today as a stark warning to governments the world over of the dangers of permitting such entities to operate on their soil with impunity – and how often, even pro-Western leaders can fall victim to their mephitic influence.
‘Defeat Dictators’
Despite much goodwill built up since 1991, in October 2003 Akayev angered Washington by inviting Moscow to open an airbase not far from Bishkek, and just a few dozen kilometres from the Empire’s vast Manas military installation, one of a cluster constructed by the US across Central Asia post-9/11 to facilitate the War On Terror. Such insubordination was sufficient to mark the President for removal, and preparations for a colour revolution according to a by-then well-honed formula began almost immediately.
Akayev was not unwise to this risk, warning in December 2004 of an “orange danger” of the kind that had just engulfed Ukraine threatening Kyrgyzstan, in advance of the country’s elections in February the next year. As it was, the results were far too clean to allege rigging or other shenanigans, as with prior colour revolutions. A detailed investigation by the European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations in fact praised a “positive… lack of reports of vote-buying, voter intimidation, and harassment of journalists.”
Washington’s vast local standing army of civil society insurrectionists began causing havoc anyway. Some operated under the banner of KelKel, a group directly inspired by US-sponsored revolutionary youth factions in Yugoslavia, Georgia and Ukraine, and trained by their alumni. Moreover, as the Wall Street Journal revealed just before the elections, an ostensibly “independent” local printing company in receipt of Freedom House, NED, Soros and USAID cash was responsible for publishing a panoply of opposition pamphlets.
Days earlier, the firm’s electricity was cut off by local authorities. Kyrgyzstan’s US embassy “stepped in with emergency generators” to maintain its anti-government propaganda deluge. This included a prominent newspaper that published “front-page photos of a palatial mansion purportedly owned by the President and of a boy in a decrepit alleyway,” highlighting state embezzlement versus citizen poverty. Another was a handbook produced by CIA-connected Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy, dubbed “the bible” of Ukraine’s US-sponsored youth activists at the forefront of the Orange Revolution.
This “manual on how to defeat dictators, including tips on hunger strikes and civil disobedience,” includes guidance “on nonviolent resistance – such as ‘display of flags and symbolic colors’.” However, the protests that instantly erupted after the elections were highly belligerent from inception, with bomb attacks, police pelted with bricks and beaten with sticks, and government buildings torched and forcibly occupied. The New York Times contemporaneously acknowledged broadcasts by US-funded local TV stations inspired violence in certain areas of Kyrgyzstan.
Upheaval raged for weeks, prompting a personal intervention from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who expressed significant alarm over “the use of violence and intimidation to resolve electoral and political disputes.” He welcomed Akayev’s invitation to instigate dialogue with protesters. They demanded he resign instantly – despite the President having already pledged before the election to do so in October that year. In March, Akayev acquiesced and stood down, replaced by Kurmanbek Bakiyev.
‘Terribly Disappointing’
Bakiyev’s seizure of power was initially framed by Western journalists, politicians and pundits as a sparkling victory for people power, and the dawning of a new era of democracy and freedom in Kyrgyzstan. Yet, five years later, he fled the country, following mass protests over his savage, corrupt rule. The tipping point for Bakiyev’s ouster was the April 7th 2010 mass shooting of demonstrators by security forces, which killed up to 100 people and wounded at least 450 more.
As Forbes recorded at the time, the level of graft under his Presidency was “mind-boggling”. Bakiyev appointed close relatives to key positions, allowing his family to profit handsomely from legally questionable privatisation of state industries, and supply of fuel to Washington’s Manas base. Bakiyev’s son Maxim, who oversaw the latter, was described by US diplomats in leaked cables as “smart and corrupt.” By some estimates, companies he ran reaped $1.8 billion from these deals, close to Kyrgyzstan’s total GDP in 2003.
Meanwhile, Bakiyev’s brother Zhanysh ran Bishkek’s security apparatus with an iron fist. Harsh restrictions on political freedoms were enacted, while arbitrary detentions, bogus convictions, torture, and killings of opposition activists, journalists, and politicians became commonplace. For example, in March 2009 Bakivey’s former chief of staff Medet Sadyrkulov died in an alleged road traffic accident. It was later revealed he was brutally slain upon Zhanysh’s order. That December, dissident reporter Gennady Pavlyuk was murdered, thrown out of a sixth-floor apartment with his arms and legs bound.
