A Counterspell Book Preview
I feel compelled to push this out asap for all due to the explosive and incredible thread by DataRepublican on X linking the Braver Angels organization to the NGO color revolution complex operating to overthrow the American republican government. What appears is a preview of my upcoming book: Counterspell.
CHAPTER 5, SECTION 6: THE DIALECTICAL RATCHET
The dialectic does not have to be complicated. It can be simply thought of as third-way-ism — the practice of taking two competing ideas and “synthesizing” them into a new concept that accounts for both. Somebody wants to cook dinner at home, another wants to eat dinner out, and the negotiated synthesis might be getting takeout to eat in. This process is readily weaponized, however, as it has been by the Left for centuries, into a mechanism whereby leftist ideas are synthesized with rightist ideas in a way that always favors the gradual progression of leftism.
This is accomplished by handicapping the rightist ideas through “scientizing” them — various linguistic tricks that place the rightist idea, properly considered in the realms of theology or philosophy, into the realm of “science” or “experts,” who can then speak to the rightist ideas as “false” (making an objective claim with no basis in objectivity). Alternatively, rightist ideas are placed outside the Overton Window and thus made unacceptable socially. These practices favor the leftist ideas during the negotiated process of synthesis such that it effectively builds out a dialectical ratchet — so named for the tool that moves by ever-so-small increments in one direction while resisting movement in the other.
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Further necessary to the understanding of this incremental process is that the “science” we typically consider to be science is not the same “science” that they mean when they engage in the process of political warfare. This was outlined in the political theology of Hegel in the division of “science” into two categories — one rudimentary and process-driven, the other metaphysical and prophecy-driven. Very much of what the modern Left refers to as “science” is actually of the latter variety, and more properly called Scientism.
By capturing the broader sciences and infecting them with Scientism, the Left has managed to remake institutions and repurpose them as reification agents of leftist dogma. The Left can, through the dialectical process described above, point to the institutions it has captured and the “science” it has infected with Scientism to label rightist ideas and policy as “objectively false” or “scientifically harmful” — while in reality referring to a religious ideology, not actual science. They get away with this because they have ideologically captured the institutions that would, in a functional system, serve as a check on their false claims to expertise.
Do not take my word for any of this. Psychology Today published a piece in 2020 laying out the strategy for implementing this process, citing dialectical behavioral therapy as the model, detailing how they intended to negate rightist ideas and policy through this dialectical process. The author of the piece gives away the game at the end: “In principle, Republicans could use this strategy too, but the main problem currently besetting that party is the rejection of factual and scientific information.” In other words, the Republicans do not get to use this strategy because their ideas are not correct according to the institutions that the Left controls.
I ask you then to consider, with this new knowledge, what the actual purpose might be of a training event for lawmakers from both the Left and the Right — learning to utilize the dialectical process to “work together,” to find “common ground,” and to “reduce polarization.” Would it be helpful to know that this training event was run by a psychologist? Do not assume the worst of those involved in bringing in this training, however. It is entirely likely they did not, and do not, know the true intentions of it.
I know this because I was there. And having since conducted a forensic examination of the organization behind that training, I can now tell you the full story.
The Trust: A Necessary Prologue
Before we turn to the organization itself, a historical parallel is necessary — one that should be taught in every school and is not, because its implications are too dangerous to the people who run them.
In the early 1920s, the Soviet secret police — the GPU, predecessor to the KGB — established a fake anti-Bolshevik resistance organization called the Monarchist Organization of Central Russia, known internally as Operation Trust. The organization presented itself as an underground network of loyalists working to restore the old order from within the Soviet system. It recruited genuine White Russian émigrés, anti-Communist officers, and foreign intelligence operatives into its ranks. It held meetings. It planned operations. It gathered resources. It looked, in every respect, like the real thing.
