MAGA’s "Color Revolution"
No Kings Day and the L.A. Protests as "Insurrection"
A strange thing is happening across right-wing media ecosystems. Protests against U.S. immigration raids, particularly the recent demonstrations in Los Angeles and the nationwide “No Kings” actions, are being described not as domestic unrest but as part of a “color revolution.”
This framing is bizarre at first glance. The term "color revolution" originally referred to democratic uprisings in post-Soviet states. These movements were characterized as being against authoritarianism and often portrayed favorably by Western media and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO). But now, conservative influencers, pro-Trump politicians, and conspiratorial platforms are using that same language to describe American’s protesting their own government.
Public anger over ICE raids erupted nationwide, building toward a major flashpoint in Los Angeles. As protests grew, the state reacted quickly with police deployments, legal threats, and National Guard mobilization. But alongside the physical response, a deeper narrative was being pushed into motion.
The protests weren't described as spontaneous or community-driven, from X, Telegram to Truth Social and to VK. They were portrayed as part of a coordinated coup: a Soros-backed, Marxist-engineered “color revolution.” What had once been the propaganda of foreign strongmen is now the native language of America’s MAGA movement.
This isn’t just narrative drift. It’s ideological inversion. What starts as protest is rebranded as treason. Crackdowns are framed as defense. The term “color revolution,” once used to describe real movements, has been twisted by leaders like Putin and Erdoğan into a warning sign of foreign sabotage. It’s no longer about what people are fighting for, it's about who they’re supposedly working for. And now that same logic is showing up here.
In each case, the pattern is the same: cast the regime as a victim of outsider, western/globalist subversion, and use that myth to consolidate power and repress protest movements. It shifts focus from the actual grievances and strips agency from the protesters, recasting the regime under fire as the true victim by blaming shadowy foreign forces. What we are witnessing isn’t a misunderstanding. It’s a strategic import, an international populist, rightwing propaganda model applied to American soil.
Originally used to describe movements like Ukraine’s Orange Revolution or Georgia’s Rose Revolution, the phrase was later co-opted by authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin to delegitimize dissent and accuse foreign actors of interference. Over time, this narrative seeped into some Western left sectors, fusing with legitimate critiques of U.S. intervention abroad. Eventually, it was adopted by Trump supporters and the MAGA movement, who merged it with long-standing rightwing tropes about paid protesters and deep-state subversion. The result is a dangerous rhetorical tool used to justify crackdowns, expand executive power, and lay the groundwork for authoritarian rule under the guise of defending national sovereignty.
In the Beck clip, he claimed the protests in Los Angeles weren’t really about immigration. He said they were part of a larger “color revolution” meant to overthrow the American government from within. He didn’t frame it as a question. He said it like it was already happening.
That set off alarm bells. I started looking deeper. I searched X, and quickly found dozens of similar posts. People were calling the LA protests a “psyop,” a “foreign-backed coup,” and a “color revolution just like Ukraine.” Some of the accounts were blue-checked. Some were anonymous. But they all shared the same message: this wasn’t a protest but sabotage. They didn’t offer proof—just screenshots, charts, and dramatic captions tying immigrants, Marxists, Soros, and Democrats into one giant plot.
I checked VK, the Russian social media platform, and found many of the same narratives circulating there. The protests in Los Angeles were being portrayed in Russian as a Western-backed plot to destabilize America, mirroring how protests in Ukraine or Belarus were once framed by Russian state media.
The recycled conspiracy now had a new target: immigrant protestors in the U.S.
Sites like ZeroHedge and WhatDoesItMean.com took it even further. One ZeroHedge article said the protests were the work of a “Mexican BLM clone” and warned of a “color revolution operation” in progress. The article made no effort to separate fact from speculation. It simply declared that this was a coordinated attempt to destroy America’s borders and provoke martial law.
How “Color Revolution” Became a Weaponized Narrative
The phrase “color revolution” first entered public discourse in the early 2000s to describe a wave of nonviolent, pro-democracy uprisings in post-Soviet states. These movements, such as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia's Bulldozer Revolution in 2000, Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, and Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution in 2005, were led by students, opposition parties, and civil society groups. Each adopted symbolic colors or flowers as unifying visuals: roses, orange ribbons, and tulips. Western media generally celebrated these uprisings as democratic breakthroughs.
