Open Conspiracy and the Left
Strengths and Weaknesses of Open Planning and Communications
Minnesota as a Contemporary Case Study
In January 2026, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti—activists intervening in federal immigration enforcement operations by direct, kinetic action—were shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis. These incidents occurred amid broader federal efforts to execute deportation orders, which encountered organized resistance from the broad Left. Analysis of participant behavior, including coordination via Signal messaging groups tracking federal movements, indicates criminal conspiracy and counter-state operational capacity. The nature of these interventions was insurgent: activists leveraged captured state-level apparatus (including endorsement from Minnesota officials) to obstruct what may reasonably be termed “counter-revolutionary” federal executive actions aimed at restoring national sovereignty over immigration enforcement.
The tactics deployed in response—rapid mobilization, scripted protests, disruption rituals—are derived from openly available sources, including Beautiful Trouble manuals, Alinsky’s organizing principles, Gramsci’s cultural hegemony prison notebooks, Frankfurt School disruption methods from Counterrevolution and Revolt and Repressive Tolerance, and color revolution toolkits supported by entities like the National Endowment for Democracy. These are taught and coordinated through a network of NGOs, many with official connections to the state of Minnesota, funding streams via platforms such as ActBlue, and operational ties to foreign Communist states including Cuba and China.
When these patterns are identified publicly sophistry is deployed from both the streets and the commanding heights of media: mockery, accusations of “conspiracy theory,” and exploitation of public disinterest in complicated writings to bury truth in plain sight, just outside the Overton Window. This mechanism is foremost among the revolutionaries – there is no force in the universe stronger than taboo. Like nearly everything else the Left does, sophistry, too, has its origins in Platonism.
The Minnesota events are not isolated but exemplify a captured counter-state laboratory, perpetuating rupture-repair cycles of revolutionary praxis through fraud-enabled institutional control. The thesis remains: the historic practice of open planning and open communications on the Left stems from esoteric Progressivism, with a direct line to ancient Hermeticism and Platonism—a faith presupposing inevitable historical unfoldment toward a man-made Eden by gnosis-bearing “men of history” or philosopher-kings. Openness operates as decentralized roadmap by which the zealots might push with synchronicity, while sophistry serially subverts counter-efforts below the victory threshold.
The Strategic Layer: Openness as a Consequence of Doctrinal Confidence
The Left’s openness in planning and communication is a strategic feature rooted in the presuppositions of esoteric Progressivism. Belief in the inevitable unfoldment of history toward the eschaton allows any actor who understands the doctrine to advance the shared trajectory. Revolutionary texts are published without restriction: Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui’s Unrestricted Warfare remains unclassified and openly available, enabling refinement that Western analysts often fail to confront systematically. Beautiful Trouble is available online and in audiobook format, as is Rules for Radicals. Leftists typically do not learn these tactics directly from the texts, but, historically, from revolutionary cadre and secondary education, and, today, more and more from NGOs through public trainings.
This approach resembles, in some ways, the U.S. military’s commander’s intent model—decentralized execution toward a common end-state—but substitutes the Spirit of History for a human commander and, due to the elitism of gnostic-selection, restricts operational delegated only to the gilded elites. The result is an inverse of American results: consistent kinetic weakness (e.g., paralysis in Spanish Civil War anarchist units due to suspicion of insufficient enlightenment; Maoist purges targeting perceived deviations) contrasted with sustained political and institutional successes via political warfare. Theory and praxis evolve without classification or barriers, supporting the long march through institutions, capture of commanding heights, disruption of cultural sense-making facilities, and active advancement of the foreign policy of Communist nations.
Sophistry is central to all the Left’s successes: taboo-making through mockery exploits laziness and disinterest, concealing open declarations while offensively forcing adversaries into reactive postures. There’s a reason the childhood nightmare of being laughed at before a class of peers is a recurring theme in history. This mechanism captures institutions, influences politicians via praxis, and attracts cadres often characterized by cluster-B pathologies and what may be termed the feminine nature of Marxism—emphasizing relational manipulation and passive-aggression over hierarchical confrontation.
