Republicans are panicking and right-wing media are desperately churning out “fear porn” as polls continue to point to a devastating midterm environment for their party with less than two weeks remaining before election day. From presidential rallies to Fox News primetime, MAGA stalwarts are trying to bolster their party’s turnout by warning Republican voters that if they do not go to the polls, their freedom and very lives may be at stake.

That increasingly deranged environment is generating a level of demagoguery that at times becomes simply absurd.

Fox host Laura Ingraham, for example, announced on her show Wednesday that if Democrats win control of the U.S. House and Senate, a leftist cabal of activists, journalists, “top former staffers” in the Obama and Biden administrations, and even Democratic governors will carry out a plot to force President Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act as a mechanism to “dissolve” the U.S. Constitution and “crush their enemies.”

The argument that the left is planning to destroy the federal government if and only if Democrats triumph in the midterms makes a lot of sense as an attempt to scare Republicans to the polls but none at all as a plot in its own right.

Questions abound: Why in the world is this plan only enacted after Democrats achieve actual congressional power for the first time in Trump's second term? If there is clear evidence of a sweeping plot including “top” Obama and Biden officials, why is the best example Ingraham can point to former Obama White House ethics lawyer Norm Eisen talking about protecting the Constitution with legal action? Why does the plan revolve around getting Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act — an outcome MAGA pundits like Ingraham herself have been lobbying for and Democrats have publicly opposed?

Lastly, why does Ingraham think this grand conspiracy is underway? We don’t really know — she cited no direct evidence for what on-screen Fox graphics described as “The Left’s Plan To Overthrow The U.S. Gov’t.”

But Ingraham’s claims align with a conspiracy theory that Jennica Pounds, a right-wing influencer who goes by the pseudonym DataRepublican and briefly worked for the Defense Department this year, floated over the weekend based on videos of activist meetings she obtained. Pounds’ claim of a leftist “operational plan” seems to be much less than advertised — but has nonetheless been trumpeted this week by prominent MAGA figures like Glenn Beck, Vince Coglianese, Jesse Kelly, and podcaster-turned-deputy-FBI-director-turned-podcaster Dan Bongino.

It’s the sort of wildly incendiary claim that should demand copious evidence before making it to the airwaves of a major news outlet — but Fox is a MAGA propaganda network devoted to Republican electoral victory at any cost.

Unpacking Ingraham’s evidence-free claim of a leftist plot

Ingraham built her conspiracy-minded edifice on a faulty foundation.

She began her opening monologue on Wednesday by using a deceptively cropped video snippet of Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) to allege that the former CIA officer had promised “punishment for young conservatives.” While many on the right have tried to generate outrage based on that false interpretation, Slotkin had actually been discussing how providing “accountability” for mid-level enablers of the Trump administration’s corruption could disincentivize similar behavior in the future.

From there, Ingraham pivoted to arguing that Democratic victories would hasten the downfall of the republic. “If voters give Democrats control of the House and even the House and the Senate, the punishment that Slotkin alludes to will be severe,” she claimed, adding that such punishment would be “meted out not only against individuals and corporations that work with Trump, but against the democratic system itself.”

After explaining that an unnamed leftist “they” intend to “force Trump's hand and use Paris riots, perhaps, as their guide,” Ingraham laid out her understanding of the “plan.”

“Now, the radical left's current thinking is that if they're able to mobilize in huge numbers in the streets, President Trump, if it's nationwide, will decide to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows him to deploy the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement,” she said. “Activists will then claim widespread abuses as the military struggles to restore law and order. Then the press will collaborate with activists, amplifying their wild claims with video snippets on social media.”

“Then blue state governors — this is their dream — seeing the chaos, will unite to try to override federal authority, take over federal functions, and eventually even rewrite our Constitution or just dissolve it altogether,” she continued.

Ingraham went on to claim that “this scenario is being openly discussed among top former staffers of Obama and Biden, former government employees of agencies like USAID, and of course community organizers” — but provided no examples of anyone actually discussing such a scheme.

Instead, Ingraham claimed that the plot’s adherents say they’re “reforming the government” rather than “overthrowing it,” adding, “former USAID staffer Danielle Reiff makes it sound like utopia.” Ingraham then played a brief clip of Reiff appearing on a December edition of Dr. Paul Zeitz’s Revolutionary Optimism Podcast and saying: “You have to reform your institutions so that it, you know, that becomes the foundational framework for society. And so, we're going to have to, if we want to live in peace and deeper democracy, reform our legal frameworks to foster collaboration across divides and unity and diversity.”

