Open Insurgency: A Green Beret’s Analysis of IMIP
I spent 30-plus years as a Special Forces operator and intelligence professional hunting insurgent networks in Babil, Karbala, Anbar, and Diyala provinces in Iraq, in Syria, in the Horn of Africa, and in Baghlan and Zabul provinces in Afghanistan. My teams lived the doctrine in FM 3-05.201 (Unconventional Warfare), JP 3-05, and ATP 3-05.1 every single day. We learned one hard truth: the most dangerous insurgencies do not hide in the shadows. They operate in the open, behind legitimate-sounding language such as civil society, democracy promotion, bridging divides, and beloved community. They build distributed, antifragile structures that can lose any single piece and keep functioning.
This article builds directly on the outstanding investigative thread posted by @DataRepublican
on April 15-16, 2026. She delivered the receipts: internal 4B slides, Generate Democracy call screenshots, Kleinfeld Strategy 4 adoption, Harry Boyte’s DSA history, and the dual-language gap with Braver Angels. The following adds an operator-level doctrinal lens drawn from 30 years of COIN and UW experience.
Everything here is drawn from their own public websites, Zoom recordings, May-October 2025 internal documents, foundation 990s, and @DataRepublican
’s thread. No speculation, just the pattern through a Green Beret’s eyes.
1. What IMIP Actually Is: The Base
Inter-Movement Impact Project (IMIP) is a small, low-overhead sponsored project under the Mediators Foundation, whose mailing address and operational core sit in Boulder, Colorado (2525 Arapahoe Ave Suite E-4 #509). Co-founded around 2017-2021 by Walt Roberts (Project Director) and Caleb Christen (co-founder), it calls itself a movement of many movements that convenes pro-democracy leaders, bridgers, social-justice advocates, and civic organizers through monthly Generate Democracy Zoom calls and local democracy hubs.
In UW terms, IMIP is the public component, political infrastructure, and mass-base coordinator. It is the overt hub that weaves the strands, normalizes the narrative, and provides strategic alignment without ever crossing into illegal activity. That transparency, combined with its deliberately national and virtual footprint, is not a flaw. It is the feature that makes the network so hard to disrupt.
The strategic layer running IMIP is led by a core group of older professionals, many now in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, with decades of experience in facilitation, movement-building, and civic renewal. These are individuals shaping long-term societal and political changes in a world they themselves will not inhabit for very much longer.
2. The Master Blueprint: Rachel Kleinfeld’s Five Strategies
In September 2022 Kleinfeld (Carnegie Endowment) released Five Strategies to Support U.S. Democracy. IMIP leaders openly declare they are in service to Strategy 4: build a broad-based, multistranded, pro-democracy movement around a positive vision concretized in locally rooted action.
They operationalize it as the 4B Framework (Build, Block, Bridge, Belong). Public messaging emphasizes Bridge and Belong. Internal calls and slides include explicit Block coordination: show up at Blocking events against Trump-aligned initiatives, Project 2025, DOGE, and so on.
The other four strategies are covered by aligned partners in the same ecosystem (detailed below). IMIP does not have to run everything. It just keeps the network synchronized.
3. Dual Messaging and the Braver Angels Awareness Gap
To the 200,000-plus Braver Angels members the message is: We are nonpartisan. We just depolarize and listen.
Inside IMIP calls (per @DataRepublican
screenshots) Braver Angels is treated as the grassroots Bridge-Belong pillar that supplies bodies for the full 4B plan. Walt Roberts has handed off directly to Braver Angels leadership while Harry Boyte participates. Many sincere conservative volunteers have no idea their national network is plugged into this strategic coordination. This is textbook narrative control for mass-base recruitment.
4. Key Players: Their Skills and Why They Matter in UW Terms
These are not random civic volunteers. Several bring professional backgrounds in the exact tools the U.S. government and NGOs have used overseas for democracy promotion, rule-of-law development, and below-threshold political warfare. Their locations further illustrate the network’s coast-to-coast resilience.
