Bradford Karony (@digitalgunny) header
Bradford Karony (@digitalgunny) profile picture

I recruited spies. Now I recruit facts. Service-Disabled Marine. Retired CIA. Writing about fiscal federalism, lawfare, and the myths dividing America.

Washington, DC
Joined April 2023
Photo by Bradford Karony (@digitalgunny)Photo by Bradford Karony (@digitalgunny)Photo by Bradford Karony (@digitalgunny)Photo by Bradford Karony (@digitalgunny)Photo by Bradford Karony (@digitalgunny)Photo by Bradford Karony (@digitalgunny)Photo by Bradford Karony (@digitalgunny)Photo by Bradford Karony (@digitalgunny)Photo by Bradford Karony (@digitalgunny)Photo by Bradford Karony (@digitalgunny)
I spent a career recruiting spies and running operations for the United States government. I know how myths are built, how facts are selected, and how the story you’re told is never the complete one. That’s what I write about now — applied to the country I served. The framework is called WAPFA: “Which Americans Pay for America?” WAPFA is a fiscal and legal lens, not a party. Two ledgers, one question beneath every major political fight: -Who actually pays? -Who actually receives? -Who controls the story about both? Urban centers and rural regions each carry real grievances. Both sides select real facts. Both sides omit the ones that complicate their myth. WAPFA doesn’t pick a side. It shows you the ledger. Three areas I focus on: -Fiscal federalism — the real flows of money between states and Washington, and who politicians mislead about them. -Lawfare — when legal process stops being accountability and becomes a political weapon. I’ve watched both up close. -Propaganda mechanics — how narratives harden into the only truth people will accept, and what that costs the country. I’m a permanently and totally disabled Marine. A retired CIA Operations Officer. I’m not building a career. I’m building a record. Full archive: digitalgunny.substack.com Follow if you want the ledger, not the legend.
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I’ll take two, please and than you.
Mossberg just put 20 ROUNDS OF 12 GAUGE into a short-barrel shotgun. And I have questions. The Mossberg 590RM Chisel has an 11.5-inch barrel. Magazine-fed. Folding stock. AR-style safety. And a 20-round magazine that looks completely ridiculous hanging off something this small. It's like dropping a Hellcat engine into a Mini Cooper. It shouldn't make sense. But somehow it does. And here's the part I wasn't expecting. This thing genuinely made me feel like a kid again. Every time I picked it up, I kept saying the same word. COOL. Not sophisticated. Not revolutionary. Just cool. And sometimes that's enough. Here's my question: Would you choose a compact 20-round shotgun over a traditional tube-fed shotgun? And if you're loading 20 rounds… BUCKSHOT or SLUGS? Full review on my YouTube channel.
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Who Decides When a Government Is Illegitimate? lnkd.in/p/gADiaGtM @DataRepublican has this right. Former USAID officials published a plan to renew American democracy. On paper, elections alone aren't enough. Their Zoom recordings go further: pre-written red lines for declaring Washington illegitimate, a memo for what governors do once a line is crossed, advice to federal workers kept off the form.
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“...I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor.” — Moses 4:1 (Pearl of Great Price) In this account, the first proposal of compelled salvation predates the world: everyone saved, no one lost, no one choosing — in exchange for the honor. The text’s verdict on that plan runs three words deep: it “sought to destroy the agency of man” (v. 3). Read through this lens, the rival faith of these sixteen Sundays isn’t a modern invention. It is the oldest platform on record — guaranteed outcomes, purchased with agency, billed to someone else’s glory. And it lost the first vote. The verdict is yours. (Rival Faith, 15/16)
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Vote YES on Utah’s Amendment B. Progressive money backs the opposition: Utahns Protecting Our Constitution’s backers include the Fairness Project, Better Boundaries, ACLU of Utah and Utah Donor Collaborative. Know who’s funding the campaign.
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France happens.
What good is an ally if it can’t keep you safe? Read Douglas Murray’s latest column on American bombers leaving their British base.