However, the hopeful framing of these movements quickly met resistance from authoritarian powers. By the mid-2000s, leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin began to redefine the “color revolution” as a threat. Rather than acknowledging grassroots dissent, Putin claimed the U.S. and NATO allies orchestrated these uprisings to impose regime change on sovereign nations. In speeches, including his frequent addresses to the Valdai Discussion Club, Putin framed color revolutions as a dangerous tool used by the West to destabilize sovereign nations under the guise of promoting democracy. In his view, these uprisings are not organic movements but engineered forms of “controlled chaos” that ultimately backfire, creating lawless regions vulnerable to terrorism, crime, and collapse. This narrative soon spread to leaders in Belarus, Iran, Turkey, and China, all of whom began branding internal protest as evidence of Western sabotage.
In 2013, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan labeled the Gezi Park protests as a Soros-backed conspiracy. The same logic was applied after the failed 2016 coup attempt. In Russia, this evolving narrative culminated in legal repression. The 2012 “foreign agent” law required NGOs receiving international funding and engaging in “political activity” to register as foreign agents. The law expanded in 2020 and again in 2022 to target individuals, media outlets, and informal gatherings. The justification? Fear of another color revolution.
“Color Revolution” is introduced to the Western Left
This conspiratorial version of the "color revolution" concept has steadily infiltrated Western left-wing anti-imperialist circles. Propelled by Russian state media and ideologically aligned intellectual networks, the narrative fused with preexisting, and often legitiamte, left critiques of U.S. interventions in Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The result was a reflexive suspicion toward nearly all uprisings that were not explicitly anti-Western. Rather than distinguishing between authentic grassroots revolts, foreign-influenced regime changes, or movements aligned with Western interests but rooted in local grievances, many left commentators collapsed them into a single conspiratorial logic: rebellion equals imperialist plot.
This mindset became particularly visible during the Arab Spring, the Syrian revolution, and Ukraine’s Euromaidan. In each case, significant portions of the anti-imperialist left dismissed these movements as CIA operations or NATO destabilization campaigns. Media outlets like The Grayzone and MintPress News amplified this framing, casting popular uprisings as Western-engineered regime change efforts.
What makes the narrative uniquely potent is its cross-ideological fusion.
Red Brown Syncretism
Populist rhetoric and conspiracy are the glue holding together the modern American right. From traditional conservatives to QAnon believers, a common enemy is constructed: Democratic elites, Jewish philanthropists, international NGOs, immigrant-led movements, and legacy media—portrayed as part of a vast effort to undermine national sovereignty and erase cultural identity. At the core of this worldview is the theory of the "color revolution," borrowed from post-Soviet and authoritarian regimes, then fused with older American anxieties about immigants, labor, civil rights and communism.
Few have articulated this fusion more coherently than Michael Anton. A Trump official and Claremont Institute fellow, Anton gained notoriety for his 2016 essay The Flight 93 Election, where he urged conservatives to charge the cockpit, or face national annihilation. The metaphor referenced United Airlines Flight 93 during the 9/11 attacks, equating a Hillary Clinton victory with certain death and portraying Trump as a last-ditch chance to save the nation. In his 2020 follow-up, The Coming Coup?, Anton accused Democrats and left-wing operatives of planning a stolen election using mass unrest, fraudulent mail-in ballots, and legal manipulation. Crucially, he framed all protest and legal oversight as extensions of a color revolution plot—one allegedly borrowed from the CIA's regime-change playbook abroad. His writing offers a distinctly American version of the conspiratorial logic Putin uses: democracy is a facade for elite domination; dissent is always orchestrated.
Central to this narrative is USAID, long a target of anti-imperialist critique from the left but now recast in far-right discourse as a sinister architect of domestic collapse. Right-wing ideologues aligned with Anton and his allies frame USAID as a covert arm of a globalist regime change network. They claim it funds NGOs, manipulates elections, and undermines traditional values both abroad and within the United States. While some on the left may share criticisms of USAID’s role in foreign interventions, these right-wing figures extend the same suspicion to domestic civil society. They believe protest movements and liberal institutions are not expressions of dissent but instruments of foreign subversion.
This has fueled a surge of propaganda linking USAID to everything from migrant marches to public school curricula. A video circulated by Promethean Action, a LaRouche-linked group, refers to an "NGO-NATO complex" and names USAID as a lead actor in demographic sabotage. On X and Telegram, diagrams and memes accuse Karen Bass, the Open Society Foundation, and USAID of funding "Mexican color revolutionaries" in Los Angeles. One viral image claims to show grant money flowing from USAID to protest groups organizing around ICE raids. These memes collapse fact and fiction—combining genuine criticism of USAID with fictitious claims of domestic subversion.