It was not the real thing. It was a GPU front, designed from inception to identify, attract, control, and ultimately neutralize the genuine anti-Communist resistance. By drawing real resisters into a managed structure, the Soviets accomplished several objectives simultaneously: they identified who the real opposition was, they channeled oppositional energy into activities that posed no actual threat to the regime, they gathered intelligence on foreign support networks, and they demoralized the broader resistance by ensuring that every effort undertaken through the Trust’s auspices failed at the critical moment. The Trust operated for years before its true nature was exposed. By the time it was, the damage was done — the authentic resistance had been gutted from within.
The principle is timeless: if you cannot destroy your enemy’s resistance directly, build a version of it that you control, and let your enemy’s best people walk into it voluntarily. The operation need not be a perfect conspiracy. It need not involve every participant as a knowing agent. It need only be designed — at the top, by those who understand its structure — to produce the desired outcome. The sincere participants are not obstacles to the operation. They are its most valuable assets, because their sincerity is what makes the operation credible.
Keep this pattern in mind. We are about to see it again.
Braver Angels in the New Hampshire House
In late 2022, shortly after being elected to the New Hampshire House for the first time, I received an invitation from House leadership to attend what was billed as a continuing education event: Managing Difficult Conversations with Colleagues and Constituents. The training was scheduled for December 15th, 2022, in Representatives Hall — the House chamber itself — and was put on by an organization called Braver Angels, described in the official House Record as “a nonprofit working to bridge the partisan divide.” The session was to run approximately two hours and was open to all Representatives-Elect. Members would be paid mileage for attendance. It was followed immediately by the Annual Legislative Christmas party at the Upham Walker House — refreshments and fellowship to seal the experience with warmth and goodwill.
I attended — not because I was taken in by the billing, but because I was deeply suspicious that it would be exactly what it turned out to be: a political warfare operation. A “bipartisanship training” event, run by an outside organization, conducted behind closed doors in the House chamber, led by a psychologist, and aimed at freshly elected legislators who had not yet established their bearings? Everything about it triggered the instincts I had developed over years of studying these methods. I went to see it with my own eyes and confirm what I suspected.
I was not disappointed.
The session was led by a Washington, D.C.-based representative of the Braver Angels organization — a psychologist, as was stated openly — and was conducted according to the methods of dialectical behavioral therapy. This, too, was stated plainly. To my knowledge, the session was never broadcast publicly or live-streamed. It was an intimate affair, conducted inside the House chamber, with newly elected legislators as its subjects. I understood what I was watching in real time.
The format proceeded in stages, each building on the last.
First, the exercises were relational. Legislators from opposing parties were paired together and guided through structured intimacy-building exercises — getting to know one another on a personal level, sharing experiences, establishing rapport. There is nothing sinister about getting to know your colleagues. But this was not the point of the exercise. The relational stage was the preparation of the ground for what followed.
Second came the negotiation exercises. Here the method revealed itself. Participants were required to adopt the frame of mind and policy positions of the opposing party — to inhabit the other side’s perspective, to explore that frame from within, to understand it not merely intellectually but empathetically, in the captured sense of that word we examined earlier. Having thus inhabited the other side’s frame, the participant was then guided to moderate his own position toward it — to find the middle, the synthesis, the third-way resolution.
This is the dialectical ratchet in live application, administered by a trained psychologist to elected officials in the seat of government.
Consider what this process actually does when you account for the presuppositional depth asymmetry we have been developing throughout this book. The ethics of the Left tend to be shallow, operational, and relativistic — socially constructed, situationally negotiable, and anchored not in transcendent principle but in the social context of the moment. The Right — at its best, at least, and certainly at the level of its deepest commitments — tends to stand on transcendent ethics, deep principles, and opposition to social constructivism. These are not symmetrical starting positions. The conservative participant is being asked to step off of bedrock and wade into quicksand. The progressive participant is being asked to move from one patch of quicksand to another. The conservative loses something real — contact with his principles. The progressive loses nothing, because his position was never anchored to anything deeper than social negotiation in the first place.
