Tea at Trianon: America Built USAID to Win the Cold War

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, June 25, 2026

America Built USAID to Win the Cold War — It Turned on America Instead

From Tierney's Real News:

While USAID has performed genuine humanitarian work, its core strategic role was as a tool for regime change and “color revolutions” abroad. It did this by systematically building interconnected networks of NGOs that create the preconditions and execution capability for political transitions aligned with Western liberalism.
DataRepublican outlined five interlocking pillars that, when funded together over years in a target country, create a self-reinforcing “political operating system:”
Media — Independent outlets, social media, journalism training, and funding to amplify Western-aligned narratives.
Legal infrastructure — Lawyers, rule-of-law programs, judicial reform to challenge governments legally and shape institutions.
Election monitoring and fraud — Observer training, voter rolls, and especially parallel vote tabulation (PVT) to contest official results with “independent” data.
Activist training — Youth leadership, civic engagement, protest organization, media comms, and “nonviolent” discipline training.
Governance data — Anti-corruption monitoring, budget transparency, FOIA-style tools to generate evidence for the other pillars.
“None of these looks like regime change in isolation. The system becomes visible only when you fund all five in the same country for a decade and the people running them all know each other.”
The 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia is the textbook case. Notably, in Latin America, after Trump cut USAID funding, right-wing candidates won in multiple countries — clear evidence of the network’s impact.
These same five pillars now operate inside the United States, funded by private foundations such as Open Society, Knight, MacArthur, and Arabella Advisors.
The language is softer — “civic engagement,” “democracy defense” — but the functions are identical. (Read more.)