During his first term, Trump’s early attacks on USAID puzzled many. He slashed its funding, purged its leadership, and cut off key international partnerships. Some speculated this was influenced by Elon Musk’s background as a South African Boer, given USAID’s historic role in supporting the end of apartheid. But within the color revolution narrative, these actions made perfect sense. Trump’s moves against USAID weren’t random. He cut its funding, pushed out its leadership, and treated it like part of the deep state. This mirrored how leaders he respects, like Putin, Erdoğan, and Orbán, treat NGOs in their countries. For them, groups that support civil society are seen as threats. Trump took a similar approach at home. It wasn’t about saving money. It was about control.
The right's assault on USAID marks the convergence of long-standing leftist suspicion steeped in Cold War activies. Anti-imperialists used to criticize USAID for spreading neoliberalism overseas. Now, far-right voices have taken those critiques and turned them into a conspiracy theory. Borrowed from post-Soviet strongmen, this new version claims that civil society groups—whether in Kyiv, Caracas, or California—are all part of a color revolution plot.
The result is a discursive weapon that delegitimizes protest, justifies state violence, and paints authoritarianism as a defense. On the left, it can devolve into campism. On the right, it meshes with anti-semitic tropes and globalist conspiracies. Both result in justifying, implicitly or explicitly, authoritarian crackdowns.
This convergence is exemplified in Oliver Stone's Ukraine on Fire. This film echoes Kremlin narratives by portraying former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych as a victim of a Soros-backed fascist plot. Though Stone positions the movie as a counter-narrative to Western propaganda, and it has spread among the anti-imperialist left community, it has also been widely embraced by the right who use it to argue that all mass uprisings, even when visibly organic and locally driven, are inherently suspicious or externally orchestrated. While some on the anti-imperialist left trace funding from NGOs, think tanks, or U.S. agencies, the right takes this logic and flattens it. Instead of grappling with structural critique, they lump together everything from the Democratic Socialists of America to Bernie Sanders as evidence of Marxist infiltration. In their hands, what may begin as a flawed but earnest critique from the left, when done in good faith, becomes a blunt conspiracy devoid of nuance or coherence.
The Claremont Institute Pipeline
Claremont's reach extends into darker corners of the reactionary internet. Anton conducted interviews with Curtis Yarvin, the monarchist blogger who helped shape the neo-reactionary (NRx) movement. Yarvin calls democracy a failed experiment and advocates for a tech-enabled autocracy. Claremont legal scholar John Eastman authored the infamous memo advising Mike Pence to reject electoral votes on January 6. These aren't isolated thinkers. They form a constellation of influence that reinterprets democratic norms as threats to sovereignty and revolution as an inside job.
The narrative was further legitimized through Trumps early and aggressive moves to defund USAID. While mainstream observers were puzzled by the hostility toward a development agency, those steeped in the "color revolution" frame understood: NGOs were recast as the frontline infrastructure of liberal infiltration. By weakening them, authoritarian actors hoped to neuter civil resistance before it could form.
Black Lives Matter protests in 2016, "Stop the Steal" in 2020, and migrant demonstrations in 2025 have all been filtered through this frame: not as popular responses to injustice, but as elite-driven coups. In this worldview, even peaceful protest is subversion, and civil society is a contagion spread by foreign-backed NGOs. The goal is clear, obliterate any infrastructure that might fund, mobilize, or legitimate democratic resistance.
What’s happening in the United States isn’t an isolated ideological development, it’s part of a coordinated, transnational movement. The American right didn’t invent the “color revolution” narrative. It imported and co-produced it alongside authoritarian regimes, weaving together a shared language of paranoia, victimhood, and state repression. From Moscow to Budapest to Mar-a-Lago, the script is the same: claim protest is foreign-backed subversion, criminalize civil society, and justify sweeping authoritarian powers in the name of national defense.
This isn’t an organic ideological evolution. It’s transmission. It’s replication. And it’s global.
Why Los Angeles?
At first glance, the conspiratorial framing of Los Angeles protests as part of a “color revolution” may seem less intuitive than targeting a nationwide event like the upcoming No Kings mobilization. The latter is publicly organized, features a clear coalition of activist groups, and uses language familiar to rightwing panic. But L.A., a city long demonized in reactionary discourse, offers something even more potent to the authoritarian imagination: a symbolic intersection of immigration, diversity, and alleged elite corruption.
For the conspiratorial right, Los Angeles represents everything they believe has gone wrong with the country. It is a city where immigrants are visible, progressive politicians hold power, and protests are seen as expressions of civic agency rather than threats. In this worldview, immigrants are not just newcomers—they are pawns, allegedly brought in to manipulate elections, shift demographics, and dismantle "real" American values. The antisemitic and racist undertones are never far behind. In this narrative, Jewish elites—Soros most prominently—fund NGOs, manipulate protests, and orchestrate the cultural collapse of the West. Advocates for immigrants, in this logic, are, therefore, co-conspirators in a globalist plot.