The exercise was designed to break conservative participants away from their deep ethical commitments and draw them into the realm of social constructivism, where social context and interpersonal relationships trump principles, where feelings outweigh foundations, and where the Left can and does serially dominate. The Left lives in relativistic social constructivism. It is their native territory. Asking a conservative to meet them there is not finding common ground — it is an away game on an opponent’s field with the opponent’s rules and the opponent’s referees.
This is how the dialectical ratchet operates in a legislative environment. Each “bipartisan” exercise, each “bridge-building” session, each “depolarization” workshop functions as one click of the ratchet. The conservative is moved incrementally leftward. The progressive holds position or advances. The net motion is always in one direction. And the whole operation is dressed in the language of goodwill — common ground, bridging the divide, managing difficult conversations — so that anyone who objects to the process can be dismissed as partisan, unreasonable, or unwilling to work with others.
The Organization Behind the Operation
Having experienced the method firsthand, I set about examining the organization that delivered it. What I found was not reassuring.
Braver Angels — the largest grassroots “depolarization” organization in America — was founded in December 2016 in South Lebanon, Ohio, weeks after Donald Trump’s election. Its founder and president is David Blankenhorn, a self-described liberal Democrat educated at Harvard and the University of Warwick, where he studied under the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson. By Blankenhorn’s own admission, he carried Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals “in our back pocket” during his years as a community organizer, and considered Alinsky “our ultimate teacher.” He also visited the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee — the legendary training ground for civil rights and labor organizers, and a well-documented node of Communist organizational infrastructure in the American South.
An Alinsky-trained community organizer who studied under a Marxist historian. This is the man who built the bridge that conservatives are invited to walk across.
To his credit — or to his cover — Blankenhorn spent years building credibility on the Right. He founded the Institute for American Values in 1987, a think tank focused on marriage and fatherhood. His 1995 book Fatherless America made him a prominent voice in the social conservative movement. His 2007 book The Future of Marriage argued that marriage is fundamentally oriented toward uniting biological, social, and legal parenthood. He aligned himself with the conservative position on same-sex marriage — one of the central cultural flashpoints of the era.
This is the Trust pattern. You do not build a controlled opposition by announcing your intentions. You build credibility with the target population first. You invest years. You say the right things, defend the right causes, build the right relationships. You become trusted. And then, at the moment of maximum leverage, you turn.
Blankenhorn’s turn came during Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the federal trial challenging California’s Proposition 8. He served as the defense’s principal expert witness — one of only two witnesses the Prop 8 proponents dared to present. His testimony was catastrophic for his own side: he conceded under oath that same-sex marriage would “likely improve the well-being of gay and lesbian households and their children” and identified twenty-two benefits of same-sex marriage from his own book, disagreeing with only five. He told the court: “We would be more American on the day we permitted same-sex marriage than we were the day before.” The judge ruled his testimony unreliable and entitled to essentially no weight.
Two years later, Blankenhorn published a New York Times op-ed titled “How My View on Gay Marriage Changed.” The capitulation was complete. His former colleague Maggie Gallagher, who had left the Institute for American Values years earlier over precisely this trajectory, wrote a response that now reads as prophecy: “The truth about something as important as marriage cannot be the price we pay to live with each other… Giving up marriage is too high a price to pay. And it is not the last good we will be asked to surrender.”
She was right. It was not the last good. Blankenhorn’s next project would ask conservatives to surrender something far more consequential than a single policy position. He would ask them to surrender the very method by which they hold any position at all — their grounding in transcendent ethics.
Two readings of Blankenhorn’s biography are possible. The charitable reading is that he is a sincere man who changed his mind, found that his social relationships with progressives were more important to him than his prior convictions, and channeled that experience into an organization designed to help others do the same. The analytical reading — the one informed by the Trust pattern, by Alinsky’s own methodology, and by the observable outcomes of the organization he built — is that Blankenhorn operated for decades within conservative institutions, built trust and credibility, and deployed that credibility at the critical moment to undermine the cause he had championed, before pivoting to build an organization whose structural function is to replicate that same trajectory in others.
