Rod Thomson

If you truly want to understand the generational hole we’re in that we may never dig out of…if Lankford were to get this completely traitorous legislation into law, and then Fox News made him the 2028 GOP nominee, many of the same people complaining loudly today would be clamoring then we have to “vote for Lankford to save America.”

🇺🇸 Which way, Republican Party? Three names lead the early 2028 betting markets, and each one represents a different path for the GOP. 🔴 Ron DeSantis is term-limited, and his next move looks like the White House. He’s been the most outspoken voice on the right since Tuesday, doing interview after interview. He appeals to both the establishment and populist wings of the party, with enough Trump in him to keep the base. He’s also very popular in Florida across generations. If he wins the primary, he could be a tremendous candidate. 🔴 Marco Rubio, the current Secretary of State, is rumored (unconfirmed) to be resigning in order to run. He’s a pragmatic institutionalist who has adapted to the populist shift, and remains quite popular. As a Hispanic candidate, he could help win back crucial states like Texas. But being part of the Trump administration cuts both ways. 🔴 JD Vance, the Vice President, may be the purest ideological voice of the new populist right, with real appeal to the post-liberal wing. But he may have the toughest road, since he’s tied (even moreso than Rubio) to an administration that’s very unpopular right now. That could change in 2 years, and he did move fast after the midterms to separate himself, blaming the Iran war. Some voices on the right don’t want any of the three. Tucker Carlson’s name is floating around, too. And whoever it is faces a brutal question: can ANY Republican win in 2028? Democrats just took Texas. Republicans aren’t winning California, and the party needs 270 electoral votes. It’s hard to see how they get there without Texas. History offers a warning. After Democrats’ big Senate majority in 2009 and 2010, Romney lost in 2012. Then Trump arrived in 2016, and the party was never the same. And this time, Democrats may have their own Obama. Jon Ossoff leads on their side. He’s young, charismatic, from a Southern state, and speaks with that same cadence. So do the candidates run now, or sit out and hope for better prospects in 2032? Someone like DeSantis risks fading into irrelevance if he hangs back too long. But run into this headwind, and a loss could end your political career. The one thing every Republican hopeful has to figure out: is 2028 an opportunity or a trap? Writer: Michael

Florida looking great in early voting - R+56,167 and climbing, almost Presidential margins. My Florida map updates every 10 minutes today. It'll be a shift map of *Election Day votes* only compared to the same time in Election Day 2024 - it's meant for advanced analysts. We can likely tuck Florida in as safe GOP. datarepublican.com/florida/

I am speechless. Thomas Aquinas College just dropped a study on the rigor of the new SAT. It compares the 1980/87 test with 2026. The findings should terrify every parent and teacher... Vocabulary has collapsed. Old SAT: 70.6% of questions tested vocab. New SAT: 15%. The old test forced students to know a wide range of words through analogies, antonyms, and sentence completions. The new test abandoned that. Most vocab questions now just ask students to fill in one blank from context. Reading passages also got radically shorter (average ~97 words vs 300–340). The new test uses short expository passages and hands you the necessary background knowledge inside the text. The older tests leaned much more heavily on argumentative and persuasive writing, assumed far more historical, scientific, and cultural knowledge, and penalized students who lacked it. This is a redefinition of what "college readiness" means. If you believe that kids should develop rigorous vocabulary, be capable of sustained reading, and possess background knowledge, I have bad news for you. The SAT no longer measures these. If you want a future where children can actually read difficult texts and construct complex arguments, the SAT must be replaced now. This cannot go on.

🚨🚨 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?

Inbox: Leon County elections supervisor says Border Patrol vehicles briefly showed up at an early voting site