Contemporary examples include the obfuscation of COVID-19 origins, dismissal of World Economic Forum “Great Reset” documents, and the rapid institutionalization of transgender policies (linked to Platonic-Hermetic motifs of primal androgyne unity disrupted and seeking recombination). In Minnesota, fraud-enabled capture since 2020 has transformed the state into a site for testing and exporting these methods, with NGO networks providing training and coordination against federal authority.
The Metaphysical and Religious Foundations: Esoteric Progressivism and Its Ancient Lineage
Esoteric Progressivism, with a direct line to ancient Hermeticism and Platonism, constitutes a religious faith—eschatological, coercive, and structured around gnostic elements demanding intolerance despite operating within “liberal” frameworks. Its lineage extends from ancient Gnosticism and Hermeticism, through Platonic philosopher-kings and the noble lie, Socratic provocation, Arabic inquiry, Medieval European Elites, Jacobin rupture, the German idealist tradition (Hegel’s hermetic “wizardry” as analyzed by Glenn Magee and Eric Voegelin), Marx’s “material” eschatological prophecy, the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Mao, Deng, to contemporary identity-based Democratic strategies functioning as oligarchic divide-and-conquer mechanisms.
This faith operates simultaneously at the levels of presupposition, faith, ethics, and strategy, with specific linkages to Platonic and Hermetic ideas in each domain:
- Presuppositional level: Esoteric Progressivism presupposes a teleological view of history as an inevitable unfoldment toward perfection, mirroring the Hermetic principle of the universe as an alchemical process (solve et coagula) and Platonic emanation from the realm of Forms, where the material world is a shadowed ascent toward ideal truth, guided by those who perceive the eternal patterns.
- Faith level: The eschatological conviction in a man-made Eden available after all oppressive hierarchy is deconstructed reflects Hermetic rebirth into divine unity (the adept completing the great work) and Platonic return to the ideal state under philosopher-king rule, where gnosis-bearers realize the promised harmony disrupted in the fallen world.
- Ethical level: Justification for deception, manipulation, and perpetual rupture derives from the Platonic noble lie (permissible falsehoods to maintain social order among the ungifted) and Hermetic pendulum and creation mythology, where dissolution of existing structures is morally required for higher coagulation and rebirth as the elect gather the divine shards and transcend distinctions.
- Strategic level: The vanguard’s role in driving history forward, with openness among initiates, echoes Platonic guardianship (philosopher-kings educating and directing society covertly when needed) and Hermetic transmission of knowledge among adepts, proclaiming doctrine evangelically while concealing operative details from the profane. This is reflected in the modern paradigm of “democracy” more correctly identified as oligarch-led identity factions, perhaps as one might suspect was Plato’s intent from the beginning, with his Republic as an initiate text teaching a pre-modern form of revolution and power consolidation to elites reading between the lines and educated within the academy.
The rupture-repair cycle—Hermetic solve et coagula, dialectical thesis-antithesis-synthesis—ensures perpetual revolution. Openness of these doctrines reflects faith in this inevitability while serving practically as a self-fulfilling roadmap appealing to fallen human nature. The story of Lucifer’s fall offers insight into the strong inward desire to make oneself the lawgiver and seize the knowledge of powerful things. Strategic doctrine is proclaimed evangelically (like gospel), distinct from compartmentalized tactical operations.
Liberalism, in this view, is a metaphysically thin mechanism—”don’t go to war over small differences”—that, untethered from ordered Christian liberty, necessarily accelerates toward libertinism and liberationism, as, lacking its own metaphysical limiting principle it can advance only calls for “more liberty” even in the face of excess liberty, acting as a solvent for the culture and ethics.
Sophistry plays a theological role: concealing truth from the ungifted while enabling vanguard manipulation. This is also a key origin of the “tyranny of the theater-kids” idea, where it takes an actor to summon righteous indignation and cackling hysteria in the face of truth and justice.
Counter-Strategies: Addressing the Asymmetry
The Minnesota case exemplifies the model: open playbooks operationalized under sophist cover by NGO networks, academia and media, a perpetual rupture-repair sustained against federal enforcement, and institutional capture creating a counter-state laboratory for tactics. Leveraging the state apparatus for insurgent purposes is a key indicator of the state of play. Openness, while signaling doctrinal confidence in esoteric Progressivism, presents exploitable weaknesses when systematically confronted.