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“…an error somewhere in the equation—no, in the whole mathematical system of thought.” — Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940, Hardy trans.), closing section Rubashov’s final realization: the Party denied his free will and demanded his willing sacrifice — both at once, as doctrine. He concludes there was an error in the calculation; the equation did not work out. The contradiction wasn’t a flaw in the system. It was the system. The verdict is yours. (The Witnesses, 15/16)
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One refinement from a retired CIA ops officer: domestic money can fund a protest, disclosed or not. The legal hinge is a foreign principal — that's FARA. The tradecraft hinge is simpler: advocacy survives attribution. An operation doesn't.
Replying to @WadeMiller
Unfortunately, you're likely right - running a color revolution is legal, as @CynicalPublius put it in last night's space. These are regime change professionals who know how to game laws in target countries until it's too late.
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Thank you for last night's Space. Monica's action item is the kind of thing that travels well, so I've been carrying it to my LinkedIn network — a crowd that mostly isn't on X and wouldn't have seen it otherwise.
To everyone who joined this space last night (and even if you missed it), Monica gave us an actionable, concrete thing that we can do. You don't need to have a big account on X (or any account on X), you don't need to have money, you don't need to be silver-tongued; you just need to love this country. TELL OTHERS what is going on. Tell about the seditious, traitorous behavior of the Left! Get the word out! Post it on FB or any other social media platform. Monica was right. The Left tells everyone how they feel, and they don't even espouse coherent arguments. We have facts, videos, text messages, etc. that PROVE that the Democrats are complicit in attempting to transform our Republic in exchange for power. SO TELL OTHERS! Don't worry about them not liking you or disagreeing. Just tell them! My husband and I walked our usual 3-mile neighborhood route this morning. We have met just about everyone who lives on the route at one time or another. So today, my husband did it! He told someone about it! This guy is not anti- or pro-Trump. He just kind of floats through life, but he was VERY surprised! It was eye-opening to us that most people really have no idea what we're up against. So, TELL OTHERS (and VOTE RED)!
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An interesting read.
🚨🚨 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?
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Please understand there are no “CIA coup parts of USAID”; there are parts of USAID who use CIA methodology. CIA doesn’t and didn’t work with USAID on covert action activities—that is not how this works. Other than that, everything @DataRepublican is exposing is correct. Semper Fi!
🚨 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. 👇
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Nah, it’s never too late.
I feel that it’s too late for me to turn to Jesus and start a better life. Even though my life has gotten better since I started praying, reading scriptures and attending church, I think it’s something one should have done since childhood.
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Maybe take a look at The Steady State? They are decidedly a small group of anti-Trumpers. To quote their website: The 450+ members of the Steady State are former national security and intelligence officials who remain committed to their oaths to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” They promote democracy, rule of law, the Constitution and the institutions that support these pillars [as long as you don’t support the Trump Administration].
This is how you know my recordings are real and they're scared. Washington Post already doing counter-messaging. "A small group of U.S. national security officials has been discreetly advising state governments and congressional lawmakers on how to prepare for the possibility that the Trump administration will attempt to interfere in November’s midterm elections, according to people involved in the effort. The group includes about 10 current and former officials with experience in the Defense Department, some of whom have previously focused on countering authoritarianism abroad."
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Worth a listen.
Hello Washington Post, Are these people in the group of 10 officials you mention? Because they're all over my files where they're working with the same ex-USAID officials plotting to rewrite the Constitution.
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Please quit grouping every CIA officer in with what the bottom 10% of CIA does. Slotkin is not representative of CIA. Brennan is not representative of CIA. These people are subversive elements who worked within CIA.
Replying to @SenatorSlotkin
You "touched a nerve" because you are from the CIA and you are proposing to criminalize dissent from your orthodoxies. You are a fiend.
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Please stop your use of phrases like ‘CIA coup plotting’. USAID got in CIA’s way overseas too. We wanted them gone as much as anyone else. Involving today’s CIA in a conspiracy against the US Constitution is poor analysis. Using Brennan and Slotkin to represent CIA is equally as bad. Come up from Draper to NSL and we can do lunch to help you sort fact from fiction from an insider’s perspective. Semper Fi.
Replying to @DataRepublican
Another thing to understand: these are people who did regime change as a career before USAID was cut. And they were "successful" in many scenarios. These are the literal "CIA coup" people doing the plotting.
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“We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.” — Doctrine and Covenants 121:39 (Liberty Jail, 1839) Notice where this was received: a jail cell. Joseph Smith, imprisoned by state power through a Missouri winter — and the revelation he records indicts not his captors but almost all men, his own people included, the moment they get a little authority. Sixteen Sundays of witnesses said the same thing in Russian, German, and Czech. Then verse 41 names the only power the text will allow: persuasion, long-suffering, gentleness, love unfeigned. No system in this series would have survived that test. That is what the test is for. The verdict is yours. (Rival Faith, 14/16)
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Elon Musk is changing the present.
2 nights ago I saw a car fly. This morning I saw a taxi without a driver. A few weeks ago I saw a rocket caught out of mid air. In Vegas I got to the convention center going through a tunnel. During the floods in Texas, I used Starlink to connect to First Responders. Elon Musk is changing the future.
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I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.” — Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978), sec. III Havel’s forensic point, and the sharpest tool in the essay: the sign’s text says workers of the world, unite. Its message says I comply; leave me alone. Once you learn to read public speech on both channels — what it says, and what displaying it performs — you can’t unlearn it. That skill is the whole reason this series exists. The verdict is yours. (The Witnesses, 14/16)
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