Bishkek’s Tulip Revolution wasn’t unique in producing such horrors. A March 2013 essay in elite imperial journal Foreign Policy acknowledged the results of every US-orchestrated government overthrow in the first years of the new millennium were “terribly disappointing”, and “far-reaching change never really materialized” resultantly. This is quite an understatement. Most target countries slid into autocracy, chaos and poverty as a result of Washington’s meddling. It has typically taken years for the damage to be corrected, if at all.
Still, despite this disgraceful legacy, the US appetite for fomenting colour revolutions – and the willingness of groomed citizens, particularly youth, the world over to serve as Washington’s regime change footsoldiers – remains undimmed. In September, Nepal’s elected government was overthrown by disaffected ‘Gen Z’ activists, with the full support of the country’s powerful military. The palace coup bore all the hallmarks of a colour revolution. Who and what will replace the felled administration still remains far from clear.
As a September 15th New York Times editorial noted, “Nepalis from all walks were ready to reject the system they had fought for decades to achieve,” but lack “any clear sense of what comes next.” There is an extraordinary political vacuum in Kathmandu presently, which elements within the country are seeking to exploit for malign ends. As before, Nepal’s “revolution” is likely to produce a government far worse than that which preceded it.
Nepal’s color revolution: US funding under scrutiny amid country’s political upheaval
By Kit Klarenberg | Press TV | September 17, 2025
In recent weeks, Nepal has been engulfed in chaos. Public and private buildings have been set ablaze, and dozens of civilians have been killed in incidents that many believe bear the imprint of Western involvement.
On September 9, Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli resigned. The Western media has universally framed the upheaval as spontaneous revolutionary fervour on the part of Kathmandu’s “Gen Z”, motivated by anger over official corruption, unemployment, state efforts to censor social media, and more.
However, there are unambiguous indications that the insurrectionary disarray has been long in the making and assisted by spectral, foreign forces.
The so-called “Gen Z” protests comprise a cluster of local youth activist groups, and are widely dubbed “leaderless”, although Hami Nepal has clearly emerged at the movement’s forefront.
English language Nepali Times has reported that the hitherto unknown NGO “played a central role in guiding the demonstrations, using its Instagram and Discord platforms to circulate protest information and share guidelines.”
The group was established to assist victims of earthquakes – a common occurrence in the country – and provide food, medical and other aid to disadvantaged Nepalese communities.
Subsequently, Hami Nepal oversaw the election of Kathmandu’s interim premier Sushila Karki on September 12, via the highly unorthodox and completely unprecedented expedient of an online vote via Discord.
The NGO’s chat group reportedly boasts 145,000 members, although it’s unclear how many people ultimately voted for Karki. The Western media, and local journalist Prayana Rana, a fervent supporter of the unrest who considers the palace coup to be wholly legitimate and organic, has acknowledged choosing a leader in this manner to be deeply problematic:
“It is much more egalitarian than a physical forum that many might not have access to. Since it is virtual and anonymous, people can also say what they want to without fear of retaliation. But there are also challenges, in that anyone could easily manipulate users by infiltration, and using multiple accounts to sway opinions and votes.”
Still, Karki has firmly pledged to only serve six months in the post until elections are held. She herself has an impressive revolutionary history, having participated in the 1990 People’s Movement that successfully overthrew Nepal’s absolute monarchy, for which she was jailed.
In June 1973, her husband hijacked a plane, stealing vast sums of money to fund armed resistance against the country’s brutal regime, which similarly landed him in prison. Karki’s commitment to seriously tackling corruption as Nepal’s Chief Justice led to her politically-motivated impeachment in June 2017, after just one year.
It is entirely uncertain who or what will replace Karki, and by which mechanism they will attain office. Nonetheless, that Hami Nepal, a previously obscure NGO with no history of political activism, has played such an outsized role in ousting the government of a country of 30 million people and installing its new ruler within mere days, should give us pause.