The purpose of a thing is what it does. What did Blankenhorn’s arc do? It neutralized one of the conservative movement’s expert witnesses on marriage at the precise moment his testimony was most needed. What does the organization he subsequently built do? It neutralizes conservative legislators at the precise moments their votes are most needed.
The Anatomy of Structural Asymmetry
The co-founding team tells the same story. Bill Doherty, the University of Minnesota family therapy professor who designed the workshop methodology, had previously organized a group called “Citizen Therapists Against Trumpism” — not against polarization generally, not against political extremism broadly, but against Trumpism specifically. This is the man who designed the “neutral” therapeutic process. The third co-founder, David Lapp — raised Amish, now Catholic, who writes for The Federalist and American Conservative — provides the requisite conservative credential, the essential window dressing that allows the organization to claim bipartisan bona fides. Every Trust needs its sincere participants.
Braver Angels itself discloses a sixty-forty funding split between left-of-center and right-of-center foundations. The organization grew from half a million dollars in revenue in 2017 to over five and a half million by 2024. The founder draws a salary of nearly a quarter-million dollars. The Carnegie Corporation funds it under its “Democracy” program. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation provided seed funding through its Madison Initiative. The organization operates within a broader ecosystem of roughly four hundred “depolarization” organizations tracked by the Civic Health Project at Columbia University. One of the most prominent sister organizations in this ecosystem — Living Room Conversations — was co-founded by Joan Blades, who also co-founded MoveOn.org, one of the most aggressive progressive political organizations in America.
The right-leaning funding isn’t truly “Right” at all, but socially liberal, Chamber-of-Commerce libertarianism. It is not. The neoconservative movement was funded by right-leaning money for decades while operating as a dialectical pole to the neoliberal establishment. Koch-funded organizations have a long history of funding libertarian and “reform conservative” initiatives that channel conservative energy away from populist and traditionalist priorities. Templeton funds inquiry and dialogue as institutional values — which is precisely the frame that makes the dialectical operation possible. Money follows mission, and these missions are compatible with the structural asymmetry Braver Angels produces.
The personnel confirm the pattern. The organization makes conspicuous efforts at balance — hiring a Republican CEO, maintaining a Focus on the Family director on its board, employing a former Republican congressional candidate as its national ambassador. But examine the type of conservatism represented. The Republican ambassador ran in California against Maxine Waters and associates with the American Project at Pepperdine and the Progress Network at New America Foundation — reform conservatism, heterodox conservatism, the kind of conservatism that the progressive establishment finds tolerable precisely because it has already been detached from the transcendent ethical commitments that make conservatism a threat. There is no one from Heritage Action on this board. No one from the Freedom Caucus. No one who represents the populist, the traditionalist Right, or Evangelical Christians that actually challenges the institutional progressive order. The conservatism on display at Braver Angels is the kind that has already undergone the very process the organization administers – Jeff Flake conservatism.
And most revealing of all: Braver Angels’ own internal data shows that across its events, Democrats consistently outnumber Republicans. The organization’s own Red Caucus page describes itself as “a minority within Braver Angels” that wants “our voices to be heard.” A 2024 investigation found that in conservative areas, the workshops’ most documented effect was empowering liberal participants “to come out of the closet” — an outcome benefiting progressive expression, not conservative retention. As one liberal participant candidly observed: conservatives suspect that “what you’re really going to do is get them in a room and then explain to them how they’re wrong.” That suspicion, it turns out, is analytically precise — the explanation just operates through therapeutic technique rather than overt argument.
