Perhaps underappreciated...

In December 1958 the Polish embassy in Beijing refused to let the sparrow killers onto its grounds, so the Chinese surrounded it with drummers and kept the drums going for two days until every bird sheltering in the garden had dropped dead from the air, and the diplomats cleared them up with shovels. That is how thorough it was. The campaign had been running since the spring. Every village, school and factory was turned out with gongs, pans and firecrackers to keep the sparrows flying until their hearts gave out. Nests were torn from eaves, eggs smashed, chicks killed, and children went through the fields with slingshots and were paid by the bird. The dead came in by the basket, strung on wires, piled on carts, and the totals went up the chain as a harvest. Something close to two billion sparrows in two years. The embassy garden was the last place in the capital with birdsong in it, and the drums got that too. A zoologist called Zhu Xi had told them before it started that a king had tried this and lost. Frederick the Great of Prussia had put a bounty on sparrows in the 1740s to save his grain and his cherries, and the sparrows went, and the caterpillars they had been eating stripped his orchards to the stalk, and the king cancelled the bounty and paid to have sparrows brought back from neighbouring states and let loose. The whole episode was in the library. The ministry had a figure for what a sparrow ate and no figure for what it did, and a man with the second figure was told to sit down. The locusts arrived on schedule. Then the grain borers. A sparrow takes a few grains from a field in autumn and feeds its chicks nothing but insects all spring, and with the sparrows gone the insects had the rice and the wheat to themselves. The counties with the most sparrows to lose saw their grain fall the furthest, and the rice and wheat that had been holding the country up went down together. That was 1959, and the state took its grain quota anyway, on the harvest that had been reported. What was left in the villages was not enough, and the famine that followed over the next three years is the largest in human history: tens of millions dead, the estimates running from fifteen million to forty-five, whole counties in Anhui and Sichuan where the living could not bury the dead. The sparrows were one cause among several and the economists who have gone back to the county records put the bird's share at something over two million people, with another four hundred thousand never born. Two million, from a campaign against a thing that weighs an ounce. By 1960 the ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng, who had been cutting open dead sparrows and counting the insects in their stomachs, got the bird struck off the list and bed bugs put in its place. There were almost no sparrows left in China to pardon. So the government did what Prussia had done two centuries before: it bought a quarter of a million sparrows from the Soviet Union and shipped them east in crates, to be released into a country that had drummed every one of their relatives out of the sky. The animal that does the invisible job is always the one on the ledger as a cost. Take the sheep off a chalk down and the orchids are under scrub in twenty years. Fence the cattle off a Welsh hill and the bracken takes it. Empty a savannah of its herds and the grass goes to fire. All of it written down, all of it in the library, all of it available to the next committee with a figure for what a cow eats. Beijing paid Moscow for the birds in hard currency. The men who had said so in 1958 were still not allowed to say so in 1960.

🚨🚨 THE ILLEGITIMACY PLAYBOOK / THE DEMOCRACY FILES: A PRIMER 🚨 I will be using this thread to track all drops, so bookmark it. I spent most of yesterday backing everything (now 312 gigabytes) up in various sources and getting the materials out to others. I also produced an AI video (below) to explain the whole thing to others are not on 𝕏 - feel free to distribute. Here's the primer: USAID, the foreign aid agency, had a democracy office. Inside the agency, it was called DRG. Officially, DRG administered "democracy assistance." They'd go inside countries they thought were sliding into authoritarianism and help the opposition there. That assistance included election monitoring, judicary support, independent media, and civil society building. You may have heard the term "color revolution." The model comes from Serbia in 2000, where trained student activists brought down Milosevic with the help of Western governments, after sustained protests. With the help of USAID's democracy office, this model was implemented in many other countries to topple governments: Georgia's "Rose Revolution" in 2003, Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" in 2004, and many more. Then last year, DOGE shut down USAID. But the USAID democracy office didn't stop. They formed a group called the Democracy Renewal Group, the same initials as their office (USAID Democracy, Human Rights, Governance). Their goal: apply their own playbook to the United States itself. This goal became a plan, called Renew American Democracy (RAD). It invoked the "4 B's" framework. Block - use lawfare and protests to make life harder for the Trump administration. Bridge & Belong - control dialogue and win people over. The final and most important B is Build. Build means redesigning the American government itself, and the crisis is the opening. In their own words: "We can take that breakdown moment and leverage it for a big structural reform, you know, refounding moment." - Danielle Reiff, DRG lead. Calls show DRG working alongside DSA on ideas of creating a different government, one that does away with the Constitution itself. DRG does not run the Block operations. They hand it to UDA, the United Democracy Alliance. One organizer calls it a "huge galaxy": lawsuits, street protests, non-cooperation. They list No Kings, Indivisible, MoveOn, 50501, and many other mega-activist NGOs among their members. Another organizer calls UDA Erica Chenoweth's project. Chenoweth is the Harvard professor behind the three-and-half-percent rule of regime change: get that share of a country's populace onto the streets, and historically, the movement wins. The UDA is very "hush-hush." They have no website, no roster, no filings. Then come the red lines: things the Trump administration could do, such as calling the Insurrection Act on protesters, that would mean that the federal government, in their words, "crosses the threshold into illegitimacy." Nobody voted on those lines. There was no public debate. These red lines were developed within secretive working groups, and in a paper addressed to governors and staff. In the words of Reiff/DRG: "So that if there is a red line crossed in terms of a Constitutional crisis, like everyone's already pre-organized. And so Mike Smith actually said, he goes, oh, you guys have the day after tomorrow plan." Cross a line, and the paper's options include states refusing to lend their resources to federal officials, and governors convening what it calls a "Third Continential Congress." Running the UDA's Insurrection Act working group: Rear Admiral Mike Smith (RET) of National Security Leaders of America (NSL4A). NSL4A is also credited with operationalizing UDA, the blocking operations. NSL4A consists of about 1,600 ex-officers, spies, diplomats. They're turning red lines into indicators and running a situation room to monitor them throughout the midterms and beyond. The NSL4A's lawyers told them to stop recording meetings in case of subpoenas. But the rest of the network continued to record. DRG works in conjunction with Renew to Thrive (R2T), which ended up accidentally publishing 400+ calls and thousands of documents. These calls and documents were never meant for our eyes, but it's them, on tape. Thousands of NGOs and billions of dollars are involved in this endeavor. Most of them believe they're saving democracy. The problem is that people who spent their careers deciding when other countries' governments had lost their legitimacy wrote that test for ours, in private, and planned for what comes after. Who decides when your government is legitimate?

