Paul Weyrich and Robert Kriegel of the Heritage Foundation and Free Congress Foundation held mock elections in Moscow before the collapse to teach Soviet politicians about "democracy." Another Heritage Foundation member who created the State Policy Network (SPN) is quoted as telling Kriegel "You capture the Soviet Union, I'll capture the states."
Weyrich later said in 1996 that allegedly they had been tailed and intimidated by KGB while they were in Moscow holding the fake elections and spreading "democracy." Someone told him after the coup that Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB had gone to Gorbachev and asked him to crack down on Weyrich. Gorbachev just responded with silence, so Kryuchkov started organizing the coup the next day out of anger. That sounds like total BS, but I'm not sure if Weyrich made it up or if somebody else did and Weyrich believed it.
In 1999, Weyrich started writing about how he believed the moral majority had lost the "cultural war." So rather than continue fighting to take back institutions, the movement would need to follow the model of homeschooling and create their own institutions from scratch (bc if you just admit you're trying to overthrow a government people ask too many questions). Over 20 years later, the most recent version of the Heritage Foundation's Mandate for Leadership (Project 2025) is ready to deregulate and dismantle all federal government. Once it collapses, similar to the power vacuum in post Soviet Russia, they will be ready and waiting to replace it with a new far right government led by a small group of wealthy individuals who control local resources.
Similar to Russia, I'm not sure how much control they will actually retain once it collapses and is replaced, but they've used essentially the same strategy. Doing all of this out in the open, putting the pieces in place, training and recruiting people to be ready to betray their own country. Yet when you point all this out, people want to pretend it's just a conspiracy theory.