The Fox host later described Eisen as “one of the godfathers of this effort” because he “advances the fraudulent claims that democracy is in crisis.” But she provided no evidence actually linking him to the supposed “plan,” instead airing a clip in which Eisen is asked if he thinks of his work as part of a “war” and replies, “Yes — peaceful, lawful, vigorous battle, you do have to think of it in those terms to stop what Donald Trump began after the 2020 election and has continued a coup against the Constitution.”

Ingraham concluded her monologue by suggesting that “the real tyrant” is not Trump but “Democrats like Slotkin, who want to remake the government to crush their enemies.”

Ingraham then brought on Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), telling him, “These conversations, this playbook, is real. They might not be able to get there in the next year or so, but they have that plot cooking.”

Schmitt replied in part that “their march through the institutions is almost complete” and “the goal is absolute and total control” with “no room for dissent.”

“When you go vote, there’s a lot of issues that are on the table that you’re voting on, but I think a central issue is what the Democrats are willing to do with power,” he added. “They’re telling us all over again, and I think it’s terrifying and why this election is so important.”

What “conversations”? What “playbook”? Who is supposed to be behind this “plan,” and how developed is it?

Ingraham didn’t say.

Where we think this is coming from

Jennica Pounds is a MAGA influencer with nearly 1 million followers who posts online under the moniker DataRepublican and is perhaps best known for accusing a Trump administration official who was attempting to hand her a scoop of trying to entrap her to commit a crime. Following that August debacle, she and the Pentagon disclosed that she had been secretly working as a special government employee for the Defense Department (according to Pounds, she applied for a credential as a “journalist” in the Pentagon press corps, received a press pass in April, held it until June, and joined the administration in July).

Soon after her Pentagon role became public, Pounds launched a website mapping left-wing groups called “DSA Explorer.” And on Sunday, Pounds (“fresh off her brief stint as a Special Government Employee with the Pentagon,” according to RedState’s writeup), claimed online that she had obtained access to a vast trove of transcripts and recordings of online meetings of progressive activists.

She then laid out a narrative that closely resembled what Ingraham ran with on Wednesday:

You've heard that the DSA is proposing structural reforms to America, including abolishing the Senate and imposing term limits.
What you not have heard is - there is an operational plan to put it all into action. If the Democratic Party sweeps 2026, then DSA will become “foot soldiers” in constant clashes with the administration to cross a “red line” or invoke a “doomsday scenario” - meaning, President Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, probably sometime in 2027.
Then, a lot of coordinated responses kick off, including delegitimizing the federal government itself and handing that legitimacy to Democratic governors. 2028 then becomes a vote on whether to keep America governance as-is or to burn it all down to appease a “young and brown” demographic.

But the 1-minute video snippet Pounds appended to her post does not show anything like a well-developed “operational plan” to do anything at all, much less one involving DSA “foot soldiers” plotting to force an invocation of the Insurrection Act.

Indeed, Pounds appears to be taking a series of disaggregated remarks from different people at different calls and events and weaving them together into a single coherent apocalyptic narrative. By her own subsequent admission, “almost nobody knows the ‘grand plan’ so to speak,” the various parties “simply agree to play a role.”

The video attached to Pounds’ original post, titled “April 10, 2026 - R2T core team call,” shows Reiff and Zeitz, from the podcast clip Ingraham aired, on an online video call with three other individuals. Zeitz recounts a recent meeting he and Reiff had with more influential figures at Governors Safeguarding Democracy, described as “a forum that convenes Democratic governors,” to discuss their “work around the emergency scenario planning.”

Reiff then says that they were asked in the meeting to develop “a panel of a couple of people who could talk to the governors, who could do a briefing for the governors and walk them through like the doomsday scenario and help them think through what their options are as a response,” and adds that such an opportunity would be “a huge breakthrough for us.”

That video and others Pounds released triggered a firestorm on the right, with influencers and podcasters largely adopting her narrative.

But Tim Pool, of all people, suggested she’d gotten out over her skis.

“Many people have asked me my thoughts on this and asked me what I think is going on, and I’ve said, listen, DataRepublican, with all due respect, coming out and just saying I have this data is not enough to launch a story,” he said on his show on Tuesday. “I cannot just come out and say hey, guys, someone says they’ve seen stuff the DSA is doing.”

That’s apparently a higher standard than Fox requires — because if Ingraham were aware of hard evidence of the leftist plot to destroy the country she claimed exists, she surely would have aired it. Instead, her coverage leaves so many obvious questions unanswered that it only emphasizes just how frenzied the network has become as it tries to concoct enough “fear porn” to save the GOP from electoral devastation.

Is it possible Pounds has a recording of random activists proposing something resembling her above plan? Sure, but that wouldn't be evidence of a grand conspiracy involving people with actual power and influence — and says nothing about the plausibility of such a plot, which in this author's opinion is frankly nonsensical.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters