Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews 3/19/26 Patrick Pillow on Washington’s Preferred Method of Regime Change
Mar 28, 2026
Patrick Pillow, investigative writer behind Libertarian Overwatch Substack, digs into Washington’s use of color-coded political revolutions. He traces early models like Serbia, examines NGO funding and playbooks, and walks through cases from the former Soviet space to the Philippines and Lebanon. Short, sharp stories reveal how these staged movements became a preferred method of regime change.
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Color Revolutions Follow A Reusable Playbook
- The color revolutions form a continuing playbook reused across multiple countries since the late 1990s.
- Patrick Pillow traces common characters, youth groups, and tactical lessons from Serbia 2000 through Belarus 2006 to show pattern repetition.
Internet Archives Reveal Movement Timelines
- The internet and archived web content are crucial for reconstructing movement timelines and tactics.
- Pillow used Internet Archive to find youth group pages, logos changing (e.g., Belarus bison-to-jeans), and march diaries describing on-the-ground dynamics.
Scholars Publish Playbooks That Double As Regime Change Memos
- Academic journals and practitioners openly document tactics and lessons, sometimes reading like internal memos on regime change.
- Scott Horton notes abundant journal articles and postmortems that detail what was done and how to do it better.