🚨 THE DEMOCRACY FILES / ILLEGITIMACY PLAYBOOK, PART 4: YES, MANY ARE AWARE OF THE GOALS 🚨 This one is a thread because there are multiple materials. On January 15, 2026, Renew American Democracy (RAD), the strategy built around the Democracy Renewal Group's (DRG) ex-USAID democracy officers, held planning exercises for "emergency scenarios" and how it'd affect their "strategic objectives." RAD's explicit goal is in catalyzing those so-called "emergency scenarios" to manifest "structural reform" - the rewriting of American governance which the previous drops have covered. RAD/DRG hold the unique role within the wider blocking / protest alliance of defining what the new government looks like, presumably because they are made of ex-USAID officers who have specialized in installing new governments. As @MikeBenzCyber last night said on his stream, these DRG members come from the CIA coup parts of USAID. It's been suggested that DRG is just a fringe group within the much larger blocking/protest ecosystem. This morning's interim video mentioning Mike Smith disproved that. And PART 4 disproves that further - the wider network is well aware of DRG and that its goal is to secure a new government. They will dress it in the language that it's Trump who will provoke it, and they're only preventing a true Constitutional crisis. In reality, there's a million ways to interpret what a "red line" is, and many ways to get Trump to cross it. Already, articles everywhere are telegraphing that Trump *will* cross it in the form of the Insurrection Act or martial law, softening us up for the coup ahead. The materials I'm showing you are from a RAD/DRG-ran planning exercise in January 2026. Groups represented by participants include: · National Security Leaders for America (NSL4A) · Freedom Trainers / Beautiful Trouble · Team Democracy · Federal Workers Alliance for Democracy · Civil Service Strong · Project 2029 · Braver Angels · Indivisible · Better Together America · Center for Collaborative Democracy · Democracy Accelerator · Paths to Understanding · Co-Intelligence Institute · Cohesion Strategy · Community-Vision Solutions One of the working groups concerned "National Deliberations" - which lays the groundwork for structural reforms post-crisis. So every single participant in this forum was well aware the end point is rewriting our governance. Even more interesting, Tanya Alfredson of @BraverAngels participated in this particular working group - which should give pause to anyone who believes Braver Angels simply wants better dialogue. As you watch the videos, watch out for the code language they use to hint towards the ultimate end goal. As always, patience as I pull together the thread. 👇

Because of Joe Biden's sweeping federal pardon of Anthony Fauci, the most viable path to bringing Fauci to justice now runs through the states. My new book Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison shows how. Read and subscribe: peternavarro.substack.com/p/…

Abortionist Drowned a 34-Week-Old Baby Who Survived Abortion in a Bucket of Water lifenews.com/2020/04/15/abor…

You were among the earliest Western scholars to condemn China’s one-child policy. Your sustained criticism helped create the indispensable external pressure that ultimately contributed to the policy’s abolition. I salute you!

On @cnn, Sebastien Lai told @jimsciutto that the President of the United States has asked Xi Jinping to free Jimmy Lai multiple times. So have the G7, the European Union and leaders around the world. Beijing still won’t let him go. Jimmy has been held for nearly six years, and his health is failing. “All they’ve essentially found is that he’s guilty of journalism.” #FreeJimmyLai #BringHimHome

What do Wanying “Heather” Zhang and Fang Fang aka Christine Fang have in common? They both attended 🇨🇳 University of International Relations (国际关系学院) in Beijing…

「トランプ政権と台湾」の真実‼️ 我々が訪米中に面談したピエロ・トッツィAFPI中国部長に古森義久氏が行ったインタビューより。 AFPI（アメリカ第一政策研究所）はトランプ政権直結のシンクタンク。 台湾に関する特に重要な部分は以下。 【古森】トランプ政権が台湾支援で態度を後退させ、有事でも防衛しないかも、という推測もある 【トッツィ】事実とは反する。米台関係は言葉よりも行動をみるべきだ。 トランプ政権による台湾への武器輸出は堅実に進んでいる。 新鋭のF16戦闘機はいま現在、供与中だ。 （高機動ロケット砲システム）『ハイマース』や（携行式地対空ミサイル）『スティンガー』など中国が嫌う武器も台湾への供与が続いている。 軍事面での米台の絆は強く、台湾の部隊が米国ミシガン州内で訓練中だ。 中国側は台湾併合はなんとか戦争をせずに達成したいと願っている。 その手段の一環の国際的な認知戦で『トランプ政権は台湾を守らない』というような政治宣伝を盛んに拡散している。 中国抑止では4～5月に行われた米比共催の大規模演習『バリカタン』の意味も大きい。 今回、日本が初めて本格参加した。トランプ政権の中国政策では日本の協力も超重要なのだ。 ーー以上、産経の記事より