Trump and his allies have worked relentlessly to turn this fantasy into policy. From Stephen Miller’s repeated use of the word “invasion” to Trump rebranding gangs as “terrorist organizations,” the goal is clear: frame immigration as a national security threat. This framing justifies exceptional measures. If the state is at war, extraordinary executive powers can be invoked—and must be. That includes the National Guard, and potentially the Insurrection Act.
It’s a classic fascist maneuver—victimhood in power. Trump is simultaneously the head of state and the alleged target of an insurrection. The logic is circular but effective. Protesters are foreign agents; the deep state is part of the coup; the courts are compromised. Even when Trump faces legal consequences he frames it as proof of the conspiracy. Every check on his power becomes evidence that he needs more. To save democracy, he must destroy it. That’s why Los Angeles matters. It’s not just a protest, it’s framed as a front in civilizational war. And unlike other issues, immigration provides the most expansive pretext for unilateral executive authority.
All of this feeds directly into the QAnon-adjacent fantasy of a coming storm—where the traitors are purged, the deep state dismantled, and a new golden age begins under MAGA rule. Schedule F, the executive order designed to replace civil servants with ideological loyalists, becomes the bureaucratic arm of this vision. Homeland Security raids, NGO demonization, court defiance, and cries of color revolution—these are not disparate tactics. They are part of a coordinated attempt to end multiparty democracy and establish one-party authoritarian rule, if not explicitly, then in practice.
Legal Rationalization: The Insurrection Act
Under Trump’s 2025 leadership, a new legal framework—shaped by former DOJ loyalists, Claremont Institute legal theorists, and constitutional maximalists—seeks to redefine civil dissent as “foreign ideological infiltration.” Within this narrative, migrants, student organizers, sanctuary city mayors, and pro-immigrant protesters are not simply engaging in protected political speech. They are part of a coordinated “color revolution,” an imported subversive operation requiring national defense.
This rebranding of protest as insurgency has deep roots. In 2020, Trump floated the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act to suppress Black Lives Matter demonstrations. In 2025, that theory is being tested in Los Angeles, where ICE raids on immigrant communities sparked mass protests met with tactical police, legal threats, National Guard mobilization and deployment of Marines. These actions sit in politically motivated court limbo. But more importantly, these protests were reframed across Trump-aligned platforms as part of a foreign-backed coup. The claim is not merely rhetorical. It serves as the legal and psychological groundwork to invoke the Insurrection Act preemptively—to restore order and suspend democratic norms under the guise of defending them.
By redefining protest as war, this framing enables:
The deployment of federal forces without state approval
The suppression of political opposition under national security powers
The dismissal of election results or delays under emergency conditions
This logic could be used to detain activists without due process, censor dissenting media, or even suspend elections. Under this framework, mass protest becomes treason, and political dissent becomes enemy action.
Project 2025’s blueprint makes this architecture explicit. By stoking fears of foreign-funded insurrection, it creates a legal rationale for:
Invoking the Insurrection Act to override state authority
Deploying ICE, National Guard, and military units to control civilians
Labeling dissenters as “foreign agents” or “insurrectionists,” criminalizing their participation
This strategy allows the president to sidestep Congress and the courts. It doesn’t just expand executive power, it changes how the system works. Trump’s push to dismantle USAID, his attacks on non-governmental organizations, and his support for Schedule F aren’t isolated moves. Together, they show a clear pattern: replace independent voices with loyal ones, cut off funding for civil society, and remove the checks that are supposed to keep government power balanced.
Conclusion: The Americanization of Authoritarianism
What’s happening in the U.S. isn’t new, it’s a proven authoritarian tactic. Regimes from Russia to Turkey have long claimed that any domestic resistance is the work of foreign agents. Protest isn’t protest, they say it’s sabotage. This narrative turns public anger into a threat to national security and gives the state the green light to crush it. Now, that same script is playing out in America. The language has changed, but the goal is to erase the line between civil dissent and treason.
The phrase “color revolution” is more than a slur. It’s a weaponized narrative. One that turns human rights into security threats and grassroots movements into enemy conspiracies. It lays the groundwork not just for repression but for the normalization of a permanent state of exception, where power is unaccountable, opposition is criminalized, and democratic pluralism is recast as a danger to the state.
This is not just about the United States. It is a node in a global authoritarian movement. From Moscow to Budapest to Washington, the right is learning, borrowing, and adapting from one another. The convergence is apparent: a shared political technology of fear, control, and myth, increasingly refined and deployed across borders. The “color revolution” panic is not just propaganda, it’s a blueprint. And unless resisted, it will become policy.