While the organization’s activities appear benevolent, its rollcall of “brands that support us” contains some puzzling entries, if not outright concerning.
Anonymous profiles
It is unclear what forms of “support” Hami Nepal has received from its sponsors, or when it was provided, but they run quite the gamut. For one, the list includes luxury Western hotels in Kathmandu, clothing and shoe brands, local conglomerate Shanker – the country’s biggest private investor – messaging app Viber, and Coca Cola, notorious for its complicity in countless human rights abuses in the Global South. Elsewhere, the Gurkha Welfare Trust appears.
The Gurkhas have for centuries served as an elite, unique force within the British Army, often tasked with sensitive missions. The Trust, which provides financial aid to Gurkha veterans, their widows and families, is financed by the British Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence.
Meanwhile, Students for a Free Tibet is also listed. The NGO receives funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, an avowed CIA front. In a striking coincidence, NED is deeply concerned about the precise issue that triggered Nepal’s recent protests.
In August 2023, Nepal’s government signed off on a National Cyber Security Policy, imitating China’s “Great Firewall”, which limits foreign internet traffic into the country, while allowing for the proliferation of homegrown ecommerce platforms, social networks, and other online resources. The move was harshly condemned by Digital Rights Nepal, which is bankrolled by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations – a repeat sponsor of government overthrows. Digital Rights Nepal claimed the Policy would lead to mass censorship and threaten citizens’ privacy.
Fast forward to February, and NED published a report warning “countries worldwide,” including Cambodia, Nepal and Pakistan, were looking to China’s internet sovereignty as a “potential model” to emulate.
Rather than acknowledge the threat to Washington’s waning global web dominance posed by such ambitions, the Endowment asserted the real risk was Beijing’s “prestige” being enhanced internationally, thus helping “make the world safe” for the Chinese Communist Party. That month, Nepalese lawmakers began voting on a bill supporting the National Cyber Security Policy.
The legislation required foreign social media networks and messaging apps to formally register with Kathmandu’s Ministry of Communication and Information Technology.
This was intended to not only make these platforms more legally accountable but also ensure the government could collect taxes on revenues they generated locally.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) issued a statement imploring parliamentarians to reject the bill, on the basis that it posed a grave threat to press freedom, due to potential content restriction and banning of “creation or use of anonymous profiles.”
The CPJ is bankrolled by Open Society Foundations, a welter of leading Western news outlets, US corporate and financial giants, and Google and Meta, both of which would be adversely affected by the legislation.
The law nonetheless passed, imposing a deadline of September 3rd for registration. While TikTok and Viber complied, US platforms – including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and YouTube – refused, prompting Kathmandu to ban usage of 26 foreign-owned sites. This was the spark that ultimately toppled Nepal’s government.
Secure environment
On September 4, the Federation of Nepali Journalists published a statement signed by 22 civil society organizations, expressing “strong objection” to the mass shutdown.
FNJ is funded by NED and the Open Society Foundations. Most of its co-signatories receive money from the same sources, and other Western foundations, governments, and social media platforms. For Hami Nepal, the ban was a “tipping point”, scheduling a mass rally for four days later.
The NGO extensively prepared participants in advance, even establishing a “protest support helpline”.
The September 8 protests quickly turned violent. “Gen Z” leaders distanced themselves from the destruction, claiming their peaceful action had been “hijacked” by “opportunists”.
Yet, Hami Nepal’s Discord server had bristled with belligerent messages in the preceding days. Some users openly advocated killing politicians and their children. Others posted requests for weapons, including machine guns, and openly announced their intention to “burn everything”.
So it was Nepal’s parliament that got set ablaze and the Prime Minister’s official residence torched, prompting ministers to flee in helicopters.
The next night, in the wake of K. P. Sharma Oli’s resignation, Nepalese military chiefs met with protesters to discuss the shape of the country’s future government.
As The New York Times reported on September 11, chief “Gen Z” agitators told army officials they wanted Sushila Karki as interim leader – days before this was apparently confirmed by a competitive Discord vote. Kathmandu’s powerful, popular military has pledged to “create a secure environment until the election is held,” effectively signing off on the violent coup.