The academic evidence on effectiveness is equally damning. The most rigorous study found workshops produced a modest reduction in partisan hostility at one week, with effects decaying rapidly. A 2025 meta-analysis of the broader depolarization field concluded that such interventions produce only approximately five-point shifts on a hundred-and-one-point scale, that effects decay within two weeks, that repeated exposure does not produce cumulative benefits, and that “current approaches are unlikely to scale effectively to solve polarization at a societal level.” In other words: the therapy does not even work on its own stated terms. It does not reduce polarization. What it does — the thing it actually accomplishes, as measured by observable outcomes rather than stated intentions — is produce a handful of Republican legislators in each state who have been psychologically conditioned to prioritize relational comfort over principled commitment.
The Proof in New Hampshire
The proof is in the outcomes.
In the years since that December 2022 session, a bipartisan caucus emerged from the Braver Angels training — a group of legislators from both parties who continued to meet and operate under the Braver Angels framework. That caucus, which has since rebranded itself as Granite Bridge, has serially disrupted Republican votes and undermined GOP policy commitments despite Republican majorities. The Republican members of the caucus have become unreliable voters for the party platform and the ethical commitments their constituents elected them to uphold. Meanwhile, the Democratic members of the caucus continue to vote largely as a unified bloc — as they always have. The ratchet clicks. The synthesis favors the Left. The Republican defectors provide the margin.
This is precisely the pattern we would predict from the theory. The dialectical process does not produce genuine compromise. It produces managed defeat for the side operating from deeper principles, because the act of “meeting in the middle” requires that side to abandon depth while the other side merely shifts laterally within its own shallow plane. The GOP members who underwent this training did not become more effective legislators. They became more pliable ones — more susceptible to social pressure, more willing to substitute relational comfort for principled commitment, more inclined to mistake agreeableness for virtue.
The purpose of a thing is what it does. What does Braver Angels do? It produces Republican legislators who vote against Republican priorities while Democratic legislators continue to vote as a bloc. That is what it does. That is its purpose.
The Trust Pattern, Complete
Return now to Operation Trust. The GPU did not need every member of the Monarchist Organization of Central Russia to be a knowing agent. It needed only to control the structure, set the rules of engagement, and ensure that the energy of the authentic resistance was channeled into activities that produced no real threat to the regime. The sincere White Russian who joined the Trust believing he was fighting the Bolsheviks was not an obstacle to the operation — he was its most valuable asset, because his sincerity attracted other sincere people, and their collective sincerity made the operation credible.
Braver Angels is not a carbon copy of Operation Trust. The analogy is structural, not conspiratorial in every detail. But the pattern holds: an organization founded by a man trained in Alinsky’s methods and educated under a Marxist historian, who spent years building credibility within conservative institutions before publicly capitulating on the central cultural issue of his era, and who then built an organization that uses therapeutic technique to replicate that same capitulation in elected officials — producing, as its measurable output, Republican legislators who defect from their party’s platform while Democratic legislators maintain bloc discipline. The organization is funded predominantly from the left, staffed with a carefully curated version of conservatism that poses no threat to progressive institutional power, and embedded within a broader ecosystem that includes organizations co-founded by the creator of MoveOn.org
You do not need to believe that every volunteer, every facilitator, and every well-meaning Republican state legislator who attends a Braver Angels workshop is a conscious agent of the Left. They are not. Most are sincere. That is the point. The Trust works precisely because its foot soldiers believe in it.
What you must understand is this: when a psychologist, operating from the methods of dialectical behavioral therapy, places you in structured exercises designed to detach you from your principles and move you toward “synthesis” with positions that are fundamentally incompatible with those principles — and when the organization behind that psychologist was built by an Alinsky-trained operative who personally walked the exact path they are now guiding you down. So-called “bridge building) is a political warfare operation conducted on the floor of a state legislature, with your ethics as the target.
Authors’ and Speakers’ opinions are their own and may not represent those of Grok Media, LLC, GraniteGrok.com, its sponsors, readers, authors, or advertisers.
Disagree, agree, Got Something to Say, We Want to Hear It. Comment or submit Op-Eds to steve@granitegrok.com