Walt Roberts (IMIP Project Director and co-founder) is based in Portland, Oregon. He has 30-plus years designing large-group processes (Living Room Conversations, InterOccupy.net, sustainability and transpartisan movements). He runs the monthly Generate Democracy calls. UW relevance: Classic public-component coordinator that weaves disparate strands into a coherent mass base.
Caleb Christen (IMIP co-founder) has Wisconsin roots. He is a senior U.S. Navy Reserve JAG officer with deployments to Europe, Southwest Asia, and Afghanistan (rule-of-law mentoring). He also holds Oxford organizational leadership training and a Duke seminary degree. UW relevance: Interagency rule-of-law coordination in contested environments translates directly to domestic accountability and norm-resetting work.
Duncan Autrey (key IMIP facilitator and Generate Democracy regular) served at the State Department EU mission, did Peace Corps in Paraguay, and worked extensively with Mediators Beyond Borders International. UW relevance: Conflict-transformation and international democracy-promotion skillsets are the same toolkit used in color-revolution and counter-authoritarian operations abroad, now applied domestically.
Harry Boyte (recurring IMIP intellectual influence and featured speaker) is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota at Augsburg University. He has former Democratic Socialists of America board ties and served as an SCLC field secretary under MLK. IMIP’s May 2025 document sources large sections from his book Return of the Citizen. UW relevance: Decades of reframing radical organizing into palatable civic language, the narrative camouflage that grows the mass base.
Rachel Kleinfeld (intellectual architect) is a Carnegie senior fellow and sits on advisory boards of Protect Democracy and States United Democracy Center. UW relevance: She literally wrote the global playbook on fighting insurgency with politics.
Supporting backbone includes Mark Gerzon (founder and president of Mediators Foundation in Boulder, now in his late 70s), Jacob Bornstein and Vinay Orekondy (Mediators and Better Together America), plus Braver Angels leadership overlaps. The older, experienced leadership core is what gives the network its professional staying power.
5. The Broader Ecosystem, Funding, and Engineered Origins
New Pluralists (the funder collaborative) pools grants from the Hewlett Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers, Klarman Family Foundation, Omidyar Network, Einhorn Collaborative, and others. Braver Angels supplies grassroots scale (headquartered in New York City). Protect Democracy and States United Democracy Center execute Strategy 5 (accountability and lawfare).
No direct Soros or Open Society operational control appears in public records. This is mainstream liberal-leaning U.S. philanthropy creating leverage for a tiny core.
Whose idea was it and how did it start? Mark Gerzon (founder of Mediators Foundation in Boulder) was the primary architect. He organized the pivotal 2017 convening at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Pocantico estate that brought together major philanthropists and bridge-builders. That single meeting directly incubated both IMIP (under Mediators) and New Pluralists (the funder backbone). Walt Roberts and Caleb Christen then co-founded IMIP itself around 2017-2021, citing a post-2021 Vox article that highlighted the lack of a coherent U.S. pro-democracy movement. Kleinfeld’s 2022 paper became the explicit blueprint they adopted at the National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers summit.
Were they necessary, or were they force-formed? They present themselves as an organic response to polarization and democratic backsliding. In reality they were professionally incubated and strategically engineered from the top down by experienced facilitators and philanthropists who saw a strategic gap after 2016 and 2020. The 2017 convening, foundation funding, and deliberate adoption of Kleinfeld 4 show a planned, resourced effort rather than pure bottom-up demand. That professional incubation is exactly what gives a small core its outsized leverage.
6. Doctrinal UW Placement: The Public Component and Political Infrastructure
Every resistance movement has four elements (FM 3-05.201):
Guerrilla Force (armed)
Underground (clandestine sabotage and intel)
Auxiliary (covert logistics)
Public Component or Political Infrastructure or Mass Base (overt, legal, visible)
IMIP and its network are the public component. They build legitimacy, recruit the mass base, coordinate strategy, control narratives, and maintain parallel civic structures, all in the open. This is why the design is deliberately antifragile: lose one local hub, one Braver Angels chapter, or even a major grant and the relational convening infrastructure keeps the network alive. It defeats traditional targeting because there is no single head to cut off.
Read the rest of Eric Schwalm's great article at the link: https://x.com/Schwalm5132/status/2045129188961657089