Neutralizing the taboo-making machinery of sophistry requires deliberate deployment of counter-mockery, humor, and sustained erosion of captured institutions’ social capital – this is a foremost place to deploy I/O broadly. Historically, this mirrors the use of satire and ridicule against revolutionary pretensions, as seen in Puritan writings of that Satan who cannot withstand mockery, or the underground samizdat humor in Soviet bloc countries that undermined regime legitimacy by mocking official narratives. In modern contexts, dissident online communities have effectively employed memetic warfare to dismantle DEI and critical race theory taboos, turning Alinsky’s own Rule 5 (”Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon”) against leftist enforcers as they feebly attempt to wield the hammer of the heights that they did not earn; examples include viral campaigns exposing the hilarity of “men make the best women”, which strip away the protective ridicule shield and force public reevaluation, raising the laziness threshold and disrupting the concealment mechanism that hides open planning in plain sight.
Establishing parallel epistemological institutions grounded in American founding traditions and the solid foundations of Christian theology counters the disruption of cultural sense-making facilities by rebuilding objective reality anchors outside captured commanding heights. Doctrinally, this draws from the Puritan emphasis on covenantal communities and scriptural authority as bulwarks against gnostic relativism, akin to the parallel ecclesiastical structures maintained by dissident Protestants during periods of state persecution. In the American context, it echoes the pamphlet culture of the Founding era, which fostered independent sense-making against British propaganda. Contemporary applications include the expansion of classical education networks (e.g., Hillsdale College affiliates and homeschool cooperatives) and alternative media ecosystems rooted in constitutional originalism and rejecting “living documentism.”
Applying the paradox of toleration—as articulated, poorly, by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies—involves treating openly declared revolutionary and seditious doctrine and activated playbooks not as protected speech but as high crimes. Historically, American measures like the Sedition Act of 1918 targeting socialist and anarchist agitation during wartime, the Communist Control Act, and espionage law should prevail over lawless judicial tyranny. In theoretical terms, it recognizes esoteric Progressivism’s coercive intolerance (demanding conformity under the noble lie ethic) and refuses unlimited tolerance that enables self-destruction. Modern implementation could involve rigorous Foreign Agents Registration Act enforcement against NGO networks with ties to foreign Communist states, or classifying certain color revolution training materials as seditious when used in domestic counter-state operations, as seen in ongoing federal investigations into protest coordination linked to Minnesota events.
Exploiting Leftist non-delegation rigidities in kinetic domains requires developing asymmetric, decentralized opposition. Counter-organizing within moderate populations sympathetic to the Marxists to divide and stoke jealousies and ambitions against their cadres may hold potential. More broadly, pushing the Left to enter the kinetic domain where the information battlespace has been adequately prepared shifts the initiative to the American forces.
Central to all counter-strategies is the special place of truth as the primary mechanism for breaking the gnostic spells of esoteric Progressivism. When treated with utmost seriousness and deployed rigorously, truth resonates directly with observable sense perception, inherent logic, and heart-written ethics. This resonance possesses unique power to rapidly shift the Overton Window, awakening especially elites, or potential elites, to patterns previously concealed by sophistry. Success demands always advancing the most correct arguments, grounded firmly in traditional ethics and objective reality. Imperfect argumentation—flawed reasoning, significant exaggeration, or appeals lacking direct linkage to enduring moral frameworks—alienates the persuadable center, inculcates relativism by mirroring the Left’s own ethical flexibility, and fails to distinguish the counter-position. Those susceptible to mere self-interest or expedient bad argumentation are already claimed by the Left’s pragmatic vanguard; the decisive ground lies with hearts oriented toward truth, where uncompromising fidelity to the most accurate and ethically anchored claims alone secures lasting movement.
For national security personnel and policymakers, systematic study of these forms—analogous to confronting Unrestricted Warfare—is essential. Recognition of the metaphysical and religious dimensions of esoteric Progressivism, with its direct line to ancient Hermeticism and Platonism, enables proportionate, decisive response. A path through requires acknowledging the spiritual stakes and reclaiming ordered liberty before the zealots march another peoples off the eschatological cliff.