It may be significant that one of Hami Nepal’s donors isn’t publicised on its website – arms dealer Deepak Bhatta. He has an extensive history of procuring weapons for Nepal’s military and security forces, and allegations of corruption have swirled around many of these deals.
For example, in July 2022, he was accused of sourcing small arms for local police from an Italian company at four times the actual unit price. Bhatta’s long-running relationship with the army could well have facilitated its friendly contact with protest leaders.
Yugoslavia’s CIA, NED and USAID-orchestrated “Bulldozer Revolution” in 2000 was the world’s first “color revolution”. Over subsequent decades, the US has ousted governments the world over using strategies and tactics identical to those that successfully dislodged Slobodan Milosevic from office.
In almost all cases, youth groups have been key “regime change” foot soldiers. In Belgrade, after almost a decade of lethally destructive sanctions, capped off with a criminal 78-day-long NATO bombing campaign, many residents of the country had legitimate grievances and wished to see Milosevic fall.
Nonetheless, the aftermath was a blunt-force lesson in the importance of being careful about what one wishes for. Milosevic’s downfall is dubbed the Bulldozer Revolution due to iconic scenes during the much-publicised unrest of a wheel loader helping anti-government agitators occupy state buildings, and shield activists from police gunfire. Its driver quickly turned against the “Revolution”.
Subsequent Western-imposed privatization decimated Yugoslavia’s economy, causing his successful independent business to fail, and him to go bankrupt. He subsisted until his dying day on meager state welfare payments.
Herein lies the rub. There’s little doubt that many Nepalese citizens were justifiably disillusioned with their government and sought change. Yet, colour revolutions invariably exploit grassroots public discontent to install governments considerably worse than those that preceded them.
In this context, the military, including disgraced local businessman Durga Prasai, who supports the restoration of Kathmandu’s monarchy, in transition talks with “Gen Z” activists, is rendered deeply suspect. That he has been falsely promoted by the BBC as the protesters’ leader is all the more ominous.
Even enthusiastic local supporters of Nepal’s “revolution” acknowledge it is uncertain whether Sushila Karki will be able to convene elections in six months.
In any event, all established political parties were in the firing line of demonstrators, leaving the question of who will contest any future vote likewise an open one.
There is quite a political vacuum in Kathmandu presently, and history shows us NED, Open Society Foundations, and intelligence-connected Western foundations are ever-poised to seize such “windows of opportunity”. Watch this space.
And what is particularly revealing is a fact, as reported in sections of Indian media, that a plan was in the works for years to bring about a “regime change” in Nepal, engineered by the US.
Internal USAID communications reviewed by The Sunday Guardian, together with program outputs released by US democracy organizations, show that since 2020, the US has committed over $900 million in assistance to Nepal. A significant portion of this funding has been directed toward programs administered through the Washington-based consortium CEPPS, which comprises the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES).
As the report states, $900 million represents one of the largest per-capita US democracy investments in the region, and the goal was to have a government that serves the US interests.
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MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) – Vaccine Risk Statement
MMR Vaccine (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) Is It Safer Than Measles, Mumps and Rubella?
Physicians for Informed Consent | December 2024
… It has not been proven that the MMR vaccine is safer than measles, mumps, and rubella. The vaccine package insert raises questions about safety testing for cancer, genetic mutations, and impaired fertility. Although VAERS tracks some adverse events, it is too inaccurate to measure against the risk of measles, mumps, and rubella. Clinical trials do not have the ability to detect less common adverse reactions, and epidemiological studies are limited by the effects of chance and possible confounders. Safety studies of the MMR vaccine are particularly lacking in statistical power. A review of more than 60 MMR vaccine studies conducted for the Cochrane Library states, “The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre- and post-marketing, are largely inadequate.”19 Because permanent sequelae (aftereffects) from measles, mumps, and rubella are so rare (especially in children with normal levels of vitamin A and infected after birth),6,15-17 the level of accuracy of the research studies available is insufficient to rule out the possibility that the MMR vaccine causes greater death or permanent disability than measles, mumps, and rubella